The geographic center is in Butte County, South Dakota. The geographic center of the 48 states is in Smith County, Kansas.
The climate varies along with the geography, from tropical (hot and wet in summer, warm and dry in winter) in Florida and Hawaii to tundra (cold all year) in Alaska. Large parts of the country have warm summers and cold winters. Most of the northern U.S. gets snow in winter. Some parts of the western United States, like parts of California, have a Mediterranean climate. The southeastern United States can get hurricanes. Parts of the southern United States are subtropical (hot in summer and cool in winter). Tornadoes happen a lot in the Midwest.
The highest recorded temperature is 134 degrees Fahrenheit (57 degrees Celsius) and the lowest recorded temperature is -80 degrees Fahrenheit (-62 degrees Celsius).
Wilhelm Röntgen
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (27 March 1845 10 February 1923) was a German physicist who discovered X-rays. In 1901, he was the first person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Röntgen was born at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany. His father was a manufacturer and dealer of cloth. His mother was of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam. Röntgen was three when his family moved to Apeldoorn in The Netherlands.
In Apeldoorn, he attended the Institute of Martinus Herman van Doorn, a boarding school. In 1862, he attended a technical school at Utrecht, but was expelled. He then entered the University of Utrecht in 1865 to study physics.
He entered the Polytechnic at Zurich as a student of mechanical engineering. He worked in the laboratory of Kundt. In 1869 he graduated Ph.D. at the University of Zurich. He became Kundt's assistant and went with him to Würzburg. Three years later, they went to Strasbourg.
Röntgen held positions in various European universities, but his fame rests with his discovery of (what he called) x-rays. He received many honours and awards, doctorates, and honorary doctorates. He was a modest man who enjoyed the outdoors and mountain climbing.
Röntgen was married to Anna Bertha Ludwig (m. 1872, d. 1919) and had one child, Josephine Bertha Ludwig. The child was adopted at age 6, in 1887. She was the daughter of Georges's brother.
Röntgen died on 10 February 1923 from carcinoma of the intestine in Munich, Germany, aged 77.
Henri Becquerel
Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie for his discovery of radioactivity in 1896. This happened when a piece of pitchblende ruined some photographic film and he investigated. Other scientists had seen film similarly ruined but did not discover why.
The SI unit "becquerel" named after him. One becquerel (Bq) is equal to one radioactive decay process per second. He was the third person in his family to occupy the physics chair at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.
Philosophical skepticism
Philosophical skepticism (Greek "σκέψις" - "skepsis" meaning "enquiry") is a school of philosophical thought of skepticism that began in Ancient Greece and a method that crosses many different cultures. Many skeptics examine the meaning systems of their times, and this can often result in a position of doubt. This skepticism can be either disbelief in philosophical solutions, agnosticism, or even rejecting the reality of the outside world. One kind of scientific skepticism talks about looking into claims that lack evidence that can be seen.
In Islamic philosophy, philosophical skepticism was started by Al-Ghazali, known in the West as "Algazel", as a part of the orthodox Ash'ari school of Islamic theology. It has been said that Rene Descartes' ideas in "Discourse on the Method" may have been influenced by Al-Ghazli.
List of members of the European Parliament for the United Kingdom, 2009–14
This is a list of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) for the United Kingdom in the 2009 to 2014 session. They are listed in order by their last name.
"This table can be sorted by constituency, party or party group: click the symbol at the top of the column for each."
King River (Victoria)
King River is a river in the north east of Victoria, Australia. It flows into the Ovens River and which then joins the Murray River at Echuca. The King River is used for kayaking with many level two and three rapids. In 2008 it was the site for the Victorian and Australian Downriver Championships. The King Valley is a beautiful, cool climate wine grape growing area.
The King Valley has been described as a little part of Italy, set in the hills of north east Victoria, south of Wangaratta. This area has a history which includes bushrangers, the Chinese and Italians. The Chinese came from the gold fields in the mid 1800s and worked as farmers growing vegetables and tobacco. The were also Chinese merchants, selling their goods as they moved around the valley in horse pulled wagons. Roads in the valley today carry the names of the more important families like Mahlooks, Honey and Fosangs.
The Italians came to the area in the 1940s and 50's and like the Chinese grew tobacco. They soon saw that it was a good place to grow wine grapes. The valley has become famous for its different wines, such as sangiovese, nebbiolo and barbera. The vineyards have Italian names like Pizzini, Dal Zotto, Corsini, Sartori, Ciccone and Politini. The King Valley has some of the highest altitude vineyards in Australia.
Whitfield and Moyhu are the major towns in the King Valley along the road from Wangaratta or Mansfield.
Trillion (disambiguation)
Trillion may mean:
Either of the following two numbers (see Names for large numbers for more information):
Placoderm
The Placoderms ("Placodermi": Greek = "plated skin") were a class of armoured prehistoric fish, which lived from the mid Silurian to the end of the Devonian period. Their head and thorax were covered by armoured plates; the rest of the body was scaled or naked, depending on the species. Placoderms were among the first jawed fish, the Gnathostomata. A 380 million year old fossil of one species is the oldest-known example of live birth.
The placoderms were hugely successful in the Devonian period, which is sometimes called the 'Age of Fish'. In the Upper Devonian, a series of extinction events devastated the marine fauna. As the placoderms were predators, this caused a swift decline in their numbers, and the class was entirely extinct by the end of the Devonian.
The main source of placoderm fossils is the Old Red Sandstone continent. This, in the Devonian, was a united North America and western Europe and the continental shelf areas around it. Fossils from these strata in Scotland were collected since the 18th century, and Louis Agassiz wrote the first survey of fossil fish. A century later, Eric Stensiö showed that placoderms were genuine jawed fish.
Remarkable fossils have more recently been found in the Gogo formation of northern Western Australia. This is a former Upper Devonian reef system, where well-preserved fossils of 25 species have been found. The relationship between the placoderm and other jawed fish is still not clear. Most placoderms were benthic predators, near the bottom of the water column. The largest types, such as "Dunkleosteus" and "Gorgonichthys" were 6 metre-long top predators in the middle and upper pelagic zones.
Ixia
Ixia is a genus of plants in the family Iridaceae.
All of these plants are herbs with corms. The plants grows in South Africa. In total, there are 40-60 species.
Common names for this kind of flower are "Corn lily" and "African Corn-Lily" and "Wand flower".
The leaves look like swords. The flowers look like stars.
Some species of Corn lilies are cultivated as garden plants and houseplants.
Teleost