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🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Japanese military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history 🔗 Japan/History 🔗 Japan/Royalty and nobility

The Jewel Voice Broadcast (玉音放送, Gyokuon-hōsō) was the radio broadcast in which Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa 昭和天皇 Shōwa-tennō) read out the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the Greater East Asia War (大東亜戦争終結ノ詔書, Daitōa-sensō-shūketsu-no-shōsho), announcing to the Japanese people that the Japanese Government had accepted the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military at the end of World War II. This speech was broadcast at noon Japan Standard Time on August 15, 1945.

The speech was probably the first time that an Emperor of Japan had spoken (albeit via a phonograph record) to the common people. It was delivered in the formal, Classical Japanese that few ordinary people could easily understand. It made no direct reference to a surrender of Japan, instead stating that the government had been instructed to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration fully. This created confusion in the minds of many listeners who were not sure whether Japan had surrendered. The poor audio quality of the radio broadcast, as well as the formal courtly language in which the speech was composed, worsened the confusion. A digitally remastered version of the broadcast was released on 30 June 2015.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Physics 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

A vacuum airship, also known as a vacuum balloon, is a hypothetical airship that is evacuated rather than filled with a lighter-than-air gas such as hydrogen or helium. First proposed by Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi in 1670, the vacuum balloon would be the ultimate expression of lifting power per volume displaced.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Cardiology 🔗 Wales

The Caerphilly Heart Disease Study, also known as the Caerphilly Prospective Study (CaPS), is an epidemiological prospective cohort, set up in 1979 in a representative population sample drawn from Caerphilly, a typical small town in South Wales, UK.

The initial aim was to examine relationships between a wide range of social, lifestyle, dietary and other factors with incident vascular disease. Opportunity was also taken, in collaboration with a range of clinical and laboratory colleagues, to collect data on a wide range of factors with possible relevance to diseases other than vascular, and at the same time to collect clinical information on incident disease events. The study was initiated by Professor Peter Elwood, Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit for South Wales. The work has so far led to over 400 publications in the medical press.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Geology 🔗 Weather 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Weather/Space weather

A Miyake event is an observed sharp enhancement of the production of cosmogenic isotopes by cosmic rays. It can be marked by a spike in the concentration of radioactive carbon isotope ¹⁴
C in tree rings, as well as ¹⁰
Be and ³⁶
Cl in ice cores, which are all independently dated. At present, five significant events are known (7176 BCE, 5259 BCE, 660 BCE, 774 CE, 993 CE) for which the spike in ¹⁴
C is quite remarkable, i.e. above 1% rise over a period of 2 years, and four more events (12,350 BCE, 5410 BCE, 1052 CE, 1279 CE) need independent confirmation. It is not known how often Miyake events occur, but from the available data it is estimated to be every 400–2400 years.

There is strong evidence that Miyake events are caused by extreme solar particle events and they are likely related to super-flares discovered on solar-like stars. Although Miyake events are based on extreme year-to-year rises of ¹⁴
C concentration, the duration of the periods over which the ¹⁴
C levels increase or stay at high levels is longer than one year. However, a universal cause and origin of all the events is not yet established in science, and some of the events may be caused by other phenomena coming from outer space (such as a gamma-ray burst).

A recently reported sharp spike in ¹⁴
C that occurred between 12,350 and 12,349 BCE, may represent the largest known Miyake event. This event was identified during a study conducted by an international team of researchers who measured radiocarbon levels in ancient trees recovered from the eroded banks of the Drouzet River, near Gap, France, in the Southern French Alps. According to the initial study the new event is roughly twice the size of the Δ¹⁴
C increase for more recent 774 CE and 993 CE events, but the strength of the corresponding solar storm is not yet assessed. However, the newly discovered 12,350 BCE event has not yet been independently confirmed in wood from other regions, nor it is reliably supported by a clear corresponding spike in other isotopes (such as Beryllium-10) that are usually used in combination for absolute radiometric dating.

A Miyake event occurring in modern conditions might have significant impacts on global technological infrastructure such as satellites, telecommunications, and power grids.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Brands

Metrecal was a brand of diet foods introduced in the early 1960s. Though its products were criticized for their taste, which newer varieties of flavor tried to improve upon later, it attained a niche in the popular culture of the time. Created and marketed initially by C. Joseph Genster of Mead Johnson & Company, it was eventually replaced in the market by competitors such as SlimFast and lost popularity because it was linked to deaths.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Law

Bleem! (styled as bleem!) is a commercial PlayStation emulator released by the Bleem! Company in 1999 for IBM-compatible PCs and Dreamcast. It is notable for being one of the few commercial software emulators to be aggressively marketed during the emulated console's lifetime, and was the center of multiple controversial lawsuits.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Economics

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr (1937-1994) The concept is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies or polities that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better".

First published in 1973, Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher's critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and the popularisation of the concept of globalization. In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. A further edition with commentaries was published in 1999.

🔗 Germany

The Bielefeld conspiracy (German: Bielefeldverschwörung or Bielefeld-Verschwörung, pronounced [ˈbiːləfɛltfɛɐ̯ˌʃvøːʁʊŋ]) is a satire of conspiracy theories that claims that the city of Bielefeld, Germany, does not exist, but is an illusion propagated by various forces. First posted on the German Usenet in 1994, the conspiracy has since been mentioned in the city's marketing, and referenced by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

🔗 Mathematics

Visual calculus, invented by Mamikon Mnatsakanian (known as Mamikon), is an approach to solving a variety of integral calculus problems. Many problems that would otherwise seem quite difficult yield to the method with hardly a line of calculation, often reminiscent of what Martin Gardner called "aha! solutions" or Roger Nelsen a proof without words.

🔗 Microbiology 🔗 Marine life 🔗 Tree of Life

Parakaryon myojinensis, also known as the Myojin parakaryote, is a highly unusual species of single-celled organism known only from a single specimen, described in 2012. It has features of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes but is apparently distinct from either group, making it unique among organisms discovered thus far. It is the sole species in the genus Parakaryon. It is part of the domain Parakarya.