Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 January 27

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From today's featured article

Imperator torosus, the brawny bolete, is a fungus in the family Boletaceae. Native to southern Europe, the Caucasus and Israel, it is generally associated with deciduous trees such as hornbeam, oak and beech in warm, dry locales. Although generally rare in Europe, it appears to be relatively common in Hungary. Appearing in summer and autumn on chalky soils, the stocky mushrooms have an ochre cap up to 20 cm (8 in) across, yellow pores on the cap underside, and a wine-red to brown or blackish stalk up to 6–15 cm (2.4–5.9 in) long by 3–6 cm (1.2–2.4 in) wide. The pale yellow flesh changes colour when broken or bruised depending on age; younger mushrooms become reddish, and older ones take on bluish tones. Swedish mycologists Elias Magnus Fries and Christopher Theodor Hök described this species as Boletus torosus in 1835, relying in part on the work of Louis Secretan. Eating raw, or sometimes even cooked, mushrooms of this species leads to vomiting and diarrhea. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Man Mohan Singh

... that in 1930, Man Mohan Singh (pictured) flew his Gipsy Moth Miss India solo from Croydon Airport, South London, to PAF Base Faisal, Karachi?
... that when a reviewer labelled his song "Don't Miss It" as "sad boy" music, James Blake called the term "unhealthy and problematic"?
... that at age 17, the English actress Emily Lloyd reportedly beat over 5,000 others, including Jodie Foster, for the lead role in the 1989 film Cookie?
... that the video game This Is Football 2002 had the controversial feature of allowing players to deliberately dive?
... that the space climate discipline researches how solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field fluctuations can affect Earth over timescales ranging from a few weeks to more than 1,000 years?
... that although Giorgio Mitrovich respected and admired the British, he criticised the British colonial administration of Malta for its lack of freedom of the press?
... that the Royal Air Force's AMES Type 85 radar was considered obsolete by the time it became operational?
... that 13 was a lucky number for American movie theater magnate Harry E. Huffman?

In the news

Aftermath of the Brumadinho dam collapse

A mining dam collapses (aftermath pictured) in Brumadinho, Brazil, leaving at least forty people dead and around two hundred others missing.
More than sixty people are killed in flooding across South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
More than a hundred Afghan National Security Forces members are reportedly killed in an attack on a military compound in Maidan Shar.
Ten Chadian United Nations peacekeepers are killed in an attack by al-Qaeda in Mali in apparent retaliation for the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Chad and Israel.

On this day

January 27

Entrance to Auschwitz

1142 – Despite having saved the southern Song dynasty from attempts by the northern Jin dynasty to conquer it, Chinese general Yue Fei was executed by the Song government.
1820 – A Russian expedition led by naval officers Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev became the first explorers to see the coast of Antarctica.
1945 – The Soviet Red Army liberated more than 7,500 prisoners left behind by Nazi personnel in the Auschwitz concentration camp (entrance pictured) in Oświęcim, Poland.
1967 – The Outer Space Treaty, a treaty that forms the basis of international space law, opened for signature in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
1996 – Mahamane Ousmane, the first democratically elected president of Niger, was deposed by Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara in a military coup d'état.

George Byng, 1st Viscount Torrington (b. 1663) · Eunice Hale Waite Cobb (b. 1803) · Paul Zorner (d. 2014)

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Today's featured picture

Sonar, an acronym for SOund NAvigation (and) Ranging, is a technique that uses sound propagation to communicate with or detect objects on or under the surface of a body of water. The first recorded use of the technique was by Leonardo da Vinci in 1490 via a tube inserted into the water to detect vessels by ear. Sonar equipment was developed during World War I to counter the growing threat of submarine warfare; an operational passive sonar system, which only listens for the sound of vessels, was in use by 1918. Modern active sonar systems use an acoustic transponder to generate a sound wave which is then reflected back from target objects.

This picture shows a sonar image of the Soviet Navy minesweeper T-297, formerly the Latvian Virsaitis, that was shipwrecked on 3 December 1941 in the Gulf of Finland.

Image: Tuukritööde OÜ

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