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Florence Petty

Florence Petty (1 December 1870 – 18 November 1948) was a Scottish social worker, cookery writer and broadcaster. During the 1900s she undertook social work in the deprived area of Somers Town in North London, demonstrating for working-class women how to cook inexpensive and nutritious foods. Much of the instruction was done in their homes. She published cookery-related works aimed at those also involved in social work, and a cookery book and pamphlet aimed at the public. From 1914 until the mid-1940s she toured Britain giving lecture-demonstrations of cost-efficient and nutritious ways to cook, including dealing with food shortages during the First World War. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, she was a BBC broadcaster on food and budgeting. Petty worked until she was in her seventies. She is considered to be a pioneer of social work innovations. Her approach to teaching the use of cheap nutritious food was a precursor to the method adopted by the Ministry of Food during the Second World War. (Full article...)

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1611 copy of Anders Bure's Lapponia
1611 copy of Anders Bure's Lapponia

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Henry Kissinger circa 1973
Henry Kissinger

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December 1: World AIDS Day; Great Union Day in Romania (1918)

Juan Lavalle
Juan Lavalle
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Inflexible circa 1909
Inflexible circa 1909

The first three battlecruisers of the Royal Navy were laid down while the world's first "all big gun" warship, HMS Dreadnought, was being built in 1906. The battlecruiser was the brainchild of Admiral Sir John ("Jacky") Fisher, the man who had sponsored the construction of the Dreadnought. He visualised a new breed of warship with the armament of a battleship, but faster, lighter, and less heavily armoured. This design philosophy was most successful in action when the battlecruisers could use their speed to run down smaller and weaker ships. The best example is the Battle of the Falkland Islands where Invincible and Inflexible sank the German armoured cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau almost without damage to themselves, despite numerous hits by the German ships. They were less successful against heavily armoured ships, as was demonstrated by the loss of Invincible, Indefatigable, and Queen Mary during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. (Full list...)

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The Arecibo Telescope was a 305-meter-diameter (1,000 ft) spherical-reflector radio telescope built into a natural sinkhole at the Arecibo Observatory located near Arecibo, Puerto Rico. A cable-mount steerable receiver and several radar transmitters for emitting signals were mounted 150 meters (492 ft) above the parabolic antenna. Completed in November 1963, the Arecibo Telescope was the world's largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years, until it was surpassed in July 2016 by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China. Following a long period of declining maintenance exacerbated by Hurricane Maria and two earthquakes, the Arecibo Telescope's receiver cables suffered a catastrophic failure that culminated in the collapse of the receiver platform at around 6:55 a.m. AST (10:55 UTC) on December 1, 2020, as captured in this video. The collapse of the receiver structure and cables onto the dish caused extensive additional damage, and ultimately resulted in the decision to demolish the remaining structure in 2022.

Video credit: National Science Foundation

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