# kb

id: leonardo-da-vinci-medal-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_Medal-0.md
category: reference
title: Leonardo da Vinci Medal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_Medal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:11.995311+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: leonardo-da-vinci-medal-20260505-0
summary:
The Leonardo da Vinci Medal is the highest award of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and was first given in 1962. In general this award is granted annually to scholars who have contributed outstandingly to the history of technology through research, teaching, publication or other activities. The prize consists of a certificate and a medal. The medal is a circular bronze medallion designed by the Hungarian expressionist sculptor András Beck. The face depicts the head of Leonardo da Vinci based on one of his self-portraits and the reverse depicts "the basic sources of energy (water, wind, and fire)," in the sculptor's words. == List of recipients == == References == == External links == The Leonardo da Vinci Medal – Society for the History of Technology


id: charles-a-lindbergh-chair-in-aerospace-history-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Lindbergh_Chair_in_Aerospace_History-0.md
category: reference
title: Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Lindbergh_Chair_in_Aerospace_History
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:13.200482+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: charles-a-lindbergh-chair-in-aerospace-history-20260505-0
summary:
The Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History, also known as the Lindbergh Chair, is a one-year senior fellowship hosted by the U.S. National Air and Space Museum (NASM), to assist a scholar in the research and composition of a book about aerospace history. Named for the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, the position is competitive: one experienced scholar is selected each year from multiple applicants worldwide. Up to $100,000 is granted to the winner. The Lindbergh Chair is one of four research fellowships administered by NASM within the Smithsonian Institution: the others are the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellowship, the A. Verville Fellowship, and the Postdoctoral Earth and Planetary Sciences Fellowship. Announced in 1977 at the 50th anniversary of Lindbergh's famous solo flight, 1978 was the first year that the Lindbergh Chair was occupied—British aviation historian Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith was selected as the first recipient. Each Lindbergh Chair application is judged relative to the suitability of its proposal, the scholarly record of the applicant, the availability of relevant museum staff advisors knowledgeable on the proposed topic, whether the NASM can provide the specific resources, and the applicability of the proposal to NASM's work-in-progress series. The winner is expected to reside


id: margaret-w-rossiter-history-of-women-in-science-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter_History_of_Women_in_Science_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter_History_of_Women_in_Science_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:14.378453+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: margaret-w-rossiter-history-of-women-in-science-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize is awarded by the History of Science Society for an outstanding book (in odd-numbered years) or article (in even-numbered years) on the history of women in science, published at most four years before the year of the award. It was previously called the Women's Prize, but in 2004 the History of Science Society Council voted unanimously at its annual meeting to rename it the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize. == Recipients == == See also == List of general science and technology awards List of history awards List of science and technology awards for women Women in chemistry Women in science == References ==


id: kenneth-o-may-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O._May_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Kenneth O. May Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O._May_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:15.517128+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: kenneth-o-may-prize-20260505-0
summary:
Kenneth O. May Prize and Medal in history of mathematics is an award of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM) "for the encouragement and promotion of the history of mathematics internationally". It was established in 1989 and is named in honor of Kenneth O. May, the founder of ICHM. Since then, the award is given every four years, at the ICHM congress. == Kenneth O. May Prize winners == Source: (1989-2005) A Brief History of the Kenneth O. May Prize 2025: Jan Hogendijk and David E. Rowe 2021: Sonja Brentjes and Christine Proust 2017: Eberhard Knobloch and Roshdi Rashed 2013: Menso Folkerts and Jens Høyrup 2009: Ivor Grattan-Guinness and Radha Charan Gupta 2005: Henk J. M. Bos 2001: Ubiratàn D'Ambrosio and Lam Lay Yong 1997: René Taton 1993: Christoph Scriba and Hans Wussing 1989: Dirk Struik and Adolph P. Yushkevich == See also == List of history awards List of mathematics awards == References == A Brief History of the Kenneth O. May Prize in the History of Mathematics BLC Newsletter August 2009


id: nathan-reingold-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Reingold_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Nathan Reingold Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Reingold_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:16.708201+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: nathan-reingold-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Nathan Reingold Prize (formerly Ida & Henry Schuman Prize) is given every year to a graduate student for having written an original essay in the history of science. It is awarded by the History of Science Society. == References ==


id: paul-bunge-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Paul Bunge Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:19.035070+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: paul-bunge-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Paul Bunge Prize is an international award for seminal and lasting contributions to the history of scientific instruments. Endowed in 1993 by the late Hans R. Jenemann (1920–1996), glass chemist at Schott AG in Mainz, and collector and historian of antique chemical balances. The name of the prize commemorates the leading German maker of precision balances in the nineteenth century Paul Bunge (1839–1888). The Prize is given by the Hans R. Jenemann Foundation and jointly administered by the German Chemical Society and the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft für Physikalische Chemie. == Bunge Prize Laureates == == Literature == Charlotte Bigg & Christoph Meinel (eds.), Paul Bunge Prize: History of Scientific Instruments, 1993-2023 (Frankfurt/Main: GDCh & DBG, 2023), 96 pp. == References == == External links == Foundation Flyer (in German) Jenemann Archive Project


id: pfizer-award-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-0.md
category: reference
title: Pfizer Award
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:20.251142+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: pfizer-award-20260505-0
summary:
The Pfizer Award is awarded annually by the History of Science Society "in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science" that was "published in English during a period of three calendar years immediately preceding the year of competition."


id: pfizer-award-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-1.md
category: reference
title: Pfizer Award
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:20.251142+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: pfizer-award-20260505-0
summary:
== Recipients == 1959 Marie Boas Hall, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958). 1960 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959). 1961 Cyril Stanley Smith, A History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metal before 1890 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 1962 Henry Guerlac, Lavoisier, The Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in 1772 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961) 1963 Lynn Townsend White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 1964 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). 1965 Charles Donald O'Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). 1966 L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1965). 1967 Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966). 1968 Edward Rosen, Kepler's Somnium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). 1969 Margaret T. May, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University


id: pfizer-award-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-2.md
category: reference
title: Pfizer Award
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:20.251142+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: pfizer-award-20260505-0
summary:
2022 Tara Nummedal, Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany 2023 Robyn d'Avignon, Ritual Geology. Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa 2024 Projit Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 == References ==


id: richard-w-leopold-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Leopold_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Richard W. Leopold Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Leopold_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:21.493650+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: richard-w-leopold-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Richard W. Leopold Prize is awarded biennially by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Professor Richard W. Leopold (1912–2006) was President of the OAH in 1976–1977. A three-member committee, chosen by the President of the OAH, chooses the best history book on U.S. federal government agencies, U.S. foreign policies, U.S. military affairs, or biographies of government officials. Only non-academic historians are eligible for the Prize, preferably historians employed by federal government agencies. The winning author receives $1,500. In 1990, the prize went to two books. In 2002, the prize went to two books, one of which had two authors. In these years, the authors split the prize money. In the listing below, the author links lead to the latest available biographical data. Unfortunately, few government employees have sites comparable to those sites in academia. The institutional affiliation listed is that at the time the awards was given, and the links are to those institutions. In both cases, “Wikipedia” sites, where available, were given preference. == Recipients == == See also == List of history awards == References == == External links == OAH


id: roy-g-neville-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_G._Neville_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Roy G. Neville Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_G._Neville_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:22.662449+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: roy-g-neville-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Roy G. Neville Prize in Bibliography or Biography is a biennial award given by the Science History Institute (formerly the Chemical Heritage Foundation) to recognize a biographical work in the field of chemistry or molecular science. The Roy G. Neville Prize was established in 2006 and named to honor scientist and book collector Roy G. Neville. Neville founded Engineering and Technical Consultants, Redwood City, California, in 1973. He also assembled one of the world's largest collections of rare books in the field of science and technology. The Neville collection, including over 6,000 titles from the late 15th century to the early 20th century, was acquired by the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in 2004. == Recipients == The following people have received the Neville Award: 2019 Helge Kragh, for Julius Thomsen: A Life in Chemistry and Beyond 2017 John C. Powers, for Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts 2016 Melvyn Usselman, for Pure Intelligence: The Life of William Hyde Wollaston 2013 Mary Jo Nye, for Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science 2011 Michael Hunter, for Boyle: Between God and Science 2009 William Hodson Brock, for


id: sidney-edelstein-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Sidney Edelstein Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:23.897365+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sidney-edelstein-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Sidney Edelstein Prize, previously known as the Dexter Prize, is an award presented by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) to the author of an outstanding scholarly book in the field of the history of technology. The book must have been published during the preceding three years. The award was established in 1968 through the generosity of Sidney Edelstein, a historian of dyes and the founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation. It was renamed the Sidney Edelstein Prize to honor his commitment to scholarship in the history of technology and is currently donated by his family. The prize consists of a plaque and a monetary award, which is currently $3,500. == History and design == The award was originally known as the Dexter Prize and was funded by the Dexter Chemical Corporation of New York City. When established, the prize carried a cash award of $1,000. It is awarded annually to outstanding books and monographs in the history of technology. The design of the award plaque was created by the silver sculptor Edward Widstrom. The imagery on the plaque is derived from the Plictho of Gioanventura Rosetti (1548), which is considered the first basic printed book on


id: suzanne-j-levinson-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_J._Levinson_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Suzanne J. Levinson Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_J._Levinson_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:25.028498+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: suzanne-j-levinson-prize-20260505-0
summary:
The Suzanne J. Levinson Prize is a prize of the History of Science Society, awarded biennially and established in 2006. The prize is given to the author of "a book in the history of the life sciences and natural history," published in the previous four years. The following authors have won the Levinson Prize: 2006 Prize – Sandra Herbert, Charles Darwin: Geologist ISBN 978-0-8014-4348-0 2008 Prize – Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies ISBN 978-0-674-02328-4 2010 Prize – Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language ISBN 978-0-226-70224-7. 2012 Prize – Martin Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform ISBN 978-0-226-73128-5 2014 Prize – Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire.Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment ISBN 978-0-226-05853-5 2016 Prize – Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud ISBN 978-0-226-04694-5 2018 Prize – Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection ISBN 978-0-226-43690-6 2020 Prize – Erika Lorraine Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America ISBN 978-0-691-18188-2 2022 Prize – Jenny Bangham, Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics ISBN 978-0226740034 2024 Prize - Ruth Rogaski, Knowing Manchuria: Environments,


id: verville-fellowship-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verville_Fellowship-0.md
category: reference
title: Verville Fellowship
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verville_Fellowship
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:26.234438+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: verville-fellowship-20260505-0
summary:
The A. Verville Fellowship is an American senior scholarship established in the name of aviation pioneer Alfred V. Verville at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. The Verville Fellowship is a competitive nine- to twelve-month in-residence fellowship for researching the history of aviation. The fellowship includes a $50,000 stipend with limited additional funds for travel and miscellaneous expenses. The program guidelines encourage candidates to pursue research and writing programs that appeal to an audience with broad interests while maintaining a professional tone. Outstanding manuscripts resulting from this program may be offered to the Smithsonian Institution Press for publication. == Fellowship selections == 2023-2024 - Sean Seyer - The Specter of Monopoly: The Conspiracy Theory that Shaped American Aviation, 1917-1949 2021-2022 - Alan Meyer - researching the lack of African American pilots in the industry 2016-2017 - Takashi Nishiyama 2015-2016 - Steven E. Harris - Wings of the Motherland: Soviet and Russian Cultures of Aviation from Khrushchev to Putin 2014-2015 - Alexander C.T. Geppert 2012-2013 - Richard Paul - NASA's role in the civil rights movement 2011-2012 - Anke Ortlepp - Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of Airports in the American South 2010-2011 - Monique Laney - Transnational Migration


id: watson-helen-miles-and-audrey-davis-prize-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson,_Helen,_Miles,_and_Audrey_Davis_Prize-0.md
category: reference
title: Watson, Helen, Miles, and Audrey Davis Prize
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson,_Helen,_Miles,_and_Audrey_Davis_Prize
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:27.372096+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: watson-helen-miles-and-audrey-davis-prize-20260505-0
summary:
This prize should not be confused with the Watson Davis Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology. The Watson, Helen, Miles, and Audrey Davis Prize (formerly the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize) is awarded annually by the History of Science Society for a book published, during the past three years, on the history of science for a wide public. The book should "introduce an entire field, a chronological period, a national tradition, or the work of a noteworthy individual." The book can be written by multiple authors or editors and is required to be written in English and suitable for an audience including undergraduates and readers without specialized, technical knowledge. The author (or collective author) receives 1,000 U.S. dollars and a certificate. The prize, established in 1985, is named in honor of Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis who were science popularizers in the USA. == Winners == 1986 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Random House, 1983). 1987 Thomas L. Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 1988 John Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman


id: william-h-welch-medal-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Welch_Medal-0.md
category: reference
title: William H. Welch Medal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Welch_Medal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:28.556479+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: william-h-welch-medal-20260505-0
summary:
The William H. Welch Medal is an annual award given by the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) to the author or co-authors of an outstanding book in medical history. According to the current rules, the award is not for editorial work. The book must be published during the five years preceding the award, which is presented at the AAHM's annual meeting. Any author who is awarded the William H. Welch is ineligible for subsequent awards of the medal — this rule of ineligibility was instituted in 1973, after Erwin Ackerknecht received the medal in 1953 and in 1972. The medal is named in honor of William H. Welch, M.D., a pathologist, bacteriologist, and first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The inaugural medal was awarded in 1950 to Henry E. Sigerist. He grew up in Paris and Zurich and in 1932 moved to the United States as the successor to William H. Welch as director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute of the History of Medicine. == Past recipients == The medal has been awarded every year since 1971. Before 1971, there were some years in which the medal was not awarded.


id: william-h-welch-medal-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Welch_Medal-1.md
category: reference
title: William H. Welch Medal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Welch_Medal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:28.556479+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: william-h-welch-medal-20260505-0
summary:
2023 — Yan Liu, Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China (University of Washington Press, 2021) ISBN 0295748990 2022 — Jaipreet Virdi, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020) ISBN 0226824063 2021 — Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Breen, Benjamin (20 December 2019). 2019 pbk edition. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-9662-4. 10-digit ISBN 0812224981 2020 — Nicole Barnes, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937–1945 (University of California Press, 2018) ASIN B07JMTSRNW ISBN 0520300467 2019 — Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Gómez, Pablo F. (23 February 2017). 2017 pbk edition. UNC Press Books. ISBN 9781469630878. 2018 — Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016) ISBN 9781442649620 2017 — Johanna Schoen, Abortion After Roe: Abortion After Legalization (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) ISBN 1469621185 2016 — Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China’s Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) ISBN 022616988X 2015 — Leslie J. Reagan,


id: william-h-welch-medal-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Welch_Medal-2.md
category: reference
title: William H. Welch Medal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Welch_Medal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:28.556479+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: william-h-welch-medal-20260505-0
summary:
1968 — Saul Benison, Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science (M.I.T. Press, 1967) OCLC 01085060 1967 — Howard B. Adelman, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Cornell University Press, 1966) ISBN 080140004X 1966 — Whitfield J. Bell Jr., John Morgan: Continental Doctor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); Whitfield j. Bell, Jr (11 November 2016). 2016 pbk edition. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-1-5128-0031-9. 1965 — No award 1964 — No award 1963 — Saul Jarcho, "for scholarly contributions" 1962 — Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (University of Kentucky Press, 1960) 1961 — George Rosen, "for contributions to the social history of medicine" 1960 — Richard H. Shryock, "for scholarly contributions" 1959 — No award 1958 — Charles F. Mullett (1901–1994), The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine (University of Kentucky Press, 1956) LCCN 56-6994 1957 — No award 1956 — Lyman Henry Butterfield (editor), Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton University Press, 1951) LCCN 51-11569; Butterfield, Lyman Henry (6 August 2019). 2019 pbk edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-62735-9. 1955 — No award 1954 — Jerome Pierce Webster and Martha Teach Gnudi, The


id: earth-system-science-partnership-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Science_Partnership-0.md
category: reference
title: Earth System Science Partnership
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Science_Partnership
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:30.110860+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: earth-system-science-partnership-20260505-0
summary:
Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) was an international interdisciplinary partnership established to promote integrated study of the Earth system and the interactions between environmental and human processes. The partnership brought together four major global change programmes: DIVERSITAS, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP). == Purpose and scope == ESSP aimed to transcend disciplinary boundaries by integrating natural sciences and social sciences to improve understanding and prediction of global and regional environmental change, and to inform sustainable responses. Its strategy emphasised systems-level observations, interdisciplinary modelling, regional studies, and engagement with stakeholders and policy communities. == Joint projects and activities == ESSP coordinated a small set of interdisciplinary “Joint Projects” addressing societally relevant themes: carbon (through the Global Carbon Project), food systems (GECAFS), water systems (GWSP), and global environmental change and human health (GEC&HH). These projects combined existing scientific networks, regional studies (for example the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study, MAIRS), and capacity-building activities to link local-regional research with global synthesis. == Governance and review == ESSP operated as a partnership among the sponsoring programmes with coordination provided through a scientific committee and Secretariat functions, and it was periodically reviewed


id: aerodynamics-research-institute-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics_Research_Institute-0.md
category: reference
title: Aerodynamics Research Institute
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics_Research_Institute
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:31.459964+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: aerodynamics-research-institute-20260505-0
summary:
The Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) in Göttingen was one of the four predecessor organizations of the 1969 founded "German Research and Experimental Institute for Aerospace", which in 1997 was renamed German Aerospace Center (DLR). == History == The AVA was created in 1919 from the 1907 Göttingen by Ludwig Prandtl founded "Modellversuchsanstalt für Aerodynamik der Motorluftschiff-Studiengesellschaft". In its founding years, it was still concerned with the development of the "best" form of airship. In 1908, the first wind tunnel was built in Göttingen for tests on models for aviation. In 1915, founded in 1911 Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) and under the direction of Ludwig Prandtl the "Modellversuchsanstalt aerodynamics" was founded in 1919 as the "Aerodynamic Research Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society" (AVA) was transferred to the KWG and converted in 1925 into the "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Flow Research linked to the Aerodynamic Research Institute". Ludwig Prandtl headed the institute until 1937, his successor became Albert Betz. In the same year a spin-off from the institute took place under the name "Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt Göttingen e. V. in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society ", in which the Reich Ministry of Aviation was involved. The remaining after the spin-off part was continued under


id: balfour-biological-laboratory-for-women-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women-0.md
category: reference
title: Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:32.655403+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: balfour-biological-laboratory-for-women-20260505-0
summary:
The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women was a laboratory attached to the University of Cambridge from 1884 to 1914. Established to expand the laboratory capacity and provide a separate space for women's practical work, it served as an important source of academic posts and opportunities for networking and discussion for women at Cambridge until laboratories began being shared by men and women in 1914. == Background == In March 1881, the month after women students received the right to sit the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge, twenty-two natural sciences students at Newnham College, Cambridge presented a memorial to the college's governing body outlining the need for more laboratory space. Newnham, one of two women's colleges at Cambridge, had had a purpose-built laboratory on its grounds since 1879. This laboratory was mostly set up for chemistry, and more space was needed because the Natural Sciences Tripos included a two-day examination in practical laboratory techniques. All laboratory space at Cambridge was becoming oversubscribed due to the increase in students wanting to study natural sciences, but it was also thought appropriate that women, who attended lectures alongside men, should have a separate laboratory facility rather than a shared one. In


id: biafran-research-and-production-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafran_Research_and_Production-0.md
category: reference
title: Biafran Research and Production
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafran_Research_and_Production
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:33.912878+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: biafran-research-and-production-20260505-0
summary:
Biafran Research and Production or Research and Production (RAP) was a scientific and engineering research institution of the Republic of Biafra that researched and manufactured military technology for the Biafran Armed Forces during the Nigerian Civil War. RAP was founded in April 1967 by Biafran scientists at the University of Biafra (now University of Nigeria) to independently manufacture weapons and technology that were difficult for the Biafran military to acquire from abroad due to the Nigerian blockade of Biafra. Technologies produced by chemists included incendiaries, smoke signals, detonators, napalm, primers, rocket fuels, cocktails, and bombs. Engineering groups produced grenade and rocket casings, mortar shells, bullets, and armored vehicles. One of the best known weapons was Ogbunigwe, a family of highly effective explosive devices that killed thousands of Nigerian soldiers in a single blast. Scientists at RAP additionally experimented with the development of chemical and biological weapons. RAP allowed Biafra to unexpectedly fight an extended war against the Soviet and British-backed Nigerian military, while Biafra received comparatively little international military aid. The weapons and vehicles produced by RAP are on display at the National War Museum, Umuahia. == References ==


id: cattle-breeding-centre-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_Breeding_Centre-0.md
category: reference
title: Cattle Breeding Centre
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_Breeding_Centre
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:35.113535+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: cattle-breeding-centre-20260505-0
summary:
The Cattle Breeding Centre was a veterinary research centre at Shinfield in the United Kingdom. == History == The site opened in February 1943 as the Reading Centre for the Artificial Insemination of Dairy Cattle. It had Shorthorn and Guernsey cattle. In January 1944 the site produced the world's first calf produced by artificial insemination, working with the Agricultural Improvement Council. Another site had been opened at Cambridge in November 1942. The site closed in 1991. === Visits === On Thursday 15 November 1979, the site was visited by President General Suharto of Indonesia; the President had come to power in a coup in 1965, and the visit was attended by protestors from Reading University Amnesty International group. On Wednesday 29 October 1980, the site was visited by the second President of Botswana, Quett Masire. === Demolition === The site was demolished by the University of Reading and sold for housing (360 houses) in 2003. == Structure == The site was east of the A327, south of the M4, around a half-mile east of the former headquarters of Berkshire County Council. A short section of the National Cycle Network 50 runs east–west past the former site. == Function == The


id: center-for-strategic-research-iran-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Research_(Iran)-0.md
category: reference
title: Center for Strategic Research (Iran)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Research_(Iran)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:36.240689+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: center-for-strategic-research-iran-20260505-0
summary:
Center for Strategic Research or Institute for Strategic Research (Persian: مرکز تحقیقات استراتژیک) is a leading Iranian think tank on strategy issues. It is the research arm of the Iranian state's Expediency Discernment Council. Prof. Mohammad Reza Majidi is the head of center. Before that, the head of organization was Ali Akbar Velayati who replaced former head Hassan Rouhani, the former President of Iran. It was established in 1989.It publishes Foreign Relations Quarterly, Rahbord (Strategy) in Persian and Iranian Review of Foreign Affairsin English. == Departments == The CSR has six affiliated departments: Politics and International Relations Research Department (This department publishes 3 scientific journals: Foreign Relations Quarterly, A quarterly Journal of Strategy, Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs). Infrastructure and Production Research Department (This department publishes Gozaresh Rahbordi (Strategic Report)) Economic Research Department (This department publishes Gozaresh-e Pazhouheshhay-e Eqtesadi (Economic Research Report)) Cultural Research Department (This department publishes Gozareshat-e Rahbordi (Strategic Reports)) Legal Research and Jurisprudential Studies Department (Publication: Gozaresh-e Rahbordi (Strategic Report)) Executive and Information Department == People == Presidents Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha (1989–1992) Hassan Rouhani (1992–2013) Ali Akbar Velayati (2013–2017) Researchers Saeed Hajjarian == References == == External links == Official website


id: central-research-laboratories-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Research_Laboratories-0.md
category: reference
title: Central Research Laboratories
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Research_Laboratories
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:37.392491+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: central-research-laboratories-20260505-0
summary:
The Central Research Laboratories, often referred to as CRL, was a British research laboratory that originally belonged to the EMI Corporation. == History == During the period of 1927–29 EMI invested in developing a research and innovation centre that arguably set the tone for many of the technological advancements that would occur over the next 80 years in the UK and was held in extremely high regard globally. After years operating in central London and across various greater London locations, a new company site was built in the 1980s in Hayes, Middlesex. Hayes was often referred to as EMI Town, due to the presence of various company businesses, including the Gramophone Company HQ, which later became known as HMV. The lab's first director was Isaac Shoenberg, a pioneer of television. In 1996 the company formally became known as CRL Ltd after a management buy-out, in which EMI retained a nominal ownership. The company's business model became that of an incubator, that effectively funded innovations and research projects and once the products became 'viable', they were established into standalone subsidiary companies, that typically continued to operate out of their HQ office. In the year 2000, the company floated under a new


id: fernhurst-research-station-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst_Research_Station-0.md
category: reference
title: Fernhurst Research Station
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst_Research_Station
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:38.581799+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: fernhurst-research-station-20260505-0
summary:
The Fernhurst Research Station was a crop protection chemical research institute in West Sussex, mainly run by ICI, for the fruit industry. The site is to the east of the A286, around a mile south of the village of Fernhurst and a mile north of the Haslemere to Petersfield Serpent Trail. == History == Plant Protection Limited moved to the site in 1945 and opened a research institute on the estate of Sir Felix Schuster (1854–1936). The research institute was to investigate pest and disease control in horticultural crops. As well as being an administrative site, the station comprised a 60 acres (24 ha) orchard including 9 acres of plums and 26 acres of dessert apples at Hurstfold Farm. In June 1951 an international conference, with scientists from 39 countries, took place at the site on food scarcity. On 10 May 1955, the site was visited by the Duke of Edinburgh. Another international conference took place at the site in June 1956. In 1958 Plant Protection Limited became a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries: ICI Plant Protection Division, which had its international headquarters at the site until the 1990s; in 1986 a new international conference centre was opened


id: harvard-institute-for-international-development-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-0.md
category: reference
title: Harvard Institute for International Development
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:39.773620+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: harvard-institute-for-international-development-20260505-0
summary:
The Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) was a think tank dedicated to helping nations join the global economy, operating between 1974 and 2000. It was a center within Harvard University, United States. == Foundation and leadership == The Harvard Institute for International Development originated when Harvard University's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) tried to move away from a controversial role in giving advice on topics such as arms control, foreign aid and development. The CFIA preferred a more academic role of teaching and research. The Ford Foundation and other organizations involved in aid-giving still wanted Harvard to provide hands-on training for their staff. In 1962 the Development Advisory Service was established for this purpose, associated with the CFIA but independent. It was renamed the HIID in 1974. In 1980 the economist Arnold Harberger of the Harvard University was selected as head of the institute. The announcement met with protests from students and staff since Harberger had previously advised the Augusto Pinochet military regime in Chile. He withdrew and Dwight Perkins, an economist and specialist in China, took the job. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economist Jeffrey Sachs became head of the institute. == Development programs ==


id: harvard-institute-for-international-development-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-1.md
category: reference
title: Harvard Institute for International Development
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:39.773620+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: harvard-institute-for-international-development-20260505-0
summary:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded a project by the HIID to help rebuild the Russian economy on the basis of western concepts of ethics, democracy and free markets. Jeffrey Sachs was said to have "packaged HIID as an AID consultant". USAID were glad to accept help from Harvard, since they lacked expertise for such a project. The HIID oversaw and guided disbursement of $300 million of US aid to Russia with little oversight by USAID. HIID advisers worked closely with representatives from Russia, notably Anatoly Chubais and his associates. Once USAID accepted help from the HIID, HIID was in a position to recommend U.S. aid policies while being a recipient of that aid. It also put the HIID in a position of power overseeing some of their competitors. The project, which ran from 1992 to 1997, was headed by economist Andrei Shleifer and lawyer Jonathan Hay. HIID received $40.4 million in return for its activities in Russia, awarded without the normal competitive bidding approach. In 1996 the US Congress asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the HIID activities in the Russian aid program after multiple complaints to the


id: institute-for-the-study-of-the-jewish-question-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_the_Jewish_Question-0.md
category: reference
title: Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_the_Jewish_Question
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:40.921593+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: institute-for-the-study-of-the-jewish-question-20260505-0
summary:
The Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (German: Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage) was founded in 1934 and was affiliated with the Reich Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. In 1939 the institution was called "Anti-Semitic Action" (Antisemitische Aktion) and from 1942 "Anti-Jewish Action" (Antijüdische Aktion). The institute was founded in 1934 by Eberhard Taubert on behalf of the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Originally, the institute was to be a joint research center against Judaism, Freemasonry and liberalism, but soon the tasks were separated. From the beginning, the Propaganda Ministry tried to camouflage the institute's affiliation with the government, since negative foreign policy consequences were feared. == See also == Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life Institute for Research on the Jewish Question German Christians (movement) Eberhard Taubert Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda == References ==


id: lokomotiv-versuchsamt-grunewald-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt_Grunewald-0.md
category: reference
title: Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt_Grunewald
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:42.339486+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: lokomotiv-versuchsamt-grunewald-20260505-0
summary:
The Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald or LVA ('Grunewald Locomotive Research Office') was a facility established from 1920 to 1945 at Berlin-Grunewald in Germany that conducted trials on railway vehicles. The office used the facilities of the railway repair shop (Ausbesserungswerk) at Grunewald on the Berlin Stadtbahn southwest of Berlin's Westkreuz station. == History == After the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft was founded in 1925 the Railway Central Office (Eisenbahn-Zentralamt or EZA) that had existed since 1906 was renamed to the Reichsbahn Central Office (Reichsbahnzentralamt or RZA). Amongst other things, they carried out numerous trials on steam locomotives and created the scientific basis for the performance measurement of railway vehicles. From 1920 they were supported by the Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald, a locomotive trials office based at the main railway workshop at Grunewald. In 1936 there were 152 employees working for this research establishment. In 1945 the work at Grunewald ended, due to the war, and was continued in East Germany at RAW Dessau as well as in Halle, and in West Germany initially at Göttingen, and later in Minden and München. The Office had instrumentation vehicles, a rolling test bed with water brakes for locomotives and test rigs for various vehicle components. == Key personalities ==


id: rocket-madsen-space-lab-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Madsen_Space_Lab-0.md
category: reference
title: Rocket Madsen Space Lab
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Madsen_Space_Lab
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:44.607952+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: rocket-madsen-space-lab-20260505-0
summary:
Rocket Madsen Space Lab (often called RML Spacelab) was a laboratory established by engineer and convicted murderer Peter Madsen on 16 July 2014 in Copenhagen, after he left Copenhagen Suborbitals. Rocket Madsen Space Lab was located in the Horizontal Assembly Building (HAB) of the old B&W shipyard at Refshaleøen in Copenhagen. In this building Peter Madsen researched, developed and built rockets based on H2O2 / polyurethane hybrid engines. In preparation was Flight Alpha, which was expected to reach an altitude of 14 km. == References ==


id: ves-m-halle-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VES-M_Halle-0.md
category: reference
title: VES-M Halle
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VES-M_Halle
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:45.783569+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: ves-m-halle-20260505-0
summary:
The Versuchs- und Entwicklungsstelle Maschinenwirtschaft in Halle, Germany, (VES-M Halle) was a railway research and development department working for the engineering head office of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR) in East Germany after the Second World War. It worked closely with the Railways Institute (Institut für Eisenbahnwesen). Amongst other things, all rolling stock intended for deployment on the DR railway network, whether built in Germany or abroad, was thoroughly tested here. Loading tests with measurement trains on the open line, starting tests on the Berlin outer ring and other task were carried out by this special division of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Even the fastest, still operational steam locomotive, the DR 18 201, which used to have the DR number 02 0201-0, was used by VES-M Halle before the merger of the DR and DB. It was designed here for high-speed trials and was made, to a large extent, by converting existing engines and components. For high speed runs an electric locomotive class, the E 18 was also used. The 'Germanisation' of diesel locomotives of Russian and Romanian origin was also carried out here. The first head of the VES-M in 1951 was the locomotive engineer, Max Baumberg. In 2008, a permanent


id: wau-ecology-institute-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wau_Ecology_Institute-0.md
category: reference
title: Wau Ecology Institute
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wau_Ecology_Institute
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:46.923205+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: wau-ecology-institute-20260505-0
summary:
The Wau Ecology Institute (WEI) was established in 1961 near the town of Wau, Papua New Guinea, in Morobe province, as a field station of the Bishop Museum. In 1973 it became an independent environmental organisation. It has laboratory space for visiting scientists, a herbarium and zoological reference collections. The Institute ceased operations around 2007 and is now run as a local coffee plantation by former employees and area gold miners. == Publications == Some publications of the WEI are: Menzies, J.I. (1975). Handbook of Common New Guinea Frogs. WEI Handbook No.1. Wau Ecology Institute: PNG. Lamb, K.P.; & Gressitt, J.L. (eds). (1976). Ecology and Conservation in Papua New Guinea. WEI Pamphlet No.2. Wau Ecology Institute: Wau, PNG. Gressitt, J.L.; & Hornabrook, R.W. (1977). Handbook of Common New Guinea Beetles. WEI Handbook No.2. Wau Ecology Institute: Wau, PNG. Simon, Martin. (1977). Guide to Biological Terms in Melanesian Pidgin. WEI Handbook No.3. Wau Ecology Institute: Wau, PNG. Beehler, Bruce McP. (1978). Upland Birds of North-eastern New Guinea. A guide to the hill and mountain birds of Morobe Province. WEI Handbook No.4. Wau Ecology Institute: Wau, PNG. Gressitt, J.L.; & Nadkarni, Nalini. (1978). Guide to Mt Kaindi. Background to montane New Guinea


id: american-eclipse-book-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)-0.md
category: reference
title: American Eclipse (book)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:48.457675+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: american-eclipse-book-20260505-0
summary:
American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World is a non-fiction book by journalist David Baron, published by Liveright in 2017, about the popular impression of the 1878 solar eclipse as observed across the United States. It won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award in 2018. == Background == Baron was inspired to write the book after viewing his first total solar eclipse in Aruba in 1998. He decided that he would publish it in 2017 in order to coincide with the solar eclipse of August 21, 2017. == Synopsis == American Eclipse follows three scientists, James Craig Watson, Maria Mitchell, and Thomas Edison as they traveled to view the total solar eclipse on July 29, 1878. == Reception == Kirkus Reviews described American Eclipse as a "compelling... timely, energetic combination of social and scientific history." Graham Ambrose, writing for The Denver Post, lauded Baron's social history of a scientific topic and that Baron "successfully swerves from the dry, impenetrable prose of science writing, grasping instead at something poetic, often funny." == Publication == American Eclipse was released in hardcover in June 2017, paperback in 2018,


