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December 17: National Day in Bhutan (1907)

• 1862 - American Civil War: General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky.
• 1903 - Orville and Wilbur Wright aboard the Wright Flyer (pictured) conducted the first successful flight of a powered fixed-wing aircraft.
• 1944 - Malmedy massacre: Waffen-SS troops under Joachim Peiper shot at about 150 unarmed prisoners of war with machine guns near Malmedy, Belgium.
• 1989 - The Simpsons made their debut as an animated series on the Fox television network.

• Recent days: December 16 – December 15 – December 14

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• Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the King of Bhutan, abdicates in favour of his son Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck a year earlier than expected.
• The Chinese River Dolphin (illustrated) is declared functionally extinct, the first extinction of a large mammal in recent decades.
• Suffolk police launch an investigation on five dead bodies discovered near Ipswich in Suffolk, England.
• Astronauts on mission STS-116 attempt to retract a solar array on the International Space Station's Integrated Truss Structure.
• Former President of Ethiopia Mengistu Haile Mariam is convicted in absentia of genocide by an Ethiopian court for his part in the so-called "Red Terror".
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A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before reliable synchronization was achieved in a commercially practical way. The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in the United States in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as "talkies." The first feature-length movie originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927. By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial systems. (more...)

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• ...that the Certosa di Pavia (pictured) was commissioned by Gian Galeazzo Visconti to be built halfway between his two courts in Milan and Pavia?
• ...that Jason Bedrick, a New Hampshire state representative, is that state's first Orthodox Jewish elected official?
• ...that as a teenager, Chiri Yukie prepared the first Japanese translations of several of the yukar sagas of the Ainu people?
• ...that the Vedic Mathematics genre was revived after Hindu Shankaracharya Jagadguru Swami Sri Bharati Krishna Tirthaji Maharaja rediscovered it in the form of sixteen sutras?
• ...that the Department of State Lands is one of Oregon's oldest government agencies?
• ...that on October 5, 1914, a French Voisin III pilot scored the first air-to-air kill of World War I?
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The assembled human DNA clamp, a trimer of the protein PCNA, is a processivity factor that increases the speed and efficiency of DNA replication. In the assembled replication complex, the clamp encircles the DNA, which passes through the central pore, and binds DNA polymerase to prevent the enzyme from dissociating from the template DNA strand. The DNA clamp protein's presence can increase the rate of DNA synthesis up to 1,000-fold versus a nonprocessive polymerase.

Illustration credit: Opabinia regalis
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