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🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 India 🔗 Plants 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 Science Policy

Norman Ernest Borlaug (; March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Borlaug received his B.S. in forestry in 1937 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.

Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. According to Jan Douglas, executive assistant to the president of the World Food Prize Foundation, the source of this number is Gregg Easterbrook's 1997 article "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." The article states that the "form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths." He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production in Asia and Africa.

🔗 Mexico 🔗 Marine life 🔗 Panama 🔗 Nicaragua 🔗 Cephalopods 🔗 Guatemala

The larger Pacific striped octopus (LPSO), or Harlequin octopus, is a species of octopus known for its intelligence and gregarious nature. The species was first documented in the 1970s and, being fairly new to scientific observation, has yet to be scientifically described. Because of this, LPSO has no official scientific name. Unlike other octopus species which are normally solitary, the LPSO has been reported as forming groups of up to 40 individuals. While most octopuses are cannibalistic and have to exercise extreme caution while mating, these octopuses mate with their ventral sides touching, pressing their beaks and suckers together in an intimate embrace. The LPSO has presented many behaviors that differ from most species of octopus, including intimate mating behaviors, formation of social communities, unusual hunting behavior, and the ability to reproduce multiple times throughout their life. The LPSO has been found to favor the tropical waters of the Eastern Pacific.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Germany 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Anarchism

B. Traven (German: [ˈbeː ˈtʁaːvn̩]; Bruno Traven in some accounts) was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the few certainties about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927). The film adaptation of the same name won three Academy Awards in 1948.

Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. The person most commonly identified as Traven is Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924 and who had edited an anarchist newspaper in Germany called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner). Marut is thought to have operated under the "B. Traven" pseudonym, although no details are known about Marut's life before 1912, and many hold that "Ret Marut" was in fact also a pseudonym.

Some researchers further argue that Marut/Traven's original name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern-day Świebodzin in Poland. This theory is not universally accepted. B. Traven in Mexico is also connected with the names of Berick Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, both of whom appeared and acted in different periods of the writer's life. Both, however, denied being Traven and claimed that they were his literary agents only, representing him in contacts with his publishers.

B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Ship from 1926, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927 (filmed in 1948 by John Huston), and the so-called "Jungle Novels", also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany). The Jungle Novels are a group of six novels (including The Carreta and Government), published in the years 1930–1939 and set among Mexican Indians just before and during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. B. Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period and retained this popularity after the Second World War; they were also translated into many languages. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first, with their English editions appearing later; nevertheless, the author always claimed that the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is mostly treated by Traven scholars as a diversion or a joke, although there are those who accept it.

🔗 California 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Geography 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Islands

The Island of California refers to a long-held European misconception, dating from the 16th century, that the Baja California Peninsula was not part of mainland North America but rather a large island (spelled on early maps as Cali Fornia) separated from the continent by a strait now known as the Gulf of California.

One of the most famous cartographic errors in history, it was propagated on many maps during the 17th and 18th centuries, despite contradictory evidence from various explorers. The legend was initially infused with the idea that California was a terrestrial paradise, like the Garden of Eden or Atlantis.

🔗 Mexico 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Mesoamerica

The Great Pyramid of Cholula, also known as Tlachihualtepetl (Nahuatl for "made-by-hand mountain"), is a complex located in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. It is the largest archaeological site of a pyramid (temple) in the New World, as well as the largest pyramid by volume known to exist in the world today. The adobe brick pyramid stands 25 metres (82 ft) above the surrounding plain, which is significantly shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza's height of 146.6 metres (481 ft), but much wider, measuring 300 by 315 metres (984 by 1,033 ft) in its final form, compared to the Great Pyramid's base dimensions of 230.3 by 230.3 metres (756 by 756 ft). The pyramid is a temple that traditionally has been viewed as having been dedicated to the god Quetzalcoatl. The architectural style of the building was linked closely to that of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, although influence from the Gulf Coast is evident as well, especially from El Tajín.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Energy 🔗 Caribbean 🔗 Fisheries and Fishing

Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well being drilled by the semi-submersible drilling rig Sedco 135 in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche in waters 50 m (160 ft) deep. On 3 June 1979, the well suffered a blowout resulting in one of the largest oil spills in history.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Military history/Early Modern warfare 🔗 Military history/Spanish military history 🔗 Mesoamerica 🔗 Spain 🔗 Military history/European military history