id: bad-science-taubes-book-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Taubes_book)-0.md
category: reference
title: Bad Science (Taubes book)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Taubes_book)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:49.594885+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bad-science-taubes-book-20260505-0
summary:
Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion is book of science history by Gary Taubes about the early years (1989–1991) of the cold fusion controversy. == Overview == This text is not a scholarly work, but a popular retelling of the events, based on interviews with over 260 people. The book presents a timeline of the events, making the case that the cold fusion field has many examples of poorly performed science. The actions of Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, and Steven E. Jones, the scientists who made the dramatic first claims of fusion, are described in rich detail. The book then shows the worldwide reaction and later disrepute of the cold fusion field, with Taubes placing himself in the side of "good science". Taubes says at the end that cold fusion had only demonstrated that research can continue even if the phenomenon doesn't actually exist, as long as there is funding available. Taubes had previously written an article for Science in which he insinuates that the cold fusion work of A&M University was fraudulent. == Reception == The book received a positive review in American Journal of Physics. While observing that the book was "readable, suspenseful,


id: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking-0.md
category: reference
title: Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:50.822272+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-0
summary:
Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking is a 2011 book by American historian Michael Keevak, published by Princeton University Press. Keevak traces how East Asians, who were initially described as "white" by early European observers, came to be categorized as "yellow" people by the nineteenth century. He argues that this transformation was not based on empirical observation but rather emerged through scientific classification systems, anthropological theories, and Western political anxieties about Asia. The book has been translated into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Turkish. The book won the 2013 Academia Sinica Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. == Background == Becoming Yellow investigates a paradox in the history of Western racial thinking about East Asia. When Portuguese missionaries and traders first reached China and Japan in the 16th century via their circuitous route around Africa and through the Indian Ocean, they encountered sophisticated civilizations that surprised them with their wealth, literacy, and cultural refinement. These early European observers routinely described the Chinese and Japanese as "white people"—a term that carried not only descriptive but evaluative weight, signifying superiority and civilization. Yet by the late 18th century, this characterization had vanished entirely, replaced by the


id: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking-1.md
category: reference
title: Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:50.822272+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-0
summary:
== Reviews == In his review of the book for the Shanghai Review of Books, Luo Xin praised it book as "an excellent textbook for reflecting on racial thinking" and considered it particularly important for Chinese intellectual circles. Luo emphasized that Keevak showed how the classification of East Asians as "yellow" was not based on empirical observation but was "entirely a new invention of modern science" that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century. He noted that the book traced the disturbing trajectory of scientific racism, from Linnaeus's search for a color "suggesting sickness and unhealthiness" to describe Asians, through the medicalization of racial categories, to the eventual internalization of these Western concepts by Asian societies themselves. Luo stressed Keevak's relevance for contemporary China, where racial thinking persisted in academic and popular discourse despite being largely abandoned in Western scholarship. He argued that understanding this history was essential to recognize "how absurd and dangerous racial concepts and racial classification knowledge are." James Leibold found Keevak's book to provide "the single best history of Western racial thought as it relates to East Asia," meticulously demonstrating how the taxonomic designation "yellow" emerged arbitrarily and contingently in the nineteenth century. The book revealed that early


id: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking-2.md
category: reference
title: Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:50.822272+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-0
summary:
While praising Keevak's multilingual archival research, Fiskesjö pointed out to the book's exclusive focus on Western racial thinking and suggested future scholarship might examine East Asian racial concepts and the contemporary persistence of these constructed categories. He also recommended translation into Asian languages to help readers establish critical distance from their own supposed "yellowness.". In his review for the Taipei Times, Bradley Winterton characterized the book as Keevak's "best to date" and described it as "a tightly-focused look at a narrowly-defined topic" examining representations from the 17th to 19th centuries. Winterton emphasized the author's argument that the racial categorization process was never neutral, noting Keevak's emphasis that yellow had negative connotations in the West and served to justify European domination. Winterton observed Keevak's distinctive use of extensive scare-quotes—counting 107 instances in a single chapter—which he interpreted as the author's way of distancing himself from the racist expressions encountered in historical sources. He welcomed the work's investigation into how East Asians transitioned from being considered white to being labeled as yellow when Europeans sought to differentiate colonized peoples from themselves. Paul Spickard considered the book "smart, erudite, intriguing, quirky, delightful, and ultimately unsatisfying," finding fundamental flaws in its argumentative structure despite


id: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking-3.md
category: reference
title: Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow:_A_Short_History_of_Racial_Thinking
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:50.822272+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: becoming-yellow-a-short-history-of-racial-thinking-20260505-0
summary:
== Awards == 2013 Academia Sinica Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences == Translations == The book has been translated into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Turkish. === Chinese translations === ==== Traditional Chinese ==== A Traditional Chinese translation was published in Taiwan in April 2015, under the title 成為黃種人：一部東亞人由白變黃的歷史 (Chéngwéi huángzhǒng rén: Yī bù dōngyà rén yóu bái biàn huáng de lìshǐ) by Ba Qi Culture (八旗文化). The book was translated by Wu Wei-Jiang (吳緯疆). ==== Simplified Chinese ==== A Simplified Chinese translation was published in mainland China in October 2016 under the title 成为黄种人：亚洲种族思维简史 (Chéngwéi huángzhǒng rén: Yàzhōu zhǒngzú sīwéi jiǎnshǐ) by Zhejiang People's Publishing House (浙江人民出版社), in Hangzhou. The book was translated by Fang Xiaotian (方笑天). === Korean === A Korean translation was published in June 2016 under the title 황인종의 탄생: 인종적 사유의 역사 (Hwang-injong-ui tansaeng: Injongjeok sayu-ui yeoksa) by Hyeonamsa (현암사). The book was translated by Lee Hyo-seok (이효석). The translator wrote a special preface for the Korean edition, questioning whether it was time to stop using the discriminatory term "yellow." === Turkish === A Turkish translation was published in September 2024 under the title Asyalılar Nasıl Sarardı? Irksal Düşüncenin Kısa


id: bonk-the-curious-coupling-of-science-and-sex-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonk:_The_Curious_Coupling_of_Science_and_Sex-0.md
category: reference
title: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonk:_The_Curious_Coupling_of_Science_and_Sex
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:52.008722+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bonk-the-curious-coupling-of-science-and-sex-20260505-0
summary:
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex is a 2008 book by American popular science writer Mary Roach. It follows the winding history of science and its exploration of human sexuality, going back as far as Aristotle and finally ending with recent discoveries about the origination and anatomy of the female orgasm. Throughout, Mary Roach provides a humorous and often very personal view—both as a participant and observer—of humans, scientists, animals, and sex machines. Of the book's numerous accounts, Roach discusses artificial insemination of sows in Denmark, the history of sex machines, and provides commentary on Alfred Kinsey's notorious attic sex experiments. Her footnotes provide additional humor: as in a sentence that includes several DSM diagnoses listed as acronyms, she adds, "And from HAFD (hyperactive acronym formation disorder)". In the book, Roach describes a session in which she and Ed, her husband, volunteer to have sex while being recorded by a groundbreaking 4D ultrasound, in the interests of science. A doctor looks on during the experiment, making suggestions, and finally telling Ed that he "may ejaculate now". In 2008, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, was a New York Times Top 10 Bestseller as well as a


id: climate-change-denial-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-0.md
category: reference
title: Climate Change Denial
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:54.287775+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: climate-change-denial-20260505-0
summary:
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand is a 2011 non-fiction book about climate-change denial, coauthored by Haydn Washington and John Cook, with a foreword by Naomi Oreskes. Washington had a background in environmental science prior to authoring the work; Cook, educated in physics, founded (2007) the website Skeptical Science, which compiles peer-reviewed evidence of global warming. The book was first published in hardcover and paperback formats in 2011 by Earthscan, a division of Routledge. The book presents an in-depth analysis and refutation of climate-change denial, going over several arguments point-by-point and disproving them with peer-reviewed evidence from the scientific consensus for climate change. The authors assert that those denying climate change engage in tactics including cherry picking data purported to support their specific viewpoints, and attacking the integrity of climate scientists. Washington and Cook use social-science theory to examine the phenomenon of climate-change denial in the wider public, and call this phenomenon a form of pathology. The book traces financial support for climate-change denial to the fossil-fuel industry, asserting that its companies have attempted to influence public opinion on the matter. Washington and Cook write that politicians have a tendency to use weasel words as part of a propaganda


id: climate-change-denial-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-1.md
category: reference
title: Climate Change Denial
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:54.287775+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: climate-change-denial-20260505-0
summary:
The book's coauthor John Cook won the 2011 Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge, awarded by the New South Wales Government as part of the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes, and was honoured for his role in communicating the essence of climate change science to the general public. Director of the University of Queensland Global Change Institute, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, cited Cook's research and authorship of Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand as the rationale behind him winning the award. The Ecologist reviewed the book and described it as: "well researched and painstakingly footnoted". The review concluded: Climate Change Denial is a wise and timely book. ... It deserves an audience". Writing for ECOS magazine, Mary-Lou Considine wrote that the book "dissects objections to the peer-reviewed science" in "forensic detail". Considine recommended the book to those who had previously visited the website Skeptical Science and subsequently wanted to learn more about the wider topic discussed on the site. In a review of the book by the academic journal Natures Sciences Sociétés, the authors' thesis was praised for its ability to bring reason to their analysis: "This book shows how we can break through denial, accept reality, and thus


id: the-discoverers-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discoverers-0.md
category: reference
title: The Discoverers
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discoverers
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:55.450506+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: the-discoverers-20260505-0
summary:
The Discoverers is a non-fiction historical work by Daniel Boorstin, published in 1983, and is the first in the Knowledge Trilogy, which also includes The Creators and The Seekers. The book, subtitled A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, is a history of human discovery. Discovery in many forms is described: exploration, science, medicine, mathematics, and more-theoretical ones, such as time, evolution, plate tectonics, and relativity. Boorstin praises the inventive, human mind and its eternal quest to discover the universe and humanity's place in it. In "A Personal Note to the Reader", Boorstin writes "My hero is Man, the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West ... had to be opened by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous." The structure of the book is topical and chronological, beginning in the prehistoric era in Babylon and Egypt. == Themes == The Discoverers (as well as The Creators and The Seekers) resonates with tales of individuals, their lives, beliefs and accomplishments. They form the building blocks of his tale and from them flow descriptions and commentary on historical events. In this respect he is like other historians (David McCullough,


id: encyclopaedia-of-the-history-of-science-technology-and-medicine-in-non-western-cultures-20260505-0
category: reference
title: Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures
tags: science, encyclopedia
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:56.659181+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: encyclopaedia-of-the-history-of-science-technology-and-medicine-in-non-western-cultures-20260505-0
file:
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures-0.md

summary:
Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures is an encyclopedia edited by Helaine Selin and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997, with a second edition in 2008, and third edition in 2016. == Summary == From the Preface: The purpose of the Encyclopaedia is to bring together knowledge of many disparate fields in one place to legitimize the study of other cultures' science... The Western academic divisions of science, technology and medicine have been united in the Encyclopaedia because in ancient cultures these disciplines were connected. The first edition (1997) has 600 articles by a range of experts. The arrangement is alphabetical from "Abacus" to "Zu Chongzi". It includes an index from page 1079 to page 1117. K. V. Sarma contributed 35 articles, Greg De Young 13, Boris A. Rosenfeld 12, and Emilia Calvo and Ho Peng Yoke 11 each. Fabrizio Pregadio contributed 10 articles, Julio Samo wrote 9, and Richard Bertschinger, Radha Charan Gupta and David A. King wrote 8 each. Dozens of other contributors wrote fewer articles. In 2008 the Encyclopaedia was split into two volumes and extended to 1000 articles for a second edition. == Reviews == Toby E. Huff (1999)

source_url:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures


id: an-examination-of-the-philosophy-of-bacon-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Examination_of_the_Philosophy_of_Bacon-0.md
category: reference
title: An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Examination_of_the_Philosophy_of_Bacon
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:57.844596+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: an-examination-of-the-philosophy-of-bacon-20260505-0
summary:
An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon (French: Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon) is a posthumous work by Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre, analyzing and criticizing the philosophy of Francis Bacon. It was published in 1836 and translated into English by Richard Lebrun in 1998. == Thesis == Maistre considers Bacon to be the fountainhead of a destructive rationalistic ideology, blaming him for much of the scientism and atheism of the Age of Enlightenment. The argumentation against Bacon's philosophy is based on Maistre's epistemology first enunciated in the St Petersburg Dialogues (1819), according to which science depends on the innate ideas that are common to all human minds. Without such first principles, Maistre argues, experiments would be useless because there would be no basis for judging their validity. Maistre also argues that genius plays a pivotal role in great scientific discoveries, as demonstrated by inspired intellects such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, contrary to Bacon's theory about conforming to a mechanistic method. == Reception == Although not as well known as some of Maistre's other works, its importance has long been recognized in France. Augustin Bonnetty remarked that "it would perhaps be necessary to go back


id: fatal-misconception-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Misconception-0.md
category: reference
title: Fatal Misconception
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Misconception
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:28:59.078583+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: fatal-misconception-20260505-0
summary:
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population is a 2008 book by Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University. Efforts to control population have been controversial, and Connelly argues that "the road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work". For example, millions of intrauterine contraceptive devices were exported to poor countries although they were known to cause infections and sterility. == Reception == === Book reviews === Nicholas Kristof reviewed the book favorably for The New York Times, but concluded: "It's certainly fair of Connelly to dredge up the forced sterilizations, the casual disregard for injuries caused by IUDs, the racism and sexism and all the rest — but we also need to remember that all that is history. The family planning movement has corrected itself, and today it saves the lives of women in poor countries and is central to efforts to reduce poverty worldwide. If we allow that past to tarnish today's efforts by family planning organizations, women in poor countries will be doubly hurt." Reihan Salam reviewed the book for the New York Sun, where he raised some cautionary points.


id: a-history-of-knowledge-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Knowledge-0.md
category: reference
title: A History of Knowledge
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Knowledge
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:00.274251+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: a-history-of-knowledge-20260505-0
summary:
A History of Knowledge is a 1991 book on intellectual history, with emphasis on the western civilization, written by Charles Van Doren, a former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It is a history of human thought covering over 5,000 years of philosophy, learning, and belief systems that surveys the key historical trends and breakthroughs connecting the globalizing human landscape of the 20th century all the way back to the scattered roots of human civilization in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece, and Rome. For a sense of the tone, the first section is entitled "The Wisdom of the Ancients" and begins, "By the time written history began, some fifty centuries ago, mankind had learned much more than our primitive ancestors knew." The book's last chapter focuses on the potential developments of the 21st century. It also contains biographies of many notable historical figures. == References ==


id: a-history-of-science-technology-and-philosophy-in-the-16th-and-17th-centuries-20260505-0
category: reference
title: A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries
tags: science, encyclopedia
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:17.748843+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: a-history-of-science-technology-and-philosophy-in-the-16th-and-17th-centuries-20260505-0
file:
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Philosophy_in_the_16th_and_17th_Centuries-0.md

summary:
A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries is a book by Abraham Wolf first published in 1935 by George Allen and Unwin. A survey of the history of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it received a mixed critical reception. == Background and summary == Written by Abraham Wolf with the assistance of University College London astronomer Angus Armitage and University of Bonn professor Friedrich Dannemann, the book was first published in London in 1935 by George Allen and Unwin. A second edition, with minor revisions to the bibliography by Douglas McKie, was published in 1950, following Wolf's death. Dedicated to Master of Science students at University College London, where Wolf lectured, the book comprises twenty-six chapters, with a particular focus on the physical sciences (including astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, and meteorology) and mathematics, as well as the positive relationship between modern science and technology. A companion history, titled A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 18th Century, was published in 1938. == Reception == The book received mixed reviews from critics. Herbert Blumer commended Wolf for writing "a very notable contribution to the history of science." The British Journal for

source_url:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Philosophy_in_the_16th_and_17th_Centuries


id: a-history-of-science-technology-and-philosophy-in-the-18th-century-20260505-0
category: reference
title: A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 18th Century
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Philosophy_in_the_18th_Century
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:18.908034+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: a-history-of-science-technology-and-philosophy-in-the-18th-century-20260505-0
file:
data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Philosophy_in_the_18th_Century-0.md

summary:
A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 18th Century is a book by Abraham Wolf first published in 1939 as a sequel to his 1935 work, A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries. == Summary == Written by Abraham Wolf as a sequel to A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1935), the book was first published in 1939. It comprises 32 chapters, most of which pertain to the sciences, including astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, geography, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, meteorology, physics, and zoology. Conversely, only two chapters are about philosophy. == Reception == Science reviewer Frederick E. Brasch concluded that the book was a "decidedly useful compendium of scientific, technical and philosophical knowledge of the eighteenth century" but criticised its index and table of contents. Writing in The American Historical Review, Frederick Barry described Wolf's work as "readable" and "interesting". The American Journal of Psychology reviewer E. G. Boring called the book a "masterpiece of erudition". Tenney L. Davis, in the Journal of Chemical Education, called the book "truly encyclopedic in scope", but specifically criticised it for not having a "satisfying" account of chemistry in the


id: hold-ye-front-page-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_Ye_Front_Page-0.md
category: reference
title: Hold Ye Front Page
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_Ye_Front_Page
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:20.128508+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hold-ye-front-page-20260505-0
summary:
Hold Ye Front Page is a series of books published by the UK tabloid newspaper The Sun: Hold Ye Front Page (1999), Hold Ye Front Page II (2000), Giant Leaps (2006), and On Me 'Eadline (2007). The first book, Hold Ye Front Page, was written by John Perry, Neil Roberts and Phil Leach of The Sun. It was a UK best-seller, published to commemorate the Millennium and documented the history of the last two millennia. The authors won a British Press Award in 2000, with the judges praising its educational content, wit and self-parody. Its sequel detailed history from the Big Bang to the Birth of Christ. Giant Leaps charted the history of science. On Me 'Eadline did the same with sport. Education Secretary David Blunkett advocated the use of the book in classrooms, but the Times Educational Supplement questioned whether it would be suitable. The paper also published a website with the same name. Roy Greenslade of The Guardian praised its "clever combination of popular journalism and academic rigour". == References ==


id: the-invention-of-nature-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Nature-0.md
category: reference
title: The Invention of Nature
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Nature
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:21.321145+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: the-invention-of-nature-20260505-0
summary:
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World is a non-fiction book released in 2015, by the historian Andrea Wulf about the Prussian naturalist, explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt. The book follows Humboldt from his early childhood and travels through Europe as a young man to his journey through Latin America and his return to Europe. Wulf makes the case that Humboldt synthesized knowledge from many different fields to form a vision of nature as one interconnected system, that would go on to influence scientists, activists and the public. == Sections == Part 1. Departure: Emerging Ideas Wulf describes Humboldt's childhood with his emotionally distant mother. As a child his interests in nature and travel were not taken seriously. His mother, on whom he was financially dependent, insisted he become a civil servant. As a young man, Humboldt became friends with Goethe and other German intellectuals. His mother's death allowed him the freedom and financial independence needed to journey to the New World. Part 2 Arrival: Collecting Ideas Humboldt arrives in Venezuela with his companion Bonpland and begins his journey through Central and South America. He brought with him a plethora of scientific instruments. He chronicles his travels


id: life-on-display-book-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Display_(book)-0.md
category: reference
title: Life on Display (book)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Display_(book)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:22.447513+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: life-on-display-book-20260505-0
summary:
Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century is a history of modern American science education and its relationship with museums of science. It was written by Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain and published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014. == References == == External links == Official website Introduction


id: lincoln-and-darwin-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_and_Darwin-0.md
category: reference
title: Lincoln and Darwin
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_and_Darwin
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:23.715234+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: lincoln-and-darwin-20260505-0
summary:
Lincoln and Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science, and Religion is a 2010 book by James Lander about the lives and views of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. == Overview == Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809. Both lost their mother at a young age and, despite their differences in upbringing, both men saw themselves as autodidacts. Lander argues that they also shared an interest in science and a skeptical approach to religion. Darwin closely followed the events of the American Civil War and wanted Lincoln and the Union to prevail, but it is unlikely that Lincoln read Darwin's work. Lincoln and Darwin is structured as a series of alternating narratives concerning each man's interactions with the events and discoveries of the mid-19th century. Lander explores similarities in the intellectual development, concerns, and impacts of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, focusing in particular on the issue of slavery in the United States, which both men influentially opposed. Lander's broader argument is that Lincoln and Darwin shared the same outlook on the central issues of race, science, and religion. He also looks at the relationship between science and race in the 19th century


id: man-and-the-natural-world-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_the_Natural_World-0.md
category: reference
title: Man and the Natural World
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_the_Natural_World
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:24.881238+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: man-and-the-natural-world-20260505-0
summary:
Man and the Natural World. Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 by historian Keith Thomas was originally published in Great Britain by Allen Lane in 1983. == Outline == Anthropocentric worldview. The first chapter introduces us to the extreme human-centred view of the natural world in early modern England. This view had theological foundations and roots in Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. All things were created for the benefit and pleasure of man. Wild animals, birds and fish are God's gift to all men. Plants were created by God for the sake of animals and animals for the sake of men and thus humans may lawfully kill animals. Cattle and sheep had only been given life in the first place to keep their meat fresh "till we shall have need to eat them". Furthermore, they were better off in man's care than left to the mercy of wild predators. If not for food, animals were created for moral or aesthetic purposes. The louse, for example, was created to provide "a powerful incentive to habits of cleanliness". Weeds exercised "the industry of man to weed them out". The purpose of singing-birds was to entertain mankind. No animal or plant existed for itself.


id: man-and-the-natural-world-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_the_Natural_World-1.md
category: reference
title: Man and the Natural World
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_the_Natural_World
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:24.881238+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: man-and-the-natural-world-20260505-0
summary:
Influence of botanists and zoologists. The rise of natural history helped to undermine this anthropocentric view. Anthropocentric classifications such as edible-inedible, useful-useless animals were gradually being replaced by more objective classifications based on observational criteria. That was real progress because old classifications were highly arbitrary and had harmful effects on wild animals. jays, woodpecker, worms, wrens and squirrels were targeted in particular. On the other hand, in some parts of England the robin and swallow were more or less sacred and treated with respect. The naturalists of the 17th century were beginning to study plants and animals for their own sake, independent of their utility or meaning for man. Pets narrowing the gap. In the 16th and 17th centuries pets had established themselves in the English households for company, especially in towns. Not only dogs and cats, but also pet monkeys, tortoises, otters, rabbits, squirrels and songbirds such as canaries, nightingales, goldfinches, larks, linnets, parrots, magpies and jackdaws. In the 18th century pets were given human names, and were never eaten. Observation of pets provided support for the view that pets could be intelligent, sensitive, responsive and almost every other human quality. All this helped to break down the absolute


id: merchants-of-doubt-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt-0.md
category: reference
title: Merchants of Doubt
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:26.079451+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: merchants-of-doubt-20260505-0
summary:
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is a 2010 non-fiction book by American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It identifies parallels between the global warming controversy and earlier controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer. Oreskes and Conway write that, in each case, the overall strategy of those opposing action is to "keep the controversy alive" by continuing to spread doubt and confusion long after a scientific consensus has been reached. In particular, they show that Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the scientific consensus on a wide variety of contemporary issues. Some of the book's subjects have been critical of the book, but most reviewers received it favorably. It was made into a film, Merchants of Doubt, directed by Robert Kenner, released in 2014. == Themes == Oreskes and Conway write that a handful of politically conservative scientists, with strong ties to particular industries, have "played a disproportionate role in debates about controversial questions". The authors write that this has


id: merchants-of-doubt-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt-1.md
category: reference
title: Merchants of Doubt
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:26.079451+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: merchants-of-doubt-20260505-0
summary:
== Reception == Most reviewers received Merchants of Doubt enthusiastically. Philip Kitcher in Science says that Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are "two outstanding historians". He calls Merchants of Doubt a "fascinating and important study". Kitcher says that the apparently harsh claims against Nierenberg, Seitz, and Singer are "justified through a powerful dissection of the ways in which prominent climate scientists, such as Roger Revelle and Ben Santer, were exploited or viciously attacked in the press". In The Christian Science Monitor, Will Buchanan says that Merchants of Doubt is exhaustively researched and documented, and may be one of the most important books of 2010. Oreskes and Conway are seen to demonstrate that the doubt merchants are not "objective scientists" as the term is popularly understood. Instead, they are "science-speaking mercenaries" hired by corporations to process numbers to prove that the corporations' products are safe and useful. Buchanan says they are salesmen, not scientists. Bud Ward published a review of the book in The Yale Forum on Climate and the Media. He wrote that Oreskes and Conway use a combination of thorough scholarly research combined with writing reminiscent of the best investigative journalism, to "unravel deep common links to past environmental


id: the-myth-of-the-machine-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine-0.md
category: reference
title: The Myth of the Machine
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:27.215728+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: the-myth-of-the-machine-20260505-0
summary:
The Myth of the Machine is a two-volume book by Lewis Mumford that takes an in-depth look at the forces that have shaped modern technology since prehistoric times. The first volume, Technics and Human Development, was published in 1967, followed by the second volume, The Pentagon of Power, in 1970. Mumford shows the parallel developments between human tools and social organization mainly through language and rituals. It is considered a synthesis of many theories Mumford developed throughout his prolific writing career. Volume 2 was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. == Megamachine == "In The Myth of the Machine, Mumford insisted upon the reality of the Megamachine: the convergence of science, economy, technics and political power as a unified community of interpretation rendering useless and eccentric life-enhancing values. Subversion of this authoritarian kingdom begins with that area of human contact with the world that cannot be successfully repressed - one's feelings about one's self." In the Prologue, Mumford defines his purpose here as "to question both the assumptions and the predictions upon which our commitment to the present forms of scientific and technical progress, treated as ends in themselves, have been based." Mumford dates the emergence of the "Machine" from the pyramid


id: the-new-politics-of-numbers-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Politics_of_Numbers-0.md
category: reference
title: The New Politics of Numbers
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Politics_of_Numbers
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:28.461397+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: the-new-politics-of-numbers-20260505-0
summary:
The New Politics of Numbers: Utopia, evidence and democracy is a multi-author book edited by sociologists Andrea Mennicken and Robert Salais and published in 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan. == Synopsis == This work builds on the 1989 volume The Politics of Numbers of William Alonso and Paul Starr, as well as Alain Desrosières’ The Politics of Large Numbers, the contributions of Laurent Thévenot, and other scholars in France and the UK. The volume sets out to investigate the power of statistics, how they travel across countries and domains, how they may be implicated in policy reform, and how they establish accountability and regulation. The book devotes particular attention to the linkages between statistics and democracy. The book was inspired by a working group on social quantification at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2014. It is inspired by two strands of research: one related to Foucauldian ideas of power and control, which were studied by historians and sociologists at the London School of Economics; and the other being the "economics of conventions" or "theory of conventions", studied by various French scholars, including Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, and originally by Alain Desrosières. == Content == Peter Miller's chapter investigates the role of


id: our-posthuman-future-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Posthuman_Future-0.md
category: reference
title: Our Posthuman Future
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Posthuman_Future
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:29.681239+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: our-posthuman-future-20260505-0
summary:
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution is a 2002 book by Francis Fukuyama. In it, he discusses the potential threat to liberal democracy that use of new and emerging biotechnologies for transhumanist ends poses. == Human nature == Fukuyama defines human nature as "the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetics rather than environmental factors." The "typicality" is further defined as a statistical phenomenon of the usual distribution of measured parameters describing human characteristics, such the normal distribution of height or intellectual quotient. The author recognizes that distinguishing "pathological" from "normal" is difficult, but insists that drawing the line between the two is not only possible, but is routinely achieved by regulatory agencies through a legislative process. "It has often seemed to me that the only people who can argue that there is no difference in principle between disease and health are those who have never been sick: if you have a virus or fracture your leg, you know perfectly well that something is wrong." == Human dignity == Possession of moral choice, human language, reason, sociability, emotions, sentience, and consciousness constitute distinguishing qualities that differentiate humans from animals.


id: the-politics-of-large-numbers-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Large_Numbers-0.md
category: reference
title: The Politics of Large Numbers
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Large_Numbers
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:30.831190+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: the-politics-of-large-numbers-20260505-0
summary:
The Politics of Large Numbers:A History of Statistical Reasoning is a book by French statistician, sociologist and historian of science, Alain Desrosières, which was originally published in French in 1993. The English translation, by Camille Naish, was published in 1998 by Harvard University Press. == Synopsis == Alain Desrosières's ambition is to reconcile an “Internal” history of the field, focusing on theory building and data collection, with an “External” history, examining the social conditions where and why a discipline develops. In his words, applying a science-in-the-making perspective “the distinction between technical and social objects—underlying the separation between internal and external history— disappears” (p. 5). The work of Desrosières mobilize the French style of social analysis of cognitive forms, looking at statistics as the ensemble of concepts, methods, and practices concerned with "making up things that hold". A central part of the book explores how socio-political structures of France, Britain, Germany, and the United States affect the establishment and evolution of the nationals statistical offices in these countries. The author discusses in depth how the activity of categorization, allocating individuals to classes, provide the encoding necessary for the realization of statistical constructs, following Durkheim's motto to 'treat social facts as things',


id: star-names-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Names-0.md
category: reference
title: Star Names
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Names
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:32.033125+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: star-names-20260505-0
summary:
Star-Names and Their Meanings (retitled Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning in some later reprints) is an 1899 book by Richard Hinckley Allen, that discusses the names of stars, constellations, and their histories. == Background and authorship == Richard Hinckley Allen (1838, near Buffalo, New York – 1908, Northampton, Massachusetts) was a youthful polymath with interests in "nature, astronomy, ornithology, and literature" whom his classmates described as "the walking encyclopedia"; after a college year spent at Yale, a pursuit abandoned because of problems with his eyesight, he traveled and then "joined his father’s export trade business". Allen's interest in astronomy, and in star names in particular, may have been stimulated by his coming across such a name with which he was unfamiliar, after which "[h]e spent many years researching astronomical nomenclature... primarily for personal enjoyment". With the encouragement of professors from Yale and Princeton, and from personal friends, Allen proceeded to publish the information he had gathered—as Star-Names and Their Meanings in 1899. == Content == First published in 1899 as Star-Names and Their Meanings, this work collected the origins of the names of stars and constellations from a panoply of sources, some primary but most secondary. It also briefly


id: war-in-the-age-of-intelligent-machines-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines-0.md
category: reference
title: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:33.194172+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: war-in-the-age-of-intelligent-machines-20260505-0
summary:
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) is a book by Manuel DeLanda, in which he traces the history of warfare and the history of technology. It is influenced in part by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1978) and also reinterprets the concepts of war machines and the machinic phylum, introduced in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Deleuze and Guattari appreciated Foucault's definition of philosophy as a "tool box" that was to encourage thinking about new ideas. They prepared the field for a re-appropriation of their concepts, for use in another context of the "same" concept, which they called "actualization". DeLanda drew on the concepts these authors put forth, to investigate the history of warfare and technology. == A social history of technology and of warfare == DeLanda describes how social and economic formations influence war machines, i.e. the form of armies, in each historical period. He draws on chaos theory to show how the biosphere reaches singularities (or bifurcations) which mark self-organization thresholds where emergent properties are displayed and claims that the "mecanosphere", constituted by the machinic phylum, possesses similar qualities. He argues for example how a certain level of population growth may induce


id: war-in-the-age-of-intelligent-machines-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines-1.md
category: reference
title: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:33.194172+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: war-in-the-age-of-intelligent-machines-20260505-0
summary:
== Centralization and decentralization == According to DeLanda, centralization and decentralization are two trends in the "war machine": either military commanders try to centralize command and control of each event on the battlefield and get "human will out of the decision-making loop" or they delegate responsibility to individual soldiers (e.g., platoons or the German mission-type tactics) to avoid "friction". "Friction", according to DeLanda, is like "noise" — too much friction blocks the war machine, which destroys itself. Thus, rather than waiting for friction to accumulate at the head of the control, command and communication center (C3), which is the case in centralized armies, decentralized war machines allow it to disperse at each level of the machine. The 1805 Jacquard loom, used holes punched in pasteboard punched cards to control the weaving of patterns in fabric and is the first example of a "migration" of human control to machine control and marks the invention of software according to DeLanda. Command and control techniques adapted by the Germans were then introduced in army arsenals by Frederick Taylor and extended to civilian society: "the imposition of military production methods into the civilian society was accompanied by the transfer of a whole command and


id: war-in-the-age-of-intelligent-machines-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines-2.md
category: reference
title: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:33.194172+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: war-in-the-age-of-intelligent-machines-20260505-0
summary:
reservoirs of population, of capital or of unconscious desires, put to work by the use of differences of fitness, class or sex, each following a procedure directing the circulation of naturally selected species, or commodities and labor, or symptoms and fantasies....|Serres (p.141) Thus, Napoleon's armies, born from the 1789 French Revolution, marked a new threshold of the machinic phylum or singularities or bifurcation: emergent properties are displayed in this "evolution" from the "clockwork paradigm" to the "motor paradigm". This evolution is not merely technological; it is not so much the invention of the steam engine — the first type of motor — that determines this "evolution". The first steam engine was invented through tinkering and can thus not be said to be the consequences of a "paradigm shift" as Thomas Kuhn would conceive it. There is no necessary pre-eminence of science over technology (nor the reverse). De Landa thus explains that the "abstract motor" is more important than the "concrete motor", taking as his example the dazzling victories during the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon himself did not incorporate the motor as a technical object into his war machine (as mentioned, he explicitly rejected the use of steamboats), but the abstract motor


