State College is a college town, dominated economically and demographically by the presence of the University Park campus of the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State).
Bassetki
Bassetki is a small village in Iraq, in Dohuk Governorate of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. Several important archaeological finds were made there.
In 1975 a fragment of a figure of Naram-Sin of Akkad was found near Bassetki. The statue is now called the Bassetki Statue.
In August–October 2016,  the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the University of Tübingen and Hasan Qasim from the Directorate of Antiquities in Dohuk did archaeological work near Bassetki. They found the remains of a large Bronze Age city.  The city was started around 3000 B.C. It lasted for more than 1,200 years. From around 2700 B.C., the city had a wall protecting the upper part of the city from invaders. The city had a large road network, many residential districts and a palace. A contemporary cemetery was located outside the city. The city was connected to other regions of Mesopotamia and Anatolia by a roadway dating from around 1800 B.C. The archeologists also discovered settlement layers dating from the Akkadian Empire.  The finds were announced by the University of Tübingen on 3 November 2016.
In the summer of 2017, archaeologists from the University of Tübingen in Germany uncovered a collection of Assyrian cuneiform tablets hidden inside a collection of ceramic jugs. These tablets are 3,200 years old. They indicate that the ancient lost royal city of Mardaman was where Bassetki is today.
Brahmagupta
Brahmagupta () (born , died ) was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. He was the author of two early works on mathematics and astronomy: the "Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta" (BSS, "correctly established doctrine of Brahma", dated 628).
Brahmagupta was the first to give rules to compute with "zero". The texts composed by Brahmagupta were composed in elliptical verse in Sanskrit, as was common practice in Indian mathematics. As no proofs are given, it is not known how Brahmagupta's results were derived.
Fuke Zen
Fuke Zen was a branch of Zen Buddhism which existed in Japan from the 13th century until the late 19th century. Fuke monks were noted for playing the shakuhachi flute as a form of meditation. It was characterized in the public imagination of Japan by the Fuke Zen monks playing the shakuhachi flute while wearing a large woven basket hat that covered their entire head as they went on pilgrimage.
Siberian languages
Siberian languages may refer to any languages spoken in Siberia, including:
Orrery
An orrery is a mechanical model of the Solar System. It shows the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons. It is usually a heliocentric model.
The Greeks had working planetaria. The first orrery that was a planetarium of the modern era was produced in 1704. One was presented to Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery – hence the name. They are usually driven by a clockwork mechanism. The globe in the centre represents the Sun, and a planet is at the end of each arm.
The first known orrery was the Antikythera mechanism, variously dated from 60 to 150 BC.
Clockwork
Clockwork means the inner workings of mechanical machines clocks (where it is also called a "movement". Also other similar mechanisms with a complex series of gears.
A clockwork mechanism usually has a clockwork motor. This has a mainspring, a spiral of metal ribbon. Energy is stored in the mainspring by "winding it up", turning a key attached to a ratchet which twists the mainspring tighter. Then the force of the mainspring turns the clockwork gears, until the stored energy is used up. The adjectives "wind-up" and "spring-powered" refer to mainspring-powered clockwork devices. These include clocks and watches, kitchen timers, music boxes, and wind-up toys.
Analogue computer
Analogue computers are mechanical or electronic devices which solve problems. some are used to control machines. They were once the only way a machine could be controlled, and are still used in cases where digital computers are not the best choice. The abacus, a digital device also sometimes called a computer, was used by Babylonians in c. 2500 BC.
The earliest known analogue computer in metal was the Antikythera device. However, this was certainly not the first in other forms. Some people think that mental inventions count as analogue computers, such as the invention of the zero (Ancient Egypt 1700 BC). But in that case almost every invention by mankind would count as an analogue computer, and that is not really how the term is used.
Certainly the invention of the slide rule was important for calculations. They were developed in the 17th century by William Oughtred, after John Napier's work on logarithms. Slide rules are definitely mechanical calculating machines. They were the most commonly used tools in science and engineering before the 1960s/1970s.
For the industrial revolution the invention of James Watt's governor was critical, because it was a negative feedback control for large pumps and engines. In fact most analogue computers work with continuous data rather that discrete or digital data. They are like abstract models of the real world. An analogue engine models the critical aspects of the real engine.
Tiger keelback
The Tiger keelback ("Rhabdophis tigrinus") is a species of venomous colubrid snake that lives throughout East and Southeast Asia.
The tiger keelback is shy, so it would be rare to be attacked by one, but they sometimes do, and they do need to survive. And in order to survive, a snake must have a good form of defense. And the tiger keelback has a very interesting form of defense. In addition to having ordinary venomous snake fangs, they have another trick up their sleeve. Like the poison dart frog and sea slug, the tiger keelback doesn't bother to produce its own venom - rather, it gets its deadly venom from the toads it eats as part of its normal diet. When the tiger keelback feels even the tiniest bit threatened, it'll angle the two little glands on the back of its neck and use it against the predator, the one who seems a threat to the snake. The liquid, or rather, "fluid," that exits the snake's nuchal glands contains something called bufadienolides, that irritate airways and affect heart muscle.
The snake eats poisonous toads, which fuels the snake's venom. The tiger keelback also eats a few other small vertebrates.
Mike Braun
Michael K. Braun (born March 24, 1954) is an American businessman and politician. Braun is the junior United States Senator of Indiana since January 3, 2019. He is a member of the Republican Party.
He was born in Jasper, Indiana. Braun studied at Wabash College and at Harvard Business School. He served in the Indiana House of Representatives from 2014 to 2017, representing the 63rd District.
In August 2017, Braun announced his candidacy for U.S. Senate. In November 2018, Braun defeated incumbent Senator Joe Donnelly.
Flying snake
The flying snake, or "Chrysopelea", is a mildly venomous snake found throughout India to the Indonesian archipelago. It can glide, in an arboreal habitat, going from tree to tree, most likely, much like the draco lizard. They're better at "flying" than another species of animal similar to this - the flying squirrel.
The flying snake has venom, but much like garter snakes, the snake is so small that the amount of toxins in their saliva is only enough to kill their prey, which will be covered later on in the section about the flying snake's diet. If challenged by an animal far bigger than their venom can bring down, they might bite anyway just to give the predator a great deal of pain, or may choose "flight" rather than "fight" and "fly" away.
The flying snake's usual diet consists mainly of lizards, birds, frogs, bats, small mice and other rodents, which they catch during the day since they're a diurnal creature.
There are five known species of flying snake, which are the following: