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🔗 Russia 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Russia/visual arts in Russia

The Amber Room (Russian: Янтарная комната, romanized: Yantarnaya Komnata, German: Bernsteinzimmer) was a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors, located in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg.

Constructed in the 18th century in Prussia, the room was dismantled and eventually disappeared during World War II. Before its loss, it was considered an "Eighth Wonder of the World". A reconstruction was made, starting in 1979 and completed and installed in the Catherine Palace in 2003.

The Amber Room was intended in 1701 for the Charlottenburg Palace, in Berlin, Prussia, but was eventually installed at the Berlin City Palace. It was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Schlüter and Wolfram worked on the room until 1707, when work was continued by amber masters Gottfried Turau and Ernst Schacht from Danzig (Gdańsk).

It remained in Berlin until 1716, when it was given by the Prussian King Frederick William I to his ally Tsar Peter the Great of the Russian Empire. In Russia, the room was installed in the Catherine Palace. After expansion and several renovations, it covered more than 55 square metres (590 ft²) and contained over 6 tonnes (13,000 lb) of amber.

The Amber Room was looted during World War II by the Army Group North of Nazi Germany, and taken to Königsberg for reconstruction and display. Some time in early 1944, with Allied forces closing in on Germany, the room was disassembled and crated for storage in the Castle basement. Königsberg was destroyed by Allied bombers in August 1944 and documentation of the room location ends there. Its eventual fate and current whereabouts, if it survives, remain a mystery. In 1979, the decision was taken to create a reconstructed Amber Room at the Catherine Palace in Pushkin. After decades of work by Russian craftsmen and donations from Germany, it was completed and inaugurated in 2003.

🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Croatia

The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (Latin for "Linen Book of Zagreb", also rarely known as Liber Agramensis, "Book of Agram") is the longest Etruscan text and the only extant linen book, dated to the 3rd century BCE. It remains mostly untranslated because of the lack of knowledge about the Etruscan language, though the few words which can be understood indicate that the text is most likely a ritual calendar.

The fabric of the book was preserved when it was used for mummy wrappings in Ptolemaic Egypt. The mummy was bought in Alexandria in 1848 and since 1867 both the mummy and the manuscript have been kept in Zagreb, Croatia, now in a refrigerated room at the Archaeological Museum.

🔗 Greece 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Catholicism 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Syriac Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Christian history

The First Council of Nicaea ( ny-SEE-ə; Ancient Greek: Σύνοδος τῆς Νικαίας, romanized: Sýnodos tês Nikaías) was a council of Christian bishops convened in the Bithynian city of Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) by the Roman Emperor Constantine I. The Council of Nicaea met from May until the end of July 325.

This ecumenical council was the first of many efforts to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all Christendom. Hosius of Corduba may have presided over its deliberations. Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed, mandating uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Religion 🔗 Death 🔗 China 🔗 Religion/New religious movements 🔗 Religion/Falun Gong

Reports of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and other political prisoners in China have raised increasing concern within the international community. According to a report by former lawmaker David Kilgour, human rights campaigner David Matas and Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation researcher Ethan Gutmann, political prisoners, mainly Falun Gong practitioners, may be executed "on demand" in order to provide organs for transplant to recipients.

Reports on systematic organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners first emerged in 2006, though the practice is thought by some to have started six years earlier. Several researchers—most notably Matas, Kilgour and Gutmann—estimate that tens of thousands of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience have been killed to supply a lucrative trade in human organs and cadavers and that these abuses may be ongoing. These conclusions are based on a combination of statistical analysis; interviews with former prisoners, medical authorities and public security agents; and circumstantial evidence, such as the large number of Falun Gong practitioners detained extrajudicially in China and the profits to be made from selling organs.

The Chinese government long denied all accusations of organ harvesting. However, the failure of Chinese authorities to effectively address or refute the charges has drawn attention and public condemnation from some governments, international organizations and medical societies. The parliaments of Canada and the European Union, as well as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, have adopted resolutions condemning the forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. United Nations Special Rapporteurs have called on the Chinese government to account for the sources of organs used in transplant practices, and the World Medical Association, the American Society of Transplantation and the Transplantation Society have called for sanctions on Chinese medical authorities. Several countries have also taken or considered measures to deter their citizens from travelling to China for the purpose of obtaining organs. A documentary on organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, Human Harvest, received a 2014 Peabody Award recognizing excellence in broadcast journalism. China eventually admitted that it had engaged in systematic organ harvesting from death row prisoners, though it denies that such an organ harvesting program is ongoing.

