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1948 In Science
The year 1948 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below. Astronomy and space science * February 16 – Miranda, innermost of the large moons of Uranus, is discovered by Gerard Kuiper from the McDonald Observatory in Texas. * October 10 – An R-1 (missile) on test becomes the first Soviet launch to enter space. Biology * August 7 – Teaching and research in Mendelian genetics is prohibited in the Soviet Union in favour of Lysenkoist theories of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. * October 5 – Delegates to a conference organised by Sir Julian Huxley at Fontainebleau agree to formation of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. * November 20 – The South Island takahē, a flightless bird generally thought to have been extinct for fifty years, is rediscovered by Geoffrey Orbell near Lake Te Anau in the South Island of New Zealand. * Last recorded sighting of the Caspian tiger in Kazakhstan. * Publication of Fairfield Osborn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Orbell
Geoffrey Buckland Orbell (7 October 1908 – 14 August 2007) was a New Zealand doctor and keen tramper (bush walker) who was responsible for the rediscovery of the takahē in 1948. Biography Orbell grew up on a farm at Pukeuri, near Oamaru, in New Zealand's South Island. His father, Lionel Orbell, was a farmer and his mother, Rachel Buckland, was a watercolour artist. Orbell attended Waitaki Boys High School, Oamaru and Christ's College, Christchurch, before graduating in medicine from the University of Otago, Dunedin. He completed further studies in Melbourne, Australia, and at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, and practised as an ear, eye, nose and throat specialist in Invercargill. The takahē had been last sighted in 1898 and was widely thought to be extinct but Orbell suspected it might have survived. He had been interested in the bird since childhood and had read widely about it. He was convinced that if it still existed, it might be found in the Murchison Moun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code. Source code needs another computer program to execute because computers can only execute their native machine instructions. Therefore, source code may be translated to machine instructions using the language's compiler. ( Assembly language programs are translated using an assembler.) The resulting file is called an executable. Alternatively, source code may execute within the language's interpreter. If the executable is requested for execution, then the operating system loads it into memory and starts a process. The central processing unit will soon switch to this process so it can fetch, decode, and then execute each machine instruction. If the source code is requested for execution, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main news ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kathleen Booth
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth ( Britten, 9 July 1922 – 29 September 2022) was a British computer scientist and mathematician who wrote the first assembly language and designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbeck, University of London, Birkbeck College, University of London. She helped design three different machines including the ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator), SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and APEXC, APE(X)C. Early life and education Kathleen Britten was born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England, on 9 July 1922. She obtained a Bachelor of Science, BSc in mathematics from the University of London in 1944 and went on to get a PhD in Applied mathematics, Applied Mathematics in 1950. She married her colleague Andrew Donald Booth in 1950 and had two children. Career Kathleen Booth worked at Birkbeck College, 1946–62.. She travelled to the United States as Andrew Donald Booth, Andrew Booth's research assistant in 1947, visiting with John ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birkbeck College, University Of London
, mottoeng = Advice comes over nightTranslation used by Birkbeck. , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £4.3 m (2014) , budget = £109 million (2015) , parent = University of London , staff = , president = Baroness Bakewell , chancellor = The Princess Royal (University of London) , vice_chancellor = Wendy Thomson (University of London) , head_label = Master , head = David S Latchman , students = () , undergrad = () , postgrad = () , location = London, England, United Kingdom , coordinates = , colours = , mascot = , nickname = , affiliations = ACUEuropean University AssociationRoyal Academy of Dramatic ArtUniversities ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stored-program Computer
A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms. The definition is often extended with the requirement that the treatment of programs and data in memory be interchangeable or uniform. Description In principle, stored-program computers have been designed with various architectural characteristics. A computer with a von Neumann architecture stores program data and instruction data in the same memory, while a computer with a Harvard architecture has separate memories for storing program and data. However, the term ''stored-program computer'' is sometimes used as a synonym for the von Neumann architecture. Jack Copeland considers that it is "historically inappropriate, to refer to electronic stored-program digital computers as 'von Neumann machines'". Hennessy and Patterson wrote that the early Harvard m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malthusian
Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. This event, called a Malthusian catastrophe (also known as a Malthusian trap, population trap, Malthusian check, Malthusian crisis, Malthusian spectre, or Malthusian crunch) occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing famine or war, resulting in poverty and depopulation. Such a catastrophe inevitably has the effect of forcing the population to "correct" back to a lower, more easily sustainable level (quite rapidly, due to the potential severity and unpredictable results of the mitigating factors involved, as compared to the relatively slow time scales and well-understood processes governing unchecked growth or growth affected by preventive checks). Malthusianism has been linked to a variety of political and social movements ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Our Plundered Planet
''Our Plundered Planet'' is a book published in 1948 by Fairfield Osborn about environmental destruction by humankind. With a focus on soil, the book is a critique of humankind's poor stewardship of Earth. It typifies the earliest apocalyptic environmental literature, in which human beings are seen as destroyers of the natural world. ''Our Plundered Planet'', along with William Vogt's ''Road to Survival'', also published in 1948, launched a Malthusian revival in the post-WWII era, and would inspire Anne Howland Ehrlich and her colleague and husband Paul R. Ehrlich, authors of ''The Population Bomb'', ''The Dominant Animal'' and more than 30 other books on overpopulation and ecology. Influences In writing this book, Osborn was influenced by Guy I. Burch and Elmer Pendell's overpopulation tract ''Population Roads to Peace or War'' (1945) and Paul Sears' analysis of dust bowls in ''Deserts on the March'' (1935). He had also been influenced by various "New Deal" initiatives in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr
Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. (15 January 1887 – 16 September 1969), was an American conservationist. He was longtime president of the New York Zoological Society (today known as the Wildlife Conservation Society). Biography Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1887. Born into the wealthy and influential Osborn family, he was the son of Henry Fairfield Osborn, a prominent paleontologist, eugenicist and "distinguished Aryan enthusiast". After obtaining his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University, he went on to study biology at Cambridge University, but then pursued a career in international business. Towards the end of the First World War, he served briefly as a Captain in the United States Army, after which he returned to private enterprise. In 1935, he retired from business and devoted himself to environmental causes and especially to the New York Zoological Society (today known as the Wildlife Conservation Society). Following his election to the Soc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbekistan to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southwest, with a coastline along the Caspian Sea. Its capital is Astana, known as Nur-Sultan from 2019 to 2022. Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, was the country's capital until 1997. Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country, the largest and northernmost Muslim-majority country by land area, and the ninth-largest country in the world. It has a population of 19 million people, and one of the lowest population densities in the world, at fewer than 6 people per square kilometre (15 people per square mile). The country dominates Central Asia economically and politically, generating 60 percent of the region's GDP, primarily through its oil and gas industry; it also has vast mineral ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caspian Tiger
The Caspian tiger was a ''Panthera tigris tigris'' population native to eastern Turkey, northern Iran, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus around the Caspian Sea, Central Asia to northern Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang region in western China. Until the Middle Ages, it was also present in Ukraine and southern Russia. It inhabited sparse forests and riverine corridors in this region until the 1970s. This population was regarded as a distinct subspecies and assessed as extinct in 2003. Results of a phylogeographic analysis evinces that the Caspian and Siberian tiger populations shared a common continuous geographic distribution until the early 19th century. Some Caspian tigers were intermediate in size between Siberian and Bengal tigers. It was also called Balkhash tiger, Hyrcanian tiger, Turanian tiger, and Mazandaran tiger ( fa, ). Taxonomy ''Felis virgata'' was a scientific name used by Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger in 1815 for the greyish tiger in the area surrounding the Caspian Sea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
