Earth is the fifth-largest planet of the eight in the Solar System. It is also the largest, most massive, and densest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets. Home to millions of species, including humans, Earth is the only place in the Universe where life is known to exist. The planet formed 4.54 billion years ago, and life appeared on its surface within a billion years. The world is expected to continue supporting life for another 1.5 billion years. Earth's outer surface is divided into several rigid segments that gradually migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of the surface is covered with salt-water oceans, the remainder consisting of continents and islands. Earth's interior remains active, with a thick layer of relatively solid mantle, a liquid outer core that generates a magnetic field, and a solid iron inner core. Earth interacts with other objects in outer space, including the Sun and the Moon. The mineral resources of Earth, as well as the products of the biosphere, contribute resources that are used to support a global human population. The human inhabitants are grouped into about 200 independent sovereign states and have developed many views of the planet.
Read the rest of this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1889: Over 50,000 people rushed to claim a piece of the available two million acres (8,000 km2) in the Unassigned Lands, the present-day U.S. state of Oklahoma. Within hours, both Oklahoma City and Guthrie had established cities of around 10,000 people. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Run_of_1889> 1915: The Germans released chlorine gas as a chemical weapon in the Second Battle of Ypres, killing over 5,000 soldiers within ten minutes by asphyxiation in the first large-scale successful use of poison gas in World War I. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_gas_in_World_War_I> 1945: About 600 prisoners of the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia revolted, but only 80 managed to escape while the other 520 were killed by the Croatian Ustaše regime. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp> 1993: The first version of Mosaic , created by computer programmers Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was released, becoming the first popular World Wide Web browser and Gopher client. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29> 2000: In a predawn raid, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents seized six-year-old Elián González from his relatives' home in Miami, Florida, and returned him to his Cuban father. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elian_Gonzalez_affair> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: cortical (adj): 1. (anatomy) Pertaining to the outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, such as the kidney or the brain. 2. (botany) Pertaining to the cortex of a stem or root—the tissue that lies inward from the epidermis, but exterior to the vascular tissue <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cortical> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: The death of dogma is the birth of morality. --Immanuel Kant <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant> _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Daily Article mailing list. To unsubscribe, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l Questions or comments? Contact [email protected]
