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HandWiki is the world's largest wiki-style encyclopedia dedicated to science, technology and computing. It allows you to create and edit articles as long as you have external citations and login account. In addition, this is a content management environment that can be used for collaborative editing of original scholarly content, such as books, manuals, monographs and tutorials.

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Biography
Nicholas B. Suntzeff
Nicholas B. Suntzeff (born November 22, 1952, San Francisco ) is an American University Distinguished Professor and holds the Mitchell/Heep/Munnerlyn Chair of Observational Astronomy in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he is Director of the Astronomy Program. He is an observational astronomer specializing in cosmology, supernovae, stellar populations, and astro
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  • 02 Dec 2022
Biography
William Friese-Greene
William Friese-Greene (born William Edward Green, 7 September 1855 – 5 May 1921) was a prolific English inventor and professional photographer. He is principally known as a pioneer in the field of motion pictures, creating a series of cameras in the period 1888–1891 with which he shot moving pictures in London. He went on to patent an early two-colour filming process in 1905. His inventions
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  • 02 Dec 2022
Biography
Lee Grodzins
Lee Grodzins (born July 10, 1926) is an American professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[1] After groundbreaking work as a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Grodzins joined the faculty of MIT, where he taught physics for nearly four decades. He was also head of R&D for Niton Corporation, which developed devices to detect dangerous contaminant
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  • 02 Dec 2022
Biography
Patrick G. Forrester
Patrick Graham Forrester (born March 31, 1957) is a retired United States Army officer and a NASA astronaut. At the time of his retirement from the U.S. Army, Forrester had achieved the rank of colonel. He is married and has two children. Forrester has flown on three Space Shuttle missions, STS-105, STS-117 and STS-128. He is the current Chief of the Astronaut Office, having assumed the role fr
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  • 02 Dec 2022
Biography
Ellery Schempp
Ellery Schempp (born Ellory Schempp, August 5, 1940) is a physicist[1] and is known for being the primary student involved in the landmark 1963 United States Supreme Court decision of Abington School District v. Schempp[2] which declared that required public school sanctioned Bible readings were unconstitutional. Schempp was born in Philadelphia and grew up in the Roslyn community of Abington
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  • 02 Dec 2022
Biography
Will Provine
William Ball Provine (February 19, 1942 – September 1, 2015) was an American historian of science and of evolutionary biology and population genetics. He was the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor at Cornell University and was a professor in the Departments of History, Science and Technology Studies, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Provine was born in Tenn
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  • 02 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test
The Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Color Vision test is a test of the human visual system often used to test for color blindness. The system was developed by Dean Farnsworth in the 1940s and it tests the ability to isolate and arrange minute differences in various color targets with constant value and chroma that cover all the visual hues described by the Munsell color system. There are several variations of the test, one featuring 100 color hues and one featuring 15 color hues. Originally taken in an analog environment with physical hue tiles, the test is now taken from computer consoles. An accurate quantification of color vision accuracy is particularly important to designers, photographers and colorists, who all rely on accurate color vision to produce quality content.
