Papua may refer to:
Papuan languages
The term Papuan languages means languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. That is, the term is defined negatively and does not mean a linguistic relationship.
The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea (which is divided between the country of Papua New Guinea and Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya), with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island, and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor, and the Alor archipelago to the west. One Papuan language, Meriam Mir, is spoken within the national borders of Australia, in the eastern Torres Strait. The only Papuan languages with official recognition are those of East Timor.
New Guinea is perhaps the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to anything else, plus a large number of language isolates.
Lombok
Lombok (population 2,950,105 in 2005) is an island in West Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia. It is to the east of Bali on the other side of the Lombok Strait. The capital and largest city on the island is Mataram.
The Gili Islands are very popular with tourists. There are many places to dive and the beaches are lovely.
Mount Rinjani, 3,726 m (12,224 ft), is the third-highest volcano in Indonesia.
In the summer of 2018, two major earthquakes, in July (6.4 magnitude) and in August (6.9 magnitude) hit the city killing nearly 270 people all together.
The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The poem was first published in 1590. A longer version of the poem was published in 1596. This version of the poem is in six parts or books.
"The Fairie Queene" is about different knights who fight against evil. It is an allegorical work, and each book of the poem is about a different virtue. The poem also praises Queen Elizabeth I of England and her family, the Tudors. Queen Elizabeth liked the poem so much that she gave Spenser a pension as a reward.
Torres Strait Islanders
Torres Strait Islanders are the indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands, part of Queensland, Australia. They are culturally related to the coastal peoples of Papua New Guinea. They are regarded as being distinct from other Aboriginal peoples of the rest of Australia. There are also two Torres Strait Islander communities on the nearby coast of the mainland.
There are 6,000 Torres Strait Islanders who live in the area of the Torres Strait, and 42,000 others who live outside of this area, mostly in the north of Queensland, particularly in Townsville and Cairns.
The indigenous people of the Torres Strait have a distinct culture which has slight variants on the different islands where they live. They are a sea-faring people, and engaged in trade with peoples of Papua New Guinea. The culture is complex, with some Australian elements, some Papuan elements, and some Austronesian elements, just like the languages. The Islanders seem to have been the dominant culture for many centuries, and neighbouring Aboriginal and Papuan cultures show some Island influence in religious ceremonies and the like. Archaeological, linguistic and folk history evidence suggests that the core of Island culture is Austronesian. Unlike the indigenous peoples of mainland Australia, the islanders were traditionally agriculturalists although they supplemented their food supplies through hunting and gathering.
Australian megafauna
Australian megafauna is a word used to describe a number of animal species in Australia that are quite a bit bigger than their closest living relatives. These species became extinct during the Pleistocene (16,100±100 - 50,000 years before present), but exact dates for their extinction have only been discovered recently.
Some mythological creatures from the Aboriginal dreamtime look a bit like animals from the prehistoric Australian megafauna.
Scientists have been unable to agree on the reasons the megafauna became extinct. It is possible when humans came to Australia (around 48,000-60,000 years ago), and began hunting and using fire, they may have caused the extinction of the megafauna. Climate change, which made the country much drier during an Ice Age about 18,000 years ago, may have also have led to the extinction of the megafauna. Some scientists say that climate change alone caused the extinction of the megafauna. This argument does not allow for the fact that the megafaunal species had lived through two million years of climate changes. They had lived through a number of dry times before their sudden extinction.
Scientists have got new evidence, based on new and better ways of finding dates, using optically stimulated luminescence and Uranium-thorium dating of megafaunal bones. This suggests that humans were the main cause of the extinction of megafauna in Australia. The dates show that the last of the megafauna became extinct around the same time, about 47,000 years ago. This was the time in which humans first arrived in Australia. The dates suggest the main reason for extinction was human burning of the land. Many plants were not able to survive regular fires, and so the types of plants changed. Scientists have studied oxygen and carbon isotopes from teeth of megafauna. These show sudden, dramatic, non-climate-related changes in plants, and in the diet of surviving marsupial animals, as well as the loss of megafaunal species. Further study of the teeth of megafauna shows the climate was dry at the time of extinction, similar to the dry climate of today, and that the megafauna were able to live in dry climates.
The following is a list of some of the Australian megafauna. It shows:
Mammals are set out by size with largest at the top.
Omagh bombing
The Omagh bombing was a car bomb attack by the Real Irish Republican Army in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, on 15 August 1998. 29 people were killed and over 300 people were hurt.
Themis (hypothetical moon)
On April 28, 1905, the American astronomer William H. Pickering said that he had found a tenth moon of the planet Saturn. Pickering named the moon Themis. No other astronomer has ever seen the moon that Pickering said he saw. Because of this, astronomers do not count Themis as an official moon of Saturn.
Pickering tried to figure out an orbit for Themis. He thought that Themis had an inclination of 39.1° to the ecliptic, with 0.23 eccentricity (0.23) and a semi-major axis distance of 1,457,000 km. This meant that Themis had an orbit like the moons Titan and Hyperion. Pickering believed that it took Themis 20.85 days to orbit Saturn, in a prograde motion.
Pickering thought that the diameter of Themis was about 38 miles (61 km). Pickering had also discovered the moon Phoebe, but modern astronomers know that Pickering made a mistake when he gave 42 miles (68 km) as the diameter of Phoebe. Because astronomers know how Pickering made his mistake, they can say that if Themis existed, it would have a diameter of 200 km.
In April 1861, Hermann Goldschmidt also thought he discovered a new satellite of Saturn between Titan and Hyperion. Goldschmidt called this moon Chiron. The moon Chiron also does not exist, but the name was used much later for the comet/asteroid 2060 Chiron.
In 1906, the French Academy of Sciences gave Pickering the Lalande Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his "discovery of the ninth and tenth satellites of Saturn".
The actual tenth satellite of Saturn (in order of discovery) was Janus, which was discovered in 1966 and confirmed in 1980. Its orbit is far from the supposed orbit of Themis.
There is also an asteroid named 24 Themis.
Real Irish Republican Army