A wave of statistical enthusiasm, coupled with new technologies, paved the way for data visualization that laid the foundations for social reform in 19th-century Britain.

Christopher Nolan's science fiction movie Interstellar offers a variety of opportunities for students in elementary courses on general relativity theory. This paper describes such opportunities, including: (i) At the motivational level, the manner in which elementary relativity concepts underlie the wormhole visualizations seen in the movie. (ii) At the briefest computational level, instructive calculations with simple but intriguing wormhole metrics, including, e.g., constructing embedding diagrams for the three-parameter wormhole that was used by our visual effects team and Christopher Nolan in scoping out possible wormhole geometries for the movie. (iii) Combining the proper reference frame of a camera with solutions of the geodesic equation, to construct a light-ray-tracing map backward in time from a camera's local sky to a wormhole's two celestial spheres. (iv) Implementing this map, for example in Mathematica, Maple or Matlab, and using that implementation to construct images of what a camera sees when near or inside a wormhole. (v) With the student's implementation, exploring how the wormhole's three parameters influence what the camera sees---which is precisely how Christopher Nolan, using our implementation, chose the parameters for emph{Interstellar}'s wormhole. (vi) Using the student's implementation, exploring the wormhole's Einstein ring, and particularly the peculiar motions of star images near the ring; and exploring what it looks like to travel through a wormhole.

MELK, Austria (AP) - An Austrian man beat his own record for the longest full body contact with ice cubes on Saturday. Josef Koeberl managed to stay 2 hours, 30 minutes and 57 seconds inside a custom-made glass box filled up to his shoulders with ice cubes. More than 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of ice cubes were needed to fill up the box, after Koeberl stepped inside wearing nothing but swim trunks. In order to fight the "wave of pain" caused by the freezing temperatures, Koeberl says he was trying to focus on positive emotions. "I'm fighting the pain by visualizing and drawing on positive emotions so I can dampen this wave of pain," Koeberl told reporters. "That way I can endure." A small crowd of people watched on as Koeberl beat his own record from 2019 by 30 minutes on the town square of Melk in Lower Austria. After being taken out of the ice box by helpers he said that the sun felt "really great" on his back. Koeberl is planning to beat his own record one more time - next year in Los Angeles. His team said that Koeberl's personal record is also the current world record when it comes to exposing the body to ice for as long as possible.

A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system to also include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations. The uncounted plural, geographic information systems, also abbreviated GIS, is the most common term for the industry and profession concerned with these systems. It is roughly synonymous with geoinformatics and part of the broader geospatial field, which also includes GPS, remote sensing, etc. Geographic information science, the academic discipline that studies these systems and their underlying geographic principles, may also be abbreviated as GIS, but the unambiguous GIScience is more common. GIScience is often considered a subdiscipline of geography within the branch of technical geography. Geographic information systems are utilized in multiple technologies, processes, techniques and methods. They are...

Virology is the scientific study of biological viruses. It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host cells for reproduction, their interaction with host organism physiology and immunity, the diseases they cause, the techniques to isolate and culture them, and their use in research and therapy. The identification of the causative agent of tobacco mosaic disease (TMV) as a novel pathogen by Martinus Beijerinck (1898) is now acknowledged as being the official beginning of the field of virology as a discipline distinct from bacteriology. He realized the source was neither a bacterial nor a fungal infection, but something completely different. Beijerinck used the word "virus" to describe the mysterious agent in his 'contagium vivum fluidum' ('contagious living fluid'). Rosalind Franklin proposed the full structure of the tobacco mosaic virus in 1955. Virology began when there were no methods for propagating or visualizing viruses or specific laboratory tests for viral infections. The methods for separating viral nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) and proteins...

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. ... [It] means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients. The EBM Pyramid is a tool that helps in visualizing the hierarchy of evidence in medicine, from least authoritative, like expert opinions, to most authoritative, like systematic reviews. Background, history, and definition Medicine has a long history of scientific inquiry about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human disease. In the 11th century AD, Avicenna, a...

Susanne M. Hoffmann reconstructed the not preserved celestial globe of ancient Hipparchus of Nicaea digitally. She investigated the data (celestial coordinates) on this globe and traced their sources. By means of error analysis, visualizing, mapping, and correlation plots she examined the potential origin of the Hipparchian star coordinates (or some of them) in observations of earlier Greek or Babylonian data. As preserved by Ptolemy (Almagest) and Pliny the Elder, Hipparchus is famous for his exact observations but he does, of course, also rely on older data - e.g. especially elaborated by Ptolemy's discussion of precession. Thus, the first three chapters of this book are dedicated to a detailed analysis of Hipparchus's original data. The 4th chapter presents contemporary and earlier works in mathematical astronomy by Babylonian and Greek authors. Concluding, the 5th chapter, re-writes the history of astrometrical data collection, mathematical concepts to describe and predict them, and the variants of uranographies (constellation and star naming cultures) in the millennium before Hipparchus that led to his celestial globe. Starting from MUL.APIN and giving a new interpretation of its first tablet, the book solves a puzzle on the function of the Akkadian shitqulu text, and discusses the works of Euclid, Eratosthenes, Aratos, and Hypsikles as strong influences on Hipparchus's work. The fact that Hipparchus's hour stars have much higher accuracy than the coordinates of his rising and setting stars is suspicious with regard to potential Babylonian predecessors. A missing link is not ultimately presented but Hypsikles' mathematics and some Babylonian lists of normal stars appear to shape the pillars of the bridge.