title: Kevin Malone

text: Kevin suffers a series of setbacks during the third season. In the episode "Money", Kevin announces that he has split from the band "Scrantonicity" and formed "Scrantonicity II". However, none of his coworkers come to support his new band. In "The Chair Model", Kevin is angered when the Dunder Mifflin employees are forced to park in a satellite parking lot, and he teams up with Andy in order to reclaim their parking spaces. Though Michael denies him the opportunity to call a meeting, Kevin and Andy decide to call a meeting with the bosses of the office park, and they are given the parking spaces back. Kevin is cheered up by the news, revealing that he's had a hard time because Stacy broke off their engagement.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "Goodbye, Toby", Dwight pranks the office's new HR representative Holly Flax by telling her that Kevin is mentally challenged, and that he got his job at Dunder Mifflin through a special program. Holly pays special attention to Kevin, praising him for doing simple tasks. Kevin, however, interprets Holly's frequent praise and breathy condescension as sexual interest in him.


title: Kevin Malone

text: At the beginning of the season, Holly still believes Kevin is mentally challenged. When Angela berates Kevin over a mistake he made, Holly steps in; Kevin reveals that he is not mentally challenged, which embarrasses Holly.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "Blood Drive", Kevin meets a woman named Lynn, but is awkward when talking to her. Andy, Jim, and Pam give him greatly disparate advice on wooing her in "Golden Ticket", and ultimately he successfully asks her to dinner and a movie. They are later seen kissing passionately at Michael's "Cafe Disco". In a deleted scene, Kevin reveals that he and Lynn had broken up.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "Casual Friday" Kevin brings a batch of his homemade chili (which he names "Kevin's Famous Chili") upstairs to the office, only to drop the pot, causing chili to spill all over the floor in front of Erin's desk. He desperately tries to clean up the mess, only to drench papers and binders in chili while spreading the food all over the carpet.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "The Delivery", Michael attempts to set Kevin up with the new receptionist, Erin Hannon, telling Kevin that she is interested in him. When Erin tells Michael that she likes Andy, not Kevin, Michael rudely tells Kevin that he is not good enough to date Erin, infuriating and confusing Kevin.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "Secretary's Day", the office are amused by a video Oscar makes that compares Kevin's voice to Cookie Monster. Kevin reports the video to Gabe, but the office ignores Gabe's attempts to stop the mockery. Ultimately, Kevin ends up impersonating Gabe as well, which makes everybody laugh. At the end of the episode, Kevin makes a video of Oscar as The Count, with only Michael finding it funny.


title: Kevin Malone

text: Following the holiday break, Kevin writes on Pam's "New Year's Resolution Board" for him to eat more vegetables. Later, Michael is upset that Holly did not stick to her ultimatum with A.J., projects his anger onto the rest of the office for not sticking to their resolutions; he forces Kevin to eat a stalk of broccoli. Michael later apologizes to Kevin for his actions, and Kevin readily forgives him. In "Todd Packer", Kevin is excited when he learns Todd Packer will be working at the office full-time, but upon his arrival at the office, Todd insults him. Visibly hurt, Michael later calls Kevin to the front of the office so Packer can apologize to him, though Packer's apology is insincere.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "Goodbye, Michael", Michael's initial going-away present to Kevin is a caricature of Kevin as a pig sloppily eating a pizza. Michael rips it up, telling Kevin that he will eventually be thin and find love. Kevin informs Michael that he's okay with who he is now.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "Trivia", Kevin tries to join the "A-team" for the trivia contest, which includes Andy, Jim, Darryl, and Ryan, only to be gently steered away from that group and into the "Hail Mary" team with the less intellectually imposing Kelly, Erin, and Meredith. To the astonishment of Andy and all of the other teams at the gay bar where the contest is taking place, the Hail Mary team in general and Kevin in particular prove to be excellent at answering obscure questions and win the $1,000 prize. Kevin speaks with pride about the achievement. However, in the episode's closing scenes, Kevin and the rest of his team try to win a higher-stakes trivia contest and fail miserably.


title: Kevin Malone

text: While Kevin is generally portrayed as a simple-minded and unsophisticated person, he is shown to exhibit remarkable astuteness, being one of the only staff members to notice Andy is suffering from a mental breakdown following his abrupt dismissal from Dunder Mifflin. Towards the end of the season, Kevin is revealed to have adopted an old and feeble dog, Ruby.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In "The Boat", Kevin overhears Oscar talking about kissing Angela's husband Robert. When Oscar sees that Kevin heard, he goes to great lengths to ensure that Kevin keeps the secret. Later, in "Vandalism", Kevin and Oscar attend Angela's son's birthday party, where Kevin confronts Robert and accuses him of using Oscar and Angela to boost his political campaign.


title: Kevin Malone

text: In the series finale, Dwight mentions that he had fired Kevin shortly after the airing of the documentary; a later interview reveals that Kevin had been cooking the books at Dunder-Mifflin for the duration of the series, using the invented number "Keleven" to correct his myriad mathematical errors. During Dwight's bachelor party, Jim takes all of the current and past men from the office to a bar, where it is revealed that Kevin is the owner. When Kevin refuses them service and tells them to leave, Dwight tells Kevin that he was only fired because of his constant mistakes, and that he misses him and still considers him a friend. Kevin forgives Dwight and tells him that he misses him too. He is later seen attending Dwight and Angela's wedding.


title: Kevin Malone

text: During the time period between the second and third seasons, NBC posted "The Accountants", a season of "webisodes" (online mini episodes) with Kevin, Oscar, and Angela attempting to solve an accounting error. The error ends up being the fault of Angela and when it is discovered, Kevin says it is the best day of his life.


title: Kevin Malone

text: Throughout the summer between the fourth and fifth seasons, NBC's website featured a new season of webisodes entitled "Kevin's Loan". The four online episodes detailed Kevin's attempts to find money in order to pay his gambling debt back to his bookmaker. Kevin settles on trying to get a small business loan under the auspices of selling ice cream. When his first attempt goes poorly, Darryl joins Kevin in making the proposal to another loan officer at the same bank and they bring a sample into the meeting. Darryl flirts with the female loan officer and asks her to "taste the ice cream". When she does, she remarks that it tastes like Breyer's. The first loan officer comes in and Darryl asks him to taste the ice cream. The loan officer asks if they made the ice cream or bought it in a store and Kevin throws a nervous fit, hissing at Darryl to abort their mission. The webisode season ends with Kevin selling ice cream outside of the office to pay back his debt. Stanley comes out to buy some but refuses to pay the ten dollar cost. And Kevin is seen with a sly smile turned to a slight frown.


title: Kevin Malone

text: Kevin became a fan-favorite due to his numerous quirks and optimistic outlook in life, though "Screen Rant" noted several inconsistencies with his character. His "spilled chili" scene became one of the most memorable moments on the show, with actor Brian Baumgartner paying homage to the scene in a real-life commercial for Bush's Baked Beans aired on National Chili Day.


title: Electronic (band)

text: Electronic were an English alternative dance supergroup formed by singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner (of New Order) and guitarist Johnny Marr (of The Smiths). They co-wrote the majority of their output between 1989 and 1998, collaborating with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, of Pet Shop Boys, on three tracks in their early years, and former Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos on nine songs in 1995.


title: Electronic (band)

text: The two first met in 1984 when the Smiths guitarist contributed to a Quando Quango track that Sumner was producing. Later in 1988, Sumner was frustrated because his New Order bandmates were not receptive to his desire to add synth programming to their music. He decided to produce a solo album but found that he did not enjoy working alone, so he called Marr for help.


title: Electronic (band)

text: Inspired by contemporary dance music like Italo house and acts such as Technotronic, their initial concept was to release white label records on Factory and remain an anonymous entity, in contrast to their considerable reputations with The Smiths and New Order. The track "Lucky Bag" and the name Electronic itself are two of the vestiges of this initial approach. In 1989, Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant suggested a collaboration when he heard of the budding partnership through sleeve designer Mark Farrow.


title: Electronic (band)

text: The fruits of this union became "Getting Away with It", Electronic's debut single which was released in December 1989 and sold around a quarter of a million copies. The drums on this record were played by ABC's David Palmer and the string arrangement was written by Anne Dudley. It was a Top 40 hit in America the following spring and they toured in support for Depeche Mode in August 1990. After this success, Sumner and Marr took a more commercial direction, blending synthesizers, guitars and analogue technology while retaining the template of contemporary alternative rock.


title: Electronic (band)

text: After a year of intensive recording (and 18 months after "Getting Away with It"), the debut album "Electronic" was released to critical acclaim and domestic commercial success, featuring the Top 10 single "Get the Message" and another Top 40 single, "Feel Every Beat". The album sold over a million copies worldwide.


title: Electronic (band)

text: Along with its fusion of rock and pop, Electronic continued their interest in dance music by inviting DJs to remix their singles and album tracks; this was a trend that continued throughout their career. Prominent acts that worked on Electronic songs around this period include Danny Rampling, DNA, Dave Shaw and Quando Quango founder and Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering.


title: Electronic (band)

text: After the first album was released and promoted, Marr and Sumner recorded albums with The The and New Order respectively, regrouping with Neil Tennant in 1992 to record their fourth and highest-charting single "Disappointed".


title: Electronic (band)

text: Electronic was resumed when these activities ended, and work began on the second album in late 1994. The core duo was joined by Karl Bartos, ex-percussionist and songwriter with Kraftwerk.


title: Electronic (band)

text: "Raise the Pressure" was released in July 1996 on the Parlophone label in the UK and Warner Bros. Like its predecessor it fused dance music with a guitar-led approach, but some reviewers felt its production was too rich and distracted from the songs. The album spawned two guitar oriented singles, "Forbidden City" [UK #14] and "For You" [UK #16], with the dancier "Second Nature" issued in February 1997 and reaching UK #35.


