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🔗 Central Asia 🔗 Oceans 🔗 Lakes 🔗 Central Asia/Kazakhstan 🔗 Central Asia/Uzbekistan

The Aral Sea ( ARR-əl; Kazakh: Арал теңізі, romanized: Aral teñızı; Uzbek: Орол денгизи, romanized: Orol dengizi; Karakalpak: Арал теңизи, romanized: Aral teńizi; Russian: Аральское море, romanized: Aral'skoye more) was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions) in the north and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region) in the south which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s. The name roughly translates as "Sea of Islands", referring to over 1,100 islands that had dotted its waters. In the Mongolic and Turkic languages aral means "island, archipelago". The Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km² (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea began shrinking in the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes: the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and the smaller intermediate Barsakelmes Lake.

By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea. In subsequent years occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree. Satellite images by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up. The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.

In an ongoing effort in Kazakhstan to save and replenish the North Aral Sea, the Dike Kokaral dam was completed in 2005. By 2008, the water level had risen 12 m (39 ft) above that of 2003. Salinity has dropped, and fish are again present in sufficient numbers for some fishing to be viable. The maximum depth of the North Aral Sea was 42 m (138 ft) (as of 2008).

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the shrinking of the Aral Sea "one of the planet's worst environmental disasters". The region's once-prosperous fishing industry has been devastated, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The water from the diverted Syr Darya river is used to irrigate about two million hectares (5,000,000 acres) of farmland in the Ferghana Valley. The Aral Sea region is heavily polluted, with consequent serious public health problems. UNESCO has added historical documents concerning the Aral Sea to its Memory of the World Register as a resource to study the environmental tragedy.

🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Plants

A Dyson tree is a hypothetical genetically engineered plant (perhaps resembling a tree) capable of growing inside a comet, suggested by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Plants could produce a breathable atmosphere within hollow spaces in the comet (or even within the plants themselves), utilising solar energy for photosynthesis and cometary materials for nutrients, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer solar system analogous to a greenhouse in space or a shell grown by a mollusc.

A Dyson tree might consist of a few main trunk structures growing out from a comet nucleus, branching into limbs and foliage that intertwine, forming a spherical structure possibly dozens of kilometers across.

🔗 Soviet Union

The Andreev Bay nuclear accident took place at Soviet naval base 569 in February 1982. Andreev Bay is a radioactive waste repository, located 55 km (34 mi) northwest of Murmansk and 60 km (37 mi) from the Norwegian border on the western shore of the Zapadnaya Litsa (Kola Peninsula). The repository entered service in 1961. In February 1982, a nuclear accident occurred in which radioactive water was released from a pool in building #5. Cleanup of the accident took place from 1983 to 1989. About 700,000 tonnes (770,000 tons) of highly radioactive water leaked into the Barents Sea during that time period. About 1,000 people took part in the cleanup effort. Vladimir Konstantinovich Bulygin, who was in charge of the naval fleet's radiation accidents, received the Hero of the Soviet Union distinction for his work.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity

In astrophysics, spaghettification (sometimes referred to as the noodle effect) is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (rather like spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field; it is caused by extreme tidal forces. In the most extreme cases, near black holes, the stretching is so powerful that no object can withstand it, no matter how strong its components. Within a small region the horizontal compression balances the vertical stretching so that small objects being spaghettified experience no net change in volume.

Stephen Hawking described the flight of a fictional astronaut who, passing within a black hole's event horizon, is "stretched like spaghetti" by the gravitational gradient (difference in strength) from head to toe. The reason this happens would be that the gravity force exerted by the singularity would be much stronger at one end of the body than the other. If one were to fall into a black hole feet first, the gravity at their feet would be much stronger than at their head, causing the person to be vertically stretched. Along with that, the right side of the body will be pulled to the left, and the left side of the body will be pulled to the right, horizontally compressing the person. However, the term "spaghettification" was established well before this. Spaghettification of a star was imaged for the first time in 2018 by researchers observing a pair of colliding galaxies approximately 150 million light-years from Earth.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Hugin () is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy (optionally automatic) creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms along with a preview window so the user can see whether the panorama is acceptable. Once the preview is correct, the panorama can be fully stitched, transformed and saved in a standard image format.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management

The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect, collisional cascading, or ablation cascade), proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a theoretical scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) due to space pollution is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade in which each collision generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions. One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space activities and the use of satellites in specific orbital ranges difficult for many generations.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Ukraine

The Kramatorsk radiological accident was a radiation accident that happened in Kramatorsk, in the Ukrainian SSR from 1980 to 1989. A small capsule containing highly radioactive caesium-137 was found inside the concrete wall of an apartment building, with a surface gamma radiation exposure dose rate of 1800 R/year. The capsule was detected only after residents requested that the level of radiation in the apartment be measured by a health physicist.

The capsule was originally part of a radiation level gauge and was lost in the Karansky quarry in the late 1970s. The search for the capsule was unsuccessful and ended after a week. The gravel from the quarry was used in construction. The caesium capsule ended up in the concrete panel of apartment 85 of building 7 on Mariyi Pryimachenko Street (at the time under the Soviet name Gvardeytsiv Kantemirovtsiv), between apartments 85 and 52.

Over nine years, two families lived in apartment 85. A child's bed was located directly next to the wall containing the capsule. The apartment was fully settled in 1980. A year later, an 18-year-old woman who lived there suddenly died. In 1982, her 16-year-old brother followed, and then their mother. Even after that the flat did not attract much public attention, despite the fact that the residents all died from leukemia. Doctors were unable to determine root-cause of illness and explained the diagnosis by poor heredity. A new family moved into the apartment, and their son died from leukemia as well. His father managed to start a detailed investigation, during which the vial was found in the wall in 1989.

By the time the capsule was discovered, four residents of the building had died from it and 17 more had received varying doses of radiation. Part of the wall was removed and sent to the Institute for Nuclear Research, where the caesium capsule was removed, identified by serial number and disposed of.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Aesthetics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature

A Mathematician's Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy. It concerns the aesthetics of mathematics with some personal content, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 India 🔗 India/Tamil Nadu

Ramanujan's lost notebook is the manuscript in which the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan recorded the mathematical discoveries of the last year (1919–1920) of his life. Its whereabouts were unknown to all but a few mathematicians until it was rediscovered by George Andrews in 1976, in a box of effects of G. N. Watson stored at the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. The "notebook" is not a book, but consists of loose and unordered sheets of paper described as "more than one hundred pages written on 138 sides in Ramanujan's distinctive handwriting. The sheets contained over six hundred mathematical formulas listed consecutively without proofs."

George Andrews and Bruce C. Berndt (2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2018) have published several books in which they give proofs for Ramanujan's formulas included in the notebook. Berndt says of the notebook's discovery: "The discovery of this 'Lost Notebook' caused roughly as much stir in the mathematical world as the discovery of Beethoven’s tenth symphony would cause in the musical world."