Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Chemicals

Solanine is a glycoalkaloid poison found in species of the nightshade family within the genus Solanum, such as the potato (Solanum tuberosum), the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), and the eggplant (Solanum melongena). It can occur naturally in any part of the plant, including the leaves, fruit, and tubers. Solanine has pesticidal properties, and it is one of the plant's natural defenses. Solanine was first isolated in 1820 from the berries of the European black nightshade (Solanum nigrum), after which it was named. It belongs to the chemical family of saponins.

🔗 Death 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Latin

Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die') is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards.

The most common motif is a skull, often accompanied by one or more bones. Often this alone is enough to evoke the trope, but other motifs such as a coffin, hourglass and wilting flowers signified the impermanence of human life. Often these function within a work whose main subject is something else, such as a portrait, but the vanitas is an artistic genre where the theme of death is the main subject. The Danse Macabre and Death personified with a scythe as the Grim Reaper are even more direct evocations of the trope.

🔗 Business 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Law and government 🔗 Japan/Business and economy

The Employment Ice Age (Japanese: 就職氷河期, romanized: Shūshoku Hyōgaki) is a term in Japan that refers to a period starting around 1994 and ending by 2004 where young graduates, as well as those who had lost their first jobs due to the Bubble Economy collapsing, were unable to find stable sources of employment. This phenomenon took place during the Lost Decades, and the cohort affected, Generation X, came to be referred to as the “Lost Generation” or the “Ice Age Generation”.

The phenomenon was triggered by the burst of the Japanese “Bubble Economy”, which although initially believed to be a temporary recession, by 1994 saw long-term economic stagnation in the Japanese economy, ushering in the uncertainties of the “Lost Decade”. To cut costs and protect older workers, companies offered limited numbers of jobs, shutting recent graduates out of the workforce, thus triggering the “Employment Ice Age”.

Those affected by the Employment Ice Age became accustomed to unstable and temporary employment, if any at all. The period severely affected Generation X (people in their 40s and 50s in 2020), encouraging social issues such as the development of the hikikomori, a spike in suicide rates, and the phenomenon of jōhatsu, as well as impacting their financial well-being, health, outlook, and ability to start families.

Given Japan's aging population, there is concern that government focus on the elderly has overshadowed those too poor to have ever started a family, who themselves will be moving into old age largely devoid of the financial resources other generations had. Government efforts on this matter have been deemed far too little and too late, and Nikkei writers claim that lawmakers remain unaware of the gravity of the situation.

🔗 Chess

The mutilated chessboard problem is a tiling puzzle proposed by philosopher Max Black in his book Critical Thinking (1946). It was later discussed by Solomon W. Golomb (1954), Gamow & Stern (1958) and by Martin Gardner in his Scientific American column "Mathematical Games". The problem is as follows:

Suppose a standard 8×8 chessboard has two diagonally opposite corners removed, leaving 62 squares. Is it possible to place 31 dominoes of size 2×1 so as to cover all of these squares?

Most considerations of this problem in literature provide solutions "in the conceptual sense" without proofs. John McCarthy proposed it as a hard problem for automated proof systems. In fact, its solution using the resolution system of inference is exponentially hard.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

PGPfone was a secure voice telephony system developed by Philip Zimmermann in 1995. The PGPfone protocol had little in common with Zimmermann's popular PGP email encryption package, except for the use of the name. It used ephemeral Diffie-Hellman protocol to establish a session key, which was then used to encrypt the stream of voice packets. The two parties compared a short authentication string to detect a Man-in-the-middle attack, which is the most common method of wiretapping secure phones of this type. PGPfone could be used point-to-point (with two modems) over the public switched telephone network, or over the Internet as an early Voice over IP system.

In 1996, there were no protocol standards for Voice over IP. Ten years later, Zimmermann released the successor to PGPfone, Zfone and ZRTP, a newer and secure VoIP protocol based on modern VoIP standards. Zfone builds on the ideas of PGPfone.

According to the MIT PGPfone web page, "MIT is no longer distributing PGPfone. Given that the software has not been maintained since 1997, we doubt it would run on most modern systems."

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory

The AN/PSQ-42 Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B) is a third-generation passive binocular night vision device developed for the United States Army by L3Harris. It combines dual tube image-intensifying (I²) and thermal-imaging technologies into a single goggle, enabling vision in low-light conditions. The two methods can be used individually or simultaneously in a fused mode. The ENVG-B is intended to be issued to the dismounted combat arms soldiers within the Army's Brigade combat teams (BCT), and so far over 10,000 have been issued to several BCT's within the 1st Infantry Division, 2nd Infantry Division, 25th Infantry Division, 82nd Airborne Division and 101st Airborne Division. The US Marine Corps has also purchased 3,100 ENVG-B units.

