Darwin

Darwin,

city (1991 pop. 67,946), capital of the Northern Territory, N Australia, on Port Darwin, an inlet of the Timor Sea. Remotely situated on the sparsely settled north coast, Darwin had no rail connection with any of the major Australian cities until 2003, when the line to Adelaide was completed. Australian military personnel and their dependents make up a large part of the population. Darwin is multicultural, with large Chinese and aboriginal populations. In World War II the city was heavily bombed by the Japanese; later a military airdrome, fuel-oil installations, and a wharf were built, and Darwin became a key Allied base. Originally called Palmerston, the town was renamed (1911) for Charles Darwin because its site had been a stop (1839) during a voyage of Darwin's ship, the Beagle. The city was almost completely destroyed by a cyclone in Dec., 1974. It was rebuilt and now attracts large numbers of tourists who visit nearby Kakadu National Park.

Darwin

A ‘cornerstone’ mission of ESA's Horizon 2000 program that aims to contribute to humanity's search for Earthlike planets around nearby stars on which life as we understand it may have evolved or could be supported. It takes the form of a space-based infrared interferometer that will be used to seek out such extrasolar planets and then discover by spectral analysis whether the planets have atmospheres containing carbon dioxide, ozone (showing evidence of photosynthesis), and water. Darwin will consist of seven spacecraft, six of them carrying a 1-meter-class telescope functioning in the near infrared (6–17 μm) and linked in to a nulling interferometer in the centrally placed seventh craft. All the telescopes will be focused on each selected nearby star in turn. If a planet is revolving about the star, any light it reflects will be swamped by light from the star. The separate images the telescopes pick up will be fed to the seventh craft where they will be combined to cancel out the star's light, leaving only that of the planet, if there is one. This ambitious project is planned for launch in or after 2015.

Darwin

 

(Port Darwin), a city in Australia and administrative capital of the Northern Territory. Population, 43,000 (1973, including suburbs). A port on the Timor Sea, Darwin is the terminus of a highway from Adelaide. It is linked by a narrow-gauge railroad with Larrimah and has an international airport. Darwin is the commercial and distribution center of northern Australia. It has a meat-canning plant and sawmills. The city was badly damaged by the cyclone “Tracy” in December 1974.

darwin

[′där·wən]

(evolution)

A unit of evolutionary rate of change; if some dimension of a part of an animal or plant, or of the whole animal or plant, changes from l_o to l_t over a time of t years according to the formula l_t = l_o exp (Et /10⁶), its evolutionary rate of change is equal to E darwins.

Darwin

¹

1. Charles (Robert). 1809--82, English naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, expounded in On the Origin of Species (1859) and applied to man in The Descent of Man (1871)

2. his grandfather, Erasmus. 1731--1802, English physician and poet; author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794--96), anticipating Lamarck's views on evolution

3. Sir George Howard, son of Charles Darwin. 1845--1912, English astronomer and mathematician noted for his work on tidal friction

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Darwin

²

a port in N Australia, capital of the Northern Territory: destroyed by a cyclone in 1974 but rebuilt on the same site. Pop.: 71 347 (2001)

Darwin

(operating system)

An operating system based on the FreeBSD version of Unix, running on top of a microkernel (Mach 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers advanced networking, services such as the Apache web server, and support for both Macintosh and Unix file systems. Darwin was originally released in March 1999. It currently runs on PowerPC based Macintosh computers, and, in October 2000, was being ported to Intel processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community.

Darwin

(programming, tool)

A general purpose structuring tool of use in building complex distributed systems from diverse components and diverse component interaction mechanisms. Darwin is being developed by the Distributed Software Engineering Section of the Department of Computing at Imperial College. It is in essence a declarative binding language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with orthogonally to system structuring. The language allows the specification of both static structures and dynamic structures which evolve during execution. The central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are formed by manipulating references to services.

The operational semantics of Darwin is described in terms of the Pi-calculus, Milner's calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's operational semantics. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour.

Distributed Software Engineering Section. Darwin publications.

E-mail: Jeff Magee <jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk>, Naranker Dulay <nd@doc.ic.ac.uk>.

Darwin

(3)

Core War.

Darwin

The open source version of Mac OS X from Apple, which allows developers to make their own improvements. Darwin is based on the Mach microkernel and various Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) versions of Unix. Although Darwin has been available as source code since 2000, the Mac OS X programming interface (API) source code is not, however, open and free to use. From 2002 to 2006, a community-based OpenDarwin project existed, which was followed by PureDarwin in 2007. See Mac OS X.