id: 2009-latvian-meteorite-hoax-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Latvian_meteorite_hoax-0.md
category: reference
title: 2009 Latvian meteorite hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Latvian_meteorite_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:34.813828+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: 2009-latvian-meteorite-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
The 2009 Latvian meteorite hoax was a publicity stunt in which Swedish-based telecommunications company Tele2 staged an apparent meteorite landing which was later revealed to be fake. == The "Meteorite" incident == The drama began at around 17:30 local time (15:30 GMT) in Latvia on Sunday 25 October 2009. Student Ancis Steinbergs reported that a fiery meteor-like object had fallen in a field outside the town of Mazsalaca near the Estonian border. Reports described the object lighting up the evening sky with a blazing trail and hitting the ground with a loud crash, leaving a burning crater claimed to be around 20 m (66 ft) wide and from 3 m (9.8 ft) up to 10 m (33 ft) deep. Fire crews, police and military units attended the site, which was cordoned off while tests were carried out to check radiation levels. The crater quickly attracted scientific and media interest amid widespread speculation about the origin of the object. Steinbergs also filmed a video in which he and his two companions (his girlfriend and another student) approach the smoking crater and talk to each other excitedly when they apparently discover a burning mass at the bottom of the crater. The deliberately


id: alien-autopsy-1995-film-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Autopsy_(1995_film)-0.md
category: reference
title: Alien Autopsy (1995 film)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Autopsy_(1995_film)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:35.993109+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: alien-autopsy-1995-film-20260505-0
summary:
Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction is a 1995 pseudo-documentary containing grainy black and white footage of a hoaxed alien autopsy. In 1995, film purporting to show an alien autopsy conducted shortly after the Roswell incident was released by British entrepreneur Ray Santilli. The footage aired on television networks around the world. Fox television broadcast the purported autopsy, hosted by Jonathan Frakes, on August 28, 1995, under the title Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, and re-broadcast it twice, each time to higher ratings. The footage was also broadcast on UK's Channel 4, and repackaged for the home video market. The program was an overnight sensation, with Time magazine declaring that the film had sparked a debate "with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since the Zapruder film". The program was thoroughly debunked; the footage was shot on an inexpensive set constructed in a London living room. Its alien bodies were hollow plaster casts filled with offal, sheep brains, and raspberry jam. Multiple participants in Alien Autopsy stated that misleading editing had removed their opinions that the footage was a hoax. Santilli admitted in 2006 that the film was a fake, though he continued to claim it was inspired by


id: babylonokia-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonokia-0.md
category: reference
title: Babylonokia
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonokia
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:37.153317+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: babylonokia-20260505-0
summary:
Babylonokia (also Babylon-Nokia, Alien-Mobile, and Cuneiform Mobile Phone) is a 2012 artwork by Karl Weingärtner in the form of a clay tablet shaped like a mobile phone, its keys and screen showing cuneiform script. Weingärtner created the work to represent the evolution of information transfer from the ancient world to the present. Fringe scientists and pseudoarchaeology proponents subsequently misrepresented a photograph of the artwork as showing an 800-year-old archaeological find; that story was popularised in a video on the YouTube channel Paranormal Crucible and led to the object being reported by some press sources as a mystery. == Artwork == Weingärtner created the phone-styled clay tablet with cuneiform signs as a reaction to an exhibition at the Museum for Communication in Berlin titled From the Cuneiform to the SMS: Communication Once and Today, as well as the negative, global effects of information technology. Cuneiform signals the beginning of written records of information. The fact that it is a clay copy of what appears to be an Ericsson S868 mobile phone, a model from the 1990s, had no meaning for the artist, who was using it as a metaphor for mobile devices in general. The work of art is unique and


id: bare-fronted-hoodwink-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-fronted_Hoodwink-0.md
category: reference
title: Bare-fronted Hoodwink
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-fronted_Hoodwink
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:38.334119+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bare-fronted-hoodwink-20260505-0
summary:
The Bare-fronted Hoodwink (Dissimulatrix spuria) was a hoax and satirical wastebasket species of bird created by ornithologist M. F. M. Meiklejohn. The Hoodwink has the ability to be "almost seen" or "almost captured". Bird watchers can easily identify this bird by its "blurred appearance and extremely rapid flight away from the observer." Meiklejohn claimed that the single species could easily account for every bird not completely sighted. Birdwatchers added this species to their list of birds to watch for, and amateurs seemed to sight the Hoodwink more often. On 1 April 1975, the bird was put on display at the Royal Scottish Museum at Edinburgh. The exhibit also included photos of blurry birds flying away. The bird was created using the head of a carrion crow, the body of a plover, and the feet of an unknown waterfowl. The bare front appeared to be wax. Meiklejohn's paper was published in the scientific journal Bird Notes in 1950. The paper was rather long and humorous, and he even claimed the genus to be descendant of an ancient species Paleodissimulatrix. == References ==


id: beringer-s-lying-stones-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringer's_Lying_Stones-0.md
category: reference
title: Beringer's Lying Stones
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringer's_Lying_Stones
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:39.452870+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: beringer-s-lying-stones-20260505-0
summary:
Beringer's Lying Stones (German: Lügensteine) are pieces of limestone which were carved into the shape of various fictitious animals and "discovered" in 1725 by Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer (1667–1740), Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Würzburg. Beringer believed them to be fossils, and because some of them bore the name of God in Hebrew, suggested that they might be of divine origin. The scientific community at the time was still unsure as to what fossils actually were, the notion that they were the petrified remains of once-living organisms being merely one of several competing hypotheses. Beringer published a book on his findings but shortly after discovered that he had been the victim of a hoax. He took the hoaxers to court and won the case but his reputation was forever besmirched. == Background == Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer was born in 1667 to German physician Ludwig Behringer. Beringer held high positions including chief physician to the Julian Hospital and dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the university. In addition to all this, he took an interest in oryctics. He had hired Christian Zänger (aged 17), and the brothers Niklaus and Valentin Hehn (aged 18 and


id: bixonimania-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixonimania-0.md
category: reference
title: Bixonimania
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixonimania
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:40.597299+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bixonimania-20260505-0
summary:
Bixonimania is a fake disease invented by researchers to examine artificial intelligence and its ability to utilize information in medical and healthcare applications. The fake enabled researchers to show that some AI engines would report as fact fake research that to an expert would be obviously implausible. == Use in exposing weaknesses of artificial intelligence == The disorder, with symptoms of sore eyes and darkening around them ("periorbital hyperpigmentation"), is supposedly caused by blue light from screens. The name was first used in a blog posted on Medium titled "How many people suffer from Bixonimania?" A more scholarly-looking paper describing it was posted later in April 2024 on a preprint server with several fake authors. A second paper was posted in May. By 2026, AI chatbots suggested bixonimania based on the list of symptoms provided. The experiment was conducted by a team from the University of Gothenburg led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström. Many steps were taken to ensure that any person who read the actual paper could tell it wasn't a real condition. The team chose an obviously inappropriate name ending in -mania, a description used only in psychiatry. The lead author was noted as belonging to Asteria Horizon University


id: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge-0.md
category: reference
title: Blue Whale Challenge
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:41.776773+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-0
summary:
Blue Whale Challenge (Russian: Си́ний ки́т, romanized: Siniy kit), also known simply as the Blue Whale, is a social network phenomenon, first appeared in Russia in 2013, that is claimed to exist in several countries. It is a "game" reportedly consisting of a series of tasks assigned to players by administrators over a 50-day period, initially innocuous before introducing elements of self-harm and the final challenge requiring the player to commit suicide. Blue Whale Challenge first attracted news coverage in May 2016 in an article in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta that linked many unrelated child suicides to membership of group "F57" on the Russian-based VK social network. A wave of moral panic swept Russia. The piece was criticized for attempting to make a causal link where none existed, and none of the suicides were found to be a result of the group's activities. Claims of suicides connected to the game have been reported worldwide, but none have been confirmed. The game has been banned in some countries, including Egypt, Kenya, and Pakistan. However, experts have said that since the game is not played on any specific website or app, it may be difficult or even impossible to fully ban


id: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge-1.md
category: reference
title: Blue Whale Challenge
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:41.776773+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-0
summary:
== Arrests == In 2016, Philipp Budeikin, a 21-year-old former psychology student who was expelled from his university, claimed that he invented the game in 2013. According to Budeikin, its purpose is to "clean society of biological wastes", as he intended to "clean" society from individuals who were deemed as having no value and considered as burdens. Although originally claiming innocence and stating he was "just having fun", Budeikin was arrested and held in Kresty Prison, Saint Petersburg, and in May 2016 pled guilty to "inciting at least 16 teenage girls to commit suicide". He was later convicted on two counts of inciting suicide of a minor. Commentators such as Benjamin Radford have pointed out that sensationalized stories in world news regarding the involvement of Budeikin have all linked back to just two Russian sources, with tabloid news outlets replicating the same information without elaboration. In June 2017, postman Ilya Sidorov was arrested in Moscow, also accused of setting up a Blue Whale group to encourage children to self-harm and ultimately commit suicide. He claimed to have persuaded 32 children to join his group and follow his commands. In June 2018, Russian financial analyst Nikita Nearonov was arrested for allegedly


id: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge-2.md
category: reference
title: Blue Whale Challenge
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:41.776773+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-0
summary:
=== India === Throughout 2017, media in India reported several cases of child suicide, self-harm and attempted suicide alleged to be a result of Blue Whale, and in response, the Indian government's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, requested that several internet companies (including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!) remove all links which direct users to the game. Some commentators accused the government of creating a moral panic. The Indian internet watchdog Centre for Internet and Society accused the coverage of effectively spreading and advertising a "game" for which there is little evidence. The Supreme Court asked the Indian Central government to ban the game, following which the government responded that since Blue Whale wasn't an application, it couldn't be banned. For a period of time several internet providers blocked Russian social network VKontakte over concerns about the "game" believed to originate on this Russian social network. In January 2018, the government reported there was no evidence that any death was a result of the challenge, stating, "The committee analysed the internet activities, device activities, call records and other social media activity, other forensic evidences and also interacted with rescued victims associated with these incidents. Involvement of Blue Whale challenge game


id: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge-3.md
category: reference
title: Blue Whale Challenge
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Whale_Challenge
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:41.776773+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: blue-whale-challenge-20260505-0
summary:
=== Saudi Arabia === On 15 July 2018, the Saudi General Commission for Audio-Visual Media banned 47 video games, including Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin's Creed II and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, that had online components that were alleged to be part of the Blue Whale game following the suicides of two teenagers that had been involved in it. === Spain === In 2018, the first suicide in Spain allegedly linked to the game was reported, after a 14-year-old girl from Gipuzkoa, Basque Country committed suicide and acknowledged that she played the game. Although she initially did not intend to complete all 50 challenges (the last being to commit suicide), she ended up killing herself, stating that the perpetrators could be found "in Barcelona and in Argentina". === Tunisia === On 12 March 2018, the parents of seven Tunisian children who claimed their children had killed themselves due to the game requested a ban on Blue Whale from the Tunisian courts. A trial court in Sousse issued an interim judgment prohibiting Blue Whale and another supposed similar game named "Miriam". === United States === Many schools in the United States have warned parents about the game, though the number


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-0.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
The Bogdanov affair was a controversy in the early 2000s over the legitimacy of the PhD degrees in theoretical physics obtained at the University of Burgundy by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov in 2002 and 1999, respectively. The papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to present a new theory describing what occurred before and at the Big Bang. The controversy began in 2002, with an allegation that the twins, popular in France for hosting science-themed TV shows, had obtained PhDs with nonsensical work. Rumors spread on Usenet newsgroups that their work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system that physics journals use to select papers for publication. While the Bogdanov brothers continued to defend the legitimacy of their work, the debate over whether it represented a contribution to physics spread from Usenet to many other internet forums, eventually receiving coverage in the mainstream media. A French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) internal report later concluded that their theses had no scientific value. The incident prompted criticism of the Bogdanovs' approach to science popularization, led to a number of lawsuits, and provoked reflection among physicists as


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-1.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
== Origin == The Bogdanov brothers were born in 1949 in the small village of Saint-Lary, in the Gascony region of southwest France. The brothers each studied applied mathematics in Paris, but then began careers in television, hosting several popular programs on science and science fiction. The first of these, Temps X (Time X), ran from 1979 to 1989. In 1991, the Bogdanovs published their book Dieu et la Science (God and Science), drawn from interviews with Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton, which became a French bestseller. This book provoked a dispute of its own when University of Virginia astronomy professor Trinh Xuan Thuan accused the Bogdanovs of plagiarizing his 1988 book The Secret Melody: And Man Created the Universe. After a legal battle in France, during which a judge initially ruled in Thuan's favour, Thuan and the Bogdanovs settled out of court, and the Bogdanovs later denied all wrongdoing. Thuan suggests that the plagiarism suit pressed the brothers to obtain doctorates as fast as possible, since (according to Thuan) the back cover of the book claimed that the Bogdanovs held doctorates when they did not. In 1993, the brothers began work toward doctorates, first working under the mathematical physicist Moshé


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-2.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
=== Thesis readers === One of the scientists who approved Igor Bogdanov's thesis, Roman Jackiw of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to The New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye. Overbye wrote that Jackiw was intrigued by the thesis, although it contained many points he did not understand. Jackiw defended the thesis:All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask. In contrast, Ignatios Antoniadis (of the École Polytechnique), who approved Grichka Bogdanov's thesis, later reversed his judgment of it. Antoniadis told Le Monde, I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text. Alas, I was completely mistaken. The scientific language was just an appearance behind which hid incompetence and ignorance of even basic physics. === Pre- and post-publication official commentary on the journal articles === In May 2001, the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (CQG) reviewed an article authored by Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, titled "Topological theory of the initial singularity of spacetime". One of the referees' reports stated that the article was "Sound, original, and of interest. With revisions I expect the paper to


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-3.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
No matter which way a pendulum swings, there is some point on the plane in which it swings. Yet this rephrasing is itself equivalent to the following statement: Any plane contains a point. If this was the essence of the statement, Baez noted, it cannot be very useful in "explaining the origin of inertia". Urs Schreiber, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, noted that the mention of the Foucault pendulum was at odds with the papers' general tone, since they generally relied upon more "modern terminology". (According to George Johnson, the Foucault pendulum is "an icon of French science that would belong in any good Gallic spoof.") Schreiber identified five central ideas in the Bogdanovs' work—"'result' A" through "'result' E"—which are expressed in the jargon of statistical mechanics, topological field theory and cosmology. One bit of jargon, the Hagedorn temperature, comes from string theory, but as Schreiber notes, the paper does not use this concept in any detail; moreover, since the paper is manifestly not a string theory treatise, "considering the role the Hagedorn temperature plays in string cosmology, this is bordering on self-parody." Schreiber concludes that the fourth "result" (that the spacetime metric "at the initial


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-4.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
=== Claims of pseudonymous activity === One episode after the heyday of the affair involved the participation of an unidentified "Professor Yang". Using an e-mail address at the domain th-phys.edu.hk, an individual publishing under this name wrote to a number of individuals and on the Internet to defend the Bogdanov papers. This individual wrote to physicists John Baez, Jacques Distler and Peter Woit; to The New York Times journalist Dennis Overbye; and on numerous physics blogs and forums, signing his name "Professor L. Yang—Theoretical Physics Laboratory, International Institute of Mathematical Physics—HKU/Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong." It is the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology which is located in Clear Water Bay, not Hong Kong University (HKU), whose main campus is located in the Mid-Levels of Hong Kong Island. The Bogdanovs have claimed that the "domain name 'th-phys.edu.hk' was owned by Hong Kong University." This was not confirmed officially by HKU and no Prof. Yang existed on the roster of the HKU physics department; nor did the university have an "International Institute of Mathematical Physics". Suspicions were consequently raised that Professor L. Yang was actually a pseudonym of the Bogdanovs. However, Igor Bogdanov has maintained that Professor Yang is


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-5
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-5.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
Alain Riazuelo, an astrophysicist at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, participated in many of the online discussions of the Bogdanovs' work. He posted an unpublished version of Grichka Bogdanov's PhD thesis on his personal website, along with his critical analysis. Bogdanov subsequently described this version as "dating from 1991 and too unfinished to be made public". Rather than suing Riazuelo for defamation, Bogdanov filed a criminal complaint of copyright (droit d'auteur) violation against him in May 2011. The police detained and interrogated Riazuelo. He came to trial and was convicted in March 2012. A fine of 2,000 euros the court imposed was suspended, and only one euro of damages was awarded. But in passing judgement the court stated that the scientist had "lacked prudence", given "the fame of the plaintiff". The verdict outraged many scientists, who felt that the police and courts should have no say in a discussion of the scientific merits of a piece of work. In April 2012, a group of 170 scientists published an open letter titled L'affaire Bogdanoff: Liberté, Science et Justice, Des scientifiques revendiquent leur droit au blâme (The Bogdanov Affair: Liberty, Science and Justice, scientists claim their right of critique). In 2014, the


id: bogdanov-affair-20260505-6
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair-6.md
category: reference
title: Bogdanov affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bogdanov-affair-20260505-0
summary:
The much-anticipated New York Times article on the Bogdanov scandal has appeared. Alas, it suffers from the usual journalistic conceit that a proper newspaper article must cover a "controversy". There must be two sides to the controversy, and the reporter's job is to elicit quotes from both parties and present them side-by-side. Almost inevitably, this "balanced" approach sheds no light on the matter, and leaves the reader shaking his head, "There they go again..." Distler also suggested that the fact that the Bogdanovs had not uploaded their papers to the arXiv prior to publication, as was standard practice by that time, meant that the physics community must have paid vanishingly little attention to those papers before the hoax rumors broke. The affair prompted many comments about the possible shortcomings of the referral system for published articles, and also on the criteria for acceptance of a PhD thesis. Frank Wilczek, who edited Annals of Physics (and who would later share the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics), told the press that the scandal motivated him to correct the journal's slipping standards, partly by assigning more reviewing duties to the editorial board. Prior to the controversy, the reports on the Bogdanov theses and


id: peter-boghossian-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian-0.md
category: reference
title: Peter Boghossian
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:44.239028+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: peter-boghossian-20260505-0
summary:
Peter Gregory Boghossian (; born July 25, 1966) is an American philosopher and college professor. He was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for ten years, and his areas of academic focus include atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, and (with James A. Lindsay) of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide. Boghossian was involved in the grievance studies affair (also called "Sokal Squared" in media coverage) with collaborators James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, which entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals related to gender studies and other fields in order to test peer-reviews. This project generated significant media and academic attention, including both praise and condemnation, as well as ethical and methodological criticism. After an investigation, Portland State University restricted Boghossian's future work on the basis of research misconduct. In September 2021, Boghossian resigned his position from Portland State University, citing harassment and a lack of intellectual freedom. Boghossian coined the term street epistemology for a set of conversational techniques he described, which are designed to enable examination of strongly held beliefs, especially of the religious kind, in a


id: peter-boghossian-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian-1.md
category: reference
title: Peter Boghossian
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:44.239028+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: peter-boghossian-20260505-0
summary:
=== Previous hoax paper === In 2017, Boghossian and Lindsay published a hoax paper titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct". The paper, which the authors said was intentionally absurd and written in a way that imitated the style of "poststructuralist discursive gender theory", argued that the penis should be seen "not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity". Boghossian and Lindsay initially submitted the paper to Norma, where it was rejected. They later submitted the paper to Cogent Social Sciences, a Taylor & Francis open access journal which has been criticized as a pay-to-publish operation. The authors later revealed the hoax in Skeptic magazine. Boghossian and Lindsay stated that they intended to demonstrate that "gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil", and also to highlight problems with the review processes of open-access journals. A number of critics questioned whether Boghossian and Lindsay's paper demonstrated a problem in the field of gender studies. Alan Sokal, a mathematics professor who was responsible for a similar hoax in 1996, noted that Cogent Social Sciences was a low-tiered open access journal that did not


id: peter-boghossian-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian-2.md
category: reference
title: Peter Boghossian
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:44.239028+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: peter-boghossian-20260505-0
summary:
=== Research misconduct investigation === In 2018, Boghossian's employer, Portland State University, initiated a research misconduct inquiry relating to the grievance studies affair. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the university's institutional review board (IRB) concluded in December that Boghossian violated the ethical guidelines by conducting research on human subjects without approval. Consequently, he was banned from doing research until he had "completed training and could demonstrate that he understood how to protect the rights of human subjects". The University also said it was "considering a further charge that he had falsified data". After news of the research conduct investigation broke, a number of prominent academics wrote letters defending Boghossian, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal, philosopher Daniel Dennett, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Pinker wrote that Portland State University's investigation struck him and his colleagues "as an attempt to weaponize an important [principle] of academic ethics in order to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion". Dawkins suggested that the investigation could be politically motivated: "If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression,


id: bombay-cyclone-of-1882-hoax-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_Cyclone_of_1882_(hoax)-0.md
category: reference
title: Bombay Cyclone of 1882 (hoax)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_Cyclone_of_1882_(hoax)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:45.409075+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bombay-cyclone-of-1882-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
The so-called Bombay Cyclone of 1882 or Great Bombay Cyclone is a hoax (or otherwise fictitious) historical event. Supposedly, the cyclone struck Bombay on 6 June 1882. Though it is widely reported, even in scientific literature, historical research shows that it did not in fact happen. == Example accounts of the supposed event == Reportedly, the earliest mention of the supposed cyclone so far discovered by researchers is in an article entitled "Hurricane second only to tornado in wind violence" by M. Hall in the American newspaper The Nashua Telegraph published on 17 September 1947, followed by a piece by one B. Chester, "Earthquakes, tidal waves cause historic disasters" from The Evening Independent of 31 March 1964. The cyclone is mentioned in academic literature from at least 1976. An entry in the 2008 edition of the Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones by David Longshore states: The Great Bombay Cyclone of June 6, 1882: One of few truly great Indian cyclones to have formed over the Arabian Sea, the Great Bombay Cyclone—engorged with 110-MPH (177-km/h) winds and an 18-foot (6-m) surge—reportedly claimed more than 100,000 lives when it came ashore at Bombay right before daybreak. A 2014 academic article claims


id: bonsai-kitten-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten-0.md
category: reference
title: Bonsai Kitten
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:46.620421+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bonsai-kitten-20260505-0
summary:
BonsaiKitten.com was a hoax shock site that claimed to raise kittens in jars, so as to mold the bones of the kitten into the shape of the jar as the cat grows, similarly to a bonsai plant. It was launched in 2000 by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student under the alias of Dr. Michael Wong Chang. Many people believed that the black comedy website was serious, and filed complaints to animal rights organizations and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI and several other organizations, including Snopes.com and the Humane Society of the United States, debunked the concept of a "bonsai kitten". The website's legacy remains as a notable example of a hoax site, and generated much discussion about Internet animal cruelty and the issue of free speech. == Site overview == BonsaiKitten.com is dedicated to the "long lost art" of growing "bonsai kittens". The introduction on its homepage invokes orientalism as it describes how the West has long been captivated by the culture of the Far East, such as tattoos, martial arts, and miniature sculpture. It then claims that the concept of miniature sculpture has been famously applied to bonsai trees, it can also be applied to


id: bonsai-kitten-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten-1.md
category: reference
title: Bonsai Kitten
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:46.620421+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bonsai-kitten-20260505-0
summary:
=== Animal cruelty accusations === Very shortly after the creation of the website, controversy arose surrounding the content. Many people believed that the site was serious, and wrote to various animal rights and welfare organizations pleading for investigations. Humane World for Animals (then the Humane Society of the United States) could not determine whether the site was a hoax or not, but called for its termination either way. Other animal advocacy groups did determine that the site was a hoax, but still demanded it be shut down for fear that it could encourage copycat violence. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said it was "horrified" by the site, along with the larger trend of animal cruelty on the internet, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said that the joke was "inappropriate and certainly not funny", lamenting that it is legal to joke about animal cruelty. In early 2001, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals issued a subpoena to MIT for information on the site's owners. They also sent an armed investigator to the campus to gather information, as MSPCA is deputized under state law with arrest abilities. BonsaiKitten.com was the


id: calaveras-skull-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calaveras_Skull-0.md
category: reference
title: Calaveras Skull
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calaveras_Skull
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:47.773315+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: calaveras-skull-20260505-0
summary:
The Calaveras Skull (also known as the Pliocene Skull) was a human skull found in 1866 by miners in Calaveras County, California, which was presented as evidence that humans were in North America as early as during the Pliocene Epoch (at least 2 million years ago), and which was used to support the idea the humans, mastodons, and mammoths had coexisted. The skull was later revealed to be a hoax, although it is now known that humans, mastodons, and mammoths had indeed coexisted, but much more recently (during the Pleistocene Epoch: at least 12,000 years ago). Coincidentally, calaveras is the Spanish word for skulls. == History == On February 25, 1866, miners claimed to have found a human skull in a mine, beneath a layer of lava, 130 feet (40 m) below the surface of the earth. The skull made it into the hands of Josiah Whitney, then the state geologist of California and professor of geology at Harvard University. A year before the skull came to his attention, Whitney published the belief that humans, mastodons, and mammoths coexisted; the skull served as proof of his convictions. After careful study, he officially announced its discovery at a meeting of the


id: legrand-g-capers-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legrand_G._Capers-0.md
category: reference
title: Legrand G. Capers
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legrand_G._Capers
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:48.954197+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: legrand-g-capers-20260505-0
summary:
Legrand G. Capers (April 16, 1834 – December 2, 1877) was an American physician, best known for his 1874 spurious case report of bullet-mediated impregnation of a young woman. == Biography == Legrand Guerry Capers, Jr. was born on April 16, 1834, in Charleston, South Carolina, as the son of the merchant LeGrand G. Capers (1808–1868) and his first wife, Abigail Swift (1810–1846). LeGrand G. Capers, Sr. served on Gen. Worth's staff during the Mexican–American War. LeGrand G. Capers, Jr. studied medicine as the assistant to his brother-in-law, Ebenezer Swift, and graduated from Jefferson Medical College. Later he practised as ship physician on Vanderbilt's steamers. When the American Civil War broke out, Capers participated in the foundation of the Confederate Medical Department in Alabama. On July 19, 1861, he became assistant surgeon in the 4th Georgia Volunteer Infantry. On October 30, 1863, he was promoted to chief surgeon in Cutshaw's battalion. After the end of the war in 1865, Capers moved to New Orleans and became demonstrator of anatomy in the New Orleans School of Medicine. He fell ill in October 1877 and died shortly after from tuberculosis on December 2. He is buried in Vicksburg. Obituaries appeared in the


id: cardiff-giant-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant-0.md
category: reference
title: Cardiff Giant
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:50.145870+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: cardiff-giant-20260505-0
summary:
The Cardiff Giant was one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history. It was a 10-foot-tall (3.0 m), roughly 3,000 pound purported "petrified man", uncovered on October 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell, in Cardiff, New York. He covered the giant with a tent and it soon became an attraction site. Both it and an unauthorized copy made by P. T. Barnum are still being displayed. == Creation and discovery == The giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He was deeply attracted to science and especially to the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin. Hull got into an argument with Reverend Turk and his supporters at a Methodist revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which states that there were giants who once lived on Earth. Hull, a skeptic, being the minority party, lost the argument. Angered by his defeat and the credulity of people, Hull wanted to prove how easily he could fool people with a fake giant. The idea of a petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. During 1858, the newspaper Alta California had published a fake letter claiming that


id: cardiff-giant-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant-1.md
category: reference
title: Cardiff Giant
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:50.145870+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: cardiff-giant-20260505-0
summary:
Being asked my opinion, my answer was that the whole matter was undoubtedly a hoax; that there was no reason why the farmer should dig a well in the spot where the figure was found; that it was convenient neither to the house nor to the barn; that there was already a good spring and a stream of water running conveniently to both; that, as to the figure itself, it certainly could not have been carved by any prehistoric race, since no part of it showed the characteristics of any such early work; that, rude as it was, it betrayed the qualities of a modern performance of a low order. However, he was taken aback by the channels on the bottom part of the giant, stating that for such grooving to be created on local Onondaga grey limestone would require years. Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh examined the statue, pointing out that it was made of soluble gypsum, which, had it been buried in its blanket of wet earth for centuries, would not still have fresh tool marks on it (which it did), and termed it "a most decided humbug". Some theologians and preachers, however, defended its authenticity. Eventually, Hull


id: cello-scrotum-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_scrotum-0.md
category: reference
title: Cello scrotum
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_scrotum
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:51.325708+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: cello-scrotum-20260505-0
summary:
Cello scrotum is a hoax medical condition originally published as a brief case report in the British Medical Journal in 1974. As its name suggests, it was purportedly an affliction of the scrotum affecting male players of the cello. == History == The original letter was written by Elaine Murphy but signed by her husband John. The journal had printed an earlier report about 'guitar nipple', a condition said to occur when some styles of guitar playing excessively irritate the player's nipple (a form of contact dermatitis similar to jogger's nipple), which Murphy and her husband believed was likely a joke. Murphy now points out that even a cursory study of the cellist's posture would show that the 'cello scrotum' complaint would not occur. The unlikelihood of a cellist's posture contributing to scrotal injury was raised back in 1974, but seems to have been overlooked. Murphy admitted the hoax in 2009 in another letter to the BMJ after an article in the 2008 Christmas edition of the BMJ made reference to the complaint. The truth of the case report had already been questioned in the medical literature in 1991. Others have cited it, although expressing scepticism. The implications of this


id: ctenophthalmus-nepalensis-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenophthalmus_nepalensis-0.md
category: reference
title: Ctenophthalmus nepalensis
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenophthalmus_nepalensis
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:52.452130+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: ctenophthalmus-nepalensis-20260505-0
summary:
Ctenophthalmus nepalensis was a fictional species of parasitic flea described by a pseudonymous author Otto Suteminn in 1969 as part of a scientific hoax. The description was published in the journal Zeitschrift der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Österreichischer Entomologen to ostensibly to demonstrate how poor their editorial process was. The hoax was uncovered only in 1973. == Hoax details and background == The hoax was foisted by Hans Malicky, who was the chairperson of the Entomological Society of Austria in the late 1960s. He sought to improve the quality of publishing by the society newsletter Entomologische Nachrichtenblatt which led to him being relieved from the post. The hoax article was published shortly after in 1969. The journal paper described two new species of fleas named Ctenophthalmus nepalensis and Amalareus fossoris, both purportedly from Nepal by the author "Otto Suteminn". It was not until 1972 that the hoax was uncovered in an article by flea taxonomist F.G.A.M. Smit of the Natural History Museum, London who published “Notes on Two Fictitious Fleas from Nepal” in the journal Entomologische Nachrichtenblatt. Smit identified that not only were the species hoaxes but so were their hosts Canis fossor (meaning grave-digging dog) and Apodemus roseus. Along with an Austrian


id: dipak-k-das-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipak_K._Das-0.md
category: reference
title: Dipak K. Das
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipak_K._Das
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:53.764019+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: dipak-k-das-20260505-0
summary:
Dipak Kumar Das (1947 – September 19, 2013) was the director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington and is known for research fraud. His work centered on the beneficial properties of resveratrol, which is found in red wine, but over twenty of his research papers have been since retracted. On January 11, 2012, the University of Connecticut Health Center announced that a review board has found Das guilty of 145 counts of fabrication or falsification of data; the three-year investigation examined more than seven years of activity in Das's lab, and centered on Western blot results that had been manipulated and used in published papers. In May 2012, Das was fired from both positions at the University of Connecticut Health Center. == Biography == Das graduated from Jadavpur University and received his Ph.D. from Calcutta University in India. He joined the University of Connecticut in 1984 and received tenure in 1993. Das was a prolific publisher of research. His name appears on over 500 articles, including 117 articles on resveratrol. Das was an editor-in-chief of the journal Antioxidants and Redox Signaling. He also served as associate editor of the American Journal of


id: de-loys-s-ape-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Loys's_ape-0.md
category: reference
title: De Loys's ape
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Loys's_ape
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:54.934501+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: de-loys-s-ape-20260505-0
summary:
De Loys's ape, given the proposed scientific name Ameranthropoides loysi, was an alleged large primate reported by Swiss geological explorer François de Loys in South America. The only evidence for the animal besides de Loys's testimony is one photograph. It was promoted by George Montandon as a previously unknown species, but is now considered a misidentification of a spider monkey species or a hoax. == Encounter == Swiss oil geologist François de Loys led an expedition from 1917 to 1920 to search for petroleum in an area along the border between Colombia and Venezuela, primarily near Lake Maracaibo. The expedition was unsuccessful. De Loys's group suffered diseases and violent encounters with native populations; only four of the 20 members survived. According to de Loys's later report, in 1920, while camped on a bank of a tributary of the Tarra River, two large creatures approached the group. Initially, de Loys thought they were bears, but then noted that they were monkey-like. The creatures – one male, one female – seemed angry, said de Loys, and they advanced howling and gesturing, as well as breaking and holding some branches.They defecated into their hands,and flung feces at the expedition. Fearing for their safety,