title: Electronic (band)

text: Electronic did not promote "Raise the Pressure" with a tour, although they performed its singles live on television shows including Top of the Pops" and "TFI Friday"." Instead, they chose to swiftly record their third album. This was to be a reaction to the length of time they spent producing "Raise the Pressure", with an emphasis on writing and demoing songs quickly before recording them. Marr and Sumner were joined by Doves bassist Jimi Goodwin and Black Grape drummer Ged Lynch, and together they made the album "Twisted Tenderness" as a more conventional four-piece group. The album did not return the group to their early 1990s levels of popularity but was well received by critics.


title: Electronic (band)

text: Neither Sumner nor Marr has gone on record with any formal dissolution of the band despite both having moved on to other projects. However, in 2003, Marr did agree that the band had reached "its natural conclusion" and that he was happy that it ended on a positive note. Sumner recorded with New Order again and, in 2009, formed a new band, Bad Lieutenant. Marr has since worked with many acts, including The Healers, Pet Shop Boys, The Cribs and Modest Mouse, as well as releasing multiple solo albums.


title: Electronic (band)

text: Marr and Sumner played with the Doves for the Manchester v Cancer charity concert in January 2006 and the compilation album "Get the Message – The Best of" was released that September to mild promotion and sales [UK #194]. In July 2013 Sumner joined Marr at Jodrell Bank to perform "Getting Away With It". Marr was supporting for New Order and performing songs from his career.


title: Microsecond

text: A microsecond is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10 or ) of a second. Its symbol is μs, sometimes simplified to us when Unicode is not available.


title: Microsecond

text: A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10 and 10 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds.


title: Standard-definition television

text: Standard-definition television (SDTV, SD, often shortened to standard definition) is a television system which uses a resolution that is not considered to be either high or enhanced definition. "Standard" refers to it being the prevailing specification for broadcast (and later, cable) television in the mid- to late-20th century, and compatible with legacy analog broadcast systems.


title: Standard-definition television

text: The two common SDTV signal types are 576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution, derived from the European-developed PAL and SECAM systems, and 480i based on the American NTSC system. Common SDTV refresh rates are 25, 29.97 and 30 frames per second. Both systems use


title: Standard-definition television

text: Standards that support digital SDTV broadcast include DVB, ATSC, and ISDB. The last two were originally developed for HDTV, but are also used for their ability to deliver multiple SD video and audio streams via multiplexing. In North America, digital SDTV is broadcast in the same 4:3 aspect ratio as NTSC signals, with widescreen content often being center cut. However, the aspect ratio of widescreen content may be preserved in a 4:3 frame through letterboxing. In other parts of the world that used the PAL or SECAM color systems, digital standard-definition television is now usually shown with a , with the transition occurring between the mid-1990s and late-2000s depending on region. Older programs with a 4:3 aspect ratio are broadcast with a flag that switches the display to 4:3.


title: Standard-definition television

text: Digital SDTV eliminates the ghosting and noisy images associated with analog systems. However, if the reception has interference or is poor, where the error correction cannot compensate one will encounter various other artifacts such as image freezing, stuttering or dropouts from missing intra-frames or blockiness from missing macroblocks.


title: Standard-definition television

text: The pixel aspect ratio is the same for 720- and 704-pixel resolutions because the visible image (be it 4:3 or 16:9) is contained in the center 704 horizontal pixels of the digital frame. In the case of a digital video line having 720 horizontal pixels (including horizontal blanking), only the center 704 pixels contain the actual 4:3 or 16:9 image, and the 8-pixel-wide stripes on either side are called nominal analog blanking or horizontal blanking and should be discarded when displaying the image. Nominal analog blanking should not be confused with overscan, as overscan areas are part of the actual 4:3 or 16:9 image.


title: Standard-definition television

text: For SMPTE 259M-C compliance, an SDTV broadcast image is scaled to 720 pixels wide for every 480 NTSC (or 576 PAL) lines of the image with the amount of non-proportional line scaling dependent on either the display or pixel aspect ratio. The display ratio for broadcast widescreen is commonly 16:9, the display ratio for a traditional or letterboxed broadcast is 4:3.


title: Standard-definition television

text: An SDTV image outside the constraints of the SMPTE standards requires no non-proportional scaling with 640 pixels for every line of the image. The display and pixel aspect ratio is generally not required with the line height defining the aspect. For widescreen 16:9, 360 lines define a widescreen image and for traditional 4:3, 480 lines define an image.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Philippine Airlines Flight 434, sometimes referred to as PAL434 or PR434, was a flight on December 11, 1994 from Cebu to Tokyo on a Boeing 747-283B that was seriously damaged by a bomb, killing one passenger and damaging vital control systems. The bombing was a test run of the unsuccessful Bojinka terrorist attacks. The Boeing 747 (tail number EI-BWF) was flying the second leg of a route from Ninoy Aquino International Airport (formerly Manila International Airport), Pasay in the Philippines, to Narita International Airport, in Tokyo, Japan, with a stop at Mactan–Cebu International Airport, Cebu, in the Philippines. After the bomb detonated, 58-year-old veteran pilot Captain Eduardo "Ed" Reyes was able to land the aircraft, saving it and the remaining passengers and crew.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Authorities later discovered that Ramzi Yousef, a passenger on the aircraft's prior flight leg, had placed the explosive. Yousef boarded the flight under the fake Italian name "Armaldo Forlani", an incorrect spelling of the name of the Italian legislator Arnaldo Forlani, in order not to get caught. Yousef was later convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: The aircraft operating Flight 434 was a 15-year-old Boeing 747-283BM, registration EI-BWF, serial number 21575.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: It made its first flight on February 17, 1979, and was delivered to Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) on March 2, 1979 as SE-DFZ, operating the plane as "Knut Viking". The plane was then delivered to Philippine Airlines on April 1, 1992, after flying with Nigeria Airways, Lionair, and Aerolíneas Argentinas, from June 3, 1983, to March 30, 1992.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Ramzi Yousef boarded the aircraft for the Manila to Cebu leg of the flight. The plane departed from Manila at 5:35 a.m. () After the plane was airborne, he went into the lavatory with his toiletry bag in hand and took off his shoes to get out the batteries, wiring, and spark source hidden in the heel below a level where metal detectors in use at the time couldn't detect. Yousef removed a modified Casio digital watch from his wrist to be used as a timer, unpacked the remaining materials from his toiletry bag, and assembled his bomb. He set the timer for four hours later, when he would be long disembarked and the plane would be far out over the ocean and en route to Tokyo during the next leg of its journey, put the entire bomb back into the bag, and returned to his assigned seat.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: After moving to seat 26K following a granted permission by a flight attendant due to his claim that he could get a better view from that seat, Yousef tucked the assembled bomb into the life vest pocket underneath. Yousef decided here as in some 747 models, the fuel tank is underneath which would cause considerable damage and most likely bring the plane down; the 747 used for this flight had the fuel tank further back. He exited the aircraft in Cebu. Philippine domestic Flight Attendant Maria De La Cruz noticed that Yousef had switched seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight and got off the plane in Cebu with the domestic cabin crew, but did not pass the information along to the international flight crew that boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo. 25 other passengers also got off the plane at Cebu, where 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew consisting of Flight Purser Isidro Mangahas, Jr., Flight Stewards Fernando Bayot, Agustin Azurin, Ronnie Macapagal, E. Reyes, R. Santiago, Flight Attendants M. Alvar, Alpha Nicolasin, Cynthia Tengonciang, Andre Palma, Socorro Mendoza, E. Co, L. Garcia, N. dela Cruz, Adora Altarejos, L. Abella and Japanese interpreter K. Okada, boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Flight 434 landed in Cebu at 6:50 a.m., after a flight time of 1 hour 15 minutes. At 8:38 a.m., after a 38-minute delay due to airport congestion, the plane took off with a total of 273 passengers on board. Among them was 24-year-old , a Japanese industrial sewing machine maker returning from a business trip to Cebu, occupying seat 26K. At 11:43 a.m. Eastern Indonesian Time, 4 hours after Yousef planted his bomb, the device exploded Ikegami’s seat injuring an additional ten passengers in the adjacent seats in front of and behind seat 26K. Steward Fernando Bayot tried to pull him out of the hole that was from the explosion, but soon Bayot realized that part of Ikegami’s body was missing, and that Ikegami had died. After that Bayot reported to the captain. The blast also blew off a two-square-foot (0.2 m²) portion of the cabin floor leaving a gaping hole leading to the cargo hold location, and the cabin's rapid expansion from the explosion severed a number of control cables in the ceiling that controlled the plane's right aileron, as well as cables that connected to the steering controls of both the Captain and First Officer.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: The severity of the disaster was reduced by several mitigating factors. One was that this particular 747 had a modified seating arrangement instead of the standard layout, making seat 26K two rows forward of the center fuel tank. The hole in the floor beneath the seat punched through to the cargo hold instead of the fuel tank, sparing the plane from exploding. The bomb's orientation, positioned front-to-back and upward angled from horizontal, caused the blast to expand vertically and lengthwise. This spared the plane's outer structure, as Ikegami's body absorbed most of the blast force; the lower half of his body fell into the cargo hold. Additionally, due to the 38-minute delay in takeoff from Cebu the plane was not as far out to sea as anticipated, which contributed to the captain's available options for an emergency landing.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Masaharu Mochizuki, a passenger on the flight, recalled that passengers, both injured and uninjured, initially tried to move away from the blast site, but cabin crew told passengers to remain in place until an assessment of the situation could be made. Assistant purser and lead economy class flight attendant, Fernando Bayot, moved an injured passenger named Yukihiko Osui away from the bomb site. Bayot then saw Ikegami and tried to pull him out of the hole, but soon realized that most of Ikegami's body below the waist was either damaged or missing entirely. In order to prevent additional panic, Bayot called another flight attendant over to give the appearance that they were tending to Ikegami's needs with a blanket and oxygen mask, then reported the extent of the passenger injuries to the cockpit. Of the ten passengers who were injured, one needed urgent medical care.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Immediately after the bombing, the aircraft banked hard to the right, but the autopilot quickly fixed the bank. After the blast, Captain Reyes asked Systems Engineer Dexter Comendador to survey the blast area to check for damage. Reyes placed the Mayday call, requesting landing at Naha Airport, Okinawa Island, Okinawa Prefecture. The Japanese air traffic controller experienced difficulty in trying to understand Reyes' request, so American air traffic controllers from a U.S. military base on Okinawa took over and processed Reyes' landing. They directed a USAF Learjet towards PAL 434 to visually check for damage of the outer fuselage and to verify that the landing gear was in place. The autopilot had stopped responding to Reyes' commands and the aircraft flew past Okinawa.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Reyes said in an interview for the Canadian television series "Mayday" that when he disengaged the autopilot he feared that the aircraft would bank right again and the crew would lose control of the aircraft; because of the pressing need to land quickly to attend to the injured and inspect the plane for additional damage, however, Reyes instructed First Officer Jaime Herrera to take hold of his own controls and then Reyes deactivated the autopilot. The aircraft did not bank after the disengagement of the autopilot, but neither would it respond to steering inputs from either controller due to the control cable damage caused by the bomb. The crew struggled to use the ailerons, which could allow the aircraft to roll but were still unable to change the plane's direction. After thinking through the different hypothetical methods of control, the crew settled on using asymmetric thrust to control the jet, in a very similar fashion to United Airlines Flight 232's crew five years earlier, because other methods of control were either deemed too risky to attempt, or would not have as much effect as other ways.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: By using the throttles to steer the plane, reducing air speed to both control the radius of turns and to allow the plane to descend, and dumping fuel to lessen the strain on the landing gear, the Captain landed the damaged 747 at Naha Airport at 12:45 p.m., one hour after the bomb exploded. The aircraft's other 272 passengers and 20 crew members survived.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: U.S. prosecutors said the device was a "Mark II" PETN "microbomb" constructed using Casio digital watches as described in Phase I of the Bojinka plot, for which this was a test. On Flight 434, Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January 1995. The bomb was, or at least all of its components were, designed to slip through airport security checks undetected. The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Manila police were able to track the batteries used in the bomb and many of its contents from Okinawa back to Manila. Police uncovered Yousef's plan on the night of January 6 and the early morning of January 7, 1995, and Yousef was arrested a month later in Pakistan. He was extradited back to the United States to face trial wherein the New York Supreme Court gave him a life sentence with an additional 240 years. Yousef concurrently serves his terms at the ADX Florence prison. Ramzi Yousef's accomplices also received 240 years in prison.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: The flight deck and cabin crew members were commended by President Fidel Ramos for their "professional handling of a potentially disastrous situation" and went their separate ways following the incident. Ed Reyes transferred to Cebu Pacific to work as an Administrative Check Pilot, flight instructor, and DC-9 captain until his retirement in 2002. He served as Board Secretary and Director of Airlink International Aviation School, also working as an aviation course professor in the same institution until his death on February 14, 2007, from prostate cancer. First Officer Jaime Herrera was later promoted to Captain and continued to fly for Philippine Airlines until his retirement in 2008. He died on March 27, 2021, at the age of 73. Systems Engineer Dexter Comendador also moved to Cebu Pacific in 1998 and served as a management pilot in that company, then moved to Philippines AirAsia in 2011 where he served as COO and was later appointed as interim CEO in July 2016 and CEO in January 2017. Comendador retired in July 2019.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: The aircraft, then registered as EI-BWF, was later converted to a cargo configuration as Boeing 747-283B(SF). It subsequently changed hands several times, always to air cargo companies, and was finally placed in storage in 2007 at Châteauroux-Centre "Marcel Dassault" Airport.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: Philippine Airlines still uses flight number 434, but it currently operates as a Cebu–Narita sector that utilizes an Airbus A321 or A330. The airline retired its last 747 aircraft in September 2014. PAL still operates a Manila-Tokyo (Narita and Haneda) sector separately.