Gonzalo Guerrero (also known as Gonzalo Marinero, Gonzalo de Aroca and Gonzalo de Aroza) was a sailor from Palos, Spain who was shipwrecked along the Yucatán Peninsula and was taken as a slave by the local Maya. Earning his freedom, Guerrero became a respected warrior under a Maya lord and raised three of the first mestizo children in Mexico and one of the first mestizo children in the Americas, alongside Miguel Díez de Aux and the children of Caramuru and João Ramalho in Brazil. Little is known of his early life.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 Canada 🔗 Death 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Mexico

The 2009 flu pandemic or swine flu was an influenza pandemic that lasted from January 2009 to August 2010, and the second of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus (the first being the 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic), albeit a new strain. First described in April 2009, the virus appeared to be a new strain of H1N1, which resulted from a previous triple reassortment of bird, swine, and human flu viruses further combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus, leading to the term "swine flu". According to WHO, the laboratory confirmed death toll is more than 18,036. Meanwhile, some studies estimated that 11 to 21 percent of the global population at the time – or around 700 million to 1.4 billion people (out of a total of 6.8 billion) – contracted the illness. This was more than the number of people infected by the Spanish flu pandemic, but only resulted in about 150,000 to 575,000 fatalities for the 2009 pandemic. A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu. For comparison, the WHO estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 people die of seasonal flu annually.

Unlike most strains of influenza, the Pandemic H1N1/09 virus does not disproportionately infect adults older than 60 years; this was an unusual and characteristic feature of the H1N1 pandemic. Even in the case of previously very healthy people, a small percentage develop pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This manifests itself as increased breathing difficulty and typically occurs three to six days after initial onset of flu symptoms. The pneumonia caused by flu can be either direct viral pneumonia or a secondary bacterial pneumonia. A November 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article recommended that flu patients whose chest X-ray indicates pneumonia receive both antivirals and antibiotics. In particular, it is a warning sign if a child (and presumably an adult) seems to be getting better and then relapses with high fever, as this relapse may be bacterial pneumonia.

🔗 Mexico 🔗 Spain 🔗 Folklore 🔗 Tambayan Philippines

A folk legend holds that in October 1593 a soldier of the Spanish Empire (named Gil Pérez in a 1908 version) was mysteriously transported from Manila in the Philippines to the Plaza Mayor (now the Zócalo) in Mexico City. The soldier's claim to have come from the Philippines was disbelieved by the Mexicans until his account of the assassination of Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas was corroborated months later by the passengers of a ship which had crossed the Pacific Ocean with the news. Folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier in 1908 described the legend as "current among all classes of the population of the City of Mexico". Twentieth-century paranormal investigators giving credence to the story have offered teleportation and alien abduction as explanations.

🔗 Mexico 🔗 Geology 🔗 Caves

Cave of the Crystals (Spanish: Cueva de los cristales), also known as Naica Cave (Spanish: Cueva de Naica) or the Giant Crystal Cave, is a cave connected to the Naica Mine at a depth of 300 metres (980 ft), in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico. It takes the form of a chamber within the limestone host rock of the mine, and is about 109 metres (358 ft) long with a volume of 5,000 to 6,000 cubic metres (180,000 to 210,000 ft³).

The chamber contains giant selenite crystals (gypsum, CaSO₄ · 2 H₂O), some of the largest natural crystals ever found. The largest is 11.40 metres (37.4 ft), with a volume of about 5 cubic metres (180 ft³), and an estimated mass of 12 tonnes. When not flooded, the cave is extremely hot, with air temperatures reaching up to 58 °C (136 °F) with 90 to 99 percent humidity. This is comparable to temperature records in Death Valley, but with much wetter air that results in a much higher wet bulb temperature; this prevents cooling via sweating. The cave is relatively unexplored because of these factors. Without proper protection, people can only endure approximately ten minutes of exposure at a time.

The cave was discovered in April 2000 by brothers Juan and Pedro Sánchez while drilling in the mine. As of October 2015, the mine had reflooded and the cavern filled once more with the water rich in minerals required for the crystals to grow.

A group of scientists in the Naica Project have been studying these caverns.