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  • 01 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Mosasaurus
Mosasaurus (/ˌmoʊzəˈsɔːrəs/; "lizard of the Meuse River") is the type genus (defining example) of the mosasaurs, an extinct group of aquatic squamate reptiles. It lived from about 82 to 66 million years ago during the Campanian and Maastrichtian stages of the Late Cretaceous. The earliest fossils of Mosasaurus known to science were found as skulls in a chalk quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht in the late 18th century, which were initially thought to have been the bones of crocodiles or whales. One skull discovered around 1780, and which was seized by France during the French Revolutionary Wars for its scientific value, was famously nicknamed the "great animal of Maastricht". In 1808, naturalist Georges Cuvier concluded that it belonged to a giant marine lizard with similarities to monitor lizards but otherwise unlike any known living animal. This concept was revolutionary at the time and helped support the then-developing ideas of extinction. Cuvier did not designate a scientific name for the new animal, and this was done by William Daniel Conybeare in 1822 when he named it Mosasaurus in reference to its origin in fossil deposits near the Meuse River. The exact affinities of Mosasaurus as a squamate remain controversial, and scientists continue to debate whether its closest living relatives are monitor lizards or snakes. Traditional interpretations have estimated the maximum length of the largest species, M. hoffmannii, to be up to 17.1 meters (56 ft), making it one of the largest mosasaurs, although some scientists consider this an overestimation with recent estimates suggesting a length closer to 13 meters (43 ft). The skull of Mosasaurus was equipped with robust jaws capable of swinging back and forth and strong muscles capable of powerful bites using dozens of large teeth adapted for cutting prey. Its four limbs were shaped into robust paddles to steer the animal underwater. Its tail was long and ended in a downward bend and a paddle-like fluke. Mosasaurus was a predator possessing excellent vision to compensate for its poor sense of smell, and a high metabolic rate suggesting it was endothermic ("warm-blooded"), an adaptation only found in mosasaurs among squamates. There is considerable morphological variability across the currently-recognized species in Mosasaurus—from the robustly-built M. hoffmannii to the slender and serpentine M. lemonnieri—but an unclear diagnosis (description of distinguishing features) of the type species M. hoffmannii led to a historically problematic classification. As a result, more than fifty different species have been attributed to the genus in the past. A redescription of the type specimen in 2017 helped resolve the taxonomy issue and confirmed at least five species to be within the genus. Another five species still nominally classified within Mosasaurus are planned to be reassessed in a future study. Fossil evidence suggests Mosasaurus inhabited much of the Atlantic Ocean and the seaways adjacent to it. Mosasaurus fossils have been found in places as diverse as North and South America, Europe, Africa, Western Asia, and Antarctica. This distribution encompassed a wide range of oceanic climates including tropical, subtropical, temperate, and subpolar climates. Mosasaurus was a common large predator in these oceans and was positioned at the top of the food chain. Paleontologists believe its diet would have included virtually any animal; it likely preyed on bony fish, sharks, cephalopods, birds, and other marine reptiles including sea turtles and other mosasaurs. It likely preferred to hunt in open water near the surface. From an ecological standpoint, Mosasaurus probably had a profound impact on the structuring of marine ecosystems; its arrival in some locations such as the Western Interior Seaway in North America coincides with a complete turnover of faunal assemblages and diversity. Mosasaurus faced competition with other large predatory mosasaurs such as Prognathodon and Tylosaurus—which were known to feed on similar prey—though they were able to coexist in the same ecosystems through niche partitioning. There were still conflicts among them, as an instance of Tylosaurus attacking a Mosasaurus has been documented. Several fossils document deliberate attacks on Mosasaurus individuals by members of the same species. Infighting likely took place in the form of snout grappling, similarly seen in modern crocodiles today.
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  • 01 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Solar System Model
Solar System models, especially mechanical models, called orreries, that illustrate the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System have been built for centuries. While they often showed relative sizes, these models were usually not built to scale. The enormous ratio of interplanetary distances to planetary diameters makes constructing a scale model of the Solar System a challenging task. As one example of the difficulty, the distance between the Earth and the Sun is almost 12,000 times the diameter of the Earth. If the smaller planets are to be easily visible to the naked eye, large outdoor spaces are generally necessary, as is some means for highlighting objects that might otherwise not be noticed from a distance. The Boston Museum of Science has placed bronze models of the planets in major public buildings, all on similar stands with interpretive labels. For example, the model of Jupiter is located in the cavernous South Station waiting area. The properly-scaled, basket-ball-sized model is 1.3 miles (2.14 km) from the model Sun which is located at the museum, graphically illustrating the immense empty space in the Solar System. The objects in such large models do not move. Traditional orreries often did move, and some used clockworks to display the relative speeds of objects accurately. These can be thought of as being correctly scaled in time, instead of distance. Modern digital simulations now complement these mechanical representations, enabling interactive exploration of planetary orbits, relative velocities, and dynamic trajectories, thereby enhancing education and public engagement with astronomy.
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  • 19 Sep 2025
Topic Review
Crosslinguistic Influence
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) refers to the different ways in which one language can affect another within an individual speaker. It typically involves two languages that can affect one another in a bilingual speaker.  An example of CLI is the influence of Korean on a Korean native speaker who is learning Japanese or French. Less typically, it could also refer to an interaction between different dialects in the mind of a monolingual speaker. CLI can be observed across subsystems of languages including pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, and orthography. Discussed further in this article are particular subcategories of CLI—transfer, attrition, the complementarity principle, and additional theories.
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  • 01 Dec 2022
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