🔗 United States 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Cities 🔗 World Heritage Sites 🔗 Illinois 🔗 National Register of Historic Places 🔗 Historic sites 🔗 Protected areas 🔗 St. Louis

The Cahokia Mounds (also simply known as Cahokia) (11 MS 2) is the site of a Native American city (which existed c. 1050–1350 CE) directly across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis. The state archaeology park lies in south-western Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville. The park covers 2,200 acres (890 ha), or about 3.5 square miles (9 km²), and contains about 80 manmade mounds, but the ancient city was much larger. At its apex around 1100 CE, the city covered about 6 square miles (16 km²), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.

Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the Central and the Southeastern United States, beginning around 1000 CE. Today, the Cahokia Mounds are considered to be the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico.

The city's original name is unknown. The mounds were later named after the Cahokia tribe, a historic Illiniwek people living in the area when the first French explorers arrived in the 17th century. As this was centuries after Cahokia was abandoned by its original inhabitants, the Cahokia tribe was not necessarily descended from the earlier Mississippian-era people. Most likely, multiple indigenous ethnic groups settled in the Cahokia Mounds area during the time of the city's apex.

Cahokia Mounds is a National Historic Landmark and a designated site for state protection. It is also one of the 26 UNESCO World Heritage Sites within the United States. The largest pre-Columbian earthen construction in the Americas north of Mexico, the site is open to the public and administered by the Illinois Historic Preservation Division and supported by the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society. In celebration of the 2018 Illinois state bicentennial, the Cahokia Mounds were selected as one of the Illinois 200 Great Places by the American Institute of Architects Illinois component (AIA Illinois). It was recognized by USA Today Travel magazine, as one of the selections for 'Illinois 25 Must See Places'.

🔗 Canada

The Inco Superstack in Sudbury, Ontario, with a height of 381 metres (1,250 ft), is the tallest chimney in Canada and the Western hemisphere, and the second tallest freestanding chimney in the world after the GRES-2 Power Station in Kazakhstan. It is also the second tallest freestanding structure of any type in Canada, behind the CN Tower but ahead of First Canadian Place. It is the 51st tallest freestanding structure in the world. The Superstack is located on top of the largest nickel smelting operation in the world at Vale's Copper Cliff processing facility in the city of Greater Sudbury.

In 2018, Vale announced that the stack would be decommissioned and dismantled beginning in 2020. Two new, smaller stacks were constructed under the company's Clean Atmospheric Emissions Reduction Project. In July 2020, Vale announced that the Superstack had been officially taken out of service, but would remain operational in standby mode for two more months as a backup in the event of a malfunction in the new system, following which the dismantling of the Superstack would begin. As of August 2021, however, Vale has not yet announced the awarding of a demolition contract on the Superstack, and it remains unknown when demolition will actually begin.

In addition to further reducing sulphur dioxide emissions by 85 per cent, the decommissioning of the stack is expected to cut the complex's natural gas consumption in half.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Death 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Netherlands 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Malaysia

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 km (31 mi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage of the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred in the War in Donbas in an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels.

The responsibility for investigation was delegated to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), who concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. According to the JIT, the Buk that was used originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area and the launch system returned to Russia afterwards. The findings by the DSB and JIT are consistent with the earlier claims by American and German intelligence sources and claims by the Ukrainian government. On the basis of the JIT's conclusions, the governments of the Netherlands and Australia held Russia responsible for the deployment of the Buk installation and were pursuing legal routes as of May 2018. The Russian government denied involvement in the shooting down of the airplane, and its account of how the aircraft was shot down has varied over time. Coverage in Russian media has also differed from that in other countries.

This was Malaysia Airlines' second aircraft loss during 2014, after the disappearance of Flight 370 on 8 March, and is the deadliest airliner shoot-down incident to date.

Congratulations, you have discovered Wikipedia, one of the most popular sites on the Internet and probably the leading informational resource in the world today.

Unfortunately some people are evil and have to be banned. In order to save time, we have compiled this easy questionnaire. It's multiple choice, one answer only.

Q: You have discovered a website which has enormous reach and is used by millions of people every day. You think:

1. Wow, this is awesome! How can I help?
2. Wow, this is awesome! How can I use this to my advantage?

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Scoring:

1. 1 point
2. 0 points

Marking: 0 points: Fail. Please die in a fire. 1 point: Pass. Welcome!

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It seems like the authors of this 'test' are evil, willing people to die and in a most horrible manner.