Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

319 Leona (provisional designation A920 HE), is a dark asteroid and tumbling slow rotator from the outermost regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 70 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 8 October 1891, by French astronomer Auguste Charlois at Nice Observatory in southwestern France. Any reference of its name to a person is unknown. On 12 December 2023 Leona will occult Betelgeuse as seen from southern Europe.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Ireland

Percy Edwin Ludgate (2 August 1883 – 16 October 1922) was an Irish amateur scientist who designed the second analytical engine (general-purpose Turing-complete computer) in history.

🔗 Economics

Eagle Cash (stylized as EagleCash), and sister program EZpay, are cash management applications that use stored-value card technology to process financial transactions in "closed-loop" operating environments. The United States Department of the Treasury sponsors the programs for the U.S. Armed Forces. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston administers the programs for the Treasury, and they are in use at approved U.S. military facilities inside and outside the continental United States. The systems use a plastic payment card, similar to a credit or debit card, which has an embedded microchip that tracks the card's balance and interfaces with encrypted card readers. This method allows soldiers to purchase goods and services at U.S. military posts and canteens, without carrying cash, or manage their personal bank accounts while on deployment or in training. The program reduces the amount of American currency required overseas, reduces theft, saves thousands of man-hours in labor, helps reduce the risk of transporting cash in combat environments, and increases security and convenience for service members. It helped reduce or eliminate the need for cash and money orders.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Energy 🔗 Africa/Djibouti 🔗 Yemen

The Red Sea dam is a speculative macro-engineering proposal put forward in 2007 by a group of scientists and engineers. Although the authors' intentions are to explore "the ethical and environmental dilemmas and some of the political implications of macro-engineering", the proposal has attracted both criticism and ridicule.

🔗 Mathematics

Bellard's formula is used to calculate the nth digit of π in base 16.

Bellard's formula was discovered by Fabrice Bellard in 1997. It is about 43% faster than the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula (discovered in 1995). It has been used in PiHex, the now-completed distributed computing project.

One important application is verifying computations of all digits of pi performed by other means. Rather than having to compute all of the digits twice by two separate algorithms to ensure that a computation is correct, the final digits of a very long all-digits computation can be verified by the much faster Bellard's formula.

Formula:

${\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}\pi ={\frac {1}{2^{6}}}\sum _{n=0}^{\infty }{\frac {(-1)^{n}}{2^{10n}}}\,\left(-{\frac {2^{5}}{4n+1}}\right.&{}-{\frac {1}{4n+3}}+{\frac {2^{8}}{10n+1}}-{\frac {2^{6}}{10n+3}}\left.{}-{\frac {2^{2}}{10n+5}}-{\frac {2^{2}}{10n+7}}+{\frac {1}{10n+9}}\right)\end{aligned}}}$

🔗 Energy 🔗 Engineering

A heat pipe is a heat-transfer device that employs phase transition to transfer heat between two solid interfaces.

At the hot interface of a heat pipe, a volatile liquid in contact with a thermally conductive solid surface turns into a vapor by absorbing heat from that surface. The vapor then travels along the heat pipe to the cold interface and condenses back into a liquid, releasing the latent heat. The liquid then returns to the hot interface through capillary action, centrifugal force, or gravity and the cycle repeats.

Due to the very high heat transfer coefficients for boiling and condensation, heat pipes are highly effective thermal conductors. The effective thermal conductivity varies with heat pipe length and can approach 100 kW/(m⋅K) for long heat pipes, in comparison with approximately 0.4 kW/(m⋅K) for copper.

Modern CPU heat pipes are typically made of copper and use water as the working fluid. They are common in many consumer electronics like desktops, laptops, tablets, and high-end smartphones.

🔗 Japan

In Japanese culture, a hatsuyume (Japanese: 初夢) is the first dream one has in the new year. Traditionally, the contents of such a dream would foretell the luck of the dreamer in the ensuing year. In Japan, the night of December 31 was often passed without sleeping, so the hatsuyume is often experienced during the night of January 1; the day after the night of the "first dream" is also known as the hatsuyume. This day is January 2 in the Gregorian calendar, but was different in the traditional Japanese calendar.

It is considered to be particularly good luck to dream of Mount Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant. This belief has been in place since the early Edo period but there are various theories regarding the origins as to why this particular combination was considered to be auspicious. One theory suggests that this combination is lucky because Mount Fuji is Japan's highest mountain, the hawk is a clever and strong bird, and the word for eggplant (茄子, nasu or nasubi) suggests achieving something great (成す nasu). Another theory suggests that this combination arose because Mount Fuji, falconry, and early eggplants were favorites of the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Although this superstition is well known in Japan, often memorized in the form ichi-Fuji, ni-taka, san-nasubi (一富士、二鷹、三茄子; 1. Fuji, 2. Hawk, 3. Eggplant), the continuation of the list is not as well known. The continuation is yon-sen, go-tabako, roku-zatō (四扇、五煙草、六座頭; 4. Fan, 5. Tobacco, 6. Blind acupressurer). The origins of this trio are less well known, and it is unclear whether they were added after the original three or whether the list of six originated at the same time.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft

Internet Explorer for UNIX is a discontinued graphical web browser that was available free of charge and produced by Microsoft for use in the X Window System on Solaris or HP-UX. Development ended with a version of Internet Explorer 5 in 2001 and support for it was completely discontinued in 2002.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Crime 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software

A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files visible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.

Following public outcry, government investigations and class-action lawsuits in 2005 and 2006, Sony BMG partially addressed the scandal with consumer settlements, a recall of about 10% of the affected CDs and the suspension of CD copy-protection efforts in early 2007.

🔗 Environment