Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 January 8b

From today's featured article

Artist rendition of a Patagonian landscape in the early Paleocene

The Paleocene is a geological epoch that started 66 million years ago with the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and 75 percent of all species. The Paleocene was marked by the recovery of the biosphere, with dense forests worldwide, while small mammals and birds rapidly evolved to take advantage of the mass extinction. In the seas, ray-finned fish rose to dominance. The supercontinents Laurasia and Gondwana were still separating, the Rocky Mountains were being uplifted, the Americas were divided, the Indian Plate was colliding with Asia, and the North Atlantic Igneous Province was forming. Like the preceding Mesozoic, the Paleocene had a greenhouse climate, with an average global temperature of 24–25 °C (75–77 °F), compared to 14 °C (57 °F) today. It ended 56 million years ago with a sharp rise in temperature in the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. (Full article...)

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Portrait of Teriitaria II (c. 1826)

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UIA Flight 752 aircraft

Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 (aircraft pictured) crashes shortly after takeoff from Tehran, Iran, killing all 176 people on board.
After a U.S. airstrike kills Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, at least 56 people die in a stampede during his burial procession in Kerman, and Iranian forces attack two military bases in Iraq.
Seventeen inmates are killed in two prison riots at a rehabilitation center in Cieneguillas, Mexico.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

1697 – Scottish student Thomas Aikenhead became the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Great Britain.
1790 – George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York City, then the provisional capital of the United States.
1889 – American statistician Herman Hollerith received a patent for his electromechanical tabulating machine for punched-card data.
1972 – Following the country's defeat by India in the previous year's war, new Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto released Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (pictured) from prison in response to international pressure.
2010 – Gunmen from an offshoot of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda attacked the bus transporting the Togo national football team to the Africa Cup of Nations in Angola, killing three people.

Nikolay Nekrasov (d. 1878) · David Bowie (b. 1947) · Bernard Krigstein (d. 1990)

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Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. He was the director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology and previously the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His scientific works included a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. He was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and was a supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Hawking achieved commercial success with several works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general, including his 1988 book A Brief History of Time.

Hawking was diagnosed with a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) that gradually paralysed him. He is pictured here in 2007 being rotated in mid-air while experiencing weightlessness in a reduced-gravity aircraft, a modified Boeing 727.

Photograph credit: NASA / Jim Campbell / Aero-News Network

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