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From today's featured article

Position of the hippocampus in the human brain

The hippocampus is a major component of the brain of humans and many other vertebrates. It plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation. In humans and other primates, the hippocampus is located in the archicortex, one of the three regions of allocortex, in each hemisphere. The hippocampus is a structure found in all vertebrates. In Alzheimer's disease (and other forms of dementia), the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; short-term memory loss and disorientation are included among the early symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation, encephalitis or medial temporal lobe epilepsy. Since different neuronal cell types are neatly organized into layers in the hippocampus, it has frequently been used as a model system for studying neurophysiology. (Full article...)

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Pyramidal tomb at Horvat Midras

... that a stepped pyramid at Horvat Midras (pictured) has been identified as the remnant of a monumental family tomb from Second Temple Judea?
... that American poet Gladys Cromwell took her own life alongside her twin sister by jumping off a ship while returning home from World War I?
... that attempted crimes with no chance of success are still punishable by law in Germany?
... that the developers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 added an easy mode so that Jennifer English could play it?
... that as of 2023 only about 150 people had been diagnosed with Skraban–Deardorff syndrome?
... that Johann Voldemar Jannsen was rebuked by the Estonian nationalist movement that he helped to found, only for a song he wrote to become Estonia's national anthem?
... that the head of a labor union was jailed during the 1979 New York prison guards' strike and guarded by members of his union?
... that Dan Muse was a history teacher before becoming a hockey coach?
... that French drag queens carried the Olympic flame in 2024?

In the news

Connie Francis

A fighter jet crashes into a college in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing at least 25 people.
A tourist boat capsizes during a thunderstorm in Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam, leaving at least 36 people dead.
American singer Connie Francis (pictured), the first woman to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100, dies at the age of 87.
A fire at a shopping mall in Kut, Wasit Governorate, Iraq, kills at least 69 people.

On this day

July 22: Feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene (Christianity)

Stanley Forman

1802 – Gia Long conquered Hanoi and unified modern-day Vietnam, which had experienced centuries of feudal warfare.
1817 – Windham William Sadler made the first successful aerial crossing of the Irish Sea, which he accomplished by balloon.
1975 – Stanley Forman (pictured) took the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo Fire Escape Collapse, which spurred action to improve the safety of fire escapes across the United States.
1997 – Written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda, One Piece, the best-selling manga series in history, debuted in Weekly Shōnen Jump.
2002 – The Israel Defense Forces bombed the home of Salah Shehade, the leader of the military arm of Hamas, killing him, his family and neighboring civilians.

Augusta Fox Bronner (b. 1881)
Willem Dafoe (b. 1955)
Albertus Soegijapranata (d. 1963)
Prince George of Wales (b. 2013)

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Today's featured picture

The Atari video game burial was a 1983 mass burial of unsold video game cartridges, consoles, and computers, undertaken by the American video game and home computer company Atari, Inc., at a landfill site in the U.S. state of New Mexico. The burial occurred amid the video game crash of 1983, at the end of a disastrous fiscal year that saw Atari being sold off by its parent company Warner Communications. It included 700,000 cartridges of various games, including unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), one of the largest video game failures in history. For several decades after the burial was first reported, there were doubts as to its veracity and scope, and it was frequently dismissed as an urban legend. In 2013 and 2014, an excavation was carried out by Fuel Industries, Microsoft, the New Mexico government and others, which revealed discarded games and hardware. Only a small fraction, about 1,300 cartridges, were recovered, with a portion reserved for curation and the rest auctioned to raise money for a museum to commemorate the burial. This photograph shows packaging for cartridges of the video games E.T. and Centipede in situ at the excavation site.

Photograph credit: taylorhatmaker

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