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From today's featured article

Apus is a small constellation in the southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name (from Greek for "without feet") was chosen because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus Plancius in 1598, it was charted on a star atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria (pictured). The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille charted the brighter stars and gave them Bayer designations in 1756. The five brightest stars are all reddish in hue. Shading the others at apparent magnitude 3.8 is Alpha Apodis, an orange giant that has around 48 times the diameter and 928 times the luminosity of the Sun. Marginally fainter is Gamma Apodis, another ageing giant star. Delta Apodis is a double star, the two components of which are 103 arcseconds apart and visible with the naked eye. Two star systems have been found to have planets. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

OK gesture

... that the OK gesture (pictured) can stand for the evil eye, the letter F, the number 9, the rising and setting of the sun, or to signal that a scuba diver is safe?
... that "Three Incarnations" by Pu Songling may have been inspired by certain stories in Feng Menglong's Stories to Caution the World?
... that Arthur Blackburn was the first South Australian to be awarded the Victoria Cross in World War I?
... that the Indian organisation Poovulagin Nanbargal filed a case to prevent the commissioning of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant?
... that a small group of Holocaust survivors tried to kill six million Germans?
... that Stephen Twinoburyo, a Ugandan expatriate in South Africa, said that Ugandans were unhappy about the ticket prices for the 2010 FIFA World Cup that took place in his new country?
... that while the Irish horror film The Green Marker Scare was animated by children, it is not made for them and may even unsettle some adults?
... that merchant George Meade was once considered a patriot of the American Revolution, but his firm actually profited from both sides during the war?

In the news

Artist's concept of the Mars rover

A suicide bombing attack near Pulwama, in Indian-administered Kashmir, kills 40 security personnel.
NASA concludes the 15-year Opportunity Mars rover mission after being unable to wake the rover (artist's concept shown) from hibernation.
The Republic of Macedonia changes its name to the Republic of North Macedonia as the Prespa agreement takes effect, ending a 27-year naming dispute with Greece.
In an American trial, Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is found guilty of ten criminal charges, including one mandating life imprisonment.

On this day

February 17: Independence Day in Kosovo (2008)

Geraldine Farrar as Madama Butterfly

1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: Napoleon led a French army to a crushing victory in the Battle of Mormant, nearly destroying a Russian division.
1859 – The French Navy captured the Citadel of Saigon, a fortress that was manned by 1,000 Nguyễn dynasty soldiers, en route to conquering Saigon and other regions of southern Vietnam.
1904 – Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly (Geraldine Farrar in the title role pictured) premiered at La Scala in Milan, generating negative reviews that forced him to rewrite the opera.
1974 – A U.S. Army soldier stole a Bell UH-1 helicopter and landed it on the White House South Lawn.
2006 – A massive landslide in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte killed over 1,000 people.

Jovian (d. 364) · Isabelle Eberhardt (b. 1877) · Amber Merritt (b. 1993)

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Today's featured picture

Liguus virgineus, also known as the candy cane snail, is a species of snail in the family Orthalicidae. It is native to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. There have also been at least three reports of living specimens being found in the Florida Keys of the United States. The snail lives on trees and feeds on moss, fungi and microscopic algae covering the bark.

Photograph: H. Zell

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