title: Philippine Airlines Flight 434

text: The events of Flight 434 were featured in "Bomb on Board", a Season 3 (2005) episode of the Canadian TV series "Mayday" (called "Air Emergency" and "Air Disasters" in the United States and "Air Crash Investigation" in the UK and elsewhere around the world). Filipino Canadian actor Von Flores portrayed Captain Reyes while Canadian actor and comedian Sam Kalilieh played Ramzi Yousef.


title: Naomi Wu

text: Naomi Wu, also known as Sexy Cyborg (), is a Chinese DIY maker and internet personality. As an advocate of women in STEM, transhumanism, open source hardware, and body modification, she attempts to challenge gender and tech stereotypes with a flamboyant public persona, using objectification of her appearance to inspire women.


title: Naomi Wu

text: Naomi was raised as a boy due to the one-child policy in China at the time. She remembers wanting to look like the beautiful ladies who were mistresses of Hong Kong businessmen. She discovered her own gender and sexual identity when she was a teenager. She identifies as a dee lesbian.


title: Naomi Wu

text: Wu's maker projects often center on wearable technology, including cyberpunk clothes and accessories, along with other projects. One of her early designs (2015) was 3D-printed "Wu Ying" (Chinese for "shadowless") platform heels, with a compartment that hides hacker tools including a keystroke recorder, a wireless router, and lock-picking tools. She explained to an interviewer that women's clothing often lacks pockets, but "chunky platform style shoes that many women in China wear to appear taller—have a lot of unused space."


title: Naomi Wu

text: In addition to her public work as a maker, Wu says she also works as a professional coder in Ruby on Rails, using a masculine pseudonym to protect her identity and preclude gender discrimination; she also reviews electronics. Wu maintains active Reddit and Twitter accounts under the pen names and , respectively.


title: Naomi Wu

text: On International Women's Day 2017 she was listed as one of the 43 most influential women in 3D printing, a male-dominated field, by 3D Printer & 3D Printing News. She regards the usage of 3D printing to teach design principles and creativity in the Chinese classroom as the most exciting development of the technology, and more generally regards 3D printing as being the next desktop publishing revolution. She regards "Chinese gadgets" as good as or better than foreign.


title: Naomi Wu

text: In 2013 the Post-Polio Health International (PHI) organizations estimated that there were only six to eight iron lung users in the United States; as of 2017 its executive director knew of none. Press reports then emerged, however, of at least three (perhaps the last three) users of such devices, sparking interest among those in the makerspace community such as Wu (who had never heard of iron lungs before) in the remanufacture of the obsolete components, particularly the gaskets, and prompting discussion of the regulatory and legal issues involved. Wu hoped to achieve a solution with help from her followers on Twitter and YouTube, saying, "Anything from the 50s and 60s, we can whip up in a makerspace, no problem."


title: Naomi Wu

text: On November 5, 2017 Dale Dougherty, the CEO of Maker Media, publisher of "Make" magazine, doubted Wu's authenticity in a since deleted tweet: "I am questioning who she really is. Naomi is a persona, not a real person. She is several or many people." On November 6, 2017, Dougherty publicly apologized to Wu for "my recent tweets questioning your identity," saying they represented a failure to live up to the inclusivity "Make" magazine should value. Wu herself considers the matter settled. Wu appeared on the February/March 2018 cover of "Make", which also included an article about her experiences with open source hardware in China. Wu was the first Chinese person ever to appear on the cover of Make.


title: Naomi Wu

text: In 2018, a reporter from "Vice" spent three days with Wu in Shenzhen, exploring the city, meeting Wu's friends, photographing Wu's home, and describing in depth the local creative history and Wu's recent creation, the Sino:Bit, a single-board microcontroller for computer education in China, and the first Chinese open-source hardware product to be certified by the Open Source Hardware Association.


title: Naomi Wu

text: The article which revealed details of her personal life drew criticism from Wu and from others when according to her agreement with "Vice", such details should have been left out of the article, out of fear of retaliation by the Chinese government and also to protect her own private life. "Vice" refused to comply with the agreement and published the details regardless.


title: Naomi Wu

text: After "Vice" failed to retract the story, Wu created a video in which she made boots with tiny video screens, which briefly displayed "Vice's" editor-in-chief's home address. "Vice" responded by having Wu's Patreon account withdrawn for "doxxing". This temporarily stalled Wu's independent maker career, and she returned to freelance coding for a brief period of time.


title: Naomi Wu

text: In November 2019, Wu was detained by Chinese authorities for an interstitial "Wall Street Journal" interview expose piece on Chinese censorship in an episode of Netflix's Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.


title: Cody Hall

text: Cody Taylor Hall (born May 31, 1991) is an American professional wrestler. He is best known for working for New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), where he was a member of the Bullet Club stable. Hall is a second generation wrestler, as the son of the late Scott Hall.


title: Cody Hall

text: Hall was born to Scott Hall and Dana Lee Burgio in 1991 and has a sister, Cassidy. He considers fellow professional wrestlers Kevin Nash and Sean Waltman as uncles due to them being close friends of his father.


title: Cody Hall

text: Hall was a member of the United States Air Force and served an active duty service commitment with the 460th Security Forces Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado. Hall departed to become a professional wrestler.


title: Cody Hall

text: Hall began to train as a professional wrestler in 2010 with his father, as he wanted to follow in his footsteps. Hall's first match took place on July 14, 2012, in Belleview Pro Wrestling, defeating Josh Hess. In the following years, Hall worked in various promotions, usually in tag matches with Kevin Nash or Sean Waltman, both Scott Hall's friends. On November 15, 2014, at Superstars of Wrestling 2, Hall won the Superstars of Wrestling Championship after defeating Tim Zbyszko in a ladder match. In 2014, Hall won the Georgia Heavyweight Championship from Southern Fried Championship Wrestling.


