Besse Berry Cooper (August 26, 1896 – December 4, 2012) was an American woman who was, at the time of her death, the youngest of only 6 verified people (all of whom were women) who had become at least 116 years old, the oldest living person in the United States since Eunice Sanborn's death on January 31, 2011 and also believed to be the world's oldest living person. However, Brazilian woman Maria Gomes Valentim was on May 18, 2011 confirmed to be almost 7 weeks older, which made her the oldest living person from Frenchwoman Eugénie Blanchard's death on November 4, 2010 and Cooper the oldest living person from her death on June 21, 2011, just 18 days before her 115th birthday. Later on December 2 that year, when Japanesewoman Chiyono Hasegawa died 12 days after celebrating her 115th birthday, Cooper also became the last living person born in 1896. Cooper is (except from possibly disputed Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment) one of two people to have regained the status of world's oldest living person, with the other being Elizabeth Bolden.
Besse Cooper was born as Besse Berry Brown in Sullivan County in Tennessee on August 26, 1896. She was the third of eight children of Richard Brown and Angeline Berry. She graduated from East Tennessee State Normal School (now East Tennessee State University) in 1916. While a college student, she joined the so-called first wave of feminism in the United States, becoming a suffragette, joining the struggle for women's right to vote. The dedication of suffragettes like Besse, after some four decades of struggle by a fierce women's movement, resulted in the United States finally recognizing women as having the same right to vote as men, awarding them equal voting rights in all states. Besse's home state of Tennessee would prove the state which tipped the balance, being the 36th state needed to ratify and thus approve the Nineteenth Amendment be added to the U.S. Constitution in August 1920. She worked as a school teacher until the time of America's entrance to World War I in 1917, when she moved to Georgia. She taught in the Walton County town of Between until 1929, being the principal teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She was married to Luther Cooper from 1924 until his death in 1963 with whom she had four children. She also had eleven grandchildren, thirteen great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. In her final years, Cooper lived in a nursing home in Monroe, Georgia. In August 2012, a bridge in Between was named the "Besse Brown Cooper Bridge" in her honour.
Cooper died of respiratory failure on December 4, 2012 at age 116 years, 100 days, and was succeeded as the oldest living person by Italian-born Americanwoman Dina Manfredini, who died just 13 days later, and was at the time of her death the youngest of only 6 verified people who had become at least 116 years old.
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a red brick university in Bristol, southwest England. Some studies rate it as one of the top 30 universities in the world. It has about 14 applicants for every undergraduate place.
James Lovelock
James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist who lives in Devon. He became an environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia theory. This suggests the biosphere is a self-regulating system.
After the development of an instrument in the late 1960s, Lovelock was the first to detect the widespread presence of CFCs in the atmosphere. He found a concentration of 60 parts per trillion of CFC-11 over Ireland. He went on to measure the concentration of CFC-11 from the northern hemisphere to the Antarctic aboard the research ship RRS "Shackleton".
Lovelock developed his Gaia ideas after working for NASA on detecting life on Mars.
The Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding, the idea is that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment which acts to sustain life.
While the idea was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been widely accepted by other scientists. Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould. Lovelock has responded to these criticisms with models such as Daisyworld, which illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis, under the right circumstances.
In Lovelock's 2006 book, "The Revenge of Gaia", he argues that the destruction of rainforests weakens Gaia's capacity to control greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If so, the planet's negative feedbacks would weaken, and global warming would continue to increase.
The warming of the oceans is extending the oceanic thermocline layer of tropical oceans over the Arctic and Antarctic waters. This would prevent the rise of oceanic nutrients into the surface waters and eliminate the algal blooms of phytoplankton. As phytoplankton and forests are the main ways in which Gaia draws down carbon dioxide, taking it out of the atmosphere, the elimination of this environmental buffering will see, according to Lovelock, most of the earth becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of this century, with a massive extension of tropical deserts. This rather extreme view is held by only a few other scientists.
In his most recent book, ""The Vanishing Face of Gaia"", he suggests that we may already be beyond the tipping point of terrestrial climate into a permanently hot state. Given these conditions, Lovelock expects human civilization will be hard pressed to survive. He expects the change to be similar to the PaleoceneEocene Thermal Maximum when atmospheric concentration of CO was 450 ppm. At that point the Arctic Ocean was 23 °C and had crocodiles in it, with the rest of the world mostly scrub and desert.
In September 2007, Lovelock and Chris Rapley proposed the construction of ocean pumps to pump water up from below the thermocline to "fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom". The basic idea was to accelerate the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean by increasing photosynthesis and increasing the export of organic carbon (as "marine snow") to the deep ocean. A scheme similar to that proposed by Lovelock and Rapley is being independently developed by a commercial company.
Lovelock subsequently said that his proposal was intended to stimulate interest, and research would be the next step.
DIN connector
A DIN connector is a type of round electronic connector. It is named for the Deutsches Institut für Normung, the German national standards regulator. DIN plugs can be used in audio systems and MIDI connections.The Mini-DIN connector is similar but smaller. Before USB connectors, keyboards and mice used mini-DIN connectors.
XLR connector
XLR connector is a type of electronic connector that is mostly used with audio technology. Balanced and unbalanced circuits are possible with XLR when using monosignal per one XLR connection. Sound quality improves with a balanced circuit because noise signal reduces, especially with microphones where the signal is often weak.
Jayne Meadows
Jayne Meadows (who was born as Jane Cotter; September 27, 1919 – April 27, 2015) was an American movie and stage actress. She was the older sister for the deceased actress Audrey Meadows. She was married to Steve Allen. Meadows was nominated for three Emmy Awards. Meadows was born in Wu-ch'ang, Heilongjiang, China to an American family.
Meadows died of natural causes at her home in Encino, California, aged 95.
Line level