Learning Skills

Article of the day for December 10, 2019 is Limalok . Limalok is a guyot, an undersea volcanic mountain with a flat top, in the southeastern Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Located at a depth of 1,255 metres (4,117 ft) with a 636-square-kilometre (246 sq mi) summit platform, it is joined to Mili Atoll and Knox Atoll through a volcanic ridge. Limalok probably started as a shield volcano built up from basaltic rocks; the Macdonald, Rarotonga, Rurutu and Society hotspots may have been involved in its formation. A period of erosion and flattening began around 56 million years ago. During the Paleocene and Eocene, a carbonate platform (mostly red algae) supported an atoll, or an atoll-like structure with reefs. The platform sank below sea level roughly 46–50 million years ago during the Eocene, perhaps because the equatorial area it moved through was too hot or nutrient-rich to support the growth of a coral reef. Thermal subsidence lowered the drowned seamou...

By BY DWIGHT GARNER from NYT Books https://ift.tt/341ohux

With a high of 55F and a low of 37F.

By BY ANNA MOMIGLIANO from NYT Books https://ift.tt/36ibzsQ

Article of the day for December 9, 2019 is Emanuel Moravec . Emanuel Moravec (1893–1945) was a Czech army officer and writer who collaborated with Nazi Germany as the minister of education of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia between 1942 and 1945. He was also chair of the Board of Trustees for the Education of Youth, a fascist youth organisation in the protectorate. In World War I, Moravec served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, but following capture by the Russians he changed sides, first joining Russian-backed Serbian forces and then the Czechoslovak Legion. During the interwar period he commanded an infantry battalion in the Czechoslovak Army. As a proponent of democracy during the 1930s, Moravec appealed for armed action against Germany and scorned German demands for the Sudetenland, but after their occupation of the rump Czechoslovakia, he became an enthusiastic collaborator, realigning his political worldview towards fascism. He killed himself in the final days of World War...

With a high of 62F and a low of 40F.

Article of the day for December 8, 2019 is Project Rover . Project Rover was a nuclear thermal rocket project that ran from 1955 to 1973. Beginning as a United States Air Force project to develop a nuclear-powered upper stage for an intercontinental ballistic missile, it was transferred to NASA in 1958 after the Sputnik crisis triggered the Space Race. Nuclear reactors for Project Rover were built and tested at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory at very low power and then shipped to Area 25 (known as Jackass Flats) at the Nevada Test Site. Project Rover produced two large reactors, Kiwi (pictured) and Phoebus, and a smaller reactor, Pewee, conforming to the smaller budget available after 1968. The reactors were fueled by highly enriched uranium, with liquid hydrogen used as both a rocket propellant and reactor coolant. Their efficiency was roughly double that of chemical rockets. Project Rover was canceled in 1973, and none of the reactors developed ever flew.