id: dihydrogen-monoxide-parody-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_parody-0.md
category: reference
title: Dihydrogen monoxide parody
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_parody
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:56.126199+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: dihydrogen-monoxide-parody-20260505-0
summary:
The dihydrogen monoxide parody involves referring to water (H2O) by its unfamiliar chemical systematic name "dihydrogen monoxide" (DHMO) and describing some properties of water in a particularly concerning manner – such as its ability to accelerate corrosion (rust) and cause suffocation (drowning) – often calling for it to be banned, regulated strictly, or labeled as a hazardous chemical. The motivation behind the parody is to play into chemophobia, and to demonstrate how exaggerated analysis, information overload, and a lack of scientific literacy can lead to misplaced fears. Occasionally, reports also reference its widespread contamination of rivers or municipal water supplies. The parody has also involved other uncommon chemical nomenclatures for water such as "hydrogen hydroxide", "dihydrogen oxide" and "hydric acid". == History == In 1983, on April Fools' Day, an edition of the Durand Express, a weekly newspaper in Durand, Michigan, reported that "dihydrogen oxide" had been found in the city's water pipes, and warned that it was fatal if inhaled, and could produce blistering vapors. The first appearance of the parody as "dihydrogen monoxide" on the Internet was attributed to the "Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide", a parody organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz following on-campus postings


id: dihydrogen-monoxide-parody-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_parody-1.md
category: reference
title: Dihydrogen monoxide parody
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_parody
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:56.126199+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: dihydrogen-monoxide-parody-20260505-0
summary:
In 1989–1990, several students circulated a dihydrogen monoxide contamination warning on the University of California, Santa Cruz, campus via photocopied fliers. In 1994, Craig Jackson created a web page for the Coalition to Ban DHMO. The Friends of Hydrogen Hydroxide website was created by Dan Curtis Johnson, partly as a foil on the Coalition page, claiming to oppose its "subversive agenda". The site points out that hydrogen hydroxide is "environmentally safe" and "enhances the functionality, growth, and health of many forms of life". In 1997, Nathan Zohner, a 14-year-old student at Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho Falls, Idaho, gathered 43 votes to ban the chemical, out of 50 ninth-graders surveyed. Zohner received the first prize at Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair for analysis of the results of his survey. In recognition of his experiment, journalist James K. Glassman coined the term "Zohnerism" to refer to "the use of a true fact to lead a scientifically and mathematically ignorant public to a false conclusion". In late 1997, drawing inspiration from Jackson's web page and Zohner's research, Tom Way created a website at DHMO.org, including links to some legitimate sites such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Institutes of


id: disappearing-blonde-gene-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_blonde_gene-0.md
category: reference
title: Disappearing blonde gene
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_blonde_gene
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:57.289553+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: disappearing-blonde-gene-20260505-0
summary:
The "disappearing blonde gene" refers to a hoax that emerged in parts of the Western world in the early 2000s, claiming that a scientific study had estimated that blonds would become extinct within the next two centuries. More specifically, it claimed that, because the alleles for blond hair genes are recessive, people with natural blond hair would become less common as people with dominant non-blond hair alleles had offspring with them, even though such a pairing would retain one copy of the blond allele in the genome of said offspring. Nevertheless, the hoax was repeated as fact by some mainstream Western media outlets, such as ABC News, the BBC, CNN, and The Sunday Times, between 2002 and 2006. The earliest known claims of a looming "blond extinction" date back to 1865. Several outlets propagating the hoax also falsely cited the World Health Organization (WHO), asserting that it had published a report claiming that blonds "will become extinct by 2202" in spite of the fact that neither the WHO nor any reputable expert had issued such a report. In response, the WHO released an official statement telling all those who had commented on the non-existent report to retract their remarks. ==


id: document-12-571-3570-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_12-571-3570-0.md
category: reference
title: Document 12-571-3570
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_12-571-3570
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:58.452726+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: document-12-571-3570-20260505-0
summary:
Document 12-571-3570 (also titled NASA No. 12 571-3570) is a hoax document originally posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.sex on November 28, 1989. According to this document, astronauts aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-75 performed a variety of sex acts to determine which positions are most effective in zero gravity. The document goes on to report that of the 10 positions tested, six required the use of a belt and an inflatable tunnel, while four were contingent on hanging on. The document also discusses a video record of the 10 one-hour sessions in the lower deck of the shuttle, and notes that the subjects added their own personal footnotes to help scientists. The real STS-75 mission occurred in 1996‍—‍seven years after the text was published‍—‍clearly indicating that the document is a hoax. Nonetheless, many people have been fooled by this document and NASA has had to debunk it on several occasions. In March 2000, NASA's director of media services Brian Welch referred to the document as a "fairly well-known 'urban legend'". This fictional document was rediscovered and widely publicized by astronomer and scientific writer Pierre Kohler, who used it as a major source about sex experiments in space in his 2000


id: enigmarelle-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigmarelle-0.md
category: reference
title: Enigmarelle
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigmarelle
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:29:59.593980+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: enigmarelle-20260505-0
summary:
Enigmarelle was a fake humanoid automaton, in fact with a person concealed inside, which was exhibited as a scientific and technical curiosity around 1905 in the US and Europe, chiefly in theaters. Enigmarelle was claimed to be able to perform several extraordinary tasks, which it demonstrated in performances: these included walking, riding a bicycle, and writing its name on a blackboard. == Presentation == Enigmarelle was shown in the US and then in parts of Europe, in vaudeville theaters and circuses. The booking agent, an American named Frederick J. Ireland, was represented at these appearances as the creator and owner of the automaton. Enigmarelle was a large automaton and was in fact operated by a human concealed within its body, although the precise operating mechanisms are not known. The operator is believed to have been a performer who had had both his legs amputated and who went by the name of Alba W. Root, and who also performed as a bicycle acrobat using leg prostheses. Enigmarelle was the subject of a short documentary film in 1905 and a detailed "scientific" description with three photos in Scientific American in 1906. It is mentioned in some modern publications on automatons. === Name


id: eo-rnis-pterovelox-gobiensis-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoörnis_pterovelox_gobiensis-0.md
category: reference
title: Eoörnis pterovelox gobiensis
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoörnis_pterovelox_gobiensis
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:00.756375+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: eo-rnis-pterovelox-gobiensis-20260505-0
summary:
Eoörnis pterovelox gobiensis is a fictional bird, a humorous hoax by Lester W. Sharp, professor of botany, Cornell University, United States. It was initially a short talk presented together with a graduate student, Cuthbert Fraser, about the most unusual bird from the Gobi Desert, called woofen-poof by the local populace. Eventually it grew into a 34-page monograph signed by an "Augustus C. Fotheringham, Sc.D. (Cantab.), F.R.G.S.", printed by "The Buighleigh Press" in 1928, full of illustrated detail of anatomy, physiology, ecology, evolution, and historical references, complete with Cro-Magnon cave paintings — all inspired by a car mascot of a pelican. For example, Pterovelox "is perhaps most frequently observed in a peculiar resting position — legs straight out behind with the feet on the rock, tree branch or other object, the body being supported by continuous vibration of wings". The monograph has later been reprinted several times. The peculiarities of the bird's mating were even unwittingly quoted in a eugenics article on consanguineous marriages in 1934: "A new, and recently authenticated, case of naturally determined incest, appears to have been discovered by the British Museum Expedition to the Gobi Desert in 1929, when a bird, the Eoörnis pterovelox gobiensis, was found,


id: fatu-liva-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatu-liva-0.md
category: reference
title: Fatu-liva
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatu-liva
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:01.925930+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: fatu-liva-20260505-0
summary:
The Fatu-liva is a fictional species of bird invented by George S. Chappell in his travel parody The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas, by Walter E. Traprock (1921). Fatu-liva were said to be found only in the fictional "Filbert Islands" in the South Pacific Ocean where they laid cube-like, black-spotted eggs that were very similar in appearance to dice. The bird's nest was described in the book as: "...a semi-spheric bowl of closely woven grass in which lay four snow-white, polka-dotted cubes, the marvelous square eggs of the fatu-liva." Additionally, a black-and-white photograph of what was supposedly the bird's dice-like eggs was provided. Its caption read: "This is without question the most extraordinary picture which has ever been taken of any natural history subject. It corroborates in most convincing manner the author's claim to the discovery of the wonderful fatu-liva bird with its unique gift of laying square eggs. Here we see the eggs themselves in all the beauty of their cubical form and quaint marking; here we see the nest itself, made of delicately woven haro and brought carefully from the tree's summit by its discoverer, Babai-Alova-Babai. An extremely interesting feature of the picture is


id: flying-penguin-hoax-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_penguin_hoax-0.md
category: reference
title: Flying penguin hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_penguin_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:03.131460+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: flying-penguin-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
Miracles of Evolution is a BBC film trailer featuring flying penguins made in 2008 as an April Fools' Day hoax. The film was advertised as compelling evidence for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. It was largely set on King George Island, 120 kilometres (75 mi) from mainland Antarctica. The Daily Telegraph wrote that the film was "an instant classic. It is accomplished work of this kind that guarantees the BBC its unique status." The BBC website still claims that it may attempt to film the flying penguins again because the original film did not explain how such small birds, that are not used to flying, could survive long migrations over vast, stormy oceans. Miracles of Evolution was filmed with animated penguins for the occasion of April Fools' Day, and to promote the BBC iPlayer. MSN included "The BBC's flying penguins" as one of their twelve "hoaxes of the decade." == The film == The film features Adélie penguins that live in Antarctica. Adélie penguins are one of the most southern seabirds in the world. The film claims that long and extremely cold Antarctic winters forced some groups of Adélies to adapt by (re)gaining the ability to fly. In the film


id: fur-bearing-trout-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur-bearing_trout-0.md
category: reference
title: Fur-bearing trout
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur-bearing_trout
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:04.254222+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: fur-bearing-trout-20260505-0
summary:
The fur-bearing trout (or furry trout) is a legendary creature found in American folklore and Icelandic folklore. According to folklore, the trout has created a thick coat of fur to maintain its body heat. Tales of furry fish date to the 17th century. The earliest known American publication dates from a 1929 Montana Wildlife magazine article by J.H. Hicken. A taxidermy furry trout produced by Ross C. Jobe is a specimen at the Royal Museum of Scotland; it is a trout with white rabbit fur "ingeniously" attached. There are no known examples of any fur-bearing trout species, but two examples of hair-like growths on fish are known. The "cotton mold", Saprolegnia, can infect fish, which can result in the appearance of fish covered in white "fur". Another fish, Mirapinna esau, has hairlike outgrowth and sports wing-like pectoral fins. == Commonalities == Fur-bearing trout are fictional creatures that are purportedly found in the Arkansas River, northern North America, and Iceland. The basic claim (or tall tale) is that the waters of lakes and rivers in the area are so cold that they evolved a thick coat of fur to maintain their body heat. Another theory says that it is due to


id: genpet-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genpet-0.md
category: reference
title: Genpet
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genpet
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:05.428633+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: genpet-20260505-0
summary:
Genpets are a mixed media installation art piece by artist Adam Brandejs. It is considered a hoax of exposure. The project has been shown in multiple galleries in Canada and Europe and has garnered some attention in the mass media. The creations were sculpted, automated creatures made of latex and plastic, and housed robotic circuitry to simulate slow respiration. They looked like small, hairless humanoids, and were intended to be displayed as living, but dormant, bio-engineered creatures for purchase as pets. The fabricated packaging indicated a purchaser had a choice of what personality traits their Genpet displayed based on a color-coded chemical behavioral modulation system, and that the creatures had a limited vocal capacity. The sculptures and packaging, along with the professional appearance and cleverly open ended interactive features website led many observers to assume that Genpets were real. In 2006, Genpets were featured on the weblog for The Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego, California. as well as broadcast on BBC News Worldwide on a BBC programme called Click as well as the Times (UK), the New York Times and G4TechTV. All the work was hand done by the artist Adam Brandejs, with assistance from makeup artist Crystal Pallister


id: golfballia-ambusta-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golfballia_ambusta-0.md
category: reference
title: Golfballia ambusta
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golfballia_ambusta
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:07.690226+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: golfballia-ambusta-20260505-0
summary:
Golfballia ambusta is a purported species of fungus with specimens primarily kept at Kew Gardens, London. The specimens are not of organisms but burnt golf balls. In 1962, they were described as a new fungal species by R. W. G. Dennis, the head of mycology at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, possibly to challenge the mycological criteria in place as to what could be considered a fungus. Its binomial name is 'burnt golf ball' in Dog Latin. == History == In 1952, a burnt golf ball was submitted to mycologists from an anonymous source in Lancashire, northwest England, and deposited in the Fungarium at Kew Gardens, London. The submitter claimed it to be a specimen of a "rare fungal species" belonging to the genus Queletia, but mycologists thought its appearance more closely resembled Scleroderma citrinum, which has an irregular, nearly spherical sporocarp with thick leathery skin and colours that vary from white to tan or brown. The surface of a golf ball is dimpled and, when burned, its outer shell cracks to expose the rubber core, which is similar to the dark gleba of a mature S. citrinum sporocarp. Kew mycologists unsuccessfully attempted to collect spores from the specimen before realizing


id: great-moon-hoax-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax-0.md
category: reference
title: Great Moon Hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:08.852773+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: great-moon-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
The "Great Moon Hoax", also known as the "Great Moon Hoax of 1835", was a series of six articles published in The Sun (a New York newspaper), beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel and his fictitious companion Andrew Grant. The story was advertised on August 21, 1835, as an upcoming feature allegedly reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant. The first in a series of six was published four days later on August 25. These articles were never retracted; however, on September 16, 1835, The Sun admitted the articles were in fact fabricated. == Hoax == The headline read: The articles described animals on the Moon, including bison, single-horned goats, mini zebras, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids ("Vespertilio-homo") who built temples. There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle". The telescope, transported to South Africa from New England, was said to be many times larger than any other telescope in the world. The lens measured "24 feet in diameter and 7 tons in weight". "Vespertilio-homo" can be translated


id: great-moon-hoax-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax-1.md
category: reference
title: Great Moon Hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:08.852773+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: great-moon-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
== Context == Locke's sensational reports were not out of place in the context of the mass proliferation of penny press newspapers such as the New York Sun which received much of their income from advertisements, a business practice made sustainable by large numbers of readers. The Sun was a pioneer when it came to producing shocking and often sensationalist journalism, being the first New York newspaper to report on murders, suicides, personal events, and divorces, and it was because of stories such as these that the Sun thrived in attracting readers to their articles, and thus to their advertisements. The success of such sensational stories as the "Great Moon Hoax" can be partly attributed to the influence of contemporary speculative science. Figures like the Reverend Thomas Dick, who claimed that the Moon was inhabited by billions of beings, had captured the public's imagination in the early 19th century. Locke's hoax played on similar popular beliefs, presenting them as the latest scientific findings from the well-respected astronomer Sir John Herschel, which lent the story credibility. == Legacy == The hoax is featured in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History. Nate


id: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair-0.md
category: reference
title: Grievance studies affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:10.101456+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-0
summary:
The grievance studies affair was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and erosion of standards in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Four of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention. The affair echoed Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax in Social Text, a cultural studies journal, which inspired Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose. The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed [...] and put social grievances ahead of objective truth". As such, the trio, identifying themselves as political liberals, though with Vox identifying prior transgressions made by each against left-liberalism, described their project as an attempt to raise awareness of what they believed was the damage that postmodernism


id: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair-1.md
category: reference
title: Grievance studies affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:10.101456+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-0
summary:
=== Attempts === Prior to the affair, various academics highlighted concerns about the intellectual validity of much research influenced by postmodern philosophy and critical theory by publishing hoax articles in various journals. It was the 1996 hoax by Alan Sokal in Social Text, in particular, that influenced James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian to publish a hoax article of their own. On May 19, 2017, peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences published "The conceptual penis as a social construct", which argued that penises are not "male"; rather, they should be analyzed as social constructs instead. The same day, Lindsay and Boghossian revealed it to be a hoax aimed at discrediting gender studies, although Cogent Social Sciences is not exclusively a gender-studies journal. While the journal did conduct a postmortem, both authors concluded the "impact [of the hoax] was very limited, and much criticism of it was legitimate". The authorship of each paper was either fictional—such as "Helen Wilson" of "Portland Ungendering Research Initiative"—or real people willing to lend their name, such as Richard Baldwin, professor emeritus of history at Gulf Coast State College. The first acceptance, "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park", was achieved five


id: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair-2.md
category: reference
title: Grievance studies affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:10.101456+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-0
summary:
=== Praise === Mounk of Johns Hopkins University said that while the authors received no favors for preparing the hoax, they demonstrated mastery in postmodern jargon and not only ridiculed the journals in question, but, more importantly, outed double standards of gender studies which happily welcome hoaxes against "morally suspect" fields like economics, but are unable to accept a criticism of their own methods. He also commented on the "sheer amount of tribal solidarity it has elicited among leftists and academics" and the fact that many of the reactions were purely ad hominem, while few have actually said that there is an actual problem highlighted by the hoax: "some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit". Rejecting complaints that the trio, lacking a control group, engaged in a "confused attempt to import statistics into a question where it doesn't apply", Mounk stated that the trio had promised "nothing of the sort" in the first place, and had instead successfully accomplished their goal of demonstrating that it was "possible" to "get bullshit published" in the journals in question. Justin E. H. Smith defended


id: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair-3.md
category: reference
title: Grievance studies affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:10.101456+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: grievance-studies-affair-20260505-0
summary:
(1) journals with higher impact factors were more likely to reject papers submitted as part of the project; (2) the chances were better, if the manuscript was allegedly based on empirical data; (3) peer reviews can be an important asset in the process of revising a manuscript; and (4) when the project authors, with academic education from neighboring disciplines, closely followed the reviewers' advice, they were able to learn relatively quickly what is needed for writing an acceptable article. The boundary between a seriously written paper and a "hoax" gradually became blurred. Finally (5), the way the project ended showed that in the long run, the scientific community will uncover fraudulent practices. Lagerspetz concludes that the experiment was flawed both experimentally and ethically, and failed to provide the evidence it sought. It is unclear, on what grounds the project group decided what journals to target. One third (7) of the 21 final editorial decisions the authors received were positive, two thirds of the decisions were negative. In the absence of a control group, it is impossible to tell whether this proportion would have been lower or higher within other disciplines. == List of hoax papers == === Accepted === ====


id: vishwa-jit-gupta-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishwa_Jit_Gupta-0.md
category: reference
title: Vishwa Jit Gupta
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishwa_Jit_Gupta
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:11.304705+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: vishwa-jit-gupta-20260505-0
summary:
Vishwa Jit Gupta, alternatively spelt Viswa Jit Gupta, or Vishwajit Gupta, (1942—2022) was an Indian paleontologist and former professor of geology at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He is reputed for research in the geological settings and fossil records of the Himalayas, publishing five books and 458 articles on the subject between 1966 and 1989. However, many of his fossils were revealed to be fake or manipulated, and he became infamous for large-scale scientific fraud, the case that came to be known as the Himalayan fossil hoax. Once recognised as "India's most celebrated fossil scientist", he has been named as "the greatest" and "most notorious paleontological fraudster" and "Houdini of the Himalayas." == Biography == Gupta studied M.Sc. in the Department of Geology (at the time the Centre of Advanced Study in Palaeontology and Himalayan Geology) at Panjab University, Chandigarh. After enrolling in a doctoral programme under the supervision of Mulk Raj Sahni, he investigated on the fossils of the Himalayan region in Kashmir. He and Sahni published the first reports of fossils in 1964, the discovery of graptolites in two papers in Nature, and fossil assemblage in two papers in Current Science, and one in the Journal of the Palaeontological Society


id: john-william-heslop-harrison-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Heslop-Harrison-0.md
category: reference
title: John William Heslop-Harrison
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Heslop-Harrison
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:12.446334+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: john-william-heslop-harrison-20260505-0
summary:
John William Heslop Harrison, (1881–1967) was a professor of Botany at Kings College, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, specialising in the genetics of moths. He is now best remembered for a widely recognised academic fraud. == Early life and education == He was born in Birtley on 22 January 1881, the son of George Heslop-Harrison, a pattern-maker at Birtley Iron Works. He was educated at Bede College School in Durham then Rutherford School for Boys in Newcastle upon Tyne. His mother was a keen gardener, and other influences such as his uncle, Rev J E Hull, and neighbour, Charles Robson, led him to an early interest in botany and natural history. He then studied at Durham College of Science, where he obtained a BSc degree in 1903. He did further postgraduate study at the University of Newcastle, gaining an MSc degree in 1916 and a DSc in 1917. In 1921 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). His proposers were James Hartley Ashworth, Sir Thomas Hudson Beare, Percy Hall Grimshaw, and James Ritchie. He served as the Society's Vice-President 1945–1948. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1928. He died in Birtley, Tyne and Wear


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-0.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
The Himalayan fossil hoax (also called the Himalayan hoax or the case of the peripatetic fossils) is a case of scientific misconduct perpetrated by Indian palaeontologist Vishwa Jit Gupta of Panjab University. Since his doctoral research in the 1960s and the following two decades, Gupta worked on the geology and fossil record of the Himalayan region, producing hundreds of research publications that were taken as fundamentals to understanding the geological formation of the Himalayas. Australian geologist John Talent from Macquarie University followed Gupta's research and happened to visit the Himalayas where he found that Gupta's fossils did not match those geological settings and were odd — some being extraordinarily similar to fossils from other parts of the world. In 1987, in the presence of Gupta at a scientific conference in Canada, Talent publicly displayed that Gupta's fossils were identical to those found in Morocco. Talent and his student Glenn Brock reanalysed Gupta's research, bringing out systematic evidence that Gupta had manipulated, faked, recycled, and plagiarised his data. Early in 1978, Gilbert Klapper and Willi Ziegler had suspected foul play as they noticed that Gupta's conodont fossils were similar to those collected by George Jennings Hinde from Buffalo, New York, a


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-1.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
In 1978, the American geologist Gilbert Klapper from the University of Iowa met Willi Ziegler at the University of Marburg in Germany to discuss the progress of research on extinct jawless vertebrates, the conodonts. At that time, Ziegler had Australian guests, John W. Pickett from the Geological Survey of New South Wales and his associate John Alfred Talent from Macquarie University in Sydney. Talent was by then an established expert in Devonian geology of Australian and Indian regions. As the leader of the research team of the first International Geological Correlation Programme (IGCP-1), a project of UNESCO, Talent had explored the Himalayas in 1973−1977. Pickett and Talent shared their Himalayan studies and discussed Gupta's research on Devonian conodonts. They had also investigated 20 locations around Nepal, where Gupta had claimed many discoveries from Triassic, Permian, Carboniferous, and Devonian deposits (rocks ranging from around 420 to 299 million years old), and to their astonishment, found no fossils except one which was Silurian (around 443 to 420 Ma, therefore pre-Devonian). In one specific case, they explored the area where Gupta and William B. N. Berry (Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology) had reported in 1966 several fossils from Kashmir.


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-2.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
In 1980, Gupta met Philippe Janvier at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and showed him "a magnificent fossil fish skull" which he brought along. Gupta had travelled to China, but claimed that he had collected the fossil from Zanskar, Ladakh, at the foothills of the Himalayas. Recognising the fossil as a new species, Janvier made the identification, and with Gupta submitted the discovery to the journal Recent Researches in Geology the next year. Shortly after this, Janvier went to Sweden where he met Zhang Miman (Meemann Chang), director of the Chinese Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, who was working on some fish fossils from China. Janvier immediately noticed that some of these fossils were exactly like the one he and Gupta had recently described. When inquired, Miman explained to him that the particular specimen was an extinct Devonian coelacanth species she named Youngolepis praecursor (formally reported by Miman in 1995) that was found in Yunnan and North Vietnam, and so common in those regions that the fossils were frequently used as gifts to visitors. Chang had already published the discovery in January 1981. Janvier told Gupta to hold their publication, but it was eventually published in 1982


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-3.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
The database for the Silurian and Devonian of the Himalaya has become so extensively marred by error, inconsistency and implausibility as to throw grave doubts on the scientific validity of any conclusions that might be drawn from it. An appropriate way to approach this problem and clarify many of the questions raised would be through an independent fact-finding commission set up to probe most of the legions of paleontologically anomalous and suspect reports. The story became widely known from Nature and Science articles, especially by a series of four Nature articles titled "the peripatetic fossils" between 1989 and 1990; a defence from Gupta, comments by Arun Deep Ahluwalia, S. B. Bhatia, Udai K. Bassi, and Philippe Janvier and John Bruce Waterhouse, and last by Talent's summary. It was these reports that brought the case to an international level. == The fossils == === Conodonts === The principal fossils of dispute were the conodonts. One of the first and best-understood conodont fossils was from Amsdell Creek in New York, USA, which was determined as Devonian in age. With the help of the English geologists Frank H. T. Rhodes and R. L. Austin, Gupta reported a discovery titled "Devonian Conodonts from Kashmir"


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-4.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
== Gupta's strategy == Gupta was careful in his research publications, asking eminent scientists to collaborate. He provided the fossils and the basic geological details, and allowed his collaborators to make the fossil identification, so that they became "unsuspecting partners in crime", as Bhargava lamented, or unwitting "partners in the deception", according to Bangalore Puttaiya Radhakrishna, editor of the Journal of the Geological Society of India. As in his first major publication in Nature in 1967, Gupta was able to convince Rhodes from the University College of Swansea (later president of Cornell University) and Austin from the University of Southampton. Gary Webster at Washington State University had coauthored nine of Gupta's papers, and asserted that his identification of the crinoid fossils was genuine, but later conceded that he was "virtually certain" they were obtained from places other than the Himalayas. He declared that Gupta had "willfully tried to dupe the scientific community". By 1989, Gupta had collaborated with 128 scientists around the world, including Berry, Director of the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology, Kiril J. Budurov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Michael E. Brookfield of the University of Guelph in Ontario, J. B. Waterhouse of the University


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-5
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-5.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
Bassi of the Geological Survey of India, later verified that Kurig is not Devonian but a much younger Carboniferous sediment, and that the border and village records did not have any mention of Gupta visiting the site. In the same vein, Gupta and Erben reported in 1983 the occurrence of Carnian (298 to 272 million years old) conodonts and ammonoids from Khimokul La. Bassi, who had surveyed the area several times, attested that there is no Carnian sediment there, and that the check-post register or the villagers had no record of Gupta, Erben or any foreigner.


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-6
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-6.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
== Reactions == Talent wrote that Gupta "inundated geological and biogeographical literature of the Himalayas with a blizzard of disinformation so extensive as to render the literature almost useless." Gupta said to The New York Times that he had invited Talent to Panjab University and the Himalayan sites to verify the research findings following the Calgary incident, but he had declined. In trying to undermine the accusations, he described the affair as "minor disagreements over taxonomy among experts." He defended himself by claiming Talent's allegations as "malicious bias and professional jealousy" based on lies that were "building up a story without any basis." He added, "We've had differences for the past 20 years, and he's trying to cash in on them." Talent admitted that he did decline Gupta's invitation as he felt it was more appropriate for other scientists to make inspections independently. In the Science report, Webster admitted having already had the information on the similarity between the Himalayan fossils and those in America and Europe, especially the crinoids which were found only in the United States. Commenting on Talent's Calgary speech, he conceded: "I am now virtually certain that most of these specimens did come from places other


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-7
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-7.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
=== Geological Society of India === The Geological Society of India, which claimed to normally avoid publishing controversial matters in their academic journal, feared failure to publish Talent's accusations "could be construed as aquiescence in the alleged fraud", and published two articles from Talent criticizing Gupta's research. In the first paper, published in June 1989, Talent's team gave an elaboration of instances of plagiarism in Gupta's reports. The other, published in December 1989, presented further cases of fossil recycling and mismatching of the fossil sources. As Ian Anderson reported in New Scientist, the Geological Society of India made a "controversial move" by issuing an expression of concern, stating that "the fossil finds of V. J. Gupta are not reliable", but did not formally retract Gupta's papers. The society reassessed Gupta's papers and found "several discrepancies lending support to the accusations" in 19 publications. The society's scientists visited seven localities in the Himalayas where Gupta claimed to have collected Devonian fossils, but found no such evidence, declaring "the falsification of facts attempted by Gupta." They requested Gupta provide them access to his collection of specimens, research notes and laboratory register, but never received a response. The report titled "The Himalayan Fossil


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-8
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-8.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
== Consequences == The Panjab University Vice Chancellor Ram Prakash Bambah issued Gupta's suspension order in February 1991. As Triloki Nath Kapoor soon replaced Bambah, Gupta was reinstated in January 1992. That year, the University Grants Commission of India stopped its funding to Gupta, and Nature reported a note of disappointment over Gupta's reinstallation, calling it an "Indian rope trick". The resurgent controversy compelled Kapoor for a proper action. The affair was investigated in an official inquiry led by Man Mohan Singh Gujral, the retired Chief Justice of the Sikkim High Court. The inquiry started in February 1992 and lasted two years with the final report submitted in April 1994. Gupta could not make any evidential rebuttal, resorting to lame pretexts such as claiming that he did not have a good memory of his field research and never kept field notes. The verdict found Gupta guilty of all charges including data recycling, plagiarism, concocting research locations and conning other scientists. Panjab University imposed three penalties on Gupta: (1) he was officially reprimanded; (2) he was debarred from administrative positions, his becoming a dean which was due that year was stayed; and (3) his annual increments of salary were ceased. In


id: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-9
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax-9.md
category: reference
title: Himalayan fossil hoax
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalayan_fossil_hoax
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:13.892347+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: himalayan-fossil-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
== Impact == Gupta's forgery has often been compared with the 1912 case of Piltdown Man, sometimes called the greatest hoax in science. Nature announced Talent's observations with a statement that it "will cast a longer shadow" than Piltdown Man because of its elaborate publications involving numerous discoveries through a quarter of a century, and multiple fossils and scientists. The Chicago Tribune described it as "the most serious case of its kind since the Piltdown hoax." The New York Times wrote: "Unlike the case of Piltdown man, in which a single skull was passed off as a fossil of a prehistoric human, this one involves a much broader range of reported finds that have become a part of scientific literature." Talent described the meaning and consequences of Gupta's research as proving the kangaroos as natives to Kashmir or rhinoceros to Rio. Given the scale of fossils and the research publications, he described it as "[perhaps] the biggest paleontological fraud of all time." In 1994, Down to Earth reported it as the "greatest scientific fraud of the century". According to Tony Mayer of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, the saga "is possibly one of the most extensive instances of malpractice in


id: holly-oak-gorget-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Oak_gorget-0.md
category: reference
title: Holly Oak gorget
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Oak_gorget
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:15.087375+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: holly-oak-gorget-20260505-0
summary:
The Holly Oak Gorget or Holly Oak Pendant is an artifact made from a section of shell that is engraved with the image of an extinct woolly mammoth reportedly found in Holly Oak, Delaware and initially identified as an example of Paleoindian art. Purported to have been a gorget carved during the Pleistocene, this object is now widely believed to be an archaeological forgery. == History == The Holly Oak Gorget was claimed to have been found in 1864 near the railroad station in Holly Oak. The object was reportedly found by Hilborne T. Cresson in 1864, but was not brought to the attention of the scientific community until December 1889 or the public until February 1890. The supposed discovery of the gorget by Cresson coincides directly with the discovery of another depiction of a woolly mammoth, in France; while excavating the La Madeleine rock shelter in 1864 Édouard Lartet discovered a clear depiction of a woolly mammoth on a fragment of mammoth tusk, providing evidence that humans and mammoths might once have co-existed in Europe. Once the Holly Oak gorget had been introduced to the scientific community and the public at large, the shell was put aside and rarely


id: holly-oak-gorget-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Oak_gorget-1.md
category: reference
title: Holly Oak gorget
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Oak_gorget
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:15.087375+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: holly-oak-gorget-20260505-0
summary:
=== Style === In 1892, D.G. Brinton expressed the need to be suspicious of objects purported to have been made by aboriginal artists, listing the gorget and Lenape Stone as examples of such, citing the constant recurrence of frauds, and in 1893, after having examined the gorget and Lenape Stone, deemed both to have been recently made. Several people who have viewed the Holly Oak gorget have commented on how similar the drawing is to the La Madeleine tusk. Frederick Ward Putnam of the Peabody Museum, Thomas Wilson of the United States National Museum, Daniel Brinton of the University of Pennsylvania, and even Cresson himself, have all discussed the similarities present between the two objects. At the time the shell became public, there were less than a half-dozen depictions of a mammoth available, and of those the La Madeleine drawing is by far the clearest depiction. At the time of the Holly Oak pendant, as there were so few ways known of drawing a mammoth, the marked similarities between the two were not thought of as being unduly suspicious. David Meltzer lists several parallels between the two. They both have the same orientation and posture, and while most mammoths are


id: huemul-project-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project-0.md
category: reference
title: Huemul Project
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:16.271377+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: huemul-project-20260505-0
summary:
The Huemul Project (Spanish: Proyecto Huemul) was an early 1950s Argentine effort to develop a fusion power device known as the Thermotron. The concept was invented by Austrian scientist Ronald Richter, who claimed to have a design that would produce effectively unlimited power. Richter was able to pitch the idea to President of Argentina Juan Perón in 1948, and soon received massive funding to build an experimental site on Huemul Island, on a lake just outside the town of San Carlos de Bariloche in Patagonia, near the Andes mountains. Construction began late in 1949, and by 1951 the site was completed and carrying out tests. On 16 February 1951, Richter measured high temperatures that suggested fusion had been achieved. On 24 March, the day before an important international meeting of the leaders of the Americas, Perón publicly announced that Richter had been successful, adding that in the future energy would be sold in packages the size of a milk bottle. A worldwide interest followed, along with significant skepticism on the part of other physicists. Little information was forthcoming: no papers were published on the topic, and over the next year a number of reporters visited the site but were denied


id: huemul-project-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project-1.md
category: reference
title: Huemul Project
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:16.271377+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: huemul-project-20260505-0
summary:
== Germans in Argentina == In 1947, a dossier was provided to Argentina by the Spanish embassy in Buenos Aires listing a number of German aeronautical engineers who were looking to sneak out of Germany. Among them was Kurt Tank, designer of the famed Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and many other successful designs. The dossier was passed to the recently formed Argentine Air Force's Commander in Chief, who passed it to Brigadier César Raúl Ojeda, who was in charge of aerodynamics research. Ojeda and Tank communicated and formulated plans to begin building a jet fighter in Argentina, which would eventually emerge as the FMA IAe 33 Pulqui II. Just before leaving for Argentina, Tank briefly met Richter in London, where Richter told Tank of his ideas for nuclear-powered aircraft. Richter was at that time doing some work in the German chemical industry. Tank had also contacted a number of other engineers and even famed fighter pilot and Luftwaffe general Adolf Galland. Various members of the group made their way to Argentina under false passports during late 1947 and 1948. The Germans were warmly received by Perón, who effectively gave them a blank cheque in an effort to rapidly develop the Argentine


id: huemul-project-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project-2.md
category: reference
title: Huemul Project
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:16.271377+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: huemul-project-20260505-0
summary:
== Announcement == On 16 February 1951, Richter claimed he had successfully demonstrated fusion. He re-ran the experiment for members of the CNEA, later claiming that they had witnessed the world's first thermonuclear reaction. On 23 February, a technician working for the project expressed his concerns about the claims, suggesting that the measurement was likely due to the accidental tilting of the spectrograph's photographic plate while the experimental run was being set up. Richter refused to re-run the experiment. Instead, a week later he ordered the reactor to be disassembled so a new one could be built that included a magnetic confinement system. Meanwhile, plans for a new Laboratory 1 were started with this new design, this time to be buried underground. A 14-metre (46 ft) deep hole in hard rock was constructed, but Richter changed the design and had the hole filled in with concrete. On 2 March, Edward Miller, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Station for Inter-American Affairs, visited Argentina. This was ostensibly to visit the Pan American Games, but in reality was in advance of calling a meeting of American leaders later that month to discuss China's entry into the Korean War. Perón gave Miller an introduction


id: huemul-project-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project-3.md
category: reference
title: Huemul Project
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:16.271377+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: huemul-project-20260505-0
summary:
== Public reaction == Shortly after Richter's conference, the matter was discussed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where it was noted that Richter's announcement had revealed no details of the system of operation. They also noted that Richter claimed three key advances during experimentation, but failed to mention any of them during the conference. Finally, although the method for measuring temperature was announced, the temperature itself was not. The United States Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) comment on the announcement was simply that "the Argentine Government announced more than a year ago that it was planning to engage in nuclear research." American physicists were universally dismissive of the announcement. Among the more famous responses was that of George Gamow, who said "It seemed to be 95% pure propaganda, 4¾% thermonuclear reactions on a very small scale, and the remaining ¼% probably something better." Ernest Lawrence was not so dismissive, noting that, "There is a tendency to laugh it off as being a lot of hot air or something. Well it may be, but we don't know all, and we should make every effort to find out." Edward Teller put it succinctly, "Reading one line one has to think he's


id: huemul-project-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project-4.md
category: reference
title: Huemul Project
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:16.271377+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: huemul-project-20260505-0
summary:
== Cancellation == Argentine physicists were also critical of the announcement, but found little interest on the part of Perón, who was still at odds with the academic mainstream. González was growing increasingly frustrated with Richter, and in February 1952 told Perón that either Richter left the project, or he did. Perón accepted González's resignation and replaced him with his aide, Navy Captain Pedro Iraolagoitía. Iraolagoitía soon began to protest as well, finally convincing Perón to have the project investigated. Instead of calling upon the local physics community, Perón put together a team consisting of Iraolagoitía, a priest, two engineers including Mario Báncora, and young physicist José Antonio Balseiro, who was at that time studying in England and was asked to return with all haste. The team visited the site for a series of demonstrations between 5 and 8 September 1952. The committee analyzed Richter's work and published separate reports on the topic on 15 September. Balseiro, in particular, was convinced nothing nuclear was taking place. His report critiqued Richter's claims about how the system was supposed to work, especially the claims that the system was reaching the temperatures needed to demonstrate fusion; he stated that fusion reactions would require


