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Today's featured article...

Automatic tube loader of B Reactor at the HEW

The Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) was a nuclear production complex in Benton County in the US state of Washington, established in early 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Plutonium manufactured at the HEW was used in the atomic bomb detonated in the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, and the Fat Man bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. DuPont was the prime contractor for its design, construction and operation. The land acquisition was one of the largest in US history. The construction workforce reached a peak of nearly 45,000 in June 1944. B Reactor, the world's first full-scale plutonium production nuclear reactor, went critical in September 1944, followed by D and F Reactors in December 1944 and February 1945, respectively. The HEW suffered an outage on 10 March 1945 due to a Japanese balloon bomb. The total cost of the HEW up to December 1946 was more than $348 million (equivalent to $4.1 billion in 2023). (Full article...)

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On this day...

July 16

Impact site on Jupiter of a Shoemaker–Levy 9 fragment

1377 – The ten-year-old Richard II was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey.
1782 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail premiered in Vienna, after which Emperor Joseph II anecdotally remarked that it had "too many notes".
1950 – Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred 31 prisoners of war of the U.S. Army on a mountain near the village of Tuman.
1994 – Fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 began colliding with the planet Jupiter (impact site pictured), with the first impact causing a fireball that reached a peak temperature of 24,000 kelvin.
2004 – Millennium Park, a public park in Chicago, Illinois, and one of the world's largest rooftop gardens, opened to the public.

Fulrad (d. 784)
al-Nasir Ahmad, Sultan of Egypt (d. 1344)
Ellen Oliver (b. 1870)
Gareth Bale (b. 1989)

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In the news

KP Sharma Oli

KP Sharma Oli (pictured) is appointed prime minister of Nepal following the incumbent Pushpa Kamal Dahal losing a no confidence motion.
In association football, UEFA Euro 2024 concludes with Spain defeating England in the final, and the Copa América concludes with Argentina defeating Colombia in the final.
In tennis, Barbora Krejčíková and Carlos Alcaraz win the women's and men's singles, respectively, at the Wimbledon Championships.
Former United States president Donald Trump survives an assassination attempt during a political rally near Butler, Pennsylvania.

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From Wikipedia's newest articles:

...that the Roman de Fergus is the earliest piece of non-Celtic vernacular literature to have survived from Scotland?
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...that the Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez became famous with the painting "Virgen de Guadalupe", which represents Lopez's personal investigation into Virgen de Guadalupe's status in Mexican society?

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