In 1906, scientists proved that people were getting infections from "Aedes" mosquitoes. In 1907, scientists showed that a virus causes dengue. This was just the second disease that was shown to be caused by a virus. (The first was yellow fever.) John Burton Cleland and Joseph Franklin Siler kept studying the dengue virus, and figured out the basics of how the virus spreads.
Dengue began to spread much more quickly during and after World War II. Different types of dengue also spread to new areas. For the first time, people started to get dengue hemorrhagic fever. The first case of dengue hemorrhagic fever happened in the Philippines in 1953. By the 1970s, dengue hemorrhagic fever had become a major cause of death in children. It also spread to the Pacific and the Americas. Dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome were first reported in Central America and South America in 1981.
It is not clear where the word "dengue" came from. Some people think that it comes from the Swahili phrase "Ka-dinga pepo". This phrase talks about the disease being caused by an evil spirit. The Swahili word "dinga" is thought to come from the Spanish word "dengue", which means "careful." That word may have been used to describe a person having bone pain from dengue fever; that pain would make the person walk carefully. However, it is also possible that the Spanish word came from the Swahili word, and not the other way around.
Other people think that the name "dengue" comes from the West Indies. In the West Indies, slaves that had dengue were said to stand and walk like "a dandy." Because of this, the disease was also called "dandy fever."
The name "breakbone fever" was first used by Benjamin Rush, a doctor and United States "Founding Father." In 1789, Rush used the name "breakbone fever" in a report about the 1780 dengue outbreak in Philadelphia. In his official report, Rush mostly used the more formal name "bilious remitting fever".
The term "dengue fever" was not commonly used until after 1828. Before that, different people used different names for the disease. For example, dengue was also called "breakheart fever" and "la dengue." Other names were also used for severe dengue: for example, "infectious thrombocytopenic purpura", "Philippine," "Thai," and "Singapore hemorrhagic fever."
Scientists keep doing research on ways to prevent and treat dengue. People are also working on controlling mosquitoes, creating a vaccine, and creating drugs to fight the virus.
Many simple things have been done to control mosquitoes. Some of these things have worked. For example, guppies ("Poecilia reticulata") or copepods can be put in standing water to eat the mosquito larvae (eggs).
Scientists also keep working on creating antiviral drugs to treat attacks of dengue fever and keep people from getting severe complications. They are also working on figuring out how the virus's proteins are structured. This may help them create medications that work well for dengue.
Shrove Tuesday
Shrove Tuesday is a holiday in which the christian has ash put on their head in the shape of a cross the United Kingdom, Canada, The United States and Australia for the day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of the Christian season of prayer and fasting called Lent.
On Shrove Tuesday people traditionally cook and eat pancakes. The reason for this was to use up foods such as fat, eggs and milk before Lent.
It is also called Pancake Tuesday or Pancake Day. In some other countries, such as the United States, it is called Mardi Gras.
In some cultures it has close ties with Mischief night.
Wright County
Wright County is a county in three different states of the United States:
Sicilian language
The Sicilian language ("") is a language spoken in Sicily island and central Calabria. It is currently spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of Sicily and by emigrants.
10 million people speak the language. It has three stocks: the Sicilian, the Calabro-Sicilian and Salentinu.
Compared to Italian, it is a distinctly separate form of verbal communication patterned by many years of foreign influence. Efforts to force Sicilians to speak conventional Italian include schools, television and radio. Italians maintain that Sicilian is simply a subset dialect of Italian, while Sicilians see their spoken word as a true and separate language.
Portmanteau word
A portmanteau word () is made of other words, or parts of words. It comes from putting two (or more) other words together, like "motel", from "motor" and "hotel".
"Portmanteau" originally meant a type of suitcase with two separate parts for storage.
The first use as a word combination appeared in Lewis Carroll's book "Through the Looking-Glass". There Humpty Dumpty explains that some of the unusual words in "Jabberwocky" are other words packed together into one word, as two parts of a portmanteau suitcase are packed together.
"Portmanteau" itself is an example, combining the French words for carry (porter) and coat (manteau) into a coat carrier. "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of wiki (Hawaiian for fast) and encyclopedia.
Installation (computer programs)
Installation means to put a program on a computer so that the computer can run it.
Most programs are stored in special ways to make them smaller, or to gather all the different pieces of a program up into one big piece. Before it can be used, though, the program needs to have these changes undone. Some programs also need to know extra information about the computer it is going to run on, so while it is installing, it will figure out what it needs to know and write it down for later.
Cohomology
Cohomology is something in higher math which is sometimes used to solve certain math problems.
Laplace transform
The Laplace transform is a way to turn functions into other functions in order to do certain calculations more easily. This way of turning functions to other functions is very similar to U Substitution. The aim of this change is to be able to turn the hard work of integration into a simple algebraic addition and subtraction, just as logarithms allow one to add and subtract instead of multiplying and dividing. An example of its use is in ruin theory, which is a subject of actuarial science with regards to insurance.
Functions usually take a variable (say "t") as an input, and give some output (say "f"). The Laplace transform converts these functions to take some other input ("s") and give some other output ("F"). Because of certain shared properties of Laplace transforms, this makes it very easy to manipulate the original function into something useful.
The Laplace transform of a function formula_1, written as formula_2 or formula_3, is often formulated as:
where:
Lorentz factor
The Lorentz factor is the factor by which time, length, and mass change for an object moving at speeds close to the speed of light (relativistic speeds). It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz.
The equation is:
where v is the speed of the object and c is the speed of light. The quantity (v/c) is often labeled formula_2 (beta) and so the above equation can be rewritten:
Classical or Galilean relativity is the idea that if you throw a ball at 50 mph while running at 5 mph, the ball travels 55 mph. Of course, the ball still moves away from you at 50 mph, so if one were to ask you, you "saw" the ball traveling 50 mph. Meanwhile, your friend Rory saw that you happened to be running at 5 mph. He would say that the ball was traveling 55 mph. Both of you are right, you just happened to be moving "with" the ball.
The speed of light, c, is 670,616,629 mph. So if you are in a car traveling half the speed of light (0.5c) and you turn on your headlights, the light moves away from you at 1 c... or is it 1.5 c? It ends up that c is c no matter what. The next section explains why it's not c - 0.5c.