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From today's featured article

Kate Winslet at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival

Kate Winslet (born 5 October 1975) is an award-winning English actress. She made her film debut playing a murderer in Heavenly Creatures (1994), and received her first BAFTA Award for playing Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995). After her leading role in the epic romance Titanic (1997), she appeared in critically acclaimed period pieces, including Quills (2000) and Iris (2001). She starred in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Little Children (2006), and Revolutionary Road (2008). For playing a Nazi camp guard in The Reader (2008), she won the BAFTA Award and Academy Award for Best Actress. In the 2010s, Winslet played a single mother in 1930s America in the miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), joined the Divergent film series, and portrayed Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs (2015). Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. In 2012 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Miss Ruth Doggett by Harold Gilman

... that a review of the London Group's 1936 exhibition noted that many works seemed "perverse and downright silly", but those by Ruth Doggett (portrait shown) formed "welcome oases of sense and sensibility"?
... that larvae of the drain fly can be found in trickling filter systems used to process sewage?
... that handicapped army veteran Ma Ning became a pilot and later Commander of the Chinese Air Force after being inspired by a novel about a double amputee flying ace?
... that New York City Inferno, a 1978 gay pornography film, features a licensed soundtrack by the Village People?
... that Nurul Alam Chowdhury was the youngest MP in the first parliament of Bangladesh?
... that the Colorado National Guard's 117th Space Battalion is nicknamed the "Space Cowboys"?
... that Joseph Dancis and his colleagues discovered the cause of maple syrup urine disease?
... that the 2019 film Ask Dr. Ruth features Holocaust survivor Ruth Westheimer reflecting on her career as a sex therapist?

In the news

B-17 Flying Fortress

A privately owned Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress (pictured) crashes in Connecticut, United States, killing seven people and injuring seven others.
Peruvian president Martín Vizcarra dissolves Congress, resulting in a constitutional crisis.
At the UCI Road World Championships, Mads Pedersen of Denmark wins the men's road race and Annemiek van Vleuten of the Netherlands wins the women's road race.
An earthquake strikes Maluku, Indonesia, killing at least thirty people.

On this day

October 5

Jarrow marchers with Ellen Wilkinson

610 – Heraclius was crowned Byzantine emperor, having personally beheaded the previous emperor, Phocas.
1869 – During construction of the Hennepin Island tunnel in St. Anthony, Minnesota (now Minneapolis), the Mississippi River broke through the tunnel's limestone ceiling, nearly destroying Saint Anthony Falls.
1936 – Around 200 men began a 291-mile (468 km) march (pictured) from Jarrow to London, carrying a petition to the British government requesting the re-establishment of industry in the town.
1975 – Dirty War: The Argentine guerrilla group Montoneros carried out Operation Primicia, a terrorist attack in which they hijacked an Aerolíneas Argentinas flight, captured Formosa International Airport, and attacked a military regiment.
1999 – Two trains collided head-on at Ladbroke Grove, London, killing 31 people, injuring 417, and severely damaging public confidence in the management and regulation of safety of Britain's privatised railway system.

Catherine Cooper Hopley (b. 1817) · Guido von List (b. 1848) · Bill Willis (b. 1921)

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Today's featured picture

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, 'milky circle'). From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from its outer rim. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

This picture shows a portion of the Milky Way as seen from Cerro Paranal in Chile, home to the European Southern Observatory (ESO)'s Very Large Telescope, depicting the region spanning the constellations from Sagittarius to Scorpius. The colourful nebulae surrounding Rho Ophiuchi and Antares can be seen to the right, while the dusty lane of the galaxy runs obliquely through the image, dotted with reddish objects such as the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae. This region of the Milky Way also includes the Galactic Center, likely containing a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

Photograph credit: ESO / Stéphane Guisard

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