title: Cody Hall

text: In January 2015, Hall began training at the New Japan Pro-Wrestling dojo. On January 5 at "New Year Dash!!", Hall debuted as Bullet Club's personal "young boy" trainee. Hall made his NJPW in-ring debut on February 2, teaming with his stablemates Doc Gallows, Karl Anderson, Kenny Omega and Yujiro Takahashi in a ten-man tag team main event, where they were defeated by Captain New Japan, Hirooki Goto, Katsuyori Shibata, Ryusuke Taguchi and Hiroshi Tanahashi, who pinned him for the win. As is usually the case with "young boys" in Japan, Hall would lose many of his first matches with NJPW, and often be pinned in multi-man tag matches, but achieved his first victory on April 29 at "Wrestling Hinokuni" in a tag team match, where he and Yujiro Takahashi defeated Captain New Japan and Satoshi Kojima. Hall, however, was not involved in the finish of the match. Over the next year, Hall mainly worked tag team matches with his Bullet Club stablemates, while also becoming an enforcer for The Young Bucks (Matt Jackson and Nick Jackson). Hall scored his first win himself on April 2, 2016, when he submitted rookie Hirai Kawato in a singles match. Hall was injured later that month at Invasion Attack 2016, and remained sidelined until January 2017, when his profile was quietly removed from NJPW's roster page, signaling his departure from the promotion.


title: Cody Hall

text: On March 13, 2017, the Japanese Pro Wrestling Noah promotion announced that Hall would start working regularly for the promotion on April 11. The following month, Hall teamed with Randy Reign in the 2017 Global Tag League, finishing with a record of four wins and three losses, failing to advance to the finals. During the tournament, Hall and Reign defeated eventual tournament winners and reigning GHC Tag Team Champions Maybach Taniguchi and Naomichi Marufuji, making them the number one contenders to Taniguchi and Marufuji. Hall and Reign received their title shot on June 4, but were defeated by Taniguchi and Marufuji. On October 1, Hall unsuccessfully challenged Eli Drake for the GFW Global Championship.


title: Cody Hall

text: On December 4, 2020, Major League Wrestling announced that Hall had been signed to the company, however, the next day he was released from his contract.


title: The Carpenters discography

text: The discography of the American pop group the Carpenters consists of 14 studio albums, two Christmas albums, two live albums, 49 singles, and numerous compilation albums. The duo was made up of siblings Karen (lead vocals and drums) and Richard Carpenter (keyboards and vocals).


title: The Carpenters discography

text: The siblings started their musical career together in the latter half of the 1960s. In October 1969, six months after they signed a contract with A&M Records, the Carpenters released their debut album "Offering" (its title was later changed to "Ticket to Ride"). Within a year, they rose to prominence with their chart-topping single "(They Long to Be) Close to You", a Burt Bacharach and Hal David composition that had not been commercially successful when it was recorded by television star Richard Chamberlain in 1963.


title: The Carpenters discography

text: The Carpenters garnered worldwide commercial success, scoring big hits mainly in the first half of the 1970s. RIAA-certified sales of their records (albums, singles and videos) have been estimated at around 34.6 million units. In the United Kingdom, they are ranked as the seventh top-selling albums artist on the official record chart of the 1970s. During their career, the duo scores 1 number one album and another 4 Top 10 albums on "Billboard" 200, 3 number ones singles, 12 top 10 singles and 20 top 40 hits on "Billboard" Hot 100. They have also been the third-best-selling international music act in the Japanese market, only behind Mariah Carey and the Beatles. By 2005, they had reportedly sold more than 100 million copies of records worldwide.


title: The Carpenters discography

text: Throughout their career, the Carpenters released 14 original albums, including two Christmas offerings. Most recently they released "As Time Goes By" in 2001 in Japan, and 2004 internationally.


title: The Carpenters discography

text: There are two live albums that the Carpenters have released officially, though neither of them were issued in their homeland.


title: The Carpenters discography

text: Following releases are "greatest-hits" albums of the Carpenters released in the United States, Canada, and/or the United Kingdom.


title: The Carpenters discography

text: Since many radio stations in the US adopt a format change to Christmas music each December, many holiday hits have an annual spike in popularity during the last few weeks of the year and are retired once the season is over. In December 2011, "Billboard" began a Holiday Songs chart with 50 positions that monitors the last five weeks of each year to "rank the top holiday hits of all eras using the same methodology as the Hot 100, blending streaming, airplay, and sales data", and in 2013 the number of positions on the chart was doubled, resulting in the Holiday 100. A handful of Carpenters recordings have made appearances on the Holiday 100 and are noted below according to the holiday season in which they charted there.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: The Beverly Hillbillies is a 1993 American comedy film directed by Penelope Spheeris, written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, and starring Jim Varney, Diedrich Bader, Dabney Coleman, Erika Eleniak, Cloris Leachman, Rob Schneider, Lea Thompson, and Lily Tomlin. It is based on the television series of the same name (which ran from 1962–71) and features cameo appearances by Buddy Ebsen (the original Jed Clampett, in his final motion picture appearance, playing his other starring television role, Detective Barnaby Jones), Dolly Parton, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. The film follows a poor hillbilly named Jed Clampett (Jim Varney), who becomes a billionaire after inadvertently finding crude oil on his property while firing his gun.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: Jed Clampett (Jim Varney), a hillbilly of humble station from Arkansas, accidentally discovers oil on his land while shooting at a jackrabbit. Ozark Mountain Oil, interested in purchasing his land, offers him $1 billion for the property. Unsure of what to do, Jed consults his sister, Pearl Bodine (Linda Carlson), during a family dinner. Pearl suggests that a change of scenery for Jed's daughter, Elly May (Erika Eleniak), would be a good thing. Pearl and Jethro convince them to move to Beverly Hills California. Ozark Mountain Oil come by Jed's place to check to see if he has signed the contract. Having made up his mind and signed the contract, Jed and his daughter Elly, his mother-in-law, Daisy Moses (aka "Granny" (Cloris Leachman), and his nephew, Jethro (Diedrich Bader), Pearl's son, load up Jethro's old, dilapidated truck with their possessions and move to Beverly Hills, California, even though Granny is reluctant to come.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: Milburn Drysdale (Dabney Coleman), the CEO of the Commerce Bank of Beverly Hills (where Jed's money is stored), sends out his secretary/assistant, Jane Hathaway (Lily Tomlin) to meet the Clampetts at their new estate that is next door to his. Jane calls the Beverly Hills Police after the Clampetts arrive, mistaking them for burglars. Upon learning of Jane's mistake at the police station, Drysdale briefly fires her. But seeing that Jed insists that he still wants her to watch over his affairs, Drysdale rehires her.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: The Clampetts settle into their new surroundings. Drysdale and his wife, Margaret (Penny Fuller), push their reluctant son, Morgan Drysdale (Kevin Connolly), into befriending Elly May, to whom he eventually develops an attraction. Jane is also smitten by Jethro, who seems ignorant of her affections.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: Jed requests Jane's assistance in helping him search for someone who will help turn Elly May into a lady and also wants to get married, so Miss Hathaway has to play matchmaker. Woodrow Tyler (Rob Schneider), a banker at Drysdale's bank, catches wind of this and contrives a scheme with his con artist girlfriend, Laura Jackson (Lea Thompson), to steal Jed's money by having her marry Jed. She poses as a French etiquette teacher, Laurette Voleur, and asks for work. 'Laurette' feigns romantic interest in Jed, which eventually leads to him proposing marriage to her.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: Shortly before the wedding, Granny hears Laura and Woodrow talking about the scam. Granny reveals herself to the pair and threatens to expose their scam to Jed, and thus the impending wedding will be off. But before she can do so, they capture her, restrain her, and have her institutionalized at the Los Viejos Nursing Home, so that she cannot contact Jed.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: At the wedding, Woodrow prepares to transfer all of Clampett's money in Drysdale's bank to a Swiss account, on his laptop computer, when the couple says 'I do'. Realizing that Granny is missing, Jane goes to the office of Barnaby Jones (Buddy Ebsen) and after learning where Granny is and who Laura is, poses as a nurse and breaks her out. Granny and Jane arrive at the wedding and foil Laura and Tyler's plan when Jane grabs a shotgun and blows the laptop to bits, before they can steal Jed's money. The police arrest Laura and Woodrow. Jed decides that, since the wedding was off, they should have 'one hellacious shindig'.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: The Dolly Parton 'band' was composed of members of Rhino Bucket (who had contributed a song on the soundtrack of the 1992 movie "Wayne's World", also directed by Penelope Spheeris), the Dwight Yoakam Band (Skip Edwards), and Vern Monnett (Randy Meisner, Texas Tornados and Gary Allan). Parton's appearance reunited her with "9 to 5" co-stars Lily Tomlin and Dabney Coleman.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: In its first weekend, "The Beverly Hillbillies" grossed $9,525,375 at the US box office. The film moved up to number one the following week. It grossed $40 million in the United and States and Canada and $57.4 million worldwide.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 24% based on reviews from 33 critics. The site's consensus states: "Wasting a talented cast and director Penelope Spheeris' deft comedic touch on crude hijinks, this lame adaptation digs for comedic gold and only finds dirt." On Metacritic the film has a score of 37 out of 100 based on reviews from 24 critics, indicating 'generally unfavorable reviews'. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of 'B+' on scale of A+ to F.


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times", gave the film half a star out of a possible 4, arguing that it did not capture the appeal of the original television series nor did it improve the source material:


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly", gave the film a grade 'D' and wrote: 'The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you'd catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through "The Beverly Hillbillies", I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.'


title: The Beverly Hillbillies (film)

text: In 1993, Synergistic Software developed and Capstone Software published a game for MS-DOS loosely based on the film. The game is a point-and-click adventure game.


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: Major Mohit Sharma (13 January 1978 – 21 March 2009) was an Indian Army Officer who was posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India's highest peace-time military decoration. Maj Sharma was from the elite 1st Para SF.


