| 1453 | France defeats England at Castillon, France, ending the Hundred Years’ War. | |
| 1762 | Peter III of Russia is murdered and his wife, Catherine II, takes the throne. | |
| 1785 | France limits the importation of goods from Britain. | |
| 1791 | National Guard troops open fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Paris. | |
| 1799 | Ottoman forces, supported by the British, capture Aboukir, Egypt from the French. | |
| 1801 | The U.S. fleet arrives in Tripoli. | |
| 1815 | Napoleon Bonaparte surrenders to the British at Rochefort, France. | |
| 1821 | Andrew Jackson becomes the governor of Florida. | |
| 1864 | Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaces General Joseph E. Johnston with General John Bell Hood in hopes of defeating Union General William T. Sherman outside Atlanta. | |
| 1898 | U.S. troops under General William R. Shafter take Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War. | |
| 1944 | Field Marshall Erwin Rommel is wounded when an Allied fighter strafes his staff car in France. | |
| 1946 | Chinese communists attack the Nationalist army on the Yangtze River. | |
| 1960 | American pilot Francis Gary Powers pleads guilty to spying charges in a Moscow court. | |
| 1966 | Ho Chi Minh orders a partial mobilization of North Vietnam to defend against American airstrikes. | |
| 1987 | Lt. Col. Oliver North and Rear Adm. John Poindexter begin testifying to Congress regarding the Iran-Contra scandal. |
But now the phenomenon has been observed in coral at low-light depths:...the pink and purple fluorescence in shallow waters act as a kind of sunscreen. The fluorescent pigments absorb damaging wavelengths of light and emit it as pink or purple light, protecting the single-celled organisms called zooxanthellae that live symbiotically inside coral. Zooxanthellae are photosynthetic and they provide the coral with food in exchange for shelter.
Coral may be converting blue light into orange-red light that penetrates deeper into the coral tissue, where photosynthetic zooxanthellae live. Fluorescence, by definition, is the absorption of light in one color and the emission in another... Blue light may be good at penetrating water and for photosynthesis, but it doesn’t penetrate the coral’s tissues well. And zooxanthellae can live deep inside coral...More at The Atlantic. The paper is at Proc Roy Soc B.
Mikhail Matz, a coral scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, says he’s not yet convinced this completely explains the function of the fluorescent pigment in deep water corals. As humans with eyes, we tend focus on the light coming from these coral. But maybe the glow isn’t the point. “The fluorescence may not be the important aspect. It could be a side effect,” he says. It could be that fluorescent proteins are actually there just to absorb light as the part of some metabolism, and the glow that we see is incidental to its true purpose.
George might have killed Isabella if not for Topsy’s sudden—and rather unexpected—intervention. Upon seeing her mistress being ill-used, the faithful cat sprang into action. As the Illustrated Police News relates:This is just the first of three cases that explain why women alone tend to become cat ladies or dog ladies. Although, in one case, it was the man's own dog that prevented him from killing his wife.
“The wife told the warrant-officer Roskelly that while on the ground and screaming, a favorite cat, named Topsy, suddenly sprang on her husband and fastened her claws in his eyes and her teeth in his face. Her husband could not tear the cat away, and he was obliged to implore her to take the cat from him to save his life.”
George was arrested, charged, and ultimately sentenced to prison for one month.
This wouldn't work in a species where a female mates with multiple partners before laying eggs, but apparently mosquitoes aren't like that. Of course, the first question is, what could possibly go wrong? It's not like we haven't tried "fixing" our environment by introducing new creatures who became invasive, and in this case, it's both mosquitoes and bacteria. Of course, the yellow fever mosquitoes are invasive already, but introducing one critter to take care of another critter has gone wrong before. The second thought one has is sympathy for the poor grad student who had to sort millions of male mosquitoes from the females. Read more about this project at the Verge.Verily is working with Fresno’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District to release 1 million male mosquitoes every week for 20 weeks, starting now. These mosquitoes have been rendered essentially sterile by infection with a bacteria called Wolbachia pipientis, which naturally colonizes mosquitoes and other insects in the wild. In time, if the local females continue to mate with the sterile males, the population should drop. The effort will ramp up to the full 1 million mosquito capacity over the next week, Kathleen Parkes, a Verily spokesperson, told The Verge in an email.
