As of September 2010 the founding members of the Matariki Network of Universities are (sorted by year established):
Johann Bernoulli
Johann Bernoulli (6 August 1667 – 1 January 1748) was a Swiss Calvinist mathematician. Several men in his family were mathematicians, including his brother Jacob Bernoulli. He is known for his work on infinitesimal calculus, and teaching Leonhard Euler when he was young.
Sant Ravidas Nagar district
Sant Ravidas Nagar () is a district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Sonbhadra district
Sonbhadra () is a district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Rampur district
Rampur (, ) is a district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Amroha district
Amroha District, previously known as Jyotiba Phule Nagar, is one of the 72 districts of Uttar Pradesh state in northern India.
Bijnor district
Bijnour () is a district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Jaunpur district
Jaunpur () is a district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Chandauli district
Chandauli () is a district of Uttar Pradesh, India.
Varanasi district
Varanasi () is a district of India. It is in Uttar Pradesh state.
Central Cross-Island Highway
The Central Cross-Island Highway () or Provincial Highway No.8 is one of three highway systems that connect the east and west coasts of Taiwan.
Construction of the Central Cross-Island Highway began on July 7, 1956 and it first opened to traffic on May 9, 1960.
The highway begins in the west at Dongshi District in Taichung. The highway used to go up into the Central Mountain Range along the Dajia River () valley through the townships of Guguan () and Cingshan (). At Lishan there is a branch that heads north to Yilan City. It goes through the mountains to Dayuling () which is the highest point of the route. Here another branch of the highway runs south from Dayuling to Wushe (). Continuing east from Dayuling, the highway goes down into Taroko National Park. It passes through Guanyuan (), Cih-en (), Luoshao () and Tiansiang () before entering Taroko Gorge. After the gorge the road then meets the eastern coastal Su'ao-Hualien Highway.
The highway goes through mountains. Rocks often fall and there can be landslides. Heavy rain from typhoons often push soil and rocks onto the highway so people cannot drive through parts of it. Earthquakes also damage the highway. On September 21, 1999 the Jiji earthquake caused a lot of damage to the highway and cut it in many places between Dongshih and Lishan.
There was so much damage in 1999 that repairing it would cost a lot of money. The damaged parts of the highway were supposed to re-open in 2004. However, heavy rain from the Typhoon Mindulle added more damage to the highway. These parts were closed. The highway is still closed between Lishan and Guguan. There is no plan to repair it, but the New Central Cross-Island Highway is another way across the island.
Azorina vidalii
Azorina vidalii (also known as the Azores bellflower) is the only species of the genus "Azorina" within the Campanulaceae, the bellflower family. This endemic species of the Azores is used as an ornamental plant in other countries besides the Azores.
It was first given the name "Campanula vidalii" by Hewett Cottrell Watson in "Hooker's Icones Plantarum", table DCLXXXIV (684); Watson gave it the specific name "vidalii" after "Capt. Vidal, R.N.", who collected the original plant. Heinrich Feer changed the name to "Azorina vidalii", creating a new genus "Azorina", in "Botanische Jahrbücher für Systematik, Pflanzengeschichte und Pflanzengeographie", 12, S. 611.
The Azores bellflower is an evergreen, perennial herbaceous plant that grows to a height of 80 to 150 centimetres. It produces branches at the base and these branches are woody in the lower part. The plant has dark green leaves.
The plant flowers from May to October. The inflorescence has many hanging, waxy, pale pink, bell-shaped flowers . The "Azorina vidalii" forma "alba" has, as the name suggests, white flowers.
The Azores bellflower is rare and usually grows in holes in cliffs near the sea, below the 50 metres of altitude. It is usually accompanied by the plant "Salicornia", which also tolerate the salt in the wind coming from the sea. The plant is found in all the islands of the Azores archipelago, but not on the island of Graciosa.
Mars in fiction
Novels and short stories about Mars have been popular for over a hundred years. The planet's dramatic red color that some people can see is one reason for this. another is that the planet is close to Earth. Also, it looks somewhat like Earth. There are also stories about creatures from Mars on Earth and elsewhere.
Near the end of the 19th century, the astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing what he thought might be water channels on Mars. Because the Italian for channels is "canali", English translations tended to render the word as "canals", implying artificial construction. This led to the idea of intelligent beings on Mars before it apparently dried up.
The following works of fiction deal with the planet itself, with any assumed Martian civilization as part of its planetary landscape.
Several early modern writers, including Athanasius Kircher and Emanuel Swedenborg, hypothesized contact with Mars. Early science fiction about Mars often involved the first voyages to the planet, sometimes as an invasion force, more often for the purposes of exploration.
By the 1930s, stories about reaching Mars had become somewhat trite, and the focus shifted to Mars as an alien landscape. New stories were set in a time after human contact and basic exploration. Some were about the colonization of Mars or otherwise used Mars as a setting rather than a goal.
Beginning in 1965, the Mariner and Viking space probes revealed that the canals were an illusion, and that the Martian environment is extremely hostile to life. By the 1970s, the ideas of canals and ancient civilizations had to be abandoned.
Authors soon began writing stories based on the new Mars (frequently treating it as a desert planet). Most of these works have humans struggling to tame the planet, and some of them refer to terraforming (using technology to transform a planet's environment).
A common theme, particularly among American writers, is that of a Martian colony fighting for independence from Earth. It appeared already in Heinlein's "Red Planet" and is a major plot element in Greg Bear's "Moving Mars" and Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy. It is also part of the plot of the movie "Total Recall" and the television series "Babylon 5". Many video games also use this concept, such as the "Red Faction" and "Zone of the Enders" series. A historical rebellion of Mars against Earth is also mentioned in the "Star Trek" series of novels.
In the decades following Mariner and Apollo, the once-popular subgenre of realistic stories about a first expedition to Mars fell out of fashion, possibly due to the failure of the Apollo Program to continue on to Mars. The early 1990s saw a revival and re-envisioning of realistic novels about Mars expeditions. Early novels in this renaissance were Jack Williamson's novel "Beachhead" and Ben Bova's novel "Mars" (both 1992), which envisioned large-scale expeditions to Mars according to the thinking of the 1990s. These were followed by Gregory Benford's "The Martian Race" (1999), Geoffrey A. Landis's "Mars Crossing" (2000), and Robert Zubrin's "First Landing" (2002), which took as their starting points the smaller and more focussed expedition strategies evolved in the late 1990s, mostly building on the concepts of Mars Direct.
Several post-Mariner works are homages to the older phase of Mars fiction, circumventing the scientific picture of a dry and lifeless Mars with an unbreathable atmosphere through such science fiction generic staples as positing its future terraforming, or creating alternate history versions of Mars, where Burroughs' Barsoom, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles or The War of the Worlds are literal truth.