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: On 21 March 2009, he engaged in an encounter with terrorists in the Hafruda forest of the Kupwara sector of Jammu and Kashmir. He killed four terrorists and rescued two teammates in the process, but sustained multiple gunshot wounds. For this act, he was posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra, which is the highest peace time military decoration in India. He was awarded two gallantry decorations earlier in his career. The first was the COAS Commendation card for exemplary counter-terrorism duties during Operation Rakshak, which was followed by a Sena Medal for gallantry after a covert operation in 2005.


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: In 2019, Delhi Metro Corporation renamed the Rajendra Nagar metro station as "Major Mohit Sharma (Rajendra Nagar) metro station".


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: Mohit was born on 13 January 1978 in Rohtak, Haryana in a Hindu Brahmin family. He was very naughty since childhood. His nickname in family was "Chintu" while his NDA batch mates call him "Mike". He completed his 12th schooling from DPS Ghaziabad in 1995 after which he appeared for his NDA Exam. At the same time he got admission to Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj College of Engineering, Shegaon, Maharashtra, during which he cleared the SSB exam and joined the National Defence Academy (NDA).


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: In 1995, Sharma left Engineering and joined NDA to pursue his dream. In his training, he proved his expertise in swimming, boxing and horse riding. His favourite horse was "Indira". Sharma became the champion of horse riding. He was also a winner in Boxing under the featherweight category.


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: Mohit Sharma joined the Indian Military Academy (IMA) in 1998. In IMA, he was awarded the rank of Battalion Cadet Adjutant. He got a chance to meet the then President of India K. R. Narayanan at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in December 1999.


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: His first posting was Hyderabad in the 5th Battalion The Madras Regiment (5 Madras). On completing three successful years of Military service, Major Mohit opted for the Para (Special Forces) and he became a trained Para Commando in June 2003, followed by promotion to captain on 11 December. Before getting in 1 Para (SF), he served with the 38 Rashtriya Rifles. He was then posted in Kashmir where he showed his leadership and bravery. Promoted as major on 11 December 2005, he was awarded with the Sena Medal for his bravery. During the third posting, he was given the responsibility to train the Commandos in Belgaum where he instructed for two years. Mohit Sharma was then again moved to Kashmir where he attained martyrdom in 2009.


title: Mohit Sharma (soldier)

text: For the supreme sacrifice made by Major Mohit Sharma during Kupwara operation, he was awarded with the nation's highest peace time gallantry award 'Ashok Chakra' on January 26, 2010.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: A crankcase ventilation system removes unwanted gases from the crankcase of an internal combustion engine. The system usually consists of a tube, a one-way valve and a vacuum source (such as the inlet manifold).


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: The unwanted gases, called "blow-by", are gases from the combustion chamber which have leaked past the piston rings. Early engines released these gases to the atmosphere simply by them leaking through the crankcase seals. The first specific crankcase ventilation system was the "road draught tube", which used a partial vacuum to draw the gases through a tube and release them to the atmosphere. Positive crankcase ventilation (PCV) systems— first used in the Second World War and present on most modern engines— send the crankcase gases back to the combustion chamber, in order to reduce air pollution.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Two-stroke engines with a crankcase compression design do not need a crankcase ventilation system, because normal operation of the engine involves sending the crankcase gases to the combustion chamber.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: "Blow-by," as it is often called, is the result of combustion material from the combustion chamber "blowing" past the piston rings and into the crankcase. These blow-by gases, if not ventilated, inevitably condense and combine with the oil vapour present in the crankcase, forming sludge or causing the oil to become diluted with unburnt fuel. Excessive crankcase pressure can furthermore lead to engine oil leaks past the crankshaft seals and other engine seals and gaskets. Therefore, it becomes imperative that a crankcase ventilation system be used.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Until the early 20th century, blow-by gases escaped from the crankcase by leaking through seals and gaskets. It was considered normal for oil to leak from an engine and drip onto the ground, as this had also been the case for steam engines in the decades before. Gaskets and shaft seals were intended to limit the leakage of oil, but they were usually not expected to entirely prevent it. The blow-by gases would diffuse through the oil and then leak through the seals and gaskets into the atmosphere, causing air pollution and odors.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: The first refinement in crankcase ventilation was the "road draught tube". This is a pipe running from the crankcase (or the valve cover on an overhead valve engine) down to a downwards-facing open end located in the vehicle's slipstream. When the vehicle is moving, airflow across the open end of the tube creates suction (a "draught" or draft) that pulls gases out of the crankcase. To prevent too much vacuum being created, the blow-by gases are replaced by fresh air using a device called a "breather". The breather is often located in the oil cap. Many breathers had a cup or scoop and were located in the air stream of the engine radiator fan. This type of system is called "Pressure-Suction" type and air is forced into the scoop of the breather and by vacuum is draw out by the road draft tube. Another type used of the pressure suction type was used on VW Porsche air cooled engines whereby the front crankcase pulley has a reverse screw built into it which brings air into the engine and air escapes the crankcase with the road draft tube. This system works very well in getting rid of crankcase vapors which are harmful to the engine. As per the earlier engines, the road draught tube system also created pollution and objectionable odors. The draught tube could become clogged with snow or ice, in which case crankcase pressure would build and cause oil leaks and gasket failure.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: On slow-moving delivery vehicles and boats, there was often no suitable air slipstream for the road draught tube. In these situations, the engines used positive pressure at the breather tube to push blow-by gases from the crankcase. Therefore, the breather air intake was often located in the airflow behind the engine's cooling fan. The crankcase gases exited to the atmosphere via a draught tube.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Although the modern purpose of a positive crankcase ventilation (PCV) system is to reduce air pollution, the original purpose was to allow an engine to operate underwater without the water leaking in. The first PCV systems were built during World War II, to allow tank engines to operate during deep fording operations, where the normal draught tube ventilator would have allowed water to enter the crankcase and destroy the engine.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: In the early 1950s, Professor Arie Jan Haagen-Smit established that pollution from automobile engines was a major cause of the smog crisis being experienced in Los Angeles, California. The California "Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board" (a precursor to the California Air Resources Board) was established in 1960 and began researching how to prevent blow-by gases from being released directly into the atmosphere. The PCV system was designed to re-circulate the gases into the air intake so that they could be combined with the fresh air/fuel and more completely combusted. In 1961, California regulations required that all new cars be sold with a PCV system, therefore representing the first implementation of vehicle emissions control device.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: By 1964, most new cars sold in the U.S. were so equipped by voluntary industry action so as not to have to make multiple state-specific versions of vehicles. PCV quickly became standard equipment on all vehicles worldwide because of its benefits not only in emissions reduction but also in engine internal cleanliness and oil lifespan.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: In 1967, several years after its introduction into production, the PCV system became the subject of a U.S. federal grand jury investigation, when it was alleged by some industry critics that the Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA) was conspiring to keep several such smog reduction devices on the shelf to delay additional smog control. After eighteen months of investigation, the grand jury returned a "no-bill" decision, clearing the AMA, but resulting in a consent decree that all U.S. automobile companies agreed not to work jointly on smog control activities for a period of ten years.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: In the decades since, legislation and regulation of vehicular emissions has tightened substantially. Most of today's gasoline engines continue to use PCV systems.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: In order for the PCV system to draw fumes out of the crankcase, the system must have a source of fresh air. The source of this fresh air is the "crankcase breather", which is usually ducted from the engine's air filter or intake manifold. The breather is usually provided with baffles and filters to prevent oil mist and vapour from fouling the air filter. This phenomenon can be further reduced by installing after-market air oil separators or catch cans, as colloquially known, to pull oil mist out of suspension and collect it in a reservoir before it can reach the intake. A properly designed crankcase breather will also be designed in a manner that promotes the scavenging effect, or the creation of suction within the crankcase breather to further aid in the removal of blow-by gases. It is this effect that keeps the crankcase at slightly negative pressure when a properly functioning PCV system is in place.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Intake manifold vacuum is applied to the crankcase via the PCV valve. The airflow through the crankcase and engine interior sweeps away combustion byproduct gases. This mixture of air and crankcase gases then exits, often via another simple baffle, screen, or mesh to exclude oil mist, through the PCV valve and into the intake manifold. On some PCV systems, this oil baffling takes place in a discrete replaceable part called the 'oil separator'. Aftermarket products sold to add an external oil baffling system to vehicles, which were not originally installed with them, are commonly known as "oil catch tanks".


