Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 September 20

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From today's featured article

Planet Stories was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published by Fiction House between 1939 and 1955. It featured adventures in space and on other planets, and was initially focused on a young readership. Malcolm Reiss was editor or editor-in-chief for all of its 71 issues. It was launched at the same time as Fiction House's more successful Planet Comics. Almost every issue's cover emphasized scantily clad damsels in distress or alien princesses. Planet Stories did not pay well enough to regularly attract the leading science fiction writers of the day, but did on occasion manage to obtain work from well-known names including Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, and Philip K. Dick. The two writers most identified with the magazine are Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury, both of whom set many of their stories on a romanticized version of Mars that owed much to the depiction of Barsoom in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Bradbury contributed an early story in his Martian Chronicles sequence, and Brackett authored a series of adventures featuring Eric John Stark. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Bird-headed Jewish man baking matzo

... that the oldest surviving illuminated Passover Haggadah depicts Jews as humans with the faces and beaks of birds (detail pictured)?
... that Ivy Wedgwood's retirement after 21 years in the Australian Senate was reported with the headline "Ivy is a housewife again"?
... that Henry Purcell's eight-voice anthem Hear my prayer, O Lord features "pungent" harmonies in a long, "inexorable" build-up to a "towering dissonant tone cluster" right before it ends?
... that during the American Civil War, Ephraim C. Dawes almost lost his lower jaw to a bullet wound, but went on to become a noted public speaker?
... that the extinct ant genus Electromyrmex includes an undescribed species from Bitterfeld amber?
... that as a high school student, Evin Demirhan supported her family of 13 by wrestling, and later became a bronze medalist in the 2017 World Wrestling Championships?
... that although the British commander was accused of incompetence following the Battle of the Basque Roads, he was controversially acquitted at his court-martial?
... that Alan Akaka led a campaign to deny the ukulele a place as the official state instrument of Hawaii?

In the news

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake strikes central Mexico, killing more than 248 people.
Hurricane Maria crosses the Lesser Antilles as a Category 5 hurricane, causing widespread destruction and at least 8 deaths.
In U.S. television, The Handmaid's Tale wins Best Drama and Veep (star Julia Louis-Dreyfus pictured) wins Best Comedy at the Emmy Awards.
In Gaelic football, Dublin beat Mayo in the final to win their third consecutive All-Ireland title.
The Cassini–Huygens mission to the Saturn system ends with a controlled fall into the atmosphere of the planet.
Carbon dating of the Bakhshali manuscript reveals the earliest known Indian use of a zero symbol.

On this day...

September 20

Great Buddha, Kamakura, Japan

1498 – A tsunami caused by the Nankai earthquake washed away the building housing the statue of the Great Buddha (pictured) at Kōtoku-in in Kamakura, Japan.
1792 – The French Army achieved its first major victory in the War of the First Coalition at the Battle of Valmy.
1967 – Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard publicly announced the story of Xenu in a taped lecture sent to all Scientologists.
1977 – A series of celestial phenomena of unknown nature was observed in the western Soviet Union, Finland and Denmark.
2011 – The United States ended its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military.

Veit Stoss (d. 1533) · Herbert Putnam (b. 1861) · Edith Rogers (b. 1894)

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Today's featured picture

Drainage of water in Lake Urmia in Iran between 1984 and 2014. Once the largest lake in the Middle East, with a surface area of approximately 5,200 km² (2,000 sq mi), this salt lake has shrunk to less than 10% of its former size.

Video: مانفی using NASA imagery

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