Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 July 26

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From today's featured article

The cooperative pulling paradigm is an experimental design in which animals cooperate to pull food towards themselves. Researchers use these experiments to try to understand how cooperation works and how and when it may have evolved. Meredith Crawford ran the first such experiment in 1937, attaching two ropes to a rolling platform that was too heavy to be pulled by a single chimpanzee. In another design, a rope comes loose if only one animal pulls it, and the platform can no longer be retrieved. Researchers look for signs of cooperation, such as when an animal waits for another animal's actions before pulling the rope. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, capuchins, tamarins, wolves, elephants, ravens, and keas appear to understand the requirements of the task, and other animals sometimes manage to retrieve the food. The superior scale and range of human cooperation comes mainly from the ability to use language to exchange social information. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Fanjingshan

... that Fanjingshan (pictured), a sacred Buddhist mountain, was recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
... that by 1969, president Felton Grandison Clark had expanded Southern University into America's largest historically black university by enrollment?
... that despite being unaffected by rabies or pseudorabies, the sea urchin Tripneustes depressus contains antivirals to these diseases?
... that Gujarati theatre actor Pransukh Nayak was entered in the 1989 Guinness Book of Records with 22,455 performances in his career?
... that the siting of a trolley station in front of the new courthouse in San Diego, California, was opposed by court officials and the county sheriff?
... that an army commander in the Banat Republic of 1918 claimed it could raise 40,000 troops against the French Danube Army, but in reality it had less than 4,000?
... that Alaska's Captain Cook State Recreation Area was a traditional salmon fishing spot for the Dena'ina people, before being used for commercial fishing?
... that when Byzantine emperor Anastasius I died, he left a treasury with over 23 million gold solidi, equivalent to 420 long tons of gold?

In the news

Site of sub-surface lake on Mars

Scientists announce the discovery of a 20-kilometre-wide (12 mi) sub-surface lake of water (location pictured) on Mars.
A heat wave in Japan leaves 80 people dead, with more than 22,000 others requiring hospitalization.
At least 80 people are killed and more than 100 others injured in wildfires in the Greek tourist resort of Mati.
In the Syrian Civil War, an army offensive captures all opposition-held regions in the south of the country.
A hydroelectric dam under construction in south-eastern Laos collapses, resulting in extensive damage and leaving more than 6,000 people displaced.

On this day

July 26

Emmy Noether

1533 – During the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, conquistador Francisco Pizarro executed the last independent emperor, Atahualpa, in Cajamarca.
1887 – L. L. Zamenhof published Unua Libro, the first publication to describe Esperanto, a constructed international language.
1918 – Emmy Noether (pictured) introduced what became known as Noether's theorem, from which conservation laws are deduced for symmetries of angular momentum, linear momentum, and energy, at Göttingen, Germany
1968 – After coming second to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in a rigged presidential election in 1967, Trương Đình Dzu was jailed by a military court for illicit currency transactions.
2016 – In one of the worst crimes committed in modern Japanese history, a former employee went on a knife rampage at a care home for disabled people in Sagamihara, killing 19 people and wounding 26 others.

Justin Holland (b. 1819) · Howard Vernon (d. 1921) · Ana María Matute (b. 1925)

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Today's featured picture

George Clinton (1739–1812) was an American soldier and statesman, considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He served 21 years as Governor of New York (1777–1795 and 1801–1804), the longest by any state's governor until Terry Branstad surpassed his record in 2015. A prominent Democratic-Republican, Clinton was tapped as the party's vice-presidential nominee in the 1804 and 1808 elections. He served as the fourth Vice President of the United States from 1805 until his death in 1812, under both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He and John C. Calhoun have been the only vice presidents to hold office under two different presidents.

Painting: Ezra Ames

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