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Today's featured article

Existential quantifier, used in logic to express existence

Existence is the state of having being or reality. It is often contrasted with essence, since one can understand the essential features of something without knowing whether it exists. Ontology studies existence and differentiates between singular existence of individual entities and general existence of concepts or universals. Entities present in space and time have concrete existence, in contrast to abstract entities, like numbers and sets. Other distinctions are between possible, contingent, and necessary existence and between physical and mental existence. Some philosophers talk of degrees of existence but the more common view is that an entity either exists or not, with no intermediary states. It is controversial whether existence can be understood as a property of individual objects and, if so, whether there are nonexistent objects. The concept of existence has a long history and played a role in the ancient period in pre-Socratic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophy. (Full article...)

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Selected anniversaries

August 6

Street fighting during the Battle of Saint-Malo

686 – Second Fitna: Pro-Alid forces defeated the Umayyad Caliphate in the Battle of Khazir, allowing them to take control of Mosul in present-day Iraq.
1623 – After the death of Gregory XV, a papal conclave in Rome elected Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII.
1944 – World War II: Allied forces attacked German fortifications at Saint-Malo, France, beginning the Battle of Saint-Malo (pictured).
1979 – An earthquake struck along the Calaveras Fault near Coyote Lake, California, injuring sixteen people.
1997 – Korean Air Flight 801 crashed into a hill on approach to Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport in Guam, killing 228 of the 254 people aboard.
2011 – A series of riots broke out in several London boroughs and in cities and towns across England in response to the shooting of Mark Duggan by Metropolitan Police officers.

Ludwig Ross (d. 1859)
George Kenney (b. 1889)
Lucille Ball (b. 1911)
Edsger W. Dijkstra (d. 2002)

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In the news

Sheikh Hasina

Sheikh Hasina (pictured) resigns as the prime minister of Bangladesh and flees to India following anti-government protests.
Following a mass stabbing in Southport, far-right protesters riot across the United Kingdom.
The United States, Russia, and their respective allies agree to a prisoner exchange of 26 people.
Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, is assassinated in Tehran, Iran.
Landslides in Wayanad, India, kill more than 380 people.

Did you know...

Céline Dept

... that Céline Dept (pictured) was the first Belgian YouTuber to reach 10 million subscribers?
... that Operation Matterhorn logistics involved the construction of airfields in China by thousands of laborers with hammers and wicker baskets?
... that after qualifying for the 2024 Summer Olympics at the age of 11, skateboarder Zheng Haohao became the youngest Chinese sportsperson to participate in the Olympics?
... that electrical engineering professor Mariesa Crow raises alpacas?
... that Larisa Latynina became the most-medalled Olympian after she won six medals at the 1964 Summer Olympics?
... that South African singer Tyla delayed her debut album's submission date in order to collaborate with Tems?
... that Jenya Kazbekova, a competition climber on the Ukraine's 2024 Olympic team, is the daughter and granddaughter of competition climbing medalists?
... that when delivering his speech "The boys of Pointe du Hoc" on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Ronald Reagan addressed 62 veteran service members present on D-Day?
... that after the McVey Fire, the United States Forest Service accidentally planted thousands of acres of non-native trees?

Today's featured picture

Picture of the day

ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model. This image shows the eight toroid magnets surrounding the calorimeter in the center.Photograph credit: Maximilien Brice, CERN

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