Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 July 30

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The Horncastle boar's head is an Anglo-Saxon ornament, silver and 40 mm (1.6 in) long, that probably was once attached to the crest of a helmet. Dating to the first half of the seventh century, it was discovered in 2002 by a metal detectorist searching in the town of Horncastle, Lincolnshire. It was reported as found treasure and purchased for £15,000 by the City and County Museum, now known as The Collection, in Lincoln. Its elongated head is semi-naturalistic, depicting a crouching quadruped on either side of the skull. Garnets form the boar's eyes, and its eyebrows, skull, mouth, tusks, and snout are gilded. The space underneath the hollow head has three rivets that would have affixed the fragment to a larger object. The fragment probably adorned the crest of a helmet similar to those in use in Northern Europe during the sixth through eleventh centuries. As of 2019 the museum has the fragment on display. (Full article...)

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In the news

Beji Caid Essebsi

Incumbent President of Tunisia Beji Caid Essebsi (pictured) dies at the age of 92, and Mohamed Ennaceur is named as his interim replacement.
In a European heat wave, national all-time temperature records are broken in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
Boris Johnson succeeds Theresa May as the leader of the Conservative Party and becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
The French submarine Minerve is discovered 51 years after it disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea.

On this day

July 30

Miguel Hidalgo in a
later depiction by
Antonio Fabrés

1676 – Virginia colonist Nathaniel Bacon and his makeshift army issued a Declaration of the People of Virginia, instigating a rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.
1811 – Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (pictured), an early leader of the Mexican War of Independence, was executed by Spanish authorities.
1950 – Four striking workers were shot dead by the Gendarmerie in Belgium at the height of the political crisis known as the Royal Question.
2006 – Lebanon War: The Israeli Air Force attacked a three-story building near the Southern Lebanese village of Qana, killing at least 28 civilians, including 16 children.
2014 – At least 151 people were killed when heavy rains triggered a landslide in Pune district, Maharashtra, India.

Tatwine (d. 734) · Lê Văn Duyệt (d. 1832) · Smedley Butler (b. 1881)

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-born American-British structural biologist. After graduating with a degree in physics in 1971, he moved to the United States, where he obtained a PhD in physics in 1976. He then spent two years studying biology as a graduate student while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology, beginning work on ribosomes as a postgraduate fellow at Yale University. In 1999, Ramakrishnan's laboratory published a 5.5-angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome. The following year, his laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit and its complexes with several antibiotics. Ramakrishnan was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". He was elected President of the Royal Society for a term of five years beginning in 2015. Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Photograph credit: Royal Society

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