Article of the day for March 11, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 11, 2019 is WAVES.
The WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) served in the United States Naval Reserve during World War II. In July 1942, the Naval Reserve was authorized to accept women as commissioned officers and at the enlisted level, effective until six months after the war, which freed up many men for ship duty. Mildred H. McAfee (pictured), on leave as president of Wellesley College, became the first director of the WAVES. The notion of women serving in the Navy was not widely supported in Congress or by the Navy, but it was supported by the Navy's Women's Advisory Council, Margaret Chung, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of the United States. The WAVES were primarily white, but 72 African-American women eventually served. Serving at 900 stations in the United States and the territory of Hawaii, many of the women experienced workplace hostility, but almost all of them looked upon their service as beneficial.

Article of the day for March 10, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 10, 2019 is Australasian gannet.
The Australasian gannet (Morus serrator) is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae. Adults are mostly white, with black flight feathers at the wingtips and the trailing edge of the wing. The central tail feathers are also black. The head is tinged with buff-yellow, with a pale blue-grey bill edged in black, and blue-rimmed eyes. Young birds have mottled plumage in their first year, dark above and light below, gradually acquiring more white until they reach maturity after five years. The species ranges over water above the continental shelf along the southern and eastern Australian coastline, as well as the North and South Islands of New Zealand, Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island. Nesting takes place in colonies along the coastlines of New Zealand, Victoria and Tasmania. The birds plunge into the ocean at high speed, catching mainly squid and forage fish. The species faces few natural or man-made threats.

Article of the day for March 9, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 9, 2019 is AirTrain JFK.
AirTrain JFK is an 8.1-mile-long (13 km) elevated people mover system and rail link serving John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Its three lines and ten stations, operated by the Canadian firm Bombardier Transportation, connect the airport's six terminals with the New York City Subway in Howard Beach, Queens, and with the Long Island Rail Road and subway in Jamaica, Queens. In-depth planning for a dedicated transport system at JFK began in 1990, and construction commenced in 1998. The system opened in December 2003 after multiple delays. Since then, several improvements have been proposed for AirTrain JFK, including an extension to Manhattan. The system was originally projected to carry 4 million annual paying passengers and 8.4 million annual inter-terminal passengers, but the AirTrain has consistently exceeded these projections; in 2017, it had approximately 7.66 million paying passengers and 12.6 million inter-terminal passengers.

Article of the day for March 8, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 8, 2019 is Brie Larson.
Brie Larson (born 1989) is an American actress and filmmaker who has received many awards and nominations. At age six, she became the youngest student admitted to a training program at the American Conservatory Theater. She began her acting career in 1998 with a comedy sketch in The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Larson played supporting roles in the comedy films Hoot (2006), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), and 21 Jump Street (2012), and appeared as a sardonic teenager in the television series United States of Tara (2009–2011). After her breakthrough with a leading role in Short Term 12 (2013), she continued to take on supporting parts in The Spectacular Now (2013) and Trainwreck (2015). For playing a kidnapping victim in the drama Room (2015), Larson won the Academy Award for Best Actress. After playing a photojournalist in the adventure film Kong: Skull Island (2017), she starred as the titular superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Captain Marvel (2019).

Article of the day for March 7, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 7, 2019 is Maurice Ravel.
Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, but both composers rejected the term. After studying at France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire, he developed a style that incorporated elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), requires advanced virtuoso technique. His complex orchestral work Daphnis et Chloé (1912) was commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. In 1922 Ravel made an orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in Boléro (1928), his best-known work. A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel wrote fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. He was among the first composers to use recordings to reach a wider public.

Article of the day for March 6, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 6, 2019 is Al-Mu'tasim.
Al-Mu'tasim (796–842) was the eighth Abbasid caliph. A younger son of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, he rose to prominence as a key lieutenant of his brother Caliph al-Ma'mun after forming a private army composed predominantly of Turkish slave-soldiers. When al-Ma'mun died on campaign in August 833, al-Mu'tasim succeeded him and continued many of his policies, including support for Mu'tazilism. The traditional Arab and Iranian elites were weakened in favour of a new elite drawn from among the Turks, while the government was centralized around the caliphal court and a new capital founded to house it at Samarra. Al-Mu'tasim also achieved lasting fame as a warrior-caliph by sacking the Byzantine city of Amorium in 838. The rise of the Turks would eventually lead to factional strife and the collapse of Abbasid power in the mid-10th century, but the slave-soldier system inaugurated by al-Mu'tasim would be widely adopted throughout the Muslim world for centuries to come.

Article of the day for March 5, 2019

The Wikipedia article of the day for March 5, 2019 is Resident Evil 5.
Resident Evil 5 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom, and produced by Jun Takeuchi (pictured). It was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles on March 5, 2009. The plot involves an investigation of a terrorist threat by counter-terrorist agents Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar in Kijuju, a fictional region of Africa. It is the seventh major installment in the Resident Evil series, and the first designed for two-player cooperative gameplay. Critics described the game as closer to the action genre than the survival horror of other games in the series. Resident Evil 5 had a mostly positive reception, although it was criticized for problems with its controls. The game was re-released for Nvidia Shield, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. As of September 2018, it had sold over 7.4 million units, making it Capcom's second best-selling game and the best-selling game of the Resident Evil franchise.