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-0.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
Hwang Woo-suk (Korean: 황우석; born January 29, 1953) is a South Korean veterinarian and researcher. He was a professor of theriogenology and biotechnology at Seoul National University until he was dismissed on March 20, 2006. He was considered a pioneering expert in stem cell research and even called the "Pride of Korea". However, he became infamous around November 2005 for fabricating a series of stem cell experiments that were published in high-profile journals in a case known as the Hwang affair. Hwang was best known for two articles published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005, where he reported he had succeeded in creating human embryonic stem cells by cloning. However, soon after the first paper was released, an article in the journal Nature accused Hwang of having committed ethical violations by using eggs from his graduate students and from the black market. Although he denied the charges at first, Hwang admitted the allegations were true in November 2005. Shortly after this, data from his human cloning experiments was revealed to have been falsified. On May 12, 2006, Hwang was charged with embezzlement and bioethics law violations after it emerged much of his stem cell research had been faked.


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-1.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
== Timeline == Hwang first caught media attention in South Korea when he announced he had successfully created a cloned dairy cow, Yeongrong-i in February 1999. His alleged success was touted as the fifth instance in the world in cow cloning, with a notable caveat: Hwang failed to provide scientifically verifiable data for the research, giving only media sessions and photo ops. Hwang's next claim came in April 1999, when he announced the cloning of a Korean cow, Jin-i, also without providing any scientifically verifiable data. Despite the notable absence of any of the scientific data needed to probe the validity of the research, Hwang's several claims were well received by the South Korean media and public, who were attracted by Hwang's claim of immeasurable economic prospect that his research was said to be promising. The claims of his research results resulted in him being awarded the Scientist of the Year Award by the Korea Science Journalists Association and the Inchon Award. Until 2004, Hwang's main area of research remained in creating genetically modified livestock that included cows and pigs. During that period, Hwang claimed to have created a BSE-resistant cow (which has not been verified), and also stated his


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-2.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
This is an extension of the ten days he said he needed to re-create the stem cells that he asked for back on December 16, 2005. Seoul prosecutors started a criminal investigation and raided Hwang's home that day. On January 20, 2006, Hwang maintained that two of his 11 forged stem cell lines had been maliciously switched for cells from regular, not cloned, embryos. The allegation involves the lines Hwang claims to have created at Seoul-based MizMedi Hospital. On November 22, 2016, Hwang received a certificate of patent on NT-1 technology from the Korean Intellectual Property Office.


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-3.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
== Hwang's laboratory technique == In the late 1990s, the method that scientists used in cloning was somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is the same procedure that was used to create Dolly the sheep. This laboratory technique begins when an egg is taken from a donor and the nucleus is removed from the egg, creating an enucleated egg. A cell, which contains DNA, is then taken from the animal being cloned. The enucleated egg is then fused together with the nucleus of the cloning subject's cell using electricity. This creates an embryo, which is implanted into a surrogate mother through in vitro fertilization. If the procedure is successful, then the surrogate mother will give birth to a baby that is a clone of the cloning subject at the end of a normal gestation period. In 2014 researchers were reporting cloning success rates of seven to eight out of ten but in 1996 it took 277 attempts to create Dolly. Hwang allegedly used this technique at his laboratory in SNU to clone dogs during his experiments throughout the early 2000s. He claimed that it was possible to clone mammals and that probability for success can be better than 1 in 277


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-4.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
Until late November 2005, Hwang was criticized only for unpublicized ethical violations. Colleagues and media outlets asserted that he had paid female donors for egg donations and that he had received donations from two junior researchers, both of which were violations. Later controversies centered around scientific misconduct. His team, which cloned the first human embryo to use for research, said they had used the same technology to create batches of embryonic stem cells from nine patients. According to Hwang, the result was much more efficient than they had hoped. Hwang's integrity as a researcher was again put in doubt when it was revealed that PD Su-cheop had scheduled a follow-up report questioning his achievement published in Science in June 2005, which stated he had cloned 11 lines of embryonic stem cells. This caused furious backlash among many South Koreans, and the reaction only intensified when it was discovered that Kim Sun-Jong, one of Hwang's researchers from MizMedi, had been coerced by illegal means to testify against Hwang. As a result, the scheduled broadcast was canceled and the network made a public apology to the nation, everyone more or less operating under the assumption that the show was at fault and


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-5
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-5.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
=== Official probe and confirmation of fraud === An internal panel was set up in Seoul National University to investigate the allegation, and the probe was started on December 17, 2005. The panel sealed off Hwang's laboratory and conducted a thorough investigation, collecting testimonies from Hwang, Roh and other people who were involved with the scandal. On December 23, the panel announced its initial finding that Hwang had intentionally fabricated stem cell research results creating nine fake cell lines out of eleven, and added that the validity of two remaining cell lines is yet to be confirmed. The panel stated that Hwang's misconduct is "a grave act damaging the foundation of science." Hwang's claim of having used only 185 eggs to create stem cell lines was also denied by the panel, which indicated that more eggs may have been used in the research process. The panel announced additional findings on December 29, and confirmed that no patient-matched embryonic stem cells existed, and that Hwang's team did not have the scientific data to prove any of the stem cells had ever been made. In its final report published on January 10, 2006, the panel reaffirmed its previous findings while announcing additional


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-6
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-6.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
=== Indictment of Hwang and collaborators === On May 12, 2006, Hwang was indicted on charges of embezzlement and breach of the country's bioethics law, without physical detention. Prosecutors also brought fraud charges against the three stem cell researchers. He embezzled 2.8 billion won (US$3 million) out of some 40 billion won in research funds, for personal purposes and the illegal purchase of ova used in his experiments. The prosecution also said Hwang's three associates involved in his stem cell research, Yoon Hyun-soo, Lee Byeong-chun and Kang Sung-keun, also misappropriated tens of millions of won in research money. Investigators have been tracking 24.6 billion won to find out how the research money was spent. It was part of Hwang's 36.9 billion won research funds raised through state support and private donations. Investigators said Hwang used bank accounts held by relatives and subordinates in 2002 and 2003 to receive about 475 million won from private organizations. He allegedly laundered the money by withdrawing it all in cash, breaking it up into smaller amounts and putting it back in various bank accounts. Hwang also withdrew 140 million won in August 2001 to buy gifts for his sponsors, including politicians and other prominent


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-7
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-7.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
=== Government involvement === After having acquired a celebrity status in South Korea, Hwang actively sought to establish every possible tie to political and economic institutions in the country. Hwang especially tried to win favor from the Roh Moo-hyun government, which in turn was suffering from a lack of popular support and wanted to demonstrate its competency by creating and promoting an exemplary policy success. Hwang approached Park Ki-young, a former biology professor, then appointed as the Information, Science and Technology Advisor for the President, and put her as one of the co-authors in his 2004 Science paper. Ties with Park yielded a favorable environment for Hwang in the government, as a non-official group consisting of high-ranking government officials was created to support Hwang's research that includes not only Hwang and Park, but also Kim Byung-joon, Chief National Policy Secretary, and Jin Dae-je, Information and Communications Minister. The group was dubbed as "Hwang-kum-pak-chui", a loose acronym made from member's family names, which means "golden bat" in Korean. After Hwang's paper was published in Science in 2005, support for Hwang came in full swing. In June 2005, the Ministry of Science and Technology selected Hwang as the first recipient of the


id: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-8
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk-8.md
category: reference
title: Hwang Woo-suk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-suk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:17.477711+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: hwang-woo-suk-20260505-0
summary:
=== Rallies supporting Hwang === The same day many South Korean citizens rallied outside Hwang's laboratory; as more than 1,000 women pledged to donate their eggs for the scientist's research. [ ... ] Hwang has been in seclusion since apologizing in November 2005, for ethical lapses in human egg procurement for his research. The symbolic event was as a gesture from Hwang's supporters that says they intend to donate their eggs with 1,000 of their members after they took egg-donation pledges online via their website. "Dr. Hwang will not be able to return to the lab, at least, until at the end of this week because he is extremely exhausted, mentally and physically", a key team member, Ahn Cu Rie, wrote in an e-mail to Reuters. [ ... ] At Hwang's lab at Seoul National University, women left bouquets of the national flower, a hibiscus called the Rose of Sharon, for the scientist along with notes of encouragement. The stem cell research center that Hwang led before resigning said it hoped he would return, even though his lapses could hurt its efforts to work with other research institutions. "So far more than 700 South Korean women have pledged to donate


id: journal-for-geoclimatic-studies-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_for_Geoclimatic_Studies-0.md
category: reference
title: Journal for Geoclimatic Studies
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_for_Geoclimatic_Studies
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:18.674179+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: journal-for-geoclimatic-studies-20260505-0
summary:
The Journal for Geoclimatic Studies is the name given to a nonexistent journal which published a fabricated global warming study in November 2007 entitled, "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?" The published study identified the Journal for Geoclimatic Studies as an official publication of Okinawa University's Institute for Geoclimatic Studies (The Institute for Geoclimatic Studies is also fraudulent and does not exist). The spurious study, ostensibly authored by Daniel Klein and Mandeep J. Gupta of the University of Arizona's Department of Climatology, and Philip Cooper and Arne FR Jansson at the University of Gothenburg's Department of Atmospheric Physics, claimed that global warming was not human caused, but the work of carbon-dioxide emitting bacteria based on the ocean floor. The report was circulated by a number of global warming deniers before discovery that the study authors and university departments identified in the publication did not exist. The website where the study was published was taken down once the deception was revealed, and its ownership was traced to David Thorpe, a science journalist and web designer based in the United Kingdom. The true author of the article is purportedly a man identifying himself as Mark


id: kensington-runestone-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone-0.md
category: reference
title: Kensington Runestone
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:19.883519+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: kensington-runestone-20260505-0
summary:
The Kensington Runestone is a slab of greywacke stone covered in runes that was discovered in Western Minnesota, United States, in 1898. Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant, reported that he unearthed it from a field in the largely rural township of Solem in Douglas County. It was later named after the nearest settlement, Kensington. The inscription purports to be a record left behind by Scandinavian explorers in the 14th century (internally dated to 1362). There has been a drawn-out debate regarding the stone's authenticity, but since the first scientific examination in 1910, the scholarly consensus has classified it as a 19th-century hoax, with some critics directly charging Ohman with fabrication. Nevertheless, there remains a community convinced of the stone's authenticity. == Provenance == A Swedish immigrant, Olof Ohman, said that he found the stone late in 1898 while clearing his recently acquired land of trees and stumps before plowing. The stone was said to be near the crest of a small knoll rising above the wetlands, lying face down and tangled in the root system of a stunted poplar tree estimated to be from less than 10 to about 40 years old. The artifact is about 30 × 16 ×


id: kensington-runestone-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone-1.md
category: reference
title: Kensington Runestone
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:19.883519+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: kensington-runestone-20260505-0
summary:
här : (10) : mans : ve : havet : at : se : äptir : vore : skip : 14 : dagh : rise : from : deno : öh : ahr : 1362 : The sequences rr, ll and gh represent actual digraphs. The AVM is written in Latin capitals. The numbers given in Arabic numerals in the above transcription are given in pentadic numerals. At least seven of the runes, including those transcribed a, d, v, j, ä, ö above, are not in any standard known from the medieval period (see below for details). The language of the inscription is close to modern Swedish, the transliterated text being quite easily comprehensible to any speaker of a modern Scandinavian language. The language, being closer to the Swedish of the 19th than of the 14th century, is one of the main reasons for the scholarly consensus dismissing it as a hoax. The text translates to: "Eight Geats and twenty-two Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the west. We had camp by two skerries one day's journey north from this stone. We were [out] to fish one day. After we came home [we] found ten men red of


id: kensington-runestone-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone-2.md
category: reference
title: Kensington Runestone
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:19.883519+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: kensington-runestone-20260505-0
summary:
A possible origin for the irregular shape of the runes was discovered in 2004, in the 1883 notes of a then-16-year-old journeyman tailor with an interest in folk music, Edward Larsson. Larsson's aunt had migrated with her husband and son from Sweden to Crooked Lake, just outside Alexandria, Minnesota in 1870. Larsson's sheet lists two different Futharks. The first Futhark consists of 22 runes, the last two of which are bind-runes, representing the letter-combinations EL and MW. His second Futhark consists of 27 runes, where the last three are specially adapted to represent the letters å, ä, and ö of the modern Swedish alphabet. The runes in this second set correspond closely to the non-standard runes in the Kensington inscription. Another possible origin was discovered in 2019, when two short inscriptions with runes closely resembling the ones on the Kensington stone, dated 1870 and 1877 respectively, were discovered in a farm-hand's room in the village Kölsjön in the parish of Hassela, not too far from Olof Öhman's home parish Forsa. In 2020, Swedish archaeologist Mats G. Larsson discovered that Anna Ersson, cousin and childhood friend of Olof Öhman, lived in Kölsjön during 1878. Their relationship seems to have been close,


id: list-of-spurious-inventions-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spurious_inventions-0.md
category: reference
title: List of spurious inventions
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spurious_inventions
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:21.033997+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: list-of-spurious-inventions-20260505-0
summary:
This is a list of spurious inventions, technologies which are generally considered to not possess their claimed capabilities, to be hoaxes, or to not have ever existed in the first place. == See also == List of hoaxes == References ==


id: claude-mile-jean-baptiste-litre-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Émile_Jean-Baptiste_Litre-0.md
category: reference
title: Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Émile_Jean-Baptiste_Litre
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:22.248423+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: claude-mile-jean-baptiste-litre-20260505-0
summary:
Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre (1716–1778) is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres. The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person. The lower-case character l might be difficult to distinguish from the upper-case character I or the digit 1 in certain fonts and styles, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for litre. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L, a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia. Woolner perpetrated the April Fools' Day hoax in the April 1978 issue of "CHEM 13 News", a newsletter concerned with chemistry for school teachers. According to the hoax, Claude Litre was born on 12 February 1716, the son of a manufacturer of wine bottles. During Litre's extremely distinguished fictional scientific career, he purportedly proposed a unit of volume measurement that was incorporated into the International System of Units after his death in 1778. The hoax was mistakenly printed


id: fran-ois-de-loys-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_de_Loys-0.md
category: reference
title: François de Loys
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_de_Loys
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:36.472378+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: fran-ois-de-loys-20260505-0
summary:
Louis François Fernand Hector de Loys (1892–1935) was a Swiss oil geologist. He is remembered today for the claim that he discovered a previously unknown primate, De Loys's ape (Ameranthropoides loysi), during a 1920 oil survey expedition in Venezuela. The identity of the animal he photographed has long been established with considerable confidence to be a spider monkey, and the identification as a new species is generally regarded as a hoax. == References == == Further reading == Brian Regal, Human Evolution: A Guide To The Debates, pp. 63–64 (ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004). ISBN 1-85109-423-7 Robert Silverberg, Scientists and Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes, pp. 178–187 (New York: Crowell, 1965). ISBN 978-0-8032-5989-8 Dunning, Brian (March 20, 2012). "Skeptoid #302: De Loys' Ape". Skeptoid. Viloria, A. L.; Urbani, F.; Urbani, B. (1998). "François de Loys (1892-1935) y un hallazgo desdenado: La historia de una controversia antropologica". Intercienca (in Spanish). 32 (2): 94–100. Viloria, A. L.; Urbani, F.; McCook, S.; Urbani, B. (1999). "De Lausanne aux forêts vénézuéliennes. Mission géologique de François de Loys (1892-1935) et les origines d'une controverse anthropologique". Bulletin de la Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles (in French). 86 (3): 157–174.


id: mars-hoax-email-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_hoax_email-0.md
category: reference
title: Mars hoax email
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_hoax_email
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:37.613468+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mars-hoax-email-20260505-0
summary:
A hoax circulated by email in 2003 claimed that Mars would look as large as the full Moon to the naked eye on August 27 of that year. The hoax has since resurfaced each time before Mars is at its closest to Earth, about every 26 months. It began from a misinterpretation and exaggeration of a sentence in an email message that reported the close approach between Mars and the Earth in August 2003. At that time, the distance between the two planets was about 55,758,000 kilometres (34,646,000 mi), which was the closest distance between them since September 24, 57,617 BC, when the distance has been calculated to have been about 55,718,000 kilometres (34,622,000 mi). == Background == Both Earth and Mars are in elliptical orbits around the Sun in approximately the same plane. By the nature of the laws of physics, the distance between them varies periodically from a minimum equal to the distance between their orbits at some point along them, to a maximum when they are on opposite sides of the Sun. These minimum (opposition) and maximum distances vary considerably as the two planets progress along their elliptical orbits, and occur about every 780 days. Mars was


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-0.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
The Mechanical Turk (German: Schachtürke, lit. 'chess Turk'), also known as the Automaton Chess Player or simply the Turk (Hungarian: A Török), was a chess-playing machine first displayed in 1770, which appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess autonomously, but whose pieces were in reality moved via levers and magnets by a chess master hidden in its lower cavity. The machine was toured and exhibited for 84 years as an automaton, and continued giving occasional exhibitions until 1854, when it was destroyed in a fire. In 1857, an article published by the owner's son provided the first full explanation of the mechanism, which had been widely suspected to be a hoax but never accurately described while the machine still existed. Constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress Empress Maria Theresa, the Turk won most games, including those against statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was purchased in 1804 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, who continued to exhibit it. Chess masters who operated it over this later period included Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret and William Schlumberger, but its operators during Kempelen's original tour remain unknown. The device could also perform


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-1.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
The interior had complications designed to mislead observers. When opened on the left, the front doors of the cabinet exposed gears and cogs resembling clockwork. The section was designed so that if the back doors of the cabinet were open at the same time one could see through the machine. The other side of the cabinet did not house machinery; instead it contained a red cushion and some removable parts, as well as brass structures. This too was designed to provide a clear line of vision through the machine. Underneath the robes of the Ottoman model, two other doors were hidden. These also exposed clockwork machinery and provided a similarly unobstructed view through the machine. The design allowed the presenter of the machine to open every available door to the public, to maintain the illusion of a purely clockwork mechanism. Neither the clockwork visible on the left side of the machine nor the drawer that housed the chess set extended fully to the rear of the cabinet; they instead went only one-third of the way. A sliding seat was also installed, allowing the operator inside to move from place to place and thus evade observation as the presenter opened various


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-2.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
The first person to play against the Turk was Ludwig von Cobenzl, an Austrian courtier at the palace. Along with other challengers that day, he was quickly defeated, with observers of the match stating that the machine played aggressively and typically beat its opponents within thirty minutes. Another part of the machine's exhibition was the completion of the knight's tour, a famed puzzle requiring the player to move a knight around a chessboard, visiting each square once along the way. While most experienced chess players of the time still struggled with this, the Turk could complete the tour without any difficulty from any starting point thanks to a pegboard marked with a closed-loop solution (a "reentrant tour"). Furthermore, the Turk could converse with spectators using a letterboard. The operator during the period when Kempelen presented the machine at Schönbrunn Palace, whose identity is unknown, was able to do this in English, French and German. Carl Friedrich Hindenburg, a mathematician, kept a record of the conversations during the Turk's time in Leipzig and published it in 1784. Topics of questions put to and answered by the Turk included its age, marital status and secret workings. == European tour == Following word


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-3.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
== Mälzel == Following the death of Kempelen, the Turk remained unexhibited until 1805, when Kempelen's son decided to sell it to Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a Bavarian musician with an interest in machines and devices. Mälzel, whose successes included patenting a form of metronome, had tried to buy the Turk before Kempelen's death. That attempt failed, owing to Kempelen's asking price of 20,000 francs; his son sold the machine to Mälzel for half this sum. On acquiring the Turk, Mälzel learned how it worked and returned it to working order. His goal was to make explaining the Turk a greater challenge. The completion of this task took ten years, during which the Turk still made appearances, most notably with Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1809, Napoleon I of France arrived at Schönbrunn Palace to play the Turk. The details of the encounter have been published over the years in numerous accounts, among which even those by Silas Mitchell and George Allen (see below) are contradictory (Allen's being the more plausible). According to Bradley Ewart, it is believed that the Turk sat at its cabinet, and Napoleon sat at a separate chess table. Napoleon's table was in a roped-off area and he was


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-4.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
== North American tour == The appearances of the Turk were profitable for Mälzel, and he continued by taking it and his other machines to the United States. In 1826, he opened an exhibition in New York (in the National Hotel, on 112 Broadway) that was very popular, averaging a hundred people in April, while in May "the hall was filled, and sometimes two hundred were turned away for lack of seats". It prompted many newspaper articles and anonymous threats of exposure of the hoax. Mälzel's problem was finding a talented operator for the machine, having trained an unknown woman in France before touring the United States. The "subsistence" in Paris of a former operator from Alsace, William Schlumberger "was both scanty and precarious"; and Mälzel induced him to come to Boston. As the Turk's main operator in the new world, Schlumberger "considered himself to have been fairly and kindly treated by Maelzel, and remained faithfully attached to his person and his interests to the last". Upon Schlumberger's arrival, the Turk debuted in Boston, in the Julien Hall. Mälzel claimed that "the players of Boston are at least equal to those of New York" and promised that in Boston the


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-5
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-5.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
== Publication of the mechanism == According to James Cook, by the mid-1820s "hundreds, if not thousands, of 'approaches' had been made toward discovering the secret [of the mechanical Turk], many of which were actually very close to the answer". The young Robert Willis (later a mechanical engineer and architectural historian) carefully observed Mälzel's exhibitions of the Turk, and in an 1821 booklet summarily dismissed some earlier theories: "[I]t has been suggested that [Mälzel] might touch certain springs, or pull 'a wire not much thicker than a hair', or be furnished with a powerful magnet. But such conjectures are unworthy of serious refutation". Willis noted anomalies such as the lack of correlation between the degree to which the clockwork was wound up and the number of moves the Turk then executed. He showed how "any person, well skilled in the game, and not exceeding the ordinary bulk or stature, may secretly animate the Automaton" – even if with some inaccuracies, notably that "[the operator's] head being above the table, he will see the chess-board through the waistcoat, as easily as through a veil". In 1826, the Massachusetts physician Gamaliel Bradford published a booklet, The History and Analysis of the Supposed


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-6
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-6.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
[N]obody credited the pretended discovery. The world had set its heart upon believing that the secret, which had puzzled mechanicians, mathematicians, and monarchs, for more than half a century, was something quite too deep to be penetrated by a couple of boys. The National Intelligencer, of Washington ... sagaciously treated the Gazette article as having emanated from Maelzel himself – "the tale of a discovery was but a clever device of the proprietor to keep alive the interest of the community in his exhibition". Lesser newspapers, suggests Allen, were too timid to contradict the prestigious Intelligencer and Mälzel's business was little impacted. Of the many contemporary books and articles written about the mechanism of the Turk, most were inaccurate and drew incorrect inferences. An exception was "Automate joueur d'échecs", published in the popular magazine Le Magasin pittoresque in 1834, and widely believed to have been informed, or perhaps even written, by one of the Turk's operators, Jacques Mouret. In 1836, Mathieu de Tournay based a more detailed description of the Turk for the chess magazine Le Palamède on the Magasin pittoresque article. It was not until Silas Mitchell's article for The Chess Monthly in 1857 that the secret was fully


id: mechanical-turk-20260505-7
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk-7.md
category: reference
title: Mechanical Turk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:38.944310+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mechanical-turk-20260505-0
summary:
=== In literature and the arts === The Turk has inspired works of various kinds of fiction. An early example is Jean Paul's story Menschen sind Maschinen der Engel, written in 1785. Its narrator starts by saying that we humans are merely the furniture of the true inhabitants of the world, angels; and it is "obvious [that] our industriousness, which works against our happiness, is conducive to other beings' happiness, whose hands conduct ours as their tools". Chess-playing machines exemplify the building by machines (that is, people) of machines; of which the narrator's description culminates in a "deliberate confusion of chess-playing humans and chess-playing machines", leaving the reader "incessantly bewildered about the status of the story's actors (as well as the reader's own status) as machine or as human". Fiction has also been passed off as fact. In 1859 an article in Littell's Living Age purported to be an account of the Turk from the celebrated French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin; its content soon reappeared in Robert-Houdin's memoir. Its many errors ranged from mistaken dates to outright inventions, most conspicuously the story of "an officer by the name of Worousky" whose legs had been amputated after battle, but who was


id: mephisto-automaton-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(automaton)-0.md
category: reference
title: Mephisto (automaton)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(automaton)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:40.117669+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: mephisto-automaton-20260505-0
summary:
Mephisto was a 19th-century pseudo-automaton chess player built in London by the Alsatian artificial limb maker Charles Godfrey Gumpel (c. 1835–1921). It took some 6 or 7 years to build and was first shown in 1878 at Gumpel's home in Leicester Square, London. Unlike earlier so-called "chess automatons" such as The Mechanical Turk and Ajeeb, which concealed a human player inside the cabinet, Mephisto was operated remotely by a chess master located in a different room and connected via a system of mechanical and electrical transmissions, leading later commentators to describe it as a "pseudo-automaton". It is most closely associated with the Hungarian-British master Isidor Gunsberg, who served as its principal operator during public exhibitions and on tour. == Description == Mephisto consisted of a life-size figure representing the mythical Mephistopheles. Dressed in elegant red velvet attire, the figure had a cloven hoof as a foot and was seated in an armchair in front of an unenclosed, open-sided table with a chessboard and pieces. This setup was intended to reassure the player that there were no hidden compartments beneath the board where a person could hide (as in "The Turk"). Contemporary accounts describe the figure's head and upper body as


id: isadore-nabi-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isadore_Nabi-0.md
category: reference
title: Isadore Nabi
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isadore_Nabi
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:41.275479+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: isadore-nabi-20260505-0
summary:
Isadore Nabi (sometimes Isidore Nabi or Isador Nabi) was a pseudonym used by a group of scientists including Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Robert MacArthur, and Leigh van Valen in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Nicolas Bourbaki, they allegedly hoped to create a unified approach to evolutionary biology. However, the project was aborted and the name was reused in the 1980s for satirical purposes. Nabi's biography was listed in American Men and Women of Science, articles and letters were published in prominent journals under his name, and he was listed on the editorial board of Evolutionary Theory. He has primarily written on sociobiology. His article, "An Evolutionary Interpretation of the English Sonnet" was delivered as the First Annual Piltdown Lecture on Man and Nature and appeared under the heading "Advances in Sociobiopsy". (The author was noted as a "Satirical Commentator".) He has also written articles critical of the systems-theoretical approach to mathematical ecology, as illustrated by what our laws of motion in physics would look like if early physicists had used the methods of the systems ecologists (this time listing the author as "Intrepid Investigator"). In 2002 he published a piece (under the name "Isador Nabi") on stock tips


id: nacirema-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema-0.md
category: reference
title: Nacirema
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:42.426206+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: nacirema-20260505-0
summary:
Nacirema ("American" spelled backwards) is a term used in anthropology and sociology in relation to aspects of the behavior and society of citizens of the United States. The neologism attempts to create a deliberate sense of self-distancing in order that American anthropologists might look at their own culture more objectively, thus comparing emic and etic views of it. == "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" == The original use of the term in a social science context was in "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", which satirizes anthropological papers on "other" cultures, and the culture of the United States. Horace Mitchell Miner wrote the paper and originally published it in Volume 58, Issue 3 of American Anthropologist issued June 1956. In the paper, Miner describes the Nacirema, a little-known tribe living in North America. The way in which he writes about the curious practices that this group performs distances readers from the fact that the North American group described actually corresponds to modern-day Americans of the mid-1950s. Miner presents the Nacirema as a group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. The paper describes the typical Western


id: nasology-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasology-0.md
category: reference
title: Nasology
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasology
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:43.713061+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: nasology-20260505-0
summary:
Nasology: Or, Hints towards a Classification of Noses (reissued as Notes on Noses) was a 1848 book published in London under the authorship of Eden Warwick, pen name of a George Jabet, an elaborate parody on phrenology, 282 pages thick. There were several editions of the book in the mid-19th century, and it was taken seriously, in press and among doctors. == The author == George Jabet (1815–1873) was a solicitor and he was actively involved in the public life of Birmingham, being associated with many literary and educational societies of the city. In addition to Nasology, he published several other books under the pen name Eden Warwick, the first one being The Poets' Pleasaunce, or, Garden of All Sorts of Pleasant Flowers (1847), as its Preface says, "to illustrate the extent of homage which our best Poets, prior to the present century, have paid to Nature, in Flowers" and "it is intended to exhibit a History of the Poetry in Flowers". == The book == Nasology originated as a paper communicated to a small literary society as Handsworth, later expanded into a book. However the title proved to be unattractive, and the publisher reissued the book under the title


id: haruko-obokata-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruko_Obokata-0.md
category: reference
title: Haruko Obokata
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruko_Obokata
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:44.870523+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: haruko-obokata-20260505-0
summary:
Haruko Obokata (小保方 晴子, Obokata Haruko; born 1983) is a former stem-cell biologist and research unit leader at Japan's Laboratory for Cellular Reprogramming, Riken Center for Developmental Biology. She claimed in 2014 to have developed a radical and remarkably easy way to generate stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells that could be grown into tissue for use anywhere in the body. In response to allegations of irregularities in Obokata's research publications involving STAP cells, Riken launched an investigation that discovered examples of scientific misconduct on the part of Obokata. Attempts to replicate Obokata's STAP cell results failed. The ensuing STAP cell scandal gained worldwide attention. == Early life, education and career == Obokata was born in Matsudo, Chiba, Japan, in 1983. She attended Toho Senior High School, which is attached to Toho University, and graduated from Waseda University with a B.S. degree in 2006, and an M.S. degree in applied chemistry in 2008. Obokata later joined the laboratory of Charles Vacanti at Harvard Medical School, where she was described as "a lab director’s dream" with "fanatical devotion". In 2011, Obokata completed her Ph.D. in Engineering at the Graduate School of Advanced Engineering and Science at Waseda University. Obokata became a


id: ompax-spatuloides-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ompax_spatuloides-0.md
category: reference
title: Ompax spatuloides
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ompax_spatuloides
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:46.010349+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: ompax-spatuloides-20260505-0
summary:
Ompax spatuloides was a hoax fish "discovered" in Australia in August, 1872. Said to be poisonous, it could be found on some lists of Australian fishes through the 1930s. The fish was a joke perpetrated by people at Gayndah station, Queensland, who prepared it from the body of a mullet, the tail of an eel and the head of a platypus or needlefish. They served it cooked for Karl Theodor Staiger, the director of the Brisbane Museum, and he forwarded a sketch and description of the fake to expert Francis de Laporte de Castelnau, who described the supposed "species" in 1879. The first publication was in the proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, in which Count Castelnau gave his description with figures reproducing the sketches executed at the time by "a draughtsman" at Staiger's request. Doubts about the existence of the species were expressed as soon as 1881, when William John Macleay included it in a faunal list, but the name continued to appear throughout the twentieth century. Staiger is quoted as saying the fish was brought to him by indigenous people who had obtained it around ten miles away. The components of the specimen were said


id: orgueil-meteorite-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgueil_(meteorite)-0.md
category: reference
title: Orgueil (meteorite)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgueil_(meteorite)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:47.190863+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: orgueil-meteorite-20260505-0
summary:
Orgueil is a scientifically important carbonaceous chondrite meteorite that fell in southwestern France in 1864. == History == The Orgueil meteorite fell on May 14, 1864, a few minutes after 20:00 local time, near Orgueil in southern France. About 20 stones fell over an area of 5-10 square kilometres. A specimen of the meteorite was analyzed that same year by François Stanislaus Clöez, professor of chemistry at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle, who focused on the organic matter found in this meteorite. He wrote that it contained carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and its composition was very similar to peat from the Somme valley or to the lignite of Ringkohl near Kassel. An intense scientific discussion ensued, continuing into the 1870s, as to whether the organic matter might have a biological origin. == Curation and Distribution == Orgueil specimens are in curation by bodies around the world. Given the large mass, samples are in circulation for nondestructive (and with sufficient justification, destructive) study and test. Source: Grady, M. M. Catalogue of Meteorites, 5th Edition, Cambridge University Press == Composition and classification == Orgueil is one of five known meteorites belonging to the CI chondrite group (see meteorites classification), and is the largest


id: pacific-northwest-tree-octopus-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus-0.md
category: reference
title: Pacific Northwest tree octopus
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:48.363137+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: pacific-northwest-tree-octopus-20260505-0
summary:
The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an Internet hoax created in 1998 by a humor writer under the pseudonym Lyle Zapato. Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Internet literacy classes in schools and has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility regarding online sources of information. == Description == This fictitious endangered species of cephalopod was given the Latin name Octopus paxarbolis (the species name being coined from Latin pax, the root of Pacific, and Spanish arbol meaning "tree"). It was purportedly able to live both on land and in water, and was said to live in the Olympic National Forest and nearby rivers, spawning in water where its eggs are laid. The Pacific Northwest tree octopus was said to prey on insects, small vertebrates, and bird eggs. Its major predator was said to be the Sasquatch, a mythical creature said to inhabit the same region, as well as bald eagles and cats. The conceit of the website was that the Pacific Northwest tree octopus was an endangered species, threatened by habitat loss, overexploitation for the fashion industry during the early 20th century, and eradication as a nuisance animal by loggers.