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: The PCV valve controls the flow of crankcase gases entering the intake system. At idle, the manifold vacuum is high, which would draw in a large quantity of crankcase gases, causing the engine to run too lean. The PCV valve closes when the manifold vacuum is high, restricting the quantity of crankcase gases entering the intake system.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: When the engine is under load or operating at higher RPM, a higher quantity of blow-by gases are produced. The intake manifold vacuum is lower in these conditions, which causes the PCV valve to open and the crankcase gases flow to the intake system. The greater flow rate of intake air during these conditions means that a greater quantity of blow-by gases can be added to the intake system without compromising the operation of the engine. The opening of the PCV valve during these conditions also compensates for the intake system being less effective at drawing crankcase gases into the intake system in these conditions.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: A second function of the PCV valve is to act as a flame arrester and to prevent positive pressure from the intake system from entering the crankcase. This can happen on turbocharged engines or when a backfire takes place, and the positive pressure could damage the crankcase seals and gaskets, or even cause a crankcase explosion. The PCV valve therefore closes when positive pressure is present, to prevent it from reaching the crankcase.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: The crankcase air outlet, where the PCV valve is located, is generally placed as far as possible from the crankcase breather. For example, the breather and outlet are frequently on opposite valve covers on a V engine, or on opposite ends of the valve cover on an inline engine. The PCV valve is often, but not always, placed at the valve cover; it may be located anywhere between the crankcase air outlet and the inlet manifold.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: The PCV valve gains an even more important function in increasingly popular forced induction applications. Excessive crankcase pressure won't only occur due to blow-by gasses escaping past the piston rings it can also be introduced when positive pressure from the intake manifold makes its way into the crankcase. As previously mentioned, in vehicles with forced induction systems such as turbochargers or superchargers, the engine's intake manifold experiences positive pressure under load. This differs from naturally aspirated applications where the intake manifold will remain in vacuum while under load. Thusly, when a forced induction engine is under load the intake manifold can no longer be used to draw blow-by gasses out of the crankcase and will instead begin to exacerbate the problem by increasing crankcase pressure. It is then the job of the PCV valve to isolate the intake manifold and crankcase when the intake manifold is pressurized and allow the flow of blow-by gases out of the crankcase when the intake manifold is under vacuum. In addition to this added role, in boosted applications cylinder pressures are much higher, and consequently, more blow-by gases are pushed into the crankcase thus making a fully functional PCV system all the more important.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Carbon build-up in the intake manifold will occur when blow-by gases are allowed to permanently contaminate the intake air because of a failing PCV system.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Carbon build-up or oil sludge from blow-by gases on intake valves are usually not a problem in port injected engines. This is due to the fact that the fuel hits the intake valves on the way to the combustion chamber, allowing the detergents in the fuel to keep them clean. However, carbon build-up on intake valves is a problem for engines with direct injection only, as the fuel is injected directly into the combustion chamber. Because of this, fuel system cleaners or fuel additives added to the tank will not help clean these deposits. Methods for cleaning these deposits include spraying cleaner through the intake or direct media blasting of the intake valves.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Two-stroke engines which use crankcase compression do not require a crankcase ventilation system, since all of the gases within the crankcase are then fed into the combustion chamber.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Many small four-stroke engines such as lawn mower engines and electricity generators simply use a draught tube connected to the intake system. The draught tube routes all blow-by gases back into the intake mixture and is usually located between the air filter and carburetor.


title: Crankcase ventilation system

text: Dry sump engines in some drag racing cars use scavenging pumps to extract oil and gases from the crankcase. A separator removes the oil, then the gases are fed into the exhaust system via a venturi tube.. This system maintains a small amount of vacuum in the crankcase and minimises the amount of oil in the engine that could potentially spill onto the racetrack.


title: Nihonium

text: Nihonium is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Nh and atomic number 113. It is extremely radioactive; its most stable known isotope, nihonium-286, has a half-life of about 10 seconds. In the periodic table, nihonium is a transactinide element in the p-block. It is a member of period 7 and group 13 (boron group).


title: Nihonium

text: Nihonium was first reported to have been created in 2003 by a Russian–American collaboration at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, and in 2004 by a team of Japanese scientists at Riken in Wakō, Japan. The confirmation of their claims in the ensuing years involved independent teams of scientists working in the United States, Germany, Sweden, and China, as well as the original claimants in Russia and Japan. In 2015, the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party recognised the element and assigned the priority of the discovery and naming rights for the element to Riken. The Riken team suggested the name "nihonium" in 2016, which was approved in the same year. The name comes from the common Japanese name for .


title: Nihonium

text: Very little is known about nihonium, as it has only been made in very small amounts that decay within seconds. The anomalously long lives of some superheavy nuclides, including some nihonium isotopes, are explained by the "island of stability" theory. Experiments support the theory, with the half-lives of the confirmed nihonium isotopes increasing from milliseconds to seconds as neutrons are added and the island is approached. Nihonium has been calculated to have similar properties to its homologues boron, aluminium, gallium, indium, and thallium. All but boron are post-transition metals, and nihonium is expected to be a post-transition metal as well. It should also show several major differences from them; for example, nihonium should be more stable in the +1 oxidation state than the +3 state, like thallium, but in the +1 state nihonium should behave more like silver and astatine than thallium. Preliminary experiments in 2017 showed that elemental nihonium is not very volatile; its chemistry remains largely unexplored.


title: Nihonium

text: The syntheses of elements 107 to 112 were conducted at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, from 1981 to 1996. These elements were made by cold fusion reactions, in which targets made of thallium, lead, and bismuth, which are around the stable configuration of 82 protons, are bombarded with heavy ions of period 4 elements. This creates fused nuclei with low excitation energies due to the stability of the targets' nuclei, significantly increasing the yield of superheavy elements. Cold fusion was pioneered by Yuri Oganessian and his team in 1974 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Soviet Union. Yields from cold fusion reactions were found to decrease significantly with increasing atomic number; the resulting nuclei were severely neutron-deficient and short-lived. The GSI team attempted to synthesise element 113 via cold fusion in 1998 and 2003, bombarding bismuth-209 with zinc-70; both attempts were unsuccessful.


title: Nihonium

text: Faced with this problem, Oganessian and his team at the JINR turned their renewed attention to the older hot fusion technique, in which heavy actinide targets were bombarded with lighter ions. Calcium-48 was suggested as an ideal projectile, because it is very neutron-rich for a light element (combined with the already neutron-rich actinides) and would minimise the neutron deficiencies of the nuclides produced. Being doubly magic, it would confer benefits in stability to the fused nuclei. In collaboration with the team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, United States, they made an attempt on element 114 (which was predicted to be a magic number, closing a proton shell, and more stable than element 113).


title: Nihonium

text: In 1998, the JINR–LLNL collaboration started their attempt on element 114, bombarding a target of plutonium-244 with ions of calcium-48:


title: Nihonium

text: A single atom was observed which was thought to be the isotope 114: the results were published in January 1999. Despite numerous attempts to repeat this reaction, an isotope with these decay properties has never again been found, and the exact identity of this activity is unknown. A 2016 paper by Sigurd Hofmann "et al." considered that the most likely explanation of the 1998 result is that two neutrons were emitted by the produced compound nucleus, leading to 114 and electron capture to 113, while more neutrons were emitted in all other produced chains. This would have been the first report of a decay chain from an isotope of element 113, but it was not recognised at the time, and the assignment is still uncertain. A similar long-lived activity observed by the JINR team in March 1999 in the Pu + Ca reaction may be due to the electron-capture daughter of 114, 113; this assignment is also tentative.


title: Nihonium

text: The now-confirmed discovery of element 114 was made in June 1999 when the JINR team repeated the first Pu + Ca reaction from 1998; following this, the JINR team used the same hot fusion technique to synthesise elements 116 and 118 in 2000 and 2002 respectively via the Cm + Ca and Cf + Ca reactions. They then turned their attention to the missing odd-numbered elements, as the odd protons and possibly neutrons would hinder decay by spontaneous fission and result in longer decay chains.


title: Nihonium

text: The first report of element 113 was in August 2003, when it was identified as an alpha decay product of element 115. Element 115 had been produced by bombarding a target of americium-243 with calcium-48 projectiles. The JINR–LLNL collaboration published its results in February 2004:


title: Nihonium

text: Four further alpha decays were observed, ending with the spontaneous fission of isotopes of element 105, dubnium.


title: Nihonium

text: While the JINR–LLNL collaboration had been studying fusion reactions with Ca, a team of Japanese scientists at the Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Wakō, Japan, led by Kōsuke Morita had been studying cold fusion reactions. Morita had previously studied the synthesis of superheavy elements at the JINR before starting his own team at Riken. In 2001, his team confirmed the GSI's discoveries of elements 108, 110, 111, and 112. They then made a new attempt on element 113, using the same Bi + Zn reaction that the GSI had attempted unsuccessfully in 1998. Despite the much lower yield expected than for the JINR's hot fusion technique with calcium-48, the Riken team chose to use cold fusion as the synthesised isotopes would alpha decay to known daughter nuclides and make the discovery much more certain, and would not require the use of radioactive targets. In particular, the isotope 113 expected to be produced in this reaction would decay to the known Bh, which had been synthesised in 2000 by a team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley.


title: Nihonium

text: The bombardment of Bi with Zn at Riken began in September 2003. The team detected a single atom of 113 in July 2004 and published their results that September:


title: Nihonium

text: The Riken team observed four alpha decays from 113, creating a decay chain passing through Rg, Mt, and Bh before terminating with the spontaneous fission of Db. The decay data they observed for the alpha decay of Bh matched the 2000 data, lending support for their claim. Spontaneous fission of its daughter Db had not been previously known; the American team had observed only alpha decay from this nuclide.


title: Nihonium

text: When the discovery of a new element is claimed, the Joint Working Party (JWP) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) assembles to examine the claims according to their criteria for the discovery of a new element, and decides scientific priority and naming rights for the elements. According to the JWP criteria, a discovery must demonstrate that the element has an atomic number different from all previously observed values. It should also preferably be repeated by other laboratories, although this requirement has been waived where the data is of very high quality. Such a demonstration must establish properties, either physical or chemical, of the new element and establish that they are those of a previously unknown element. The main techniques used to demonstrate atomic number are cross-reactions (creating claimed nuclides as parents or daughters of other nuclides produced by a different reaction) and anchoring decay chains to known daughter nuclides. For the JWP, priority in confirmation takes precedence over the date of the original claim. Both teams set out to confirm their results by these methods.


title: Nihonium

text: In June 2004 and again in December 2005, the JINR–LLNL collaboration strengthened their claim for the discovery of element 113 by conducting chemical experiments on Db, the final decay product of 115. This was valuable as none of the nuclides in this decay chain were previously known, so that their claim was not supported by any previous experimental data, and chemical experimentation would strengthen the case for their claim, since the chemistry of dubnium is known. Db was successfully identified by extracting the final decay products, measuring spontaneous fission (SF) activities and using chemical identification techniques to confirm that they behave like a group 5 element (dubnium is known to be in group 5). Both the half-life and decay mode were confirmed for the proposed Db which lends support to the assignment of the parent and daughter nuclei to elements 115 and 113 respectively. Further experiments at the JINR in 2005 confirmed the observed decay data.


