Wikipedia:Main Page history/2022 January 7

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From today's featured article

Skull and mandible

Hammond's rice rat (Mindomys hammondi), also known as Hammond's oryzomys, is a species of rodent in the tribe Oryzomyini of family Cricetidae. Formerly considered to be related with Nectomys, Sigmodontomys, Megalomys, or Oryzomys, it is now placed in its own genus, Mindomys, but its relationships remain obscure; some evidence supports a placement near Oecomys or as a basal member of Oryzomyini. Mindomys hammondi is known only from Ecuador, where it occurs in montane forest; a record from the Amazon basin lowlands is dubious. Reportedly, it lives on the ground and is associated with water; others suggest it lives in trees. A large, long-tailed, and long-whiskered rat, its fur is buff above and abruptly lighter below. The front part of the skull (rostrum) is heavily built. The species is named after the collector who first found it, Gilbert Hammond. He supplied natural history specimens to Oldfield Thomas and others. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Times Square Church at the Mark Hellinger Theatre

... that the Mark Hellinger Theatre (pictured) has been occupied by the Times Square Church since 1989, when its then-owner said the church's five-year lease will "pass before you know it"?
... that Rudolf Szepessy-Sokoll shot down a pair of Macchi L.3 seaplanes to become a flying ace?
... that the continuing influence of the Catholic Church in the politics of the Philippines means that the country lacks a divorce law?
... that Francis Bacon played in the first National Football League game and became the first NFL player to return a punt for a touchdown?
... that the Democratic Society Party was the 25th political party to be banned in Turkey since 1962?
... that when Antonia Urrejola was president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, her vice presidents were women as well?
... that the pictogram of Zapotitlán metro station depicts an indented sapote tree as the word tlantli means 'tooth' in Nahuatl?
... that the completion of Interstate 205 in Oregon was delayed to mitigate air and noise pollution for a jail that closed a few months later?

In the news

Protests in Aktobe

Kazakhstan's government resigns amid protests (example pictured) against a sharp increase in fuel prices.
Peter Wright wins the PDC World Darts Championship.
American actress and comedian Betty White dies at the age of 99.
In Hong Kong, Stand News closes down after its staff are arrested for sedition.

On this day

January 7: Christmas (Eastern Christianity); Victory over Genocide Day in Cambodia (1979); Flag Day in Italy (1797)

Guy Menzies

1610 – Through his telescope, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first observation of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, although he was not able to distinguish the first two until the following night.
1782 – The Bank of North America opened in Philadelphia as the first de facto central bank of the United States.
1931 – Australian aviator Guy Menzies (pictured) flew from Sydney to New Zealand's West Coast, making the first solo trans-Tasman flight.
1989 – Representatives of Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini delivered a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, inviting him to consider Islam as an alternative to communism, and predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.
2012 – A hot-air balloon flight from Carterton, New Zealand, collided with a power line while landing, causing it to crash and killing all eleven people on board.

Nicholas Hilliard (d. 1619)
Elizabeth Louisa Foster Mather (b. 1815)
Juan Gabriel (b. 1950)

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From today's featured list

Visualization of 6 as a perfect number

Mersenne primes and perfect numbers are two deeply interlinked types of natural numbers in number theory. Mersenne primes, named after the friar Marin Mersenne, are prime numbers that can be expressed as $2 p - 1$ for some positive integer $p$ . For example, $3$ is a Mersenne prime as it is a prime number and is expressible as $22 - 1$ . Perfect numbers are natural numbers that equal the sum of their positive proper divisors (all divisors excluding the number itself). There is a one-to-one correspondence between the Mersenne primes and the even perfect numbers. This is due to the Euclid–Euler theorem, partially proved by Euclid and completed by Leonhard Euler: even numbers are perfect if and only if they can be expressed in the form $2 p - 1 \times (2 p - 1)$ , where $2 p - 1$ is a Mersenne prime. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

This historical coat of arms of Illinois is an illustration from State Arms of the Union by Henry Mitchell, published by Louis Prang in 1876. It depicts a bald eagle perched on a rock carrying a shield with the stars and stripes. In the eagle's beak there is a banner with the state motto, "State Sovereignty, National Union."

Illustration credit: Henry Mitchell; restored by Andrew Shiva

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