Digital Atlas of Scientific Life of
- With over 70,000 living species (Rosenburg, 2014), the phylum Mollusca is second only to the Arthropoda in terms of total species diversity. The great diversity of mollusks is owed at least in part to their success in occupying most habitats on earth, including the marine realm, freshwater lakes and rivers, and even land. Some are filter feeders, some are herbivores, and some are deadly predators. The strong, easily-preserved shells of mollusks have left behind a rich Cambrian to Pleistocene fossil record and they have long been important subjects of macroevolutionary analyses of the fossil record.
- Instruction decoding in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip (righto.com)
In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. With this chip, CAD software, spreadsheets, flight simulators, and other programs were much speedier. The 8087 chip could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, of course, but it could also compute transcendental functions such as tangent and logarithms, as well as provide constants such as π. In total, the 8087 added 62 new instructions to the computer.