Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 January 22

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From today's featured article

Thermal Diffusion Process Building

The S-50 Project was the Manhattan Project's effort to produce enriched uranium by liquid thermal diffusion during World War II. The process was developed by Philip H. Abelson and other scientists at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and was one of three technologies for uranium enrichment pursued by the Manhattan Project. Pilot plants were built at the Anacostia Naval Air Station and the Philadelphia Navy Yard. A facility at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was the only production-scale liquid thermal diffusion plant ever built. It could not enrich uranium sufficiently for use in an atomic bomb, but it could begin the process of enrichment that was completed by the Y-12 calutrons and the K-25 gaseous diffusion plants. It sped up the production of enriched uranium for the Little Boy bomb used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This plant ceased production in September 1945, but was reopened in May 1946, and used by the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft project of the US Army Air Forces before being demolished in the late 1940s. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

A man wearing a jean jacket

... that the jean jacket (pictured) was invented by Levi Strauss in around 1880?
... that Marjorie Husted, as the radio voice of homemaking authority Betty Crocker, interviewed Joan Crawford in her home?
... that research for the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House reportedly included more than 200 interviews with Donald Trump and his closest associates conducted over 18 months?
... that after the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the Chinese returned Param Vir Chakra recipient Joginder Singh's ashes to his battalion with full military honours?
... that Black Buttes' amphitheater is partially occupied by Deming Glacier?
... that François Noël's translations of classic Chinese texts were banned in the Papal States and Germany but praised by historian Jean-Baptiste Du Halde?
... that "Private View", an episode of Inside No. 9, was a homage to Theatre of Blood satirising the world of contemporary art?
... that the Zombie Hut was a fictitious tiki bar in the 1945 Abbott and Costello film Zombies on Broadway, as well as a real tiki bar that opened in Sacramento, California, that same year?

In the news

Mudflow damage in Santa Barbara County

Turkey begins a military offensive against US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria.
A bus fire in the Aktobe Region, Kazakhstan, kills 52 people.
Russell M. Nelson becomes President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The British construction and services company Carillion goes into compulsory liquidation.
The oil tanker MV Sanchi sinks with the loss of all 32 crew eight days after colliding with another ship.
At least 18 people are killed after mudflows (damage pictured) strike the area of Montecito, California, in the area affected by the recent Thomas Fire.

On this day...

January 22: Day of Unity of Ukraine in Ukraine (1919)

Pan Am Boeing 747

565 – Justinian the Great deposed Eutychius, Patriarch of Constantinople, after the latter refused the Byzantine Emperor's order to adopt the tenets of the Aphthartodocetae, a sect of Monophysites.
1689 – The Convention Parliament convened to justify the overthrow of James II, the last Roman Catholic King of England, who had vacated the throne when he fled to France in 1688.
1905 – Russian Revolution: Peaceful demonstrators, led by Father Gapon, a Russian Orthodox priest, were massacred outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
1924 – Ramsay MacDonald took office as the first British Prime Minister from the Labour Party.
1970 – The Boeing 747 (pictured), the world's first widebody commercial airliner, entered service for Pan Am on the New York–London route.

John Donne (b. 1572) · Gisela Januszewska (b. 1867) · Ali Hassan Salameh (d. 1979)

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From today's featured list

Averno

The NWA World Middleweight Championship was a professional wrestling championship in the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) between 1939 and 2010. For most of its existence, it was defended in the Mexican lucha libre promotion Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, who called it the Campeonato Mundial Peso Medio de NWA. The championship was created as the "World Middleweight Championship" in early 1939, by Salvador Lutteroth, owner of Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre. He awarded it to Gus Kallio, a five-time National Wrestling Association World Middleweight Champion, nicknamed "The King of the Middleweights" in the United States. When Octavio Gaona defeated Kallio on March 29, 1939, he won both middleweight championships. Since 1939 45 wrestlers have shared 84 NWA Middleweight Championship reigns. René Guajardo held the championship a record six times. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

A 14th-century Korean hanging scroll in gold and color on silk depicting Kṣitigarbha, a bodhisattva primarily revered in East Asian Buddhism. He is usually shown as a Buddhist monk with a halo around his shaved head, a staff to force open the gates of hell, and a wish-fulfilling jewel to light up the darkness. In East Asian Buddhism, Kṣitigarbha is known for his vow to take responsibility for the instruction of all beings in the six worlds between the death of Gautama Buddha and the rise of Maitreya, as well as his vow not to achieve Buddhahood until all hells are emptied. He is therefore often regarded as the bodhisattva of hell-beings.

Painting: Unknown (image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

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