id: palestinabuch-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinabuch-0.md
category: reference
title: Palestinabuch
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinabuch
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:49.528067+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: palestinabuch-20260505-0
summary:
The Palestinabuch (Book of Palestine), also Palestina Buch, Palästinabuch or Palästina Buch, is an allegedly lost manuscript by the German-Dutch historian and antisemite Herman Wirth (1885–1981), founder of the German Ahnenerbe, which its adherents claim would have changed the world if it had not disappeared. The myth plays a part in antisemitic theories maintaining that the Ashkenazi Jews descend largely or entirely from the Khazars or from Central Asia. == Herman Wirth == Wirth, who was one of the main spokesmen of Pre-War Ariosophy, first referred to the Palestinabuch in his commentary to the Ura Linda Chronicle (1933), a 19th-century literary forgery that he thought to be genuine. The Chronicle tells the story of a lost civilization in the Polar Region or the Northern Atlantic, from which the Aryan, Hyperborean or Nordic races descended. The Frisian people, as being the direct offspring of the first Nordic settlers, had been able to preserve the cultural traditions of their forebears, which he considered as a key to the understanding of primeval monotheism. According to Wirth, Christ descended from a lost tribe of the original Aryans, who had left their traces in the Near East in the form of Megalithic monuments. Christianity, however,


id: palestinabuch-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinabuch-1.md
category: reference
title: Palestinabuch
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinabuch
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:49.528067+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: palestinabuch-20260505-0
summary:
[...] there is no line, not a word in the Old Testament that would not succumb to such Hyperborean deconstruction. It is not a question of criticizing the text [...]. What Wirth did was resacralize, reveal the original, Hyperborean gnosis - the true foundation of the Old Testament tradition, free it from biased interpretative models. [...] Unfortunately, now we can only guess about its contents. [...] Already in the 70s, when Wirth almost finished writing it, the only completed edition disappeared without a trace. In the scientist's absence, unknown people entered the house, turned everything upside down, but only took the Palestina Buch. Wirth turned to his students (there were two or three unfinished copies), but the mysterious strangers had also visited them. Dugin, who does not cite any sources, claims that the manuscript counted several thousands of pages. According to Dugin's former associate, Yury Vorobyevsky, the manuscript had already been stolen in the 1950s, probably by the Israeli Secret Service. Scholarly literature on the Ahnenerbe, on the other hand, does not present any evidence that the organisation ever conducted archaeological excavations in Palestine. The only relevant (but non-archaeological) expedition in 1938 went to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Since Dugin's


id: pami-tnik-handlowca-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamiętnik_handlowca-0.md
category: reference
title: Pamiętnik handlowca
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamiętnik_handlowca
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:50.688121+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: pami-tnik-handlowca-20260505-0
summary:
Pamiętnik handlowca (A Merchant's Memoir, or Memoirs of a Merchant; in Latin, Memorialium commercatori) is the name of a purported diary written by a Polish merchant, Zbigniew Stefański, in 1625. No copy of the original text is known to exist. The diary was said to be written in Polish and to contain a first-hand account of the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. It was claimed to be the only extant primary source from the Jamestown Colony that provides the perspective of Polish artisans who had been brought in by Captain John Smith in 1608. As the existence of the diary has been confirmed by only a single researcher, its veracity and very existence have been questioned. == Doubts about authenticity == The Memoir is said to have surfaced in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947, when a person offered to sell it to Mieczysław Haiman, the director of the Polish Museum of America. The book was popularized through the writings of the journalist and ethnographer Arthur Waldo, who claimed to have seen it and to have made a partial copy for his records, but more recently, researchers have questioned the authenticity of the source, which cannot be located in any museum, library, or


id: paper-generator-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_generator-0.md
category: reference
title: Paper generator
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_generator
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:51.856945+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: paper-generator-20260505-0
summary:
A paper generator is computer software that composes scholarly papers in the style of those that appear in academic journals or conference proceedings. Typically, the generator uses technical jargon from the field to compose sentences that are grammatically correct and seem erudite but are actually nonsensical. The prose is supported by tables, figures, and references that may be valid in themselves, but are randomly inserted rather than relevant. Examples include the Postmodernism Generator, snarXiv and SCIgen. The latter has been used to generate many computer science papers that were accepted for publication. == See also == Sokal affair List of scholarly publishing stings == References ==


id: p-t-de-foie-gras-short-story-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pâté_de_Foie_Gras_(short_story)-0.md
category: reference
title: Pâté de Foie Gras (short story)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pâté_de_Foie_Gras_(short_story)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:53.009473+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: p-t-de-foie-gras-short-story-20260505-0
summary:
"Pâté de Foie Gras" is a 1956 science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, originally published by Astounding Science Fiction. Like Asimov's "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline", "Pâté de Foie Gras" is a scientific spoof article, updating one of Aesop's Fables, The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs. == Plot == A Department of Agriculture employee tells of the discovery on a farm in Texas of a goose that lays golden eggs, and how US government and academic researchers try to solve the mystery of the goose. While its eggs are valuable as pure gold, learning how the bird produces the metal is more important. After the scientists realize that the goose is unharmed despite the enzyme-catalyzed nuclear process that converts oxygen-18 to gold-197 producing gamma rays, they discover that it is immune to all radioactivity, converting any unstable isotope to a stable isotope. The goose is "the perfect defense against the atomic age", one researcher observes; large-scale industrial reproduction of its biological transmutation process would ease nuclear waste disposal and defend against radioactive fallout, and modifying the mechanism would produce any element as needed. The bird poses a dilemma, however. A biopsy of the liver provides


id: piltdown-man-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man-0.md
category: reference
title: Piltdown Man
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:54.143803+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: piltdown-man-20260505-0
summary:
The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although doubts about Piltdown Man's authenticity began to be expressed almost immediately after its announcement in 1912, it was still broadly accepted for many years, and the hoax was only definitively exposed in 1953. An extensive scientific review in 2016 established that the hoax had been perpetrated by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, apparently in pursuit of recognition from other archaeologists. In 1912, Dawson claimed that he had discovered the "missing link" between early apes and humans. If the Piltdown Man was found to be legitimate, it would have been a crucial transitional form between the two species. In February 1912, Dawson contacted Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, stating he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. The find of the Piltdown Man, and the claims that Dawson was making were taken seriously due to Dawson's reputation in the archaeology community and for other local archaeological "discoveries". These "discoveries" were later found to also be false. That summer, Dawson and Woodward purportedly discovered


id: piltdown-man-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man-1.md
category: reference
title: Piltdown Man
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:54.143803+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: piltdown-man-20260505-0
summary:
The find was considered legitimate by Otto Schoetensack who had discovered the Heidelberg fossils just a few years earlier; he described it as being the best evidence for an ape-like ancestor of modern humans. Almost from the outset, Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown fragments was strongly challenged by some researchers. At the Royal College of Surgeons, copies of the same fragments used by the British Museum in their reconstruction were used to produce an entirely different model, one that in brain size and other features resembled a modern human. This reconstruction, by Arthur Keith, was called Homo piltdownensis in reflection of its more human appearance. Woodward's reconstruction included ape-like canine teeth, which was itself controversial. In August 1913, Woodward, Dawson and Teilhard de Chardin began a systematic search of the spoil heaps specifically to find the missing canines. Teilhard de Chardin soon found a canine that, according to Woodward, fitted the jaw perfectly. A few days later, Teilhard de Chardin moved to France and took no further part in the discoveries. Noting that the tooth "corresponds exactly with that of an ape", Woodward expected the find to end any dispute over his reconstruction of the skull. However, Keith attacked the


id: piltdown-man-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man-2.md
category: reference
title: Piltdown Man
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:54.143803+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: piltdown-man-20260505-0
summary:
=== Scientific investigation === Some scientists expressed scepticism about the Piltdown find from the beginning. Gerrit Smith Miller Jr., for example, wrote in 1915 that "deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together". When Dawson first said he discovered the cranium and jawbone, chemical dating techniques were primitive, meaning that there was heavy reliance on morphological comparison and expert opinions in order to classify and date artifacts and bones. Discoveries that happened after Piltdown Man, such as Australopithecus in South Africa and Homo erectus, contradicted many aspects of the Piltdown Man. These early hominid fossils showed small braincases and human jaws, which was the opposite of what Piltdown Man suggested. Despite this, Piltdown Man was treated as a different lineage for many years instead. In the decades prior to its exposure as a forgery in 1953, scientists increasingly regarded Piltdown as an enigmatic aberration, inconsistent with the path of hominid evolution as demonstrated by fossils found elsewhere. In the early 1950s, Kenneth Oakley, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, and Joseph Weiner, scientists at the British Museum, developed a


id: piltdown-man-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man-3.md
category: reference
title: Piltdown Man
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:54.143803+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: piltdown-man-20260505-0
summary:
The focus on Dawson as the main forger is supported by the accumulation of evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he perpetrated in the decade or two before the Piltdown discovery. The archaeologist Miles Russell of Bournemouth University analysed Dawson's antiquarian collection, and determined that at least 38 of his specimens were fakes. Among these were the teeth of a multituberculate mammal, Plagiaulax dawsoni, "found" in 1891 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown Man were to be some 20 years later); the so-called "shadow figures" on the walls of Hastings Castle; a unique hafted stone axe; the Bexhill boat (a hybrid seafaring vessel); the Pevensey bricks (allegedly the latest datable "finds" from Roman Britain); the contents of the Lavant Caves (a fraudulent "flint mine"); the Beauport Park "Roman" statuette (a hybrid iron object); the Bulverhythe Hammer (shaped with an iron knife in the same way as the Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be); a fraudulent "Chinese" bronze vase; the Brighton "Toad in the Hole" (a toad entombed within a flint nodule); the English Channel sea serpent; the Uckfield Horseshoe (another hybrid iron object) and the Lewes Prick Spur. Of his


id: piltdown-man-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man-4.md
category: reference
title: Piltdown Man
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:54.143803+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: piltdown-man-20260505-0
summary:
== Legacy == === Early humans === In 1912, the majority of the scientific community believed the Piltdown Man was the "missing link" between apes and humans. The Piltdown man delayed the correct understanding of human evolution for many years. However, over time the Piltdown Man lost its validity, as other discoveries such as the Taung Child and Peking Man were made. R. W. Ehrich and G. M. Henderson note, "To those who are not completely disillusioned by the work of their predecessors, the disqualification of the Piltdown skull changes little in the broad evolutionary pattern. The validity of the specimen has always been questioned". Eventually, during the 1940s and 1950s, more advanced dating technologies, such as the fluorine absorption test, proved scientifically that this skull was actually a fraud. === Influence === The Piltdown Man fraud significantly affected early research on human evolution. Notably, it led scientists down a blind alley in the belief that the human brain expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food. Discoveries of Australopithecine fossils such as the Taung child found by Raymond Dart during the 1920s in South Africa were ignored because of the support for Piltdown Man as


id: piltdown-man-20260505-5
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man-5.md
category: reference
title: Piltdown Man
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:54.143803+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: piltdown-man-20260505-0
summary:
== Further reading == The Times, 21 November 1953; 23 November 1953 Blinderman, Charles (1986), The Piltdown Inquest, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, ISBN 978-0-87975-359-7. Dawson, Charles; Woodward, Arthur Smith (18 December 1912). "On the Discovery of a Palæolithic Human Skull and Mandible in a Flint-bearing Gravel overlying the Wealden (Hastings Beds) at Piltdown, Fletching (Sussex)". Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. 69 (1–4): 117–122. doi:10.1144/GSL.JGS.1913.069.01-04.10. S2CID 129320256. De Groote, Isabelle (10 August 2016). "Solving the Piltdown Man crime: how we worked out there was only one forger". The Conversation. United States. Retrieved 11 August 2016.. Feder, Kenneth L. (2008), Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (6th ed.), New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 73–101, ISBN 978-0-07-340529-2. Grasse, Steven A. (2007). The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books. ISBN 978-1-59474-173-9., The Evil Empire, Google Books Haddon, A. C. (17 January 1913). "Eoanthropus (reporting the 1912 publication by Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward)". Science. 37 (942): 91–92. doi:10.1126/science.37.942.91. PMID 17745373. Millar, Ronald (1972). The Piltdown Men. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-575-00536-5. OCLC 2009318.. Oakley, Kenneth (October–November 1954). "Solving the Piltdown Problem: Part I". The Archaeological News Letter. 5 (6): 100–101. Oakley, Kenneth


id: anil-potti-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti-0.md
category: reference
title: Anil Potti
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:55.346672+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: anil-potti-20260505-0
summary:
Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2024, Potti, employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication received an expression of concern, and two others had been corrected. == Biography == Anil Potti graduated from Christian Medical College, Vellore, India in 1995. He finished an internship in Internal Medicine at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine in 1999. In 2006 Potti completed training in hematology and oncology at Duke University. Potti resigned from Duke in 2010, following the discovery of flaws in the genomics research conducted at Duke and allegations of embellishments in his resume, assuming responsibility for the anomalies in the scientific research. Following his resignation from Duke,


id: anil-potti-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti-1.md
category: reference
title: Anil Potti
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:55.346672+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: anil-potti-20260505-0
summary:
== Aftermath == Healthcare companies cut ties with Potti after evidence surfaced that Potti had fabricated awards on his resume. The American Cancer Society stopped payments of a five-year grant which totalled $729,000 as Potti had received the grant based on his credentials. Duke University later reimbursed the American Cancer Society for the full amount of the grant. Three clinical trials at Duke University Medical Center based on Potti's research came under scrutiny in 2009 and were temporarily suspended, then were permanently stopped in 2010. The United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) reviewed one of the studies in 2009, several years after its initiation, and concluded that the study would require an Investigational New Drug application, which had not been submitted. An FDA audit in 2011 further showed that an Investigational Device Exemption application had not been filed, but otherwise found "no significant deficiencies" in Duke's IRB conduct. Potti's medical licence record with the North Carolina Medical Board shows eleven settlements, each of at least $75,000, for incidents that appear to be related to these trials. In late 2011, the North Carolina Medical Board reprimanded Potti but he retains his medical licence. The board issued its disciplinary action against


id: anil-potti-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti-2.md
category: reference
title: Anil Potti
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:55.346672+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: anil-potti-20260505-0
summary:
"A Genomic Approach to Colon Cancer Risk Stratification Yields Biologic Insights into Therapeutic Opportunities" This article was published by PNAS. Gene expressions could allow the researchers to see if tumours are uniform throughout. This could also be used with Colon Cancer. They also can help predict how a person will respond to treatment and improve prognosis. The authors said they wanted to retract this article because "…we have been unable to reproduce certain key experiments described in the paper regarding validation and use of the colon cancer prognostic signature. This includes the validation performed with dataset E-MEXP-1224, as reported in Fig. 2A, as well as the generation of prognostic scores for colon cancer cell lines, as reported in Fig. 4…" "Validation of Gene Signatures that Predict the Response of Breast Cancer to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy" This article was published in Lancet Oncology. This study involved patients with oestrogen-receptor-negative breast cancer. The researchers wanted to confirm their previous studies of gene-expression signatures in predicting the effects of chemotherapeutic drugs. The article was retracted because the validity of the results was beginning to be questioned and because predictions were made off of the Nature Medicine article that was retracted. "Genomic Signatures to Guide


id: project-alpha-hoax-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)-0.md
category: reference
title: Project Alpha (hoax)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:56.533475+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: project-alpha-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
Project Alpha was an effort by magician James Randi to test the quality of scientific rigor of a well-known test of paranormal phenomena. In the late 1970s, Randi contacted the newly established McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research ("MacLab") with suggestions on how to conduct tests for paranormal phenomena. At the same time, two teenage boys (Steve Shaw, later known as Banachek, and Mike Edwards) independently contacted the McDonnell Laboratory and volunteered as subjects for such tests from 1979 to 1982. They quickly proved to exhibit a range of paranormal abilities far and away better than the other subjects of the experiment. The lab began leaking reports of the pair's capabilities, which were in fact simple magic tricks. When rumors of the test subjects' connection to Randi reached Peter Phillips, head of the MacLab, he instituted tighter protocols for the experiments; the two subjects' results declined sharply. In 1983, Randi held a press conference to expose the deception in the wake of Project Alpha, as there were a number of controversies about the ethics of interference in scientific research and the validity of paranormal research as it then existed. It remains a watershed event in the field of parapsychology. == McDonnell


id: project-alpha-hoax-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)-1.md
category: reference
title: Project Alpha (hoax)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:56.533475+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: project-alpha-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
== Steven Shaw and Michael Edwards == When the establishment of the laboratory was announced, Mike Edwards, 18, and Steven Shaw, 17, now known as Banachek, both magicians, each contacted Randi independently with a plan. They proposed to use their skills to deceive the researchers with tricks during the first stages of the investigations. They were chosen as test subjects and the hoax began. The project had originally started with spoon bending, so the two quickly developed a way to accomplish this. Contrary to one of the caveats Randi noted in his letter, the test setup included not one, but many and various spoons, labeled with paper on a loop of string instead of any sort of permanent marking. When starting to bend a spoon, the two magicians would complain the labels were in the way and remove them. They would then simply switch the labels when putting them back and wait. The spoons were measured before and after the experiment, and since all sorts of spoons were used, simply switching the labels would produce different measurements, causing the scientist to believe that something paranormal had occurred. In other cases, they would drop one of the spoons in their lap


id: project-alpha-hoax-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)-2.md
category: reference
title: Project Alpha (hoax)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:56.533475+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: project-alpha-hoax-20260505-0
summary:
Phillips decided to release a research brief at a workshop of the Parapsychological Association Convention in August 1981. According to the researchers' official version, in preparation Phillips also wrote to Randi to ask for a tape of fake metal-bending, which was to be shown alongside the recording of Shaw and Edwards. The researchers were looking for critical input from the parapsychology community and afterward released a revised abstract that reflected the received criticism. After the Project Alpha announcements in the press, Randi wrote to the lab again and stated that it was entirely possible the two were magicians using common sleight of hand to fool the researchers. He also started to leak stories that the two were his plants. The story had been widely circulated by the time the meeting was held the next month. Upon returning from the meeting, Phillips immediately changed the test protocols; Shaw and Edwards found that they were no longer able to fool the experimenters so easily, and in most cases, unable to fool them at all. During this time the lab started releasing additional reports that seriously toned down the success rate. In their own words, "We did not conclude that they must be


id: red-mercury-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-0.md
category: reference
title: Red mercury
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:57.782261+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: red-mercury-20260505-0
summary:
Red mercury is a discredited substance, most likely a hoax perpetrated by con artists who sought to take advantage of gullible buyers on the black market for arms. These con artists described it as a substance used in the creation of nuclear weapons; because of the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons development, it is difficult to disprove their claims completely. However, all samples of alleged "red mercury" analyzed in the public literature have proven to be well-known, common substances of no interest to weapons makers. == History == References to red mercury first appeared in major Soviet and western media sources in the late 1980s. The articles were never specific as to what exactly red mercury was, but nevertheless claimed it was of great importance in nuclear bombs, or that it was used in the building of boosted fission weapons. Almost as soon as the stories appeared, people started attempting to buy it. At that point, the purported nature of the substance started to change, and eventually turned into anything the buyer happened to be interested in. As New Scientist reported in 1992, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report outlined that: When red mercury first appeared on the international black market


id: red-mercury-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-1.md
category: reference
title: Red mercury
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:57.782261+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: red-mercury-20260505-0
summary:
== Analysis == Several common mercury compounds are indeed red, such as mercury sulfide (from which the bright-red pigment vermilion was originally derived), mercury(II) oxide (historically called red precipitate), and mercury(II) iodide. No use for any of these compounds in nuclear weapons has been publicly documented. "Red mercury" could also be a code name for a substance that contains no mercury at all. A variety of different items have been chemically analyzed as putative samples of "red mercury" since the substance first came to the attention of the media, but no single substance was found in these items. A sample of radioactive material was seized by German police in May 1994. This consisted of a complex mixture of elements, including about 10% by weight plutonium, with the remainder consisting of 61% mercury, 11% antimony, 6% oxygen, 2% iodine and 1.6% gallium. The reason why somebody had assembled this complex mixture of chemicals is unknown; equally puzzling was the presence of fragments of glass and brush bristles, suggesting that someone had dropped a bottle of this substance and then swept it up into a new container. In contrast, an analysis reported in 1998 of a different "red mercury" sample concluded that


id: red-mercury-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-2.md
category: reference
title: Red mercury
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:57.782261+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: red-mercury-20260505-0
summary:
=== Red mercury as a ballotechnic === Samuel T. Cohen, the "father of the neutron bomb", claimed for a long time that red mercury is a powerful explosive-like chemical known as a ballotechnic. The energy released during its reaction is allegedly enough to directly compress the secondary without the need for a fission primary in a thermonuclear weapon. He claimed that he learned that the Soviet scientists perfected the use of red mercury and used it to produce a number of softball-sized pure fusion bombs weighing as little as 10 lb (4.5 kg), which he claimed were made in large numbers. He went on to claim that the reason this is not more widely known is that elements within the US power structure are deliberately suppressing or hiding information due to the frightening implications such a weapon would have on nuclear proliferation. Since a red mercury bomb would require no fissile material, it would seemingly be impossible to protect against its widespread proliferation given current arms control methodologies. Instead of trying to do so, they simply claim it does not exist, while acknowledging its existence privately. Cohen also claimed that when President Boris Yeltsin took power, he secretly authorized the


id: red-mercury-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-3.md
category: reference
title: Red mercury
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:57.782261+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: red-mercury-20260505-0
summary:
=== Saudi Arabia === In April 2009 it was reported from Saudi Arabia that rumors that Singer sewing machines contained "red mercury" had caused the prices of such machines to massively increase in the Kingdom, with some paying up to SR200,000 for a single machine which could previously have been bought for SR200. Believers in the rumor claimed that the presence of red mercury in the sewing machines' needles could be detected using a mobile telephone; if the line cut off when the telephone was placed near to the needle, this supposedly proved that the substance was present. In Medina there was a busy trade in the sewing machines, with buyers seen using mobile phones to check the machines for red mercury content, while it was reported that others had resorted to theft, with two tailors' shops in Dhulum broken into and their sewing machines stolen. At other locales, there were rumors that a Kuwait-based multinational had been buying up the Singer machines, while in Al-Jouf, the residents were led to believe that a local museum was buying up any such machines that it could find, and a number of women appeared at the museum offering to sell their Singer


id: charles-redheffer-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Redheffer-0.md
category: reference
title: Charles Redheffer
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Redheffer
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:30:58.927602+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: charles-redheffer-20260505-0
summary:
Charles Redheffer was an American inventor who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. First appearing in Philadelphia, Redheffer exhibited his machine to the public, charging high prices for viewing. When he applied to the government for more money, a group of inspectors were sent to examine the machine. It was discovered the machine was actually powered by a device Redheffer claimed was powered by the machine. Redheffer moved to New York City and set up a similar scam after rebuilding his machine. However, an engineer detected that it was a fake by listening to its unsteady motions at an exhibition. He discovered that the machine was operated by a man using a crank in a room on the floor above. Redheffer returned to Philadelphia. He later claimed to have created another machine, but refused to demonstrate it to anyone. He managed to get a patent for his machine in 1820, but after this his fate is unknown. == Personal life == Little has been recorded about Redheffer's life, other than his connection to the hoax. According to one source, he was from Germantown in Philadelphia, but most sources simply state that he appeared in Philadelphia with his machine.


id: scott-reuben-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben-0.md
category: reference
title: Scott Reuben
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:00.148714+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: scott-reuben-20260505-0
summary:
Scott S. Reuben (born 1958) is an American anesthesiologist who falsified data heralding the benefits of the Pfizer pain medication Celebrex while downplaying its negative side effects. He was Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts and chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts from February 1991 until 2009 when he was sentenced to prison for healthcare fraud. Reuben was considered to be a prolific and influential researcher in pain management, and his purported findings altered the way millions of patients are treated for pain during and after orthopedic surgeries. Reuben has now admitted that he never conducted any of the clinical trials on which his conclusions were based "in what may be considered the longest-running and widest-ranging cases of academic fraud." Scientific American has called Reuben the medical equivalent of Bernie Madoff, the former NASDAQ chairman who was convicted of orchestrating a $65-billion Ponzi scheme. == Background == Reuben was educated at Columbia University. He graduated from medical school at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1985 and undertook his anesthesiology residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. Reuben fell under suspicion when Baystate


id: rhinogradentia-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinogradentia-0.md
category: reference
title: Rhinogradentia
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinogradentia
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:01.299956+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: rhinogradentia-20260505-0
summary:
Rhinogradentia is a fictitious order of extinct shrew-like mammals invented by German zoologist Gerolf Steiner. Members of the order, known as rhinogrades or snouters, are characterized by a nose-like feature called a "nasorium", which evolved to fulfill a wide variety of functions in different species. Steiner also created a fictional persona, naturalist Harald Stümpke, who is credited as author of the 1961 book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia (translated into English in 1967 as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades). According to Steiner, it is the only remaining record of the animals, which were wiped out, along with all the world's Rhinogradentia researchers, when the small Pacific archipelago they inhabited sank into the ocean due to nearby atomic bomb testing. Successfully mimicking a genuine scientific work, Rhinogradentia has appeared in several publications without any note of its fictitious nature, sometimes in connection with April Fools' Day. == Background == Rhinogradentia, their island home of Hy-yi-yi, zoologist Harald Stümpke, and a host of other people, places, and documents are fictional creations of Gerolf Steiner (1908–2009), a German zoologist. Steiner is best known for his fictional work as Stümpke, but he was an accomplished zoologist in his own right. He


id: rhinogradentia-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinogradentia-1.md
category: reference
title: Rhinogradentia
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinogradentia
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:01.299956+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: rhinogradentia-20260505-0
summary:
== Publication history == Steiner's books as Stümpke have been translated into other languages, sometimes crediting other names based on the country of publication. "Harald Stümpke", "Massimo Pandolfi", "Hararuto Shutyunpuke", and "Karl D. S. Geeste" are pseudonyms. Translator names are real. Stümpke, Harald (1957). Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag. ISBN 3-437-30083-0. OCLC 65616734. Stümpke, Harald (1962). Anatomie et Biologie des Rhinogrades — Un Nouvel Ordre de Mammifères (Trans. Robert Weill). Paris: Masson. ISBN 978-2-10-005449-7. OCLC 46829688. Stümpke, Harald (1967). The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades (Trans. Leigh Chadwick). Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press. OCLC 436148. Pandolfi, Massimo (1992). I Rinogradi di Harald Stümpke e la zoologia fantastica (Trans. Achaz von Hardenberg). Padua: Franco Muzzio. ISBN 88-7021-485-0. OCLC 875787215. Shutyunpuke, Hararuto (1997). Bikōri: atarashiku-hakken-sareta-honyūrui-no-kōzō-to-seikatsu. Tokyo: Hakuhinsha. ISBN 4-938706-19-9. OCLC 76500640. Geeste, Karl D. S. (1988). Stümpke's Rhinogradentia: Versuch einer Analyse. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag. ISBN 3-437-30597-2. OCLC 28345723. == Legacy == Rhinogradentia is considered one of the best known biological hoaxes and scientific jokes and Steiner's pseudonymous works on the subject continue to be reprinted and translated. The first edition did not explicitly state that it was a hoax. Following the publication of


id: sch-n-scandal-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal-0.md
category: reference
title: Schön scandal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:02.514203+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sch-n-scandal-20260505-0
summary:
German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born August 1970 in Verden an der Aller, Lower Saxony, West Germany) briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparently successful experiments with semiconductors that were discovered later to be fraudulent. Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, all of which were later rescinded. He was also supposed to receive the William L. McMillan Award from the University of Illinois in 2002, but due to the intervention of Daniel C. Ralph of Cornell University (who was on the committee of the McMillan Award), Schön was never given the award. The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility which coauthors and reviewers of scientific articles bear in cases of scientific misbehavior. The discussion mainly concerned whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of articles, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud. == Beginning of fame == Schön's topic of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997.