title: Nihonium

text: In November and December 2004, the Riken team studied the Tl + Zn reaction, aiming the zinc beam onto a thallium rather than a bismuth target, in an effort to directly produce Rg in a cross-bombardment as it is the immediate daughter of 113. The reaction was unsuccessful, as the thallium target was physically weak compared to the more commonly used lead and bismuth targets, and it deteriorated significantly and became non-uniform in thickness. The reasons for this weakness are unknown, given that thallium has a higher melting point than bismuth. The Riken team then repeated the original Bi + Zn reaction and produced a second atom of 113 in April 2005, with a decay chain that again terminated with the spontaneous fission of Db. The decay data were slightly different from those of the first chain: this could have been because an alpha particle escaped from the detector without depositing its full energy, or because some of the intermediate decay products were formed in metastable isomeric states.


title: Nihonium

text: In 2006, a team at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou, China, investigated the Am + Mg reaction, producing four atoms of Bh. All four chains started with an alpha decay to Db; three chains ended there with spontaneous fission, as in the 113 chains observed at Riken, while the remaining one continued via another alpha decay to Lr, as in the Bh chains observed at LBNL.


title: Nihonium

text: In June 2006, the JINR–LLNL collaboration claimed to have synthesised a new isotope of element 113 directly by bombarding a neptunium-237 target with accelerated calcium-48 nuclei:


title: Nihonium

text: Two atoms of 113 were detected. The aim of this experiment had been to synthesise the isotopes 113 and 113 that would fill in the gap between isotopes produced via hot fusion (113 and 113) and cold fusion (113). After five alpha decays, these nuclides would reach known isotopes of lawrencium, assuming that the decay chains were not terminated prematurely by spontaneous fission. The first decay chain ended in fission after four alpha decays, presumably originating from Db or its electron-capture daughter Rf. Spontaneous fission was not observed in the second chain even after four alpha decays. A fifth alpha decay in each chain could have been missed, since Db can theoretically undergo alpha decay, in which case the first decay chain would have ended at the known Lr or No and the second might have continued to the known long-lived Md, which has a half-life of 51.5 days, longer than the duration of the experiment: this would explain the lack of a spontaneous fission event in this chain. In the absence of direct detection of the long-lived alpha decays, these interpretations remain unconfirmed, and there is still no known link between any superheavy nuclides produced by hot fusion and the well-known main body of the chart of nuclides.


title: Nihonium

text: The JWP published its report on elements 113–116 and 118 in 2011. It recognised the JINR–LLNL collaboration as having discovered elements 114 and 116, but did not accept either team's claim to element 113 and did not accept the JINR–LLNL claims to elements 115 and 118. The JINR–LLNL claim to elements 115 and 113 had been founded on chemical identification of their daughter dubnium, but the JWP objected that current theory could not distinguish between superheavy group 4 and group 5 elements by their chemical properties with enough confidence to allow this assignment. The decay properties of all the nuclei in the decay chain of element 115 had not been previously characterised before the JINR experiments, a situation which the JWP generally considers "troublesome, but not necessarily exclusive", and with the small number of atoms produced with neither known daughters nor cross-reactions the JWP considered that their criteria had not been fulfilled. The JWP did not accept the Riken team's claim either due to inconsistencies in the decay data, the small number of atoms of element 113 produced, and the lack of unambiguous anchors to known isotopes.


title: Nihonium

text: In early 2009, the Riken team synthesised the decay product Bh directly in the Cm + Na reaction to establish its link with 113 as a cross-bombardment. They also established the branched decay of Db, which sometimes underwent spontaneous fission and sometimes underwent the previously known alpha decay to Lr.


title: Nihonium

text: In late 2009, the JINR–LLNL collaboration studied the Bk + Ca reaction in an effort to produce element 117, which would decay to elements 115 and 113 and bolster their claims in a cross-reaction. They were now joined by scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Vanderbilt University, both in Tennessee, United States, who helped procure the rare and highly radioactive berkelium target necessary to complete the JINR's calcium-48 campaign to synthesise the heaviest elements on the periodic table. Two isotopes of element 117 were synthesised, decaying to element 115 and then element 113:


title: Nihonium

text: The new isotopes 113 and 113 produced did not overlap with the previously claimed 113, 113, and 113, so this reaction could not be used as a cross-bombardment to confirm the 2003 or 2006 claims.


title: Nihonium

text: In March 2010, the Riken team again attempted to synthesise Rg directly through the Tl + Zn reaction with upgraded equipment; they failed again and abandoned this cross-bombardment route.


title: Nihonium

text: After 450 more days of irradiation of bismuth with zinc projectiles, Riken produced and identified another 113 atom in August 2012. Although electricity prices had soared since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and Riken had ordered the shutdown of the accelerator programs to save money, Morita's team was permitted to continue with one experiment, and they chose their attempt to confirm their synthesis of element 113. In this case, a series of six alpha decays was observed, leading to an isotope of mendelevium:


title: Nihonium

text: This decay chain differed from the previous observations at Riken mainly in the decay mode of Db, which was previously observed to undergo spontaneous fission, but in this case instead alpha decayed; the alpha decay of Db to Lr is well-known. The team calculated the probability of accidental coincidence to be 10, or totally negligible. The resulting Md atom then underwent electron capture to Fm, which underwent the seventh alpha decay in the chain to the long-lived Cf, which has a half-life of around thirteen years.


title: Nihonium

text: The Bk + Ca experiment was repeated at the JINR in 2012 and 2013 with consistent results, and again at the GSI in 2014. In August 2013, a team of researchers at Lund University in Lund, Sweden, and at the GSI announced that they had repeated the 2003 Am + Ca experiment, confirming the findings of the JINR–LLNL collaboration. The same year, the 2003 experiment had been repeated at the JINR, now also creating the isotope 115 that could serve as a cross-bombardment for confirming their discovery of the element 117 isotope 117, as well as its daughter 113 as part of its decay chain. Confirmation of 115 and its daughters was published by the team at the LBNL in 2015.


title: Nihonium

text: In December 2015, the conclusions of a new JWP report were published by IUPAC in a press release, in which element 113 was awarded to Riken; elements 115, 117, and 118 were awarded to the collaborations involving the JINR. A joint 2016 announcement by IUPAC and IUPAP had been scheduled to coincide with the publication of the JWP reports, but IUPAC alone decided on an early release because the news of Riken being awarded credit for element 113 had been leaked to Japanese newspapers. For the first time in history, a team of Asian physicists would name a new element. The JINR considered the awarding of element 113 to Riken unexpected, citing their own 2003 production of elements 115 and 113, and pointing to the precedents of elements 103, 104, and 105 where IUPAC had awarded joint credit to the JINR and LBNL. They stated that they respected IUPAC's decision, but reserved determination of their position for the official publication of the JWP reports.


title: Nihonium

text: The full JWP reports were published on 21 January 2016. The JWP recognised the discovery of element 113, assigning priority to Riken. They noted that while the individual decay energies of each nuclide in the decay chain of 113 were inconsistent, their sum was now confirmed to be consistent, strongly suggesting that the initial and final states in 113 and its daughter Db were the same for all three events. The decay of Db to Lr and Md was previously known, firmly anchoring the decay chain of 113 to known regions of the chart of nuclides. The JWP considered that the JINR–LLNL collaborations of 2004 and 2007, producing element 113 as the daughter of element 115, did not meet the discovery criteria as they had not convincingly determined the atomic numbers of their nuclides through cross-bombardments, which were considered necessary since their decay chains were not anchored to previously known nuclides. They also considered that the previous JWP's concerns over their chemical identification of the dubnium daughter had not been adequately addressed. The JWP recognised the JINR–LLNL–ORNL–Vanderbilt collaboration of 2010 as having discovered elements 117 and 115, and accepted that element 113 had been produced as their daughter, but did not give this work shared credit.


title: Nihonium

text: After the publication of the JWP reports, Sergey Dimitriev, the lab director of the Flerov lab at the JINR where the discoveries were made, remarked that he was happy with IUPAC's decision, mentioning the time Riken spent on their experiment and their good relations with Morita, who had learnt the basics of synthesising superheavy elements at the JINR.


title: Nihonium

text: The sum argument advanced by the JWP in the approval of the discovery of element 113 was later criticised in a May 2016 study from Lund University and the GSI, as it is only valid if no gamma decay or internal conversion takes place along the decay chain, which is not likely for odd nuclei, and the uncertainty of the alpha decay energies measured in the 113 decay chain was not small enough to rule out this possibility. If this is the case, similarity in lifetimes of intermediate daughters becomes a meaningless argument, as different isomers of the same nuclide can have different half-lives: for example, the ground state of Ta has a half-life of hours, but an excited state Ta has never been observed to decay. This study found reason to doubt and criticise the IUPAC approval of the discoveries of elements 115 and 117, but the data from Riken for element 113 was found to be congruent, and the data from the JINR team for elements 115 and 113 to probably be so, thus endorsing the IUPAC approval of the discovery of element 113. Two members of the JINR team published a journal article rebutting these criticisms against the congruence of their data on elements 113, 115, and 117 in June 2017.


title: Nihonium

text: Using Mendeleev's nomenclature for unnamed and undiscovered elements, nihonium would be known as "eka-thallium". In 1979, IUPAC published recommendations according to which the element was to be called "ununtrium" (with the corresponding symbol of "Uut"), a systematic element name as a placeholder, until the discovery of the element is confirmed and a name is decided on. The recommendations were widely used in the chemical community on all levels, from chemistry classrooms to advanced textbooks, but were mostly ignored among scientists in the field, who called it "element 113", with the symbol of "E113", "(113)", or even simply "113".


