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From today's featured article

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is the debut studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (pictured), released on October 24, 2006, by Big Machine Records. Swift wrote or co-wrote all the tracks of the album, based on her experiences as a teenager; its lyrics address love, friendship, and insecurity. Produced by Nathan Chapman, it is a country record with pop and pop rock influences, using acoustic arrangements composed of guitars, banjos, and fiddles. Critics generally praised the earnest teenage feelings portrayed in Taylor Swift, and it spent more weeks on the US Billboard 200 than any other album of the 2000s decade. Among its singles, "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" peaked atop the US Hot Country Songs chart, while "Teardrops on My Guitar" became Swift's first crossover success on the pop charts. Rolling Stone featured it in their 2022 list "100 Best Debut Albums of All Time". (This article is part of a featured topic: Taylor Swift original studio albums.)

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Did you know...

Flag of El Salvador

... that one of the blue stripes on the flag of El Salvador (pictured) represents the Atlantic Ocean, despite the country not having a coastline on it?
... that the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre was established after a 2004 report found that captive bears in Malaysia were largely inadequately cared for?
... that Hadiza Bazoum, a former first lady of Niger, has been imprisoned in the Presidential Palace since a 2023 coup d'état?
... that the sculpture Against the Tide was inspired by a hand gesture of Michelangelo's Pietà?
... that NBA player Chris Mañon said that his role in college was to "make life hell" for the best opposing players?
... that Dutch Maid Bakery in Tennessee has survived fire, war, the Great Depression, and the rebranding of its fruitcake?
... that Yiddish poet Mikhl Gordon's first collection under his real name was not published until 1889, a year before his death?
... that the New Zealand band Sachi gained prominence after throwing a USB demo through the car window of music producer Diplo?
... that church chancellor Baldwin and knight Bernard Vacher were sent to tell Pisa and Genoa to stop feuding and fight Muslims together instead, but the Italians would have none of that?

In the news

Miguel Uribe Turbay

The United Nations–backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirms a famine in the Gaza Governorate, Palestine.
A multi-vehicle collision involving a bus carrying migrants deported from Iran kills at least 79 people in Herat Province, Afghanistan.
Colombian senator Miguel Uribe Turbay (pictured), a pre-candidate in the 2026 presidential election, dies two months after being shot.
Azerbaijan and Armenia sign a declaration to formalize a future peace treaty to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

On this day

August 30: Victory Day in Turkey (1922)

Mohammad-Javad Bahonar

1914 – World War I: The Battle of Tannenberg resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Russian 2nd Army by the German 8th Army.
1959 – Writer and politician Abdul Muis became the first person to be awarded the posthumous title of National Hero of Indonesia.
1981 – Iranian president Mohammad-Ali Rajai and prime minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar (pictured) were assassinated in a bombing committed by the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran.
1984 – Discovery, the third orbiter of NASA's Space Shuttle program, lifted off on its maiden voyage from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
1990 – Gulf War: US General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. issued General Order No. 1 prohibiting US troops from consuming alcohol or possessing pornographic material.

Theodor Svedberg (b. 1884)
Jack Marshall (d. 1988)
Francisco Varallo (d. 2010)
Oliver Sacks (d. 2015)

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Today's featured picture

Initial image of the Mandelbrot set
(1× magnification)
"Head and shoulder"
(6× magnification)
"Seahorse valley"
(60× magnification)
"Seahorse"
(191× magnification)
"Seahorse tail"
(1345× magnification)
"Tail part"
(4169× magnification)

The Mandelbrot set is a two-dimensional mathematical set that is defined in the complex plane as the numbers $c$ for which the function $f_{c}(z)=z^{2}+c$ does not diverge to infinity when iterated starting at $z=0$ . It was first defined and drawn by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Matelski in 1978, as part of a study of Kleinian groups, with Benoit Mandelbrot obtaining the first high-quality visualizations of the set two years later. Images of the Mandelbrot set exhibit an infinitely complicated boundary that reveals progressively ever-finer recursive detail at increasing magnifications; mathematically, the boundary of the Mandelbrot set is a fractal curve. The Mandelbrot set is well-known outside mathematics and is commonly cited as an example of mathematical beauty. These images, generated by a computer program, show an area of the Mandelbrot set known as "seahorse valley", which is centred on the point $-0.75+0.1i$ , at increasing levels of magnification.

Image credit: Wolfgang Beyer

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