id: sch-n-scandal-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal-1.md
category: reference
title: Schön scandal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:02.514203+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sch-n-scandal-20260505-0
summary:
== Allegations and investigation == Soon after Schön published his work on single-molecule semiconductors, others in the physics community alleged that his data contained anomalies. Julia Hsu and Lynn Loo originally noticed problems with Schön's paper describing the assembly of molecular transistors while attempting to patent research concerning lithography, realizing that Schön had duplicated some numbers. Hsu and Loo had attempted initial experiments to gather evidence for their patent but relied on the scientific outcomes of Schön's work. It was not until April 19, 2002, when Loo and Hsu were meeting with their patent lawyer John McCabe, that they noticed the duplicated data. Hsu and Loo both contacted Robert Willett, who then contacted one of his old postdoctoral students, Lydia Sohn, telling her to look out for a correction in one of Schön's papers. Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise. When the editors of Nature mentioned this to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice. Paul McEuen of Cornell University then found the same noise in a paper describing a third experiment. More research by McEuen, Sohn, Loo, and other physicists revealed a number


id: sch-n-scandal-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal-2.md
category: reference
title: Schön scandal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:02.514203+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sch-n-scandal-20260505-0
summary:
J. H. Schön; S. Berg; Ch. Kloc; B. Batlogg (2000). "Ambipolar Pentacene Field-Effect Transistors and Inverters". Science. 287 (5455): 1022–3. Bibcode:2000Sci...287.1022S. doi:10.1126/science.287.5455.1022. PMID 10669410. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID 12416506) J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; R. C. Haddon; B. Batlogg (2000). "A Superconducting Field-Effect Switch". Science. 288 (5466): 656–8. doi:10.1126/science.288.5466.656. PMID 10784445. S2CID 37783357. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID 12416506) J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; B. Batlogg (2000). "Fractional Quantum Hall Effect in Organic Molecular Semiconductors". Science. 288 (5475): 2338–40. doi:10.1126/science.288.5475.2338. PMID 17769842. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID 12416506) J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; A. Dodabalapur; B. Batlogg (2000). "An Organic Solid State Injection Laser". Science. 289 (5479): 599–601. Bibcode:2000Sci...289..599S. doi:10.1126/science.289.5479.599. PMID 10915617. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID 12416506) J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; B. Batlogg (2000). "A Light-Emitting Field-Effect Transistor". Science. 290 (5493): 963–6. Bibcode:2000Sci...290..963S. doi:10.1126/science.290.5493.963. PMID 11062124. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID 12416506) J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; H. Y. Hwang; B. Batlogg (2001). "Josephson Junctions with Tunable Weak Links". Science. 292 (5515): 252–4. doi:10.1126/science.1058812. PMID 11303093. S2CID 38719808. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID 12416506) J. H. Schön; A. Dodabalapur; Ch. Kloc; B. Batlogg (2001). "High-Temperature Superconductivity in Lattice-Expanded C60". Science. 293 (5539): 2432–4. Bibcode:2001Sci...293.2432S. doi:10.1126/science.1064773. PMID 11533443. S2CID 28759665. (Retracted, see doi:10.1126/science.298.5595.961b, PMID


id: sch-n-scandal-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal-3.md
category: reference
title: Schön scandal
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:02.514203+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sch-n-scandal-20260505-0
summary:
J. H. Schön; Z. Bao (2002). "Organic insulator/semiconductor heterostructure monolayer transistors". Applied Physics Letters. 80 (2): 332. Bibcode:2002ApPhL..80..332S. doi:10.1063/1.1431697. S2CID 95860889. J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; A. Dodabalapur; B. Crone (2001). "Grain boundary transport and vapor sensing in α-sexithiophene". Applied Physics Letters. 79 (24): 3965. Bibcode:2001ApPhL..79.3965S. doi:10.1063/1.1423787. J. H. Schön; C. Kloc (2001). "Charge transport through a single tetracene grain boundary". Applied Physics Letters. 78 (24): 3821. Bibcode:2001ApPhL..78.3821S. doi:10.1063/1.1379986. J. H. Schön; C. Kloc (2001). "Organic metal–semiconductor field-effect phototransistors". Applied Physics Letters. 78 (22): 3538. Bibcode:2001ApPhL..78.3538S. doi:10.1063/1.1376666. J. H. Schön; C. Kloc; B. Batlogg (2000). "Efficient photovoltaic energy conversion in pentacene-based heterojunctions". Applied Physics Letters. 77 (16): 2473. Bibcode:2000ApPhL..77.2473S. doi:10.1063/1.1318234. J. H. Schön; C. Kloc; B. Batlogg (1999). "Reversible gas doping of bulk α-hexathiophene". Applied Physics Letters. 75 (11): 1556. Bibcode:1999ApPhL..75.1556S. doi:10.1063/1.124753. J. H. Schön; Ch. Kloc; R. A. Laudise; B. Batlogg (1998). "Surface and bulk mobilities of oligothiophene single crystals". Applied Physics Letters. 73 (24): 3574. Bibcode:1998ApPhL..73.3574S. doi:10.1063/1.122828. The retraction notice from March 20, 2003, in Advanced Materials mentions concerns about another article written by Schön: J. H. Schön; C. Kloc; Z. Bao; B. Batlogg (2000). "Electron Transport in Fluorinated Copper-Phthalocyanine". Advanced Materials. 12 (20): 1539–1542. doi:10.1002/1521-4095(200010)12:20<1539::AID-ADMA1539>3.0.CO;2-S. == See


id: scigen-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen-0.md
category: reference
title: SCIgen
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:03.709962+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: scigen-20260505-0
summary:
SCIgen is a paper generator that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. Its original data source was a collection of computer science papers downloaded from CiteSeer. All elements of the papers are formed, including graphs, diagrams, and citations. Created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, its stated aim is "to maximize amusement, rather than coherence." Originally created in 2005 to expose the lack of scrutiny of submissions to conferences, the generator subsequently became used, primarily by Chinese academics, to create large numbers of fraudulent conference submissions, leading to the retraction of 122 SCIgen generated papers and the creation of detection software to combat its use. == Sample output == Opening abstract of Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy: Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable. == Prominent results == In 2005, a paper generated by


id: scigen-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen-1.md
category: reference
title: SCIgen
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:03.709962+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: scigen-20260505-0
summary:
==== In journals ==== Students at Iran's Sharif University of Technology published a paper in Elsevier's Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation. The students wrote under the surname "MosallahNejad", which translates literally from Persian language (in spite of not being a traditional Persian name) as "from an Armed Breed". The paper was subsequently removed when the publishers were informed that it was a joke paper. Mikhail Gelfand published a translation of the "Rooter" article in the Russian-language Journal of Scientific Publications of Aspirants and Doctorants in August 2008. Gelfand was protesting against the journal, which was apparently not peer-reviewed and was being used by Russian PhD candidates to publish in an "accredited" scientific journal, charging them 4,000 Rubles to do so. The accreditation was revoked two weeks later. (See Dissernet for related information.) Springer Science+Business Media and IEEE were also the subject of similar pranks. === Spoofing Google Scholar and h-index calculators === Refereeing performed on behalf of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has also been subject to criticism after fake papers were discovered in conference publications, most notably by Labbé and a researcher using the pseudonym of Schlangemann. Cyril Labbé from Grenoble University demonstrated the vulnerability of


id: skvader-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skvader-0.md
category: reference
title: Skvader
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skvader
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:04.854490+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: skvader-20260505-0
summary:
The skvader (pronounced [ˈskvɑ̌ːdɛr]) is a Swedish fictional creature that was constructed in 1918 by the taxidermist Rudolf Granberg and is permanently displayed at the museum at Norra Berget in Sundsvall. It has the head, forequarters and hindlegs of a European hare (Lepus europaeus), and the back, wings and tail of a female wood grouse (Tetrao urogallus). It was later jokingly given the Latin name Tetrao lepus pseudo-hybridus rarissimus L. The term has taken on a general meaning of two disparate elements put together, often conveying a sense of a less fortunate such combination. == Name == The name is a combination of two words, explained by the Svenska Akademiens ordbok (Dictionary of the Swedish Academy) as being from the "prefix skva- from skvattra (quack or chirp), and the suffix -der from tjäder (wood grouse)". == Origins == The skvader originates from a tall tale hunting story told by a man named Håkan Dahlmark during a dinner at a restaurant in Sundsvall in the beginning of the 20th century. To the amusement of the other guests, Dahlmark claimed that he in 1874 had shot such an animal during a hunt north of Sundsvall. On his birthday in 1907, his housekeeper


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-0.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
Andriy Tykhonovych Slyusarchuk (Ukrainian: Андрі́й Ти́хонович Слюсарчу́к, born 10 May 1971) is a Ukrainian mnemonist who has claimed to be a general aviation pilot, psychotherapist, Doctor of Science in medicine, psychiatrist, psychologist and neurosurgeon. He has performed brain surgery throughout Ukraine in state and municipal hospitals. Slyusarchuk has been employed by the V. Chornovol Lviv State Institute of Modern Technology and Management, the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, the P.L. Shupyk National Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education, and the A. P. Romodanov Institute of Neurosurgery. He has lectured at the Lviv Polytechnic, and worked for the government of Ukraine as an adviser to Oleksandr Turchynov. Slyusarchuk claimed to have set several world records in mnemonics by memorizing data and figures (such as pi) and performing complex calculations in his mind. Because of this, he came to be known as "Doctor Pi". Slyusarchuk defrauded two Ukrainian presidents: Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. The Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian Parliament) referred to his activities as "the largest-scale fraud in Ukraine's 20 years of independence". On 14 February 2014, the Sykhiv Raion Court sentenced Slyusarchuk to eight years in prison. == Education and career == Slyusarchuk's education began in an institutional school


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-1.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
== Biography == The details of Andriy Slyusarchuk's life were uncovered through investigative journalism. Slyusarchuk was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine on 10 May 1971. His 21-year-old mother, Natalia Tykhonovna Slyusarchuk of Zhytomyr, left her newborn son at a maternity home. She did not know the name of the father of her child, and Slyusarchuk's middle name was recorded on his birth certificate as "Tykhonovych" (the masculine version of Natalia Slyusarchuk's patronymic). He was hospitalized at the Zhytomyr psychiatric hospital eight times between 1974 and 1987. From 1980 to 1987 (second to eighth grade) Slyusarchuk lived and studied at an institutional school for young orphans in the town of Hryshkivtsi in Berdychiv Raion, receiving a certificate for the completion of his education there. Nearly all the documents pertaining to his education at the school were later destroyed; his birth date became 19 May 1974 on some documents, yielding negative results for official inquiries about his time at the school. From 1987 to 1989, Slyusarchuk studied in the 208th group at the inter-regional Higher Vocational School of Railway Transport in Kozyatyn, Vinnytsia Oblast, to become a plasterer-tiler-facing worker. On 2 October 1989, according to order No. 31, he was transferred to the


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-2.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
It was followed by "The First Victims of Pseudo-professor Pi", "Pseudo-doctor Slyusarchuk Kills People", "The Cheap Tricks of Professor Pi", "The New Victims of the Pseudo-Doctor", "Pseudo-doctor Slyusarchuk is in a Trap", "Pseudo-doctor Slyusarchuk Buried His Mother Alive", "The Pseudo-Doctor Sows New Deaths", "It is Just a Shock. The Pseudo-doctor Kills the Child of a Priest", "The Pi Record is Cancelled", "The Pi Record is Falsified," "The Secret Protectors of Doctor Pi", "The Pseudo-Doctor Again Picked Up a Scalpel", "The Perverts of Minister Tabachnyk", "The Pseudo-Doctor, Sex and Drugs", "The Grave Sin of Minister Tabachnyk", "Three More New Victims of the Pseudo-Doctor" (a video), "The New Attitude of Doctor Pi", "The Intelligentsia of the Lviv Oblast Demand that Tabachnyk, Who is an Accessory of Doctor Pi, Be Relieved of His Position", "The Computer Operator of Doctor Pi Speaks Out", "New Actions Brought Against the Pseudo-Doctor", "A New Death in the Case of Doctor Pi", "The Millions of Doctor Pi Against Ekspres", "The Inquest Breaks the Action Brought Against Doctor Pi", "Doctor Pi is Ignorant of Even Arithmetic", "Doctor Pi Took Up to Tens of Thousands". After the Ekspres articles were published, criminal complaints were again brought against Slyusarchuk. On 14


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-3.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
=== Biography based on Slyusarchuk's own interviews === According to a birth certificate shown by him to journalists, Slyusarchuk was born in the village of Tuğ in the Hadrut Rayon of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. His father was Mushegyan Vartan Aramovich, an ethnic Armenian. His mother, a Ukrainian, was Ruslana Tykhonovna Slyusarchuk. The Hadrut Rayon civil registry reportedly changed his birth details to his mother's by request in 1984, and he became Andriy Tykhonovych Slyusarchuk. Slyusarchuk said that he graduated from a secondary school in Vinnytsia at the age of nine. His parents, medical professionals (his mother a pediatrician and his father a cardiac surgeon), died in a car accident the year he graduated from secondary school. During the 1980s he was subjected to punitive psychiatry, physically abused and sent to a psychiatric hospital where he was tied to a bed, given psychoactive drugs and injected with sulfozin. When the psychiatrists asked him which books he was reading, Slyusarchuk said that he was reading medical literature and works by Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Lenin. He was sent to an institution for the mentally-ill children. Slyusarchuk was placed in a Soviet orphanage where he was


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-4
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-4.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
== Mnemonics and hypnosis == Slyusarchuk claimed to have set records for memorizing large amounts of digital data, sequences of geometric figures, words and other information, including one million digits of the figure pi. By 2008, he claimed to have memorized two million decimal places of pi and about 7,000 volumes of text; by the following year, his claim had increased to 15,000 volumes. By June 2009 Slyusarchuk claimed to have set a record by memorizing the first 30 million decimal places of pi, which were printed in 20 volumes of text. He claimed to have memorized 200 million decimal places of pi by October 2010. None of the claimed pi records appear on the Pi World Ranking list. Slyusarchuk was known for his hypnotic skill; he claimed the ability to hypnotize people to feel no pain when burned. On a TV show, he hypnotized students of the L'viv University of Modern Technology (Львівський державний інститут новітніх технологій та управління ім. В. Чорновола) into believing that the onions they ate were apples. Slyusarchuk demonstrated hypnosis of a salesman who accepted a ₴1 bill, thinking it was a ₴500 bill. His televised demonstration of chess-position memory (memorizing all pieces on 80


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-5
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-5.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
On 6 October 2011 the Lviv newspaper Ekspres published its first article critical of Slyusarchuk, "The Sensational Exposure of Pseudo-Professor Pi", accusing him of forgery and fraud and investigating him in subsequent articles. Three weeks later, the newspaper published a letter from the Russian National Research Medical University saying that Slyusarchuk had not studied at the university. On 10 January 2012 the newspaper released a video of brain surgery performed by Slyusarchuk, surrounded by assistants in an operating room; in the video, he wiped his scalpel with cotton wool before incising the patient's brain. On 14 March Ekspres published an interview with Andriy Novosad, who told reporters that he wrote a computer program which Slyusarchuk tested with radio equipment for the pi demonstrations and created articles which were published in Slyusarchuk's name. After the Ekspres articles attracted widespread publicity Slyusarchuk denied the accusations in interviews for other media sources, saying that he had applied to the General Prosecutor of Ukraine to clarify the situation and disprove the Ekspres allegations. On 14 November 2011, the Ukrainian police detained him on suspicion of forgery and fraud. During the investigation, senior officials of the Ministry of Education and Science, Youth and Sport of


id: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-6
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk-6.md
category: reference
title: Andriy Slyusarchuk
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: andriy-slyusarchuk-20260505-0
summary:
== Conviction and sentencing == In the Verkhovna Rada, Slyusarchuk's activities were called "the largest-scale fraud in the 20 years of Ukrainian independence". According to the Ukrainian Independent Information Agency, his defrauding of government agencies is unprecedented. In 2012, Ukrainsky Medychny Chasopys (Ukrainian Medical Journal) published the outcome of his case entitled, "Head doctors who let the person without medical training into operating room should be held criminally responsible." In the article, Ukrainian psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman expressed the opinion that Slyusarchuk skillfully took advantage of poor security; if he had chosen a lower-profile specialty, he might have succeeded. According to Gluzman, Ukraine has hundreds of people with the degree of Doctor of Sciences with expertise comparable to Slyusarchuk's. In the journal, Doctor of Science Olga Bogomolets wrote that the admission of a person without medical training to an operating room violated laws clearly regulating who can practice medicine, when and where; a hospital supervising physician who violates the law must be held accountable. On 14 February 2014, the Sykhiv Raion Court sentenced Slyusarchuk to eight years in prison after finding him guilty of five counts of illegal medical activities and two counts of murder by negligence: a 52-year-old man named


id: sokal-affair-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair-0.md
category: reference
title: Sokal affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:07.214905+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sokal-affair-20260505-0
summary:
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal's Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax. The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern


id: sokal-affair-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair-1.md
category: reference
title: Sokal affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:07.214905+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sokal-affair-20260505-0
summary:
=== Follow-up between Sokal and the editors === In the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies" in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a hoax and concluded that Social Text "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject" because of its ideological proclivities and editorial bias. In their defense, Social Text's editors said they believed that Sokal's essay "was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field" and that "its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document." Besides criticizing his writing style, Social Text's editors accused Sokal of behaving unethically in deceiving them. Sokal said the editors' response demonstrated the problem that he sought to identify. Social Text, as an academic journal, published the article not because it was faithful, true, and accurate to its subject, but because an "academic authority" had written it and because of the appearance of the obscure writing. The editors said they considered it poorly written but published it because they felt Sokal was


id: sokal-affair-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair-2.md
category: reference
title: Sokal affair
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:07.214905+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sokal-affair-20260505-0
summary:
=== Criticism of social sciences === Sociologist Stephen Hilgartner, chairman of Cornell University's science and technology studies department, wrote "The Sokal Affair in Context" (1997), comparing Sokal's hoax to "Confirmational Response: Bias Among Social Work Journals" (1990), an article by William M. Epstein published in Science, Technology, & Human Values. Epstein used a similar method to Sokal's, submitting fictitious articles to real academic journals to measure their response. Though much more systematic than Sokal's work, it received scant media attention. Hilgartner argued that the "asymmetric" effect of the successful Sokal hoax compared with Epstein's experiment cannot be attributed to its quality, but that "[t]hrough a mechanism that resembles confirmatory bias, audiences may apply less stringent standards of evidence and ethics to attacks on targets that they are predisposed to regard unfavorably." As a result, according to Hilgartner, though competent in terms of method, Epstein's experiment was largely muted by the more socially accepted social work discipline he critiqued, while Sokal's attack on cultural studies, despite lacking experimental rigor, was accepted. Hilgartner also argued that Sokal's hoax reinforced the views of well-known pundits such as George Will and Rush Limbaugh, so that his opinions were amplified by media outlets predisposed to


id: song-yoo-geun-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Yoo-geun-0.md
category: reference
title: Song Yoo-geun
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Yoo-geun
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:08.408373+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: song-yoo-geun-20260505-0
summary:
Song Yoo-geun (born November 27, 1997) is a South Korean person who gained recognition as a child prodigy in South Korea since 2004. After graduating college in 2009, he was involved in a number of controversies during his ultimately unsuccessful doctorate program at Korean University of Science and Technology (UST), including one involving his paper in October 2015 written with his advisor, Park Seok-jae. The paper, entitled "Axisymmetric, Nonstationary Black Hole Magnetospheres: Revisited" appeared in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ). However, the paper was soon retracted due to concerns that it plagiarized a 2002 book chapter. == Life before October 2015 == Song Yoo-geun left a prodigy school he attended in 2003. Six months of independent study enabled him to solve pre-calculus problems. In August 2004, at age 6, he passed the "Craftsman Information Processing" (정보처리기능사) certification examination. In November of the same year, his parents tried to enroll him at a local elementary school (Shim Seok Elementary School; 심석초등학교) as a sixth grader. While Song did not perform well, obtaining a score of 12% on his math exam, his parents maintained that Song was neither used to, or interested in, calculating equations that lacked meaning. Although the school allowed this


id: song-yoo-geun-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Yoo-geun-1.md
category: reference
title: Song Yoo-geun
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Yoo-geun
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:08.408373+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: song-yoo-geun-20260505-0
summary:
Song & Park (2015) draws extensively from an earlier publication by Park, "Stationary Versus Nonstationary Force-Free Black Hole Magnetospheres," in Black Hole Astrophysics 2002: Proceedings of the Sixth APCTP Winter School (World Scientific Publishing Co., 2002). In fact, the differences are modest, mostly confined to an alternate formulation of the analytic results, and could raise the question of copyright violation. Park (2002) is not part of the peer-reviewed literature, and scientists frequently use a conference proceeding as the rough draft of a subsequent submission to a professional peer-reviewed journal. However, in this case the overlap between the 2002 book chapter and 2015 paper is exceptionally large. "This article by Yoo Geun Song & Seok Jae Park has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief due to an unacceptably large overlap with "Stationary Versus Nonstationary Force-Free Black Hole Magnetospheres," published in Black Hole Astrophysics 2002: Proceedings of the Sixth APCTP Winter School (World Scientific Publishing Co., 2002). Please see https://aas.org/posts/news/2015/11/astrophysical-journal-paper-retracted-plagiarism for a more complete explanation." Park first denied the plagiarism controversy towards Song, insisting he will "resign his position if any part of his paper is found unoriginal." He also argued that Song's work on partial differential equation is totally


id: stimulus-triggered-acquisition-of-pluripotency-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus-triggered_acquisition_of_pluripotency-0.md
category: reference
title: Stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus-triggered_acquisition_of_pluripotency
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:09.670612+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: stimulus-triggered-acquisition-of-pluripotency-20260505-0
summary:
Stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) was a proposed method of generating pluripotent stem cells by subjecting ordinary cells to certain types of stress, such as the application of a bacterial toxin, submersion in a weak acid, or physical trauma. The technique gained prominence in January 2014 when research by Haruko Obokata et al. was published in Nature. Over the following months, all scientists who tried to duplicate her results failed, and suspicion arose that Obokata's results were due to error or fraud. An investigation by her employer, RIKEN, was launched. On April 1, 2014, RIKEN concluded that Obokata had falsified data to obtain her results. On June 4, 2014, Obokata agreed to retract the papers. On August 5, 2014, Yoshiki Sasai—Obokata's supervisor at RIKEN and one of the coauthors on the STAP cell papers—was found dead at a RIKEN facility after an apparent suicide by hanging. STAP would have been a radically simpler method of stem cell generation than previously researched methods as it requires neither nuclear transfer nor the introduction of transcription factors. == Overview == Haruko Obokata claimed that STAP cells were produced by exposing CD45+ murine spleen cells to certain stresses including an acidic medium with a


id: stimulus-triggered-acquisition-of-pluripotency-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus-triggered_acquisition_of_pluripotency-1.md
category: reference
title: Stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus-triggered_acquisition_of_pluripotency
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:09.670612+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: stimulus-triggered-acquisition-of-pluripotency-20260505-0
summary:
=== Investigation into disputed claims === In the months after the two Nature papers were released, all scientists who tried to duplicate Obokata's results failed and suspicion arose that her results were due to error or fraud. An investigation into alleged irregularities was launched by RIKEN on February 15, 2014. The allegations questioned the use of seemingly duplicated images in the papers, and reported failure to reproduce her results in other prominent stem-cell laboratories. Nature also announced that they were investigating. Several stem-cell scientists defended Obokata or reserved their opinion while the investigation was ongoing. To address the problem of reproducibility in other laboratories, Obokata published some technical 'tips' on the protocols on March 5 while promising that the detailed procedure would be published in due course. On March 11, Teruhiko Wakayama, one of Obokata's coauthors, urged all the researchers involved to withdraw the articles, citing many "questionable points". Charles Vacanti said he opposed their retraction and posted a "revised protocol" for creating STAP cells on his own website, which was taken down after he resigned his BWH post. On March 14, RIKEN released an interim report of the investigation. Out of the six items being investigated, the committee concluded


id: john-alfred-talent-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alfred_Talent-0.md
category: reference
title: John Alfred Talent
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alfred_Talent
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:10.795081+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: john-alfred-talent-20260505-0
summary:
John Alfred Talent (18 October 1932 – 27 March 2024) was an Australian palaeontologist whose research and teaching career was spent largely at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is remembered particularly for leading the effort in the 1980s and 1990s to expose the large body of fraudulent publications by Vishwa Jit Gupta of Panjab University, which is collectively known as the Himalayan fossil hoax. == Biography == Talent was born to Alfred George Talent and Thelma Emily (née Henderson) at Ascot Vale, Victoria. He studied science at the University of Melbourne, graduating in science with majors in geology, chemistry and mathematics in 1953 and completing his master's degree in 1955 with a dissertation on Studies in the stratigraphy and paleontology of some paleozoic limestones of Eastern Victoria. He obtained a PhD in 1959 on the thesis Contributions to the stratigraphy and palaeontology of the Silurian and Devonian of Gippsland. He followed this in 1966 by taking a bachelor of arts degree in 1966 with majors in French and fine arts, and a minor in Arabic. Talent was awarded the a post-doctoral fellowship from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) with which he spent time in Brussels, Belgium,


id: thiotimoline-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline-0.md
category: reference
title: Thiotimoline
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:11.958549+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: thiotimoline-20260505-0
summary:
Thiotimoline is a fictitious chemical compound conceived by American biochemist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It was first described in a spoof scientific paper titled "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" in 1948. The major peculiarity of the chemical is its "endochronicity": it starts dissolving before it makes contact with water. Asimov went on to write three additional short stories, each describing different properties or uses of thiotimoline. == Chemical properties == In Asimov's writings the endochronicity of thiotimoline is explained by the fact that in the thiotimoline molecule, there is at least one carbon atom such that, while two of the carbon's four chemical bonds lie in normal space and time, one of the bonds projects into the future and another into the past. Thiotimoline is derived from the bark of the (fictitious) shrub Rosacea karlsbadensis rufo, and the thiotimoline molecule includes at least fourteen hydroxy groups, two amino groups, and one sulfonic acid group, and possibly one nitro compound group as well. The nature of the hydrocarbon nucleus is unknown, although it seems in part to be an aromatic hydrocarbon. == Background == In 1947 Asimov was engaged in doctoral research in chemistry and, as part of


id: thiotimoline-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline-1.md
category: reference
title: Thiotimoline
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:11.958549+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: thiotimoline-20260505-0
summary:
== "Thiotimoline and the Space Age" == Asimov wrote a third thiotimoline article on 14 November 1959 called "Thiotimoline and the Space Age". Instead of a fake scientific paper, this third article took the form of an address by Asimov to the 12th annual meeting of the American Chronochemical Society, a nonexistent scientific society. In his address, Asimov "describes" his first experiments with thiotimoline in July 1947, and timing the compound's dissolution with the original endochronometer, "the same instrument now at the Smithsonian". Asimov laments the skepticism with which chronochemistry has been greeted in America, noting with sorrow that his address has only attracted fifteen attendees. He then contrasts the thriving state of chronochemistry in the Soviet Union, with the research town of Khrushchevsk, nicknamed "Tiotimolingrad", established in the Urals. According to Asimov, two Scottish researchers have developed a "telechronic battery", which uses a series of 77,000 interconnected endochronometers to allow a final sample of thiotimoline to dissolve up to a day before water is added to an initial sample. Asimov says there is "strong, if indirect, evidence that the Soviet Union possesses even more sophisticated devices and is turning them out in commercial quantities". He believes that the Soviets


id: thiotimoline-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline-2.md
category: reference
title: Thiotimoline
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:11.958549+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: thiotimoline-20260505-0
summary:
== Other references to thiotimoline == In Glen Bever's story "And Silently Vanish Away" a chemist with the unique ability to use psychokinetic catalysis to speed up difficult reactions is shocked by a lab explosion and the mixture he was working on gets changed. Under analysis the structure never appears to be the same twice and when the substance is injected into lab rats they start to silently and suddenly vanish. It is found that one part of the compound is a molecule which spreads out into four dimensions. The four-dimensional molecule is thiotimoline. The story appeared in the November 1971 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. Topi H. Barr's story "Antithiotimoline" deals with a chemist who accidentally creates a thiotimoline-like compound which extrudes only into the past, enabling the scientist to create images of past events. The narrator complains that thiotimoline is extremely difficult to obtain, and suspects that the CIA or other agencies are controlling the supply for their own reasons. The story appeared in the December 1977 issue of Analog. Spider Robinson's story "Mirror mirror, off the wall", published in Time Travelers Strictly Cash in 1981, also references thiotimoline. In Robert Silverberg's 1989 story "The Asenion Solution",


id: time-travel-claims-and-urban-legends-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends-0.md
category: reference
title: Time travel claims and urban legends
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:13.108313+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: time-travel-claims-and-urban-legends-20260505-0
summary:
Multiple accounts of people who allegedly travelled through time have been reported by the press or circulated online. These reports have turned out to be either hoaxes or else based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact. Many are now recognized as urban legends. == Alleged time travelers == === Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain === In 1911, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924) published a book entitled An Adventure, under the names of "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont". They described a visit to the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they claimed they saw ghosts, including that of Marie Antoinette and others. Their story caused a sensation but was not taken seriously. === "Chaplin's Time Traveller" === In October 2010, Northern Irish filmmaker George Clarke uploaded a video clip entitled "Chaplin's Time Traveller" to YouTube. The clip analyzes bonus material in a DVD of the Charlie Chaplin film The Circus. Included in the DVD is footage from the film's Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in 1928. At one point, a woman is seen walking by, holding up an object to her ear.


id: time-travel-claims-and-urban-legends-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends-1.md
category: reference
title: Time travel claims and urban legends
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:13.108313+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: time-travel-claims-and-urban-legends-20260505-0
summary:
=== Mike "Madman" Marcum === In 1995, a caller to Art Bell's syndicated radio show Coast to Coast AM named Mike Marcum claimed to have discovered a means of time travel using a Jacob's ladder. In attempting to build a larger version of this device, Marcum admitted that he had stolen several power transformers from the local power company, St. Joseph Light and Power in King City, Missouri; in using them to power his "time machine" he caused a local blackout that brought him to the attention of authorities. Police records confirmed that he had been arrested for this theft and sentenced to 60 days in jail plus a suspended sentence. He called the radio show again in 1996, stating he was building a second "time machine" from legally acquired parts, and was 30 days from completing the device. He claimed to have sent around 200 items and small animals through this device and announced that he would travel through it himself. Marcum then "disappeared" in 1997. His absence led to a number of theories, as well as giving birth to a number of urban legends. In 2015, Bell interviewed him again on his radio show, Midnight in the Desert,


id: time-travel-claims-and-urban-legends-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends-2.md
category: reference
title: Time travel claims and urban legends
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_claims_and_urban_legends
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:13.108313+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: time-travel-claims-and-urban-legends-20260505-0
summary:
=== Håkan Nordkvist === A video uploaded in 2006 shows a Swedish man named Håkan Nordkvist claiming he was accidentally transported to 2046 while attempting to fix the sink in his kitchen. There in the future, he immediately met someone who turned out to be himself, about 70 years old, and with whom he "had a great time". He filmed short footage of the two smiling and hugging each other and showing the tattoo they had on their right arms. The story was part of a marketing campaign promoting the insurance company's pension plans. === iPhone in a 1860 painting === Some online viewers claimed that an 1860 painting by Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller titled The Expected depicted a woman holding a mobile phone and staring down at it while strolling along a country path. However, art experts debunked these claims, stating that the alleged mobile phone the woman was holding in the painting was actually a prayer book. == Alleged time-travel technology == === Die Glocke === Die Glocke ("The Bell") is a purported Nazi time machine that was supposedly part of a flying saucer. === The Chronovisor === Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have used


id: tr-ara-a-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR_Araña-0.md
category: reference
title: TR Araña
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR_Araña
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:14.304013+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: tr-ara-a-20260505-0
summary:
The TR Araña (Spanish, meaning "route tracing spider") is a robot that is claimed to remotely analyse the composition of the ground. The device was created by Chilean inventor Manuel Salinas and was reported to be able to operate at depths of up to 50 metres. It is widely believed by the scientific community to be a fraud. == Principles == Answering a request by the Chilean Commission on Nuclear Energy, Salinas wrote the following paragraph: "[The principle behind the robot is] The non linear integration of the basic unit of life conformation the way it is known; therefore and merely as a functional and explanatory concept, I detail that our device is the integration of highly sophisticated electronic components which are able to decipher the unanimity equation in the chaos theory in the context of an integral raised to the power of the radical exponent, based in the conformation of the species, the way they are known after 20,000 years of assisted evolution." At a presentation to students, physicists, and engineers at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaíso, Chile, on 12 October 2005, Salinas gave improbable and seemingly irrational theories to explain how his machine worked. He


id: trixolan-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trixolan-0.md
category: reference
title: Trixolan
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trixolan
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:15.442248+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: trixolan-20260505-0
summary:
Trixolan (TX) is a purportedly therapeutic agent based on Viroxan, a citronella-based substance used by Stephen Herman, a Californian doctor who used it to treat AIDS patients. State medical officials stated that the drug hastened the deaths of at least two AIDS patients. Herman surrendered his medical license in 1991 when prosecutors agreed they would, in return, drop civil charges of gross negligence, incompetence, dishonesty and other offenses. In 1994, in the first AIDS medical fraud case to come to trial in the United States, a Los Angeles County jury ordered two doctors and a hospital that used Viroxan to pay five patients a total of $2.7 million. Herman had been dropped from the suit when he declared bankruptcy. Trixolan was linked in headlines to American fugitive Robert Lee Vesco and to Donald A. Nixon, President Richard Nixon's nephew. In the early 1980s Donald Nixon's wife contracted breast cancer and was treated with chemotherapy. In the search for a remedy for her cancer, he met with Dr. Stephen Herman, who claimed that Viroxan could boost the immune system and could get rid of many diseases, including cancer. Donald Nixon gave his wife Trixolan and claimed that it cured his wife's


id: the-truth-about-hansel-and-gretel-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Hansel_and_Gretel-0.md
category: reference
title: The Truth About Hansel and Gretel
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Hansel_and_Gretel
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:16.605846+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: the-truth-about-hansel-and-gretel-20260505-0
summary:
The Truth About Hansel and Gretel (German: Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel) is a 1963 book written by German children's author and humorist Hans Traxler, which described how an amateur archaeologist named Georg Ossegg uncovered evidence that the story about Hansel and Gretel was based on real events, just as Heinrich Schliemann discovered the city of Troy from Ancient Greek legends. The book immediately became a bestseller, but in several months Traxler confessed it was a hoax. == Summary == According to the book, Ossegg determined that the fairytale, Hansel and Gretel, was based on the story of a 17th-century baker named Hans Metzler and his sister Grete. Hans and Grete Metzler lived in a village in the Spessart Forest during the Thirty Years' War, and killed a woman named Katharina Schraderin in order to steal her recipe for Nürnberger Lebkuchen (gingerbread). In reality, Ossegg did not exist and the details of the story were fabricated by Traxler. Vanessa Joosen has called the book a "fictive nonfictional text", which "carries the features of a nonfictional text but consciously misleads the reader". == In popular culture == Despite its fictional nature, the hoax convinced many in Germany at the time,


id: turbo-encabulator-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator-0.md
category: reference
title: Turbo encabulator
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:17.763732+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: turbo-encabulator-20260505-0
summary:
The turbo encabulator is a fictional electromechanical machine with a satirical technobabble description that became a famous in-joke among engineers after a report about it by John Quick was published by the British Institution of Electrical Engineers in their Students' Quarterly Journal in 1944. Technical documentation has been written for the non-existent machine, and there are a number of parody marketing videos. ...The original machine had a base-plate of prefamulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters... == History == An early popular American reference to the turbo encabulator appeared in an article by New York lawyer Bernard Salwen in the April 15, 1946, issue of Time magazine. Part of Salwen's job was to review technical manuscripts, including an Arthur D. Little