🔗 Physiology 🔗 Physiology/neuro

The majority of studies on sleep creativity have shown that sleep can facilitate insightful behavior and flexible reasoning, and there are several hypotheses about the creative function of dreams. On the other hand, a few recent studies have supported a theory of creative insomnia, in which creativity is significantly correlated with sleep disturbance.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Sexology and sexuality

Sex in space is human sexual activity in the weightlessness of outer space. It presents difficulties for the performance of most sexual activities due to Newton's third law. According to the law, if the couple remain attached, their movements will counter each other. Consequently, their actions will not change their velocity unless they are affected by another, unattached, object. Some difficulty could occur due to drifting into other objects. If the couple have a combined velocity relative to other objects, collisions could occur. There have been suggestions that conception and pregnancy in off-Earth environments could be an issue.

As of 2009, with NASA planning long-term missions for lunar settlements with goals to explore and colonize space, the topic has taken a respected place in life sciences. Scientist Stephen Hawking publicly concluded in 2006 that possibly human survival itself will depend on successfully contending with the extreme environments of space.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Measurement

Yan Tan Tethera or yan-tan-tethera is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for sheep counting and counting stitches in knitting until the Industrial Revolution, especially in the fells of the Lake District. Though most of these number systems fell out of use by the turn of the twentieth century, some are still in use.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Systems 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Systems/Software engineering

A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is any computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations aims to provide a higher level of abstraction of the internal computer hardware details, making the language more programmer-friendly, powerful, and versatile. While the definition of 4GL has changed over time, it can be typified by operating more with large collections of information at once rather than focusing on just bits and bytes. Languages claimed to be 4GL may include support for database management, report generation, mathematical optimization, GUI development, or web development. Some researchers state that 4GLs are a subset of domain-specific languages.

The concept of 4GL was developed from the 1970s through the 1990s, overlapping most of the development of 3GL, with 4GLs identified as "non-procedural" or "program-generating" languages, contrasted with 3GLs being algorithmic or procedural languages. While 3GLs like C, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript remain popular for a wide variety of uses, 4GLs as originally defined found uses focused on databases, reports, and websites. Some advanced 3GLs like Python, Ruby, and Perl combine some 4GL abilities within a general-purpose 3GL environment, and libraries with 4GL-like features have been developed as add-ons for most popular 3GLs, producing languages that are a mix of 3GL and 4GL, blurring the distinction.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were efforts to develop fifth-generation programming languages (5GL).

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Politics 🔗 United States/District of Columbia

The trillion-dollar coin is a concept that emerged during the United States debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, as a proposed way to bypass any necessity for the United States Congress to raise the country's borrowing limit, through the minting of very high-value platinum coins. The concept gained more mainstream attention by late 2012 during the debates over the United States fiscal cliff negotiations and renewed debt-ceiling discussions. After reaching the headlines during the week of January 7, 2013, use of the trillion dollar coin concept was ultimately rejected by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury..

The concept of the trillion-dollar coin was reintroduced in March 2020 in the form of a congressional proposal during the 2020 stock market crash.

🔗 Plants

Plant blindness is an informally-proposed form of cognitive bias, which in its broadest meaning, is a human tendency to ignore plant species. This includes such phenomena as not noticing plants in the surrounding environment, not recognizing the importance of plant life to the whole biosphere and to human affairs, a philosophical view of plants as an inferior form of life to animals and/or the inability to appreciate the unique features or aesthetics of plants.

The term was coined by the botanists and biology educators J. H. Wandersee and E. E. Schussler in their 1999 publication 'Preventing Plant Blindness'. Scientists have suggested that the reason some people don't notice plants is because plants are stationary and similarly coloured, although other research has suggested that plant blindness is affected by cultural practices. A US study looked at how plants and animals are perceived using "attentional blink" (the ability to notice one of two rapidly presented images). The study showed that participants were more accurate in detecting animals in images, rather than plants. The researchers also suggested possible strategies for characterizing and overcoming zoo-centrism.

According to the BBC journalist Christine Ro, plant blindness is potentially linked to nature deficit disorder, which she construes is causing what she claims is reduced funding and fewer classes for botany.

The term was coined in 1999 by botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler.