The Wikipedia article of the day for September 10, 2016 is North Norfolk Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest.
The North Norfolk Coast Site of Special Scientific Interest in Norfolk, England, is a Special Protection Area for birds and other wildlife, included in the European Union’s Natura 2000 network of protected sites. Its habitats include reed beds, salt marshes, freshwater lagoons, and sand or shingle beaches, across 7,700 ha (19,027 acres) of the county’s north coast. The wetlands are important for scarce breeding birds such as pied avocets. The location also attracts rare migrating birds, and ducks and geese winter along this coast in considerable numbers. The area is archaeologically significant, with sites including the mound of an Iron Age fort, a Roman naval port near Brancaster, medieval ruins, and remnants of military use from both world wars. The area attracts many tourists for birdwatching and other outdoor activities. The threat of the sea’s encroachment on this soft coast is being met by managed retreat and the creation of new reserves inland. The site is designated as a wetland of international importance, and most of it is a Biosphere Reserve.
Archives for September 2016
Wikipedia article of the day for September 10, 2016
Wikipedia article of the day for September 9, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 9, 2016 is Milos Raonic.
Milos Raonic (born 1990) is a Canadian professional tennis player. He reached a career-high world No. 4 singles ranking in May 2015, as ranked by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). His career highlights include a Grand Slam final at the 2016 Wimbledon Championships and two Grand Slam semifinals at the 2014 Wimbledon Championships and 2016 Australian Open. He was the 2011 ATP Newcomer of the Year, and has been ranked continuously inside the top 20 since August 2012. Raonic is the first player born in the 1990s to win an ATP title, to be ranked in the top 10, and to qualify for the ATP World Tour Finals. He has eight ATP singles titles, all won on hard courts. He is frequently described as having one of the best serves among his contemporaries. Statistically, he is among the strongest servers in the Open Era, winning 91% of service games to rank third all-time. Aided by his serve, he plays an all-court style with an emphasis on short points. Raonic has more ATP titles and finals appearances in the Open Era than all other Canadian men combined.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 8, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 8, 2016 is The Man Trap.
“The Man Trap” was the first episode to be broadcast in the American science fiction television series Star Trek, but the sixth to be filmed. It aired on NBC on September 8, 1966. The story was assigned to George Clayton Johnson; his first draft was entitled “Damsel With a Dulcimer”, incorporating elements from his Twilight Zone episode “The Four of Us Are Dying”. Series creator Gene Roddenberry, producer Robert H. Justman and story editor John D. F. Black all tweaked elements of the episode. The story, part of Roddenberry’s original Star Trek pitch to the studio, was chosen for the first broadcast episode because the studio liked its horror-based plot. “The Man Trap” placed first in the timeslot with a Nielsen rating of 25.2 percent for the first half-hour and 24.2 for the remainder. After broadcast, reviewers criticized the violent scenes but praised the acting. More recent appraisals have been mixed; praise has been given to the plot and diverse cast, but Hollywood.com listed it among the worst episodes of the series. The creature, created by Wah Chang and William Ware Theiss, has been dubbed the “salt vampire” by fans.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 7, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 7, 2016 is Krulak Mendenhall mission.
The Krulak Mendenhall mission was an American fact-finding expedition sent by President Kennedy’s administration to South Vietnam in 1963. It investigated the progress of the war by the South Vietnamese regime and their US military advisers against the Viet Cong insurgency. The mission was led by Victor Krulak (pictured), a major general in the Marine Corps, and Joseph Mendenhall, a senior Foreign Service officer experienced in Vietnamese affairs. The four-day whirlwind trip came in the wake of increasingly strained relations between the United States and South Vietnam. In their submissions Krulak presented an optimistic report on the progress of the war, but Mendenhall presented a bleak picture of military failure and public discontent. Krulak said that the Vietnamese soldiers’ efforts in the field would not be affected by the public’s unease with President Ngô Đình Diệm’s policies. Mendenhall concluded that those policies increased the possibility of religious civil war and led the South Vietnamese to believe that their quality of life would improve under the Viet Cong. The contradictory reports prompted Kennedy to ask, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?”
Wikipedia article of the day for September 6, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 6, 2016 is Triturus.
Triturus is a genus of European and West Asian newts, with two species of marbled newts and seven species of crested newts. They live and breed in vegetation-rich aquatic habitats for two to six months and usually spend the rest of the year in shady, well-protected land habitats close to their breeding sites. Males court females with a ritualised display, ending in the deposition of a spermatophore that is picked up by the female. After fertilisation, a female lays 200–400 eggs, folding them individually into leaves of water plants. Larvae develop over two to four months before metamorphosing into land-dwelling juveniles. The alpine newt (Ichthyosaura alpestris), banded newts (Ommatotriton), and small-bodied newts (Lissotriton) are now placed in other genera, leaving the European brook newts (Calotriton) as Triturus’s closest relatives. Although not immediately threatened, crested and marbled newts suffer from population declines, caused mainly by habitat loss and fragmentation. All species are legally protected in Europe, and some of their habitats have been designated as special nature reserves.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 5, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 5, 2016 is Calutron.
A calutron (pictured) is a device that separates isotopes of a chemical element by ionizing, accelerating and deflecting them using electric and magnetic fields. A type of sector mass spectrometer, it was developed by Ernest O. Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II, based on his earlier invention, the cyclotron. Calutrons were used to separate the isotopes of uranium on an industrial scale at the Y-12 plant at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The enriched uranium produced was used in the Little Boy atomic bomb employed in the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Electromagnetic uranium enrichment was abandoned in the early post-war period in favor of the more complicated, but more efficient, gaseous diffusion method, but calutrons remained in use to produce isotopically enriched samples of naturally occurring elements for military, scientific and medical purposes.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 4, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 4, 2016 is Wotton (Metropolitan Railway) railway station.
Wotton railway station in Buckinghamshire, England, was part of a horse-drawn freight tramway built by Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1871. It served the Duke’s home at Wotton House and the nearby village of Wotton Underwood. In 1872 the line was extended to the nearby town of Brill, converted to passenger use, equipped with steam locomotives, and named the Brill Tramway. In the 1880s, the route was taken over by the Metropolitan Railway. Wotton, the Tramway’s third busiest passenger station, was also a transit point for large shipments of milk from local farms. In 1933 the Metropolitan Railway became the Metropolitan line of London Transport, making Wotton a station on the London Underground, despite its distance from London. In November 1935 London Transport withdrew all services from the route. The Tramway reverted to the descendants of the Duke of Buckingham, but having no funds and no rolling stock they were unable to operate it. By early April 1936 the line’s entire infrastructure, including Wotton station, had been sold for scrap at auction.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 3, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 3, 2016 is Air Rhodesia Flight 825.
Air Rhodesia Flight 825 was a passenger flight that was shot down by the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) on 3 September 1978, during the Rhodesian Bush War. The aircraft, a Vickers Viscount, was flying Air Rhodesia’s scheduled service from Victoria Falls to the capital Salisbury, via the resort town of Kariba. Soon after its takeoff, ZIPRA guerrillas launched a Soviet-made Strela 2 surface-to-air missile at the plane. Attempting a belly landing in a cotton field west of Karoi, the plane hit an unseen ditch, cartwheeled, and exploded. Of the 52 passengers and four crew, 38 died in the crash. The insurgents then massacred 10 survivors with automatic gunfire. Joshua Nkomo, the ZIPRA leader, publicly claimed responsibility for the missile attack (but not for the massacre) on the BBC’s Today programme the same evening, saying the aircraft had been used for military purposes. Most Rhodesians, black and white, saw the attack as an act of terrorism. Martial law and a fierce white Rhodesian backlash followed, even though few black Rhodesians supported the attack. Five months later, ZIPRA shot down Air Rhodesia Flight 827 in a similar incident.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 2, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 2, 2016 is Hotel Chevalier.
Hotel Chevalier is a 2007 short film written and directed by Wes Anderson, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman as former lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room. The 13-minute film acts as a prologue to Anderson’s 2007 feature film The Darjeeling Limited, in which a man (played by Adrien Brody) reunites with his brothers (Owen Wilson and Schwartzman) in India after the death of their father. Hotel Chevalier was shot on location in a Parisian hotel by a small crew and self-financed by Anderson, who initially intended it as a stand-alone work. Its first showing was at the Venice Film Festival première of the feature film on September 2, 2007, and it made its own debut later that month at Apple Stores in four American cities. The day after its première, it was made available for free from the iTunes Store for one month, during which it was downloaded more than 500,000 times. The film garnered near-universal critical acclaim from reviewers who compared it favorably with The Darjeeling Limited and praised its richness, poignancy, and careful construction.
Wikipedia article of the day for September 1, 2016
The Wikipedia article of the day for September 1, 2016 is Passenger pigeon.
The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), now extinct, was endemic to North America. Sometimes confused with the mourning dove, the male pigeons were 39 to 41 cm (15.4 to 16.1 in) in length and mainly gray on the upperparts, with iridescent bronze feathers on the neck and black spots on the wings; the females were duller and browner.
They inhabited mainly deciduous forests in eastern North America, primarily around the Great Lakes. Migrating in enormous flocks, they were once the most abundant bird species in North America, with a population of perhaps 3 to 5 billion. They could reach flying speeds of 100 km/h (62 mph). The birds fed on nuts, seeds, fruits and invertebrates. They practiced communal roosting and communal breeding. In the 19th century, when widespread deforestation was destroying their habitat, they were commercialized as cheap food and hunted voraciously. Martha, thought to be the last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Eradication of the species has been described as one of the most senseless extinctions induced by humans.