title: Nihonium

text: Before the JWP recognition of their priority, the Japanese team had unofficially suggested various names: "japonium", after their home country; "nishinanium", after Japanese physicist Yoshio Nishina, the "founding father of modern physics research in Japan"; and "rikenium", after the institute. After the recognition, the Riken team gathered in February 2016 to decide on a name. Morita expressed his desire for the name to honour the fact that element 113 had been discovered in Japan. "Japonium" was considered, making the connection to Japan easy to identify for non-Japanese, but it was rejected as "Jap" is considered an ethnic slur. The name "nihonium" was chosen after an hour of deliberation: it comes from , one of the two Japanese pronunciations for the name of Japan. The discoverers also intended to reference the support of their research by the Japanese people (Riken being almost entirely government-funded), recover lost pride and trust in science among those who were affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and honour Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa's 1908 discovery of rhenium, which he named "nipponium" with symbol Np after the other Japanese pronunciation of Japan's name. As Ogawa's claim had not been accepted, the name "nipponium" could not be reused for a new element, and its symbol Np had since been used for neptunium. In March 2016, Morita proposed the name "nihonium" to IUPAC, with the symbol Nh. The naming realised what had been a national dream in Japanese science ever since Ogawa's claim.


title: Nihonium

text: The former president of IUPAP, Cecilia Jarlskog, complained at the Nobel Symposium on Superheavy Elements in Bäckaskog Castle, Sweden, in June 2016 about the lack of openness involved in the process of approving new elements, and stated that she believed that the JWP's work was flawed and should be redone by a new JWP. A survey of physicists determined that many felt that the Lund–GSI 2016 criticisms of the JWP report were well-founded, but that the conclusions would hold up if the work was redone, and the new president, Bruce McKellar, ruled that the proposed names should be released in a joint IUPAP–IUPAC press release. Thus, IUPAC and IUPAP publicised the proposal of "nihonium" that June, and set a five-month term to collect comments, after which the name would be formally established at a conference. The name was officially approved in November 2016. The naming ceremony for the new element was held in Tokyo, Japan, in March 2017, with Naruhito, then the Crown Prince of Japan, in attendance.


title: Nihonium

text: Nihonium has no stable or naturally occurring isotopes. Several radioactive isotopes have been synthesised in the laboratory, either by fusing two atoms or by observing the decay of heavier elements. Eight different isotopes of nihonium have been reported with atomic masses 278, 282–287, and 290 (Nh and Nh are unconfirmed); they all decay through alpha decay to isotopes of roentgenium; there have been indications that nihonium-284 can also decay by electron capture to copernicium-284.


title: Nihonium

text: The stability of nuclei quickly decreases with the increase in atomic number after curium, element 96, whose half-life is over ten thousand times longer than that of any subsequent element. All isotopes with an atomic number above 101 undergo radioactive decay with half-lives of less than 30 hours: this is because of the ever-increasing Coulomb repulsion of protons, so that the strong nuclear force cannot hold the nucleus together against spontaneous fission for long. Calculations suggest that in the absence of other stabilising factors, elements with more than 103 protons should not exist. Researchers in the 1960s suggested that the closed nuclear shells around 114 protons and 184 neutrons should counteract this instability, and create an "island of stability" containing nuclides with half-lives reaching thousands or millions of years. The existence of the island is still unproven, but the existence of the superheavy elements (including nihonium) confirms that the stabilising effect is real, and in general the known superheavy nuclides become longer-lived as they approach the predicted location of the island.


title: Nihonium

text: All nihonium isotopes are unstable and radioactive; the heavier nihonium isotopes are more stable than the lighter ones, as they are closer to the centre of the island. The most stable known nihonium isotope, Nh, is also the heaviest; it has a half-life of 8 seconds. The isotope Nh, as well as the unconfirmed Nh and Nh, have also been reported to have half-lives of over a second. The isotopes Nh and Nh have half-lives of 1 and 0.1 seconds respectively. The remaining two isotopes have half-lives between 0.1 and 100 milliseconds: Nh has a half-life of 70 milliseconds, and Nh, the lightest known nihonium isotope, is also the shortest-lived, with a half-life of 1.4 milliseconds. This rapid increase in the half-lives near the closed neutron shell at "N" = 184 is seen in roentgenium, copernicium, and nihonium (elements 111 through 113), where each extra neutron so far multiplies the half-life by a factor of 5 to 20.


title: Nihonium

text: Very few properties of nihonium or its compounds have been measured; this is due to its extremely limited and expensive production and the fact it decays very quickly. Properties of nihonium mostly remain unknown and only predictions are available.


title: Nihonium

text: Nihonium is the first member of the 7p series of elements and the heaviest group 13 element on the periodic table, below boron, aluminium, gallium, indium, and thallium. All the group 13 elements except boron are metals, and nihonium is expected to follow suit. Nihonium is predicted to show many differences from its lighter homologues. The major reason for this is the spin–orbit (SO) interaction, which is especially strong for the superheavy elements, because their electrons move much faster than in lighter atoms, at velocities close to the speed of light. In relation to nihonium atoms, it lowers the 7s and the 7p electron energy levels (stabilising those electrons), but two of the 7p electron energy levels are stabilised more than the other four. The stabilisation of the 7s electrons is called the inert pair effect, and the separation of the 7p subshell into the more and less stabilised parts is called subshell splitting. Computational chemists see the split as a change of the second, azimuthal quantum number "l", from 1 to 1/2 and 3/2 for the more and less stabilised parts of the 7p subshell, respectively. For theoretical purposes, the valence electron configuration may be represented to reflect the 7p subshell split as 7s 7p. The first ionisation energy of nihonium is expected to be 7.306 eV, the highest among the metals of group 13. Similar subshell splitting should exist for the 6d electron levels, with four being 6d and six being 6d. Both these levels are raised to be close in energy to the 7s ones, high enough to possibly be chemically active. This would allow for the possibility of exotic nihonium compounds without lighter group 13 analogues.


title: Nihonium

text: Periodic trends would predict nihonium to have an atomic radius larger than that of thallium due to it being one period further down the periodic table, but calculations suggest nihonium has an atomic radius of about 170 pm, the same as that of thallium, due to the relativistic stabilisation and contraction of its 7s and 7p orbitals. Thus, nihonium is expected to be much denser than thallium, with a predicted density of about 16 to 18 g/cm compared to thallium's 11.85 g/cm, since nihonium atoms are heavier than thallium atoms but have the same volume. Bulk nihonium is expected to have a hexagonal close-packed crystal structure, like thallium. The melting and boiling points of nihonium have been predicted to be 430 °C and 1100 °C respectively, exceeding the values for gallium, indium, and thallium, following periodic trends. Nihonium should have a bulk modulus of 20.8 GPa, about half that of thallium (43 GPa).


title: Nihonium

text: The chemistry of nihonium is expected to be very different from that of thallium. This difference stems from the spin–orbit splitting of the 7p shell, which results in nihonium being between two relatively inert closed-shell elements (copernicium and flerovium), an unprecedented situation in the periodic table. Nihonium is expected to be less reactive than thallium, because of the greater stabilisation and resultant chemical inactivity of the 7s subshell in nihonium compared to the 6s subshell in thallium. The standard electrode potential for the Nh/Nh couple is predicted to be 0.6 V. Nihonium should be a rather noble metal.


title: Nihonium

text: The metallic group 13 elements are typically found in two oxidation states: +1 and +3. The former results from the involvement of only the single p electron in bonding, and the latter results in the involvement of all three valence electrons, two in the s-subshell and one in the p-subshell. Going down the group, bond energies decrease and the +3 state becomes less stable, as the energy released in forming two additional bonds and attaining the +3 state is not always enough to outweigh the energy needed to involve the s-electrons. Hence, for aluminium and gallium +3 is the most stable state, but +1 gains importance for indium and by thallium it becomes more stable than the +3 state. Nihonium is expected to continue this trend and have +1 as its most stable oxidation state.


title: Nihonium

text: The simplest possible nihonium compound is the monohydride, NhH. The bonding is provided by the 7p electron of nihonium and the 1s electron of hydrogen. The SO interaction causes the binding energy of nihonium monohydride to be reduced by about 1 eV and the nihonium–hydrogen bond length to decrease as the bonding 7p orbital is relativistically contracted. This is unique among the 7p element monohydrides; all the others have relativistic expansion of the bond length instead of contraction. Another effect of the SO interaction is that the Nh–H bond is expected to have significant pi bonding character (side-on orbital overlap), unlike the almost pure sigma bonding (head-on orbital overlap) in thallium monohydride (TlH). The analogous monofluoride (NhF) should also exist. Nihonium(I) is predicted to be more similar to silver(I) than thallium(I): the Nh ion is expected to more willingly bind anions, so that NhCl should be quite soluble in excess hydrochloric acid or ammonia; TlCl is not. In contrast to Tl, which forms the strongly basic hydroxide (TlOH) in solution, the Nh cation should instead hydrolyse all the way to the amphoteric oxide NhO, which would be soluble in aqueous ammonia and weakly soluble in water.


title: Nihonium

text: The adsorption behaviour of nihonium on gold surfaces in thermochromatographical experiments is expected to be closer to that of astatine than that of thallium. The destabilisation of the 7p subshell effectively leads to a valence shell closing at the 7s 7p configuration rather than the expected 7s 7p configuration with its stable octet. As such, nihonium, like astatine, can be considered to be one p-electron short of a closed valence shell. Hence, even though nihonium is in group 13, it has several properties similar to the group 17 elements. (Tennessine in group 17 has some group-13-like properties, as it has three valence electrons outside the 7s 7p closed shell.) Nihonium is expected to be able to gain an electron to attain this closed-shell configuration, forming the −1 oxidation state like the halogens (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astatine). This state should be more stable than it is for thallium as the SO splitting of the 7p subshell is greater than that for the 6p subshell. Nihonium should be the most electronegative of the metallic group 13 elements, even more electronegative than tennessine, the period 7 congener of the halogens: in the compound NhTs, the negative charge is expected to be on the nihonium atom rather than the tennessine atom. The −1 oxidation should be more stable for nihonium than for tennessine. The electron affinity of nihonium is calculated to be around 0.68 eV, higher than thallium's at 0.4 eV; tennessine's is expected to be 1.8 eV, the lowest in its group. It is theoretically predicted that nihonium should have an enthalpy of sublimation around 150 kJ/mol and an enthalpy of adsorption on a gold surface around −159 kJ/mol.