id: villejuif-leaflet-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villejuif_leaflet-0.md
category: reference
title: Villejuif leaflet
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villejuif_leaflet
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:18.923543+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: villejuif-leaflet-20260505-0
summary:
The Villejuif leaflet, also known as the Villejuif flyer and the Villejuif list, was a pamphlet which enjoyed wide distribution. The leaflet listed a number of safe food additives with their E numbers as alleged carcinogens. The leaflet caused mass panic in Europe in the late 1970s and 1980s. One of the entries on the list was citric acid (E330). Its name derives from its false claim to have been produced at the hospital in Villejuif. == History == The earliest known sighting of the leaflet was in February 1976, in the form of a single typewritten page in France. Homemade copies were spread across Europe for a decade in the form of a leaflet or flyer pamphlet that was distributed between friends and apart from citric acid included 16 other chemicals in a list of substances that it called dangerous toxins and carcinogens. The original author of the typewritten list was never found, and the leaflet affected about 7 million people in its uncontrollable propagation. In a survey of 150 housewives, 19% said they have stopped buying these brands, and 69% planned to do so. == List contents == Multiple versions of this leaflet circulated, the exact set of


id: well-to-hell-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell-0.md
category: reference
title: Well to Hell
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:20.105350+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: well-to-hell-20260505-0
summary:
The "Well to Hell", also known as the "Siberian hell sounds", is an urban legend regarding a putative borehole in the Siberian region of Russia, which was purportedly drilled so deep that it broke through into Hell. == Legend and basis == The legend holds that a team of Soviet engineers purportedly led by an individual named "Mr. Azakov" in an unnamed place in Siberia had drilled a hole that was 14.4 km (9 miles) deep before breaking through to a cavity. Intrigued by this unexpected discovery, they lowered an extremely heat-tolerant microphone, along with other sensory equipment, into the well. The temperature deep within was 1,000 °C (1,800 °F), heat from a chamber of fire from which screaming could be heard. The Soviet Union had, in fact, drilled a hole more than 12 km (7.5 miles) deep, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, located not in Siberia but on the Kola Peninsula, which shares borders with Norway and Finland. Upon reaching the depth of 12,262 m (40,230 feet) in 1989, geological anomalies were found, although they reported no supernatural encounters. The recording of "tormented screams" was later found to be looped together from various sound effects, sometimes identified as the soundtrack


id: when-contact-changes-minds-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds-0.md
category: reference
title: When Contact Changes Minds
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:21.307446+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: when-contact-changes-minds-20260505-0
summary:
"When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality" is a fraudulent article by then-UCLA political science graduate student Michael LaCour and Columbia University political science professor Donald Green. The article was published in the academic journal Science in December 2014, and retracted in May 2015 after it emerged that the data in the study had been forged by LaCour. The article purported to demonstrate that people's minds on the issue of gay marriage could be changed by conversations with gay canvassers, but not with straight canvassers. == Study == The authors claimed to have investigated whether gay or straight messengers were effective at encouraging voters to support same-sex marriage and whether attitude change persisted and spread to others in voters’ social networks. The purported results, measured by an unrelated panel survey, show that both gay and straight canvassers produced large effects initially, but only gay canvassers’ effects persisted in 3-week, 6-week, and 9-month follow-ups. LaCour and Green (2014) also found strong evidence of within-household transmission of opinion change, but only in the wake of conversations with gay canvassers. The article is ranked in the top 5% of all research output, as scored using Altmetrics. The


id: when-contact-changes-minds-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds-1.md
category: reference
title: When Contact Changes Minds
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:21.307446+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: when-contact-changes-minds-20260505-0
summary:
== Falsified data == The "When contact changes minds" study was discredited after a critique by David Broockman, Joshua Kalla, and Peter Aronow on May 19, 2015, titled "Irregularities in LaCour (2014)", concluded that the data had been falsified and no data had been collected. The survey company that LaCour claimed to have used denied performing any work for the study and did not have an employee by the name LaCour listed as his contact with the company. In addition, LaCour had claimed that participants were paid using outside funding, but no organization could be found that had provided the amount of money required to pay thousands of people. The "Irregularities" paper also identified the likely method by which LaCour had forged the data. The baseline survey results appeared to have been taken from an earlier dataset called the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), to which LaCour had access. The later sets of data appeared to have been simulated from the first using statistical methods to shift the results and by adding normally distributed noise. In addition, the paper noted that canvasser identifiers were missing from the results, making it impossible to verify whether different canvassers produced different results as


id: when-contact-changes-minds-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds-2.md
category: reference
title: When Contact Changes Minds
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Changes_Minds
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:21.307446+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: when-contact-changes-minds-20260505-0
summary:
== Popular press == While Green, David Broockman, and Joshua Kalla conducted numerous interviews with reporters outlining their version of events, LaCour refrained from talking to the media with the exception of a single interview with The New York Times. Various opinions were advanced in the popular media regarding the implications of the scandal and the motivations of the parties involved. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal speculated that LaCour's argument originally gained acceptance in the scientific community because it "flattered the ideological sensibilities of liberals, who tend to believe that resistance to gay marriage can only be the artifact of ignorance or prejudice, not moral or religious conviction. Mr. LaCour's findings let them claim that science had proved them right." The Journal editorial further argued that the paper and its acceptance reflected a broader phenomenon in the social sciences in which liberals, according to the editorial, "recast stubborn political debates about philosophy and values as disputes over facts that can be resolved by science". New York Magazine columnist Jesse Singal dismissed the Wall Street Journal editorial, arguing that it was silly and uninformed, and suggested instead that the main reason for the article's publication was its contradiction


id: when-prophecy-fails-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails-0.md
category: reference
title: When Prophecy Fails
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:22.517812+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: when-prophecy-fails-20260505-0
summary:
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, published in 1956, detailing a study of a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse. The authors took a particular interest in the members' coping mechanisms after the event did not occur, focusing on the cognitive dissonance between the members' beliefs and actual events, and the psychological consequences of these disconfirmed expectations. Later archival work has alleged that many of the book's core claims are based on fabrications or exaggerations. == Overview == Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter were already studying the effects of prophecy disconfirmation on groups of believers when they read a story in a local newspaper headlined "Prophecy from Planet. Clarion Call to City: Flee That Flood. It'll Swamp us on Dec. 21". The prophecy came from Dorothy Martin (1900–1992), a Chicago housewife who practised automatic writing, and it outlined a catastrophe predicted for a specific date in their near future. Seeing an opportunity to test their theories with a contemporary case study, the research team infiltrated


id: when-prophecy-fails-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails-1.md
category: reference
title: When Prophecy Fails
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:22.517812+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: when-prophecy-fails-20260505-0
summary:
=== Methodology === The study was principally qualitative in nature, with data collected through participant observation, without the permission of the people being observed. The authors of the study and a selection of paid observers infiltrated groups of believers in two locations, in order to collect data as trusted insiders. Posing as people with a genuine personal interest in flying saucers and the group's belief system, the observers built rapport with the group members, aiming to take as passive a role as possible whilst gathering information on the group. Between them, the observers aimed to be present at all key events. Following each notable occurrence, each observer would attempt to excuse themselves in order to write up their notes or record them on audiotape while their memory was still fresh. They would record their notes in a variety of locations, including the bathroom of the house, the porch, or in a nearby hotel room that had been rented for the purpose. In addition to their own notes, the observers collected artifacts such as originals or copies of automatic writing produced by Martin, and transcripts of taped telephone calls that the research subjects themselves had recorded and lent to the observers.


id: when-prophecy-fails-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails-2.md
category: reference
title: When Prophecy Fails
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:22.517812+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: when-prophecy-fails-20260505-0
summary:
December 17. Ms. Keech received a phone call from person identifying himself as "Captain Video" from outer space, telling her that a saucer was to land in her backyard to pick her up at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. (Festinger considers this call to have been made by a practical joker reacting to press coverage of Keech's group.) Some of the group initially questioned the call, before accepting it and preparing themselves to be collected by the saucer, removing all metal objects from their persons. By 5:30 pm the group appeared to have given up, and were reluctant to discuss the issue of why the saucer had not arrived. When the matter was discussed, they agreed that the event had been a practice session. Ms. Keech received another message later that day that the saucer would pick them up at 1:30 am. The group waited for the saucer until 3:30 am then gave up. Before December 20. The group shuns publicity. Interviews are given only grudgingly. Access to Keech's house is only provided to those who can convince the group that they are true believers. The group evolves a belief system – provided by the automatic writing from the planet


id: who-s-afraid-of-peer-review-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Afraid_of_Peer_Review-0.md
category: reference
title: Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Afraid_of_Peer_Review?
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:23.700807+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: who-s-afraid-of-peer-review-20260505-0
summary:
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access. == Background == The first fee-charging open access scientific journals began appearing in 2000 with the creation of BioMed Central and then the Public Library of Science. Rather than deriving at least some of their revenue from subscription fees, fee-charging open access journals only charge the authors (or their funders) a publication fee. The published papers are then freely available on the internet. This business model, gold open access, is one of several solutions devised to make open access publishing sustainable. The number of articles published open access, or made freely available after some time behind a paywall (delayed open access), has grown rapidly. A 2013


id: who-s-afraid-of-peer-review-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Afraid_of_Peer_Review-1.md
category: reference
title: Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who's_Afraid_of_Peer_Review?
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:23.700807+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: who-s-afraid-of-peer-review-20260505-0
summary:
=== Responses from open-access academic publishers === Since the story was released, publishers of three journals have stated that they are shutting them down. The DOAJ is reviewing its list and instituting tighter criteria for inclusion. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) formed a committee to investigate the circumstances that led to the acceptance of the fake paper by three of its members. On 11 November 2013, OASPA terminated the membership of two publishers (Dove Medical Press and Hikari Ltd.) who accepted the fake paper. SAGE Publications, which also accepted a fake paper, was put "under review" for 6 months. Sage announced in a statement that it was reviewing the journal that accepted the fake paper, but that it would not shut it down. Sage's membership was reinstated at the end of the review period following changes to the journal's editorial processes. === Responses from the scientific community === Within hours of its publication, the Science investigation came under intense criticism by some supporters of the open-access movement. The first substantial critique was posted by PLOS cofounder Michael Eisen on his blog. "To suggest – as Science (though not Bohannon) are trying to do – that the problem with


id: f-d-c-willard-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard-0.md
category: reference
title: F. D. C. Willard
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:24.902918+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: f-d-c-willard-20260505-0
summary:
F. D. C. Willard (1968–1982) was the pen name of Chester, a Siamese cat, used on several papers written by his owner, J. H. Hetherington, in physics journals. On one occasion, he was listed as the sole author. == Background == In 1975, the American physicist and mathematician Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University wanted to publish some of his research results in the field of low-temperature physics in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. A colleague, to whom he had given his paper for review, pointed out that Hetherington had used the first person plural, "we", in his text, and that the journal would reject this form on submissions with a sole author. Rather than take the time to retype the article to use the singular form, or to bring in a co-author, Hetherington decided to invent one. == Publications == Hetherington had a Siamese cat named Chester, who had been sired by a Siamese named Willard. Fearing that colleagues might recognize his pet's name, he thought it better to use the pet's initial. Aware that most Americans have at least two given names, he invented two more given names based on the scientific name for a house


id: bibliothek-des-konservatismus-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliothek_des_Konservatismus-0.md
category: reference
title: Bibliothek des Konservatismus
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliothek_des_Konservatismus
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:26.409809+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: bibliothek-des-konservatismus-20260505-0
summary:
The Library of Conservatism (German: Bibliothek des Konservatismus (BdK)) is a specialized scientific library and think tank in Berlin. Its focus is non-fiction literature by conservative, right-wing and libertarian authors from the 18th to the early 21st century. The principal foundation for the library was laid by the writer and publicist Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing who gave his extensive private collection of books. The BdK opened in 2012 in Berlin. So far, its catalogued stock comprises around 35,000 items. The library is financed and supported by the Foundation for Conservative Education and Research (Förderstiftung Konservative Bildung und Forschung, FKBF). == Establishment == The writer and publicist Caspar von Schrenck-Notizing (1927–2009) was the scion of an old Bavarian family and a bestselling author and conservative critique in post-war Germany, who founded the bimonthly journal "Criticón" in 1970 that became a focal point for conservative and right-wing intellectuals in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2000, he established the Foundation for Conservative Education and Research (FKBF) in Munich to preserve his private library of around 20,000 books. Since 2007, Dieter Stein, the editor of weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit, is the chairman of the foundation. In 2012, the library opened to the public in


id: german-national-library-of-science-and-technology-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_Library_of_Science_and_Technology-0.md
category: reference
title: German National Library of Science and Technology
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_Library_of_Science_and_Technology
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:27.590220+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: german-national-library-of-science-and-technology-20260505-0
summary:
The German National Library of Science and Technology (German: Technische Informationsbibliothek), abbreviated TIB, is the national library of the Federal Republic of Germany for all fields of engineering, technology, and the natural sciences. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the 16 German states. Founded in 1959, the library operates in conjunction with the Leibniz Universität Hannover. In addition to acquiring scientific literature, it conducts applied research in such areas as the archiving of non-textual materials, data visualization and the future Internet. The library is also involved in a number of open access initiatives. With a collection of about 8.9 million items in 2012, the TIB is the largest technology and natural science library in the world. == Collection == The TIB acquires literature in all engineering fields as well as architecture, information technology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and other basic sciences. It is a particular specialist in the acquisition of "gray literature"; that is, literature difficult to obtain and not available via the standard book or journal trade. It also holds a large number of standards, norms, patents, source data, scientific conference proceedings, government research papers and dissertations. Special collections include the "Albrecht


id: german-national-library-of-science-and-technology-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_Library_of_Science_and_Technology-1.md
category: reference
title: German National Library of Science and Technology
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_Library_of_Science_and_Technology
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:27.590220+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: german-national-library-of-science-and-technology-20260505-0
summary:
== Research projects == As part of the German national research infrastructure, the TIB conducts its own applied research, particularly in the field of information science. In cooperation with a variety of other institutions, these projects focus on the areas of visual searching, data visualization, the Semantic Web, and the Future Internet. === PROBADO 3D === PROBADO is a project to develop tools for the automatic indexing, storage and delivery of non-textual documents such as 3D models. Its goal is to enable academic libraries to deal with multimedia objects just as easily as with textual information. Tools include searching by intuitive drawing in 2D and 3D and delivery of results while drawing. For this initiative the TIB partnered with the Technical University of Darmstadt, the University of Bonn and the Technical University of Graz. === Visual access to research data === This project, funded by the Leibniz Association, is a joint effort of the TIB, the GRIS Darmstadt (Interactive Graphics Systems at the Technical University of Darmstadt) and the IGD (Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics). It deals with developing approaches to the interactive, graphical access to research data in order to make it easily represented and searchable. The project is


id: gerstein-science-information-centre-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerstein_Science_Information_Centre-0.md
category: reference
title: Gerstein Science Information Centre
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerstein_Science_Information_Centre
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:28.812586+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: gerstein-science-information-centre-20260505-0
summary:
The Gerstein Science Information Centre is the University of Toronto's flagship library supporting the sciences and health sciences. The largest science and health science academic library in Canada, Gerstein has a collection of over 945,000 print volumes of journals and books, and also provides access to over 100,000 online journals and books. It is located in the Sigmund Samuel Library Building on the St. George campus in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Gerstein Science Information Centre's collection consists primarily of material on the sciences, including the health sciences, medicine, physics, chemistry, biology and their subfields, with the exception of mathematical journals and forestry, botany and geology materials. The library provides varying degrees of access to students, faculty, external researchers, and members of the public. == History == The library originally existed as the main University of Toronto library, and maintained this status from 1892 to 1973. In 1973 the humanities and social sciences materials were moved to the then newly built Robarts Library, and the remaining collection was divided between the undergraduate Sigmund Samuel Library and the Science and Medicine Library. In 1997, the Science and Medicine Library was renamed the Gerstein Science Information Centre after a significant donation from


id: national-research-council-canada-national-science-library-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Research_Council_Canada_National_Science_Library-0.md
category: reference
title: National Research Council Canada National Science Library
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Research_Council_Canada_National_Science_Library
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:29.974732+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: national-research-council-canada-national-science-library-20260505-0
summary:
The National Science Library (NSL), formerly known as the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information or CISTI, began in 1917 as the library of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). NRC is the Government of Canada's premier research and technology organization (RTO), working with clients and partners to provide innovation support, strategic research, scientific and technical services. The library took on the role of national science library unofficially in 1957 and became the official National Science Library in 1966. The National Science Library is located in Ottawa, Ontario, and houses one of the world's most comprehensive collections of publications in science, technology, engineering and medicine. It is part of NRC's Knowledge, Information and Technology Services Branch and provides NRC and Canada's research community with information and information services to accelerate discovery, innovation and commercialization. The NRC Research Press joined the library in 1992. On September 1, 2010, NRC Research Press became a private company called Canadian Science Publishing and is no longer directly affiliated with CISTI or the NRC. == Partnership initiatives == Shared library services – The NSL works with other Government of Canada science-based departments on a number of collaborative initiatives to realize common goals and


id: national-science-library-bangladesh-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Library_(Bangladesh)-0.md
category: reference
title: National Science Library (Bangladesh)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Library_(Bangladesh)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:31.131492+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: national-science-library-bangladesh-20260505-0
summary:
The National Science Library is a state owned and supported science library of Bangladesh. == History == The National Science Library was established in 1981 under the Bangladesh National Scientific and Technical Documentation Centre. Its functions are to collect scientific publications and books. == References ==


id: national-science-library-georgia-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Library_(Georgia)-0.md
category: reference
title: National Science Library (Georgia)
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Library_(Georgia)
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:32.299075+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: national-science-library-georgia-20260505-0
summary:
The National Scientific Library (Georgian: ეროვნული სამეცნიერო ბიბლიოთეკა) is a library in Tbilisi, Georgia. National Scientific Library is a biggest library in Georgia. Established in 1941, it initially served only the employees of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences. Presently library has three buildings: founded in 1941 former Central Library of Georgian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1965 Science and Technology Library and founded in 1961 Library-Museum of Ioseb Grishashvili. == See also == List of libraries in Georgia (country) == References ==


id: radcliffe-science-library-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_Science_Library-0.md
category: reference
title: Radcliffe Science Library
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_Science_Library
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:34.566727+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: radcliffe-science-library-20260505-0
summary:
The Radcliffe Science Library (RSL) is the main teaching and research science library at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. Being officially part of the Bodleian Libraries, the library holds the Legal Deposit material for the sciences and is thus entitled to receive a copy of all British scientific publications. Since 2023 the library has shared its buildings with Reuben College. == History == The physician John Radcliffe died in 1714, leaving money in his will to establish the Radcliffe Observatory, the Radcliffe Infirmary and the Radcliffe Library, which was intended to contain "modern books in all faculties and languages, not in the Bodleian Library". The library's building on a site south of the Bodleian Library was completed in 1749 and is now known as the Radcliffe Camera. The scientific books housed in the Radcliffe Camera were transferred to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 1861. A new Radcliffe Library building opened in 1901, on land next to the museum (on the corner of Parks Road and South Parks Road). In 1927, the library lost its independence, for financial efficiency becoming part of the Bodleian Library. The library took on its current name, the Radcliffe Science Library,


id: regional-planetary-image-facility-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Planetary_Image_Facility-0.md
category: reference
title: Regional Planetary Image Facility
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Planetary_Image_Facility
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:35.677978+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: regional-planetary-image-facility-20260505-0
summary:
The Regional Planetary Image Facilities (RPIFs) are planetary image and data libraries located throughout the United States and abroad that are funded by the host institutions. They once had funding from NASA. A network of these facilities was established in 1977 to maintain photographic and digital data as well as mission documentation. Each facility's general holding contains images and maps of planets and their satellites taken by solar system exploration spacecraft. These planetary image facilities are often open to the public. The facilities are primarily reference centers for browsing, studying, and selecting lunar and planetary photographic and cartographic materials. Experienced staff can assist scientists, educators, students, media, and the public in ordering materials for their own use. Since it was formally established, the network of RPIFs once numbered nine U.S. facilities and seven in other countries. The first RPIF to be established outside of the U.S. was in England in 1980 at the University College London (UCL), and since then RPIFs have been set up in Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, and Japan. == Resources and services offered == The RPIFs store and maintain a variety of planetary data and imagery, making them unique resources covering decades of planetary science.


id: russian-national-public-library-for-science-and-technology-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_National_Public_Library_for_Science_and_Technology-0.md
category: reference
title: Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_National_Public_Library_for_Science_and_Technology
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:36.875920+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: russian-national-public-library-for-science-and-technology-20260505-0
summary:
The Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology (Russian: Государственная Публичная Научно-Техническая Библиотека России, romanized: Gosudarstvennaya Publichnaya Nauchno-Tekhnicheskaya Biblioteka Rossii), abbreviated GPNTB (Russian: ГПНТБ) is a national library for engineering, science, and technology in Moscow, Russia. It was founded in 1958 on the basis of the State Science Library of the Ministry of Higher Education of the Soviet Union. It is located in Khoroshyovsky district of Moscow. The mission of the library is to collect and store national and foreign science and technical literature, then disseminate information and bibliographical services for commercial, organisations and other institutions of the Russian Federation, development and application of up-to-date automated information technologies. == See also == List of libraries in Russia == References == == External links == Official website


id: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague-0.md
category: reference
title: Slavonic Library in Prague
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:38.078618+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-0
summary:
The Slavonic Library (Czech: Slovanská knihovna) in Prague is a publicly accessible specialised research library for the field of Slavic Studies. It is one of the largest and most important Slavic libraries in Europe. Since its foundation in 1924, it has been systematically complementing, processing and making accessible its collection of world research Slavic (mainly historical, philological and political-science) literature and selected original production of Slavic authors. Its depositories contain more than 850,000 volumes of library documents, a collection of maps, posters, visual and artistic materials, and numerous collections of special documents. The Slavonic Library provides library and information services concerning the political, economic and cultural life of the Slavic nations, their mutual relations and their relations to other nations in the past as well as the present. Documents can be studied in the library's public reading room, provided with free internet access, an extensive reference library and open-access shelving with a large number of volumes. The library processes and edits specialised bibliographies and publications in its field. It organizes cultural events, professional seminars, conferences and exhibitions. Following the decision of the International Committee of Slavists, it has fulfilled the function of the centre for recording and processing materials related


id: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague-1.md
category: reference
title: Slavonic Library in Prague
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:38.078618+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-0
summary:
== The Book Collection == The book collection of the Slavonic Library comprises more than 850,000 library units (as of June 2018). On average, it is augmented by 9,000 new volumes of books and several hundred titles of periodicals every year. It is a varied collection of Slavic Studies literature, complexly mapping the historical, literary, philological and cultural topics of all Slavic nations. The core of individual national sections is formed by personal libraries acquired through donation or purchase in the first decades of the library's existence. Since the early 1930s, the acquisitions were carried out systematically according to a thematic plan of acquisition. The Slavonic Library owns several hundred historical manuscript books and several thousand early printed books published before 1800, but most of the collection is formed by the production of the 19th‒21st centuries. The holdings are complemented by a number of collections of special non-library documents. Almost all catalogue records of books and periodicals are available in the electronic catalogue of the Slavonic Library. Likewise the scanned general card catalogue of the Slavonic Library, used until 1996, and the scanned card catalogue of the Russian Historical Archives Abroad from 1923 to 1945 are accessible. The inventory lists


id: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-2
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague-2.md
category: reference
title: Slavonic Library in Prague
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:38.078618+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-0
summary:
=== Collections of Special Documents === A valuable part of the holdings is the section of special collections containing documents of non-library character. Many of them are related to the topic of Russian and Ukrainian emigration of the interwar period: these are parts of the personal estates of the Russian émigrés Petr N. Savitskii, Antonii V. Florovskii, Alfred L. Bem and Vladimir N. Tukalevskii; the collection of the administrative documents of the Russian Historical Archives Abroad; and the collection of leaflets and invitations to cultural and social events of Russian and Ukrainian émigrés related to the activities of diverse Ukrainian organisations functioning in interwar Czechoslovakia. Another unique collection is the set of more than a thousand hand-painted posters and leaflets made by Ukrainian émigrés in former Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1945. Other interesting documents include the correspondence of the Lusatian cultural figure Michał Hórnik, the protoiereus Nikolai N. Ryzhkov, the Ukrainian poet Lesia Ukrainka, the documents of the Leningrad artist Vadim M. Rokhlin, and the archive of clippings of articles about Yugoslavia from Czech periodicals in 1934‒1939. The items preserved in fragments include the correspondence of famous writers (P. I. Chaadaev, L. N. Tolstoi, F. M. Dostojevskii, A. M. Remizov


id: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-3
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague-3.md
category: reference
title: Slavonic Library in Prague
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavonic_Library_in_Prague
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:38.078618+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: slavonic-library-in-prague-20260505-0
summary:
== Literature == Rachůnková, Zdeňka (2002). The Slavonic Library. Prague: National Library of the Czech Republic. pp. 3-28. ISBN 8070503947. Vacek, Jiří (2016). Slovanská knihovna - můj osud. Prague: National Library of the Czech Republic. ISBN 9788070506714. 2Strnadel, Jiří (1976). Padesát let Slovanské knihovny v Praze. Prague: Státní knihovna ČSR - Slovanská knihovna. pp. 73–122.. Řeháková, Michaela; Babka, Lukáš (2005). Soupis publikací vydaných Slovanskou knihovnou )1924 - 2004) [The List of Publications Issued by the Slavonic Library (1924–2004). Published on the Occasion of the 80th Anniversary of the Activities of the Slavonic Library]. Prague: National Library of the Czech Republic - Slavonic Library. ISBN 8070504595.M Vacek, Jiří; Babka, Lukáš (2009). Voices of the Banished. Periodical Press of the Emigration from Soviet Russia (1918–1945). Prague: National Library of the Czech Republic. ISBN 978-80-7050-559-5. Richard J. Kneeley – Edward Kasinec; The Slovanská knihovna in Prague and its RZIA Collection, Slavic Review 51 (1992), no. 1, pp. 122–130. == External links == The Slavonic Library website The electronic catalogue of the Slavonic Library The card catalogue of the Slavonic Library The card catalogue of the books from the Russian Historical Archives Abroad Special collections of the Slavonic Library New Acquisitions of Slavic Studies


id: state-scientific-and-technical-library-of-ukraine-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Scientific_and_Technical_Library_of_Ukraine-0.md
category: reference
title: State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Scientific_and_Technical_Library_of_Ukraine
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:53.224573+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: state-scientific-and-technical-library-of-ukraine-20260505-0
summary:
The State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine, SSTL (Ukrainian: Державна науково-технічна бібліотека України) is the main academic library of Ukraine and is part of the system of scientific and technical information of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. The purpose of the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine activity is to promote the implementation of state policy in the field of education, science and culture, and to ensure the access of scientists, specialists, and citizens to sources of scientific and technical information. == History == In March 1935, the Interbranch Technical Library of the USSR was created that was the branch of the State Scientific Library (SSL) of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiofjazhprom) of the USSR. In 1936, the Kyiv Branch of the National Library of Ukraine made 5 thousand copies of publications and served 20 thousand readers. During World War II, almost all the fund and the library building itself were destroyed. The restoration of the library began in late 1946. Until 1958, the name and subordination of the library changed several times. The renewed funds as of January 1, 1959, amounted to more than 200,000 units. The library was granted the status


id: stefanyk-national-scientific-library-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefanyk_National_Scientific_Library-0.md
category: reference
title: Stefanyk National Scientific Library
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefanyk_National_Scientific_Library
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:54.370804+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: stefanyk-national-scientific-library-20260505-0
summary:
National Scientific Library (Ukrainian: Львівська національна наукова бібліотека України імені Василя Стефаника, romanized: Lvivska natsionalna naukova biblioteka Ukrainy imeni Vasylia Stefanyka) is a national library of Ukraine in the city of Lviv, Ukraine. It also serves as a science and research institute complex of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The library formally was established on 2 January 1940 with its headquarters in the building of Ossolineum and composed of holdings of Ossolineum and many other major libraries and private collections, all nationalized after the territory was annexed by the Soviet Union as a result of its invasion of Poland. It was named after Vasyl Stefanyk in 1971. To the development of the library greatly contributed Ukrainian archaeologist Larysa Krushelnytska who was appointed as its head in October 1991. == See also == Ossolineum List of libraries in Ukraine == References == == External links == Stefanyk National Scientific Library website


id: sukkulenten-sammlung-zurich-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkulenten-Sammlung_Zurich-0.md
category: reference
title: Sukkulenten-Sammlung Zurich
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukkulenten-Sammlung_Zurich
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:55.574288+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: sukkulenten-sammlung-zurich-20260505-0
summary:
Sukkulenten-Sammlung Zürich, literally succulent plant collection of the city of Zürich, is a botanical garden in the Swiss municipality of Zürich. It also houses a botanic library, a herbarium and the International Organizations for Succulent Plant Research (IOS). == Location == The greenhouses are located in district of Enge, on Zürichsee (Lake Zurich). They are a part of the Quaianlagen promenades, and are located on the southwestern lake shore. The collection is separated by the Mythenquai road from the lower lake shore promenade and the Enge harbour area, at the park facilities of the Mythenquai lido near the lower entrance to the Rieterpark. == History == At the end of the 1920s, Jakob Gasser, a cactus grower from Zürich, tried to sell his collection of about 1,500 succulents to the city government of Zürich, but the venture failed. in 1929, Julius Brann Gassersche, a store owner, acquired the unique collection and made a gift of it to the city of Zürich. The collection was housed in the greenhouses at the former site of the municipal gardens (Stadtgärtnerei) at Mythenquai, and established as Städtische Kakteensammlung, meaning urban cactus collection. Formally established in 1931, the collection houses one of the largest and


id: history-of-measurement-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement-0.md
category: reference
title: History of measurement
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:57.161665+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: history-of-measurement-20260505-0
summary:
The earliest recorded systems of weights and measures originate in the 3rd or 4th millennium BC. == History of units == === Units of length === Before the establishment of the decimal metric system in France during the French Revolution in the late 18th century, many units of length were based on parts of the human body. The Nippur cubit was one of the oldest known units of length. The oldest known metal standard for length corresponds to this Sumerian unit and dates from 2650 BCE. This copper bar was discovered in Nippur, on the banks of the Euphrates, and is kept in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Archaeologists consider that this 51.85 centimetres long unit was the origin of the Roman foot. Indeed, the Egyptians divided the Sumerian cubit into 28 fingers and 16 of these fingers gave a Roman foot of 29.633 cm. === Units of mass === The grain was the earliest unit of mass and is the smallest unit in the apothecary, avoirdupois, Tower, and troy systems. The early unit was a grain of wheat or barleycorn used to weigh the precious metals silver and gold. Larger units preserved in stone standards were developed that were used


id: history-of-measurement-20260505-1
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement-1.md
category: reference
title: History of measurement
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:57.161665+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: history-of-measurement-20260505-0
summary:
The metric system was first described in 1668 and officially adopted by France in 1799. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, it became the dominant system worldwide, although several countries, including the United States, China, and the United Kingdom continue to use their customary units, such as the mile. Among the numerous customary systems, many have been adapted to become an integer multiple of a related metric unit: The Scandinavian mile is now defined as 10 km, the Chinese jin is now defined as 0.5 kg, and the Dutch ons is now defined as 100 g. == See also == Historical metrology Metrication == References == This article incorporates public domain material from Specifications, Tolerances, and Other Technical Requirements for Weighing (Handbook 44 -2018). National Institute of Standards and Technology. == Further reading == , Measures and Weights in the Islamic World. An English Translation of Professor Walther Hinz's Handbook “Islamische Maße und Gewichte“, with a foreword by Professor Bosworth, F.B.A. Kuala Lumpur, ISTAC, 2002, ISBN 983-9379-27-5. This work is an annotated translation of a work in German by the late German orientalist Walther Hinz, published in the Handbuch der Orientalistik, erste Abteilung, Ergänzungsband I, Heft 1, Leiden, The Netherlands:


id: anthropic-units-20260505-0
file: data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_units-0.md
category: reference
title: Anthropic units
tags: science, encyclopedia
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_units
date_saved: 2026-05-05T09:31:59.511854+00:00
instance: kb-cron
parent: anthropic-units-20260505-0
summary:
The term anthropic unit (from Greek άνθρωπος, 'human') is used with different meanings in archaeology, in measurement and in social studies. == In archaeology == In archaeology, anthropic units are strata or deposits of material containing a high proportion of man-made detritus. For example: "… 'degraded anthropic units', i.e., deposits produced by weathering and decay of fired bricks and mixed fill with non-selected inclusions …" == In measurement == Following the coinage of the term "anthropic principle" by Brandon Carter in 1973–1974, units of measurement that are on a human scale are occasionally referred to as "anthropic units", as the example here: "… the metre and kilogram occupy a reasonably central position as far as symmetry in positive and negative powers of ten is concerned, emphasising that the SI units are natural anthropic units …" == In social studies == In fields of study such as sociology and ethnography, anthropic units are identifiable groupings of people. For example: "Ethnographers have been accustomed to deal with the 'race', the 'tribe' and the 'nation' as social or anthropic units …" and: "... among the more primitive anthropic units it seems a grave ineptitude for the Chukchees not to adopt the snowhouse building


