Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is best remembered for formulating the Periodic Law and creating a farsighted version of the periodic table of elements, he used the Periodic Law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but to predict the properties of eight elements that were yet to be discovered. Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva. Ivan worked as a school principal and a teacher of fine arts and philosophy at the Tambov and Saratov gymnasiums. Ivan's father, Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, was a Russian Orthodox priest from the Tver region; as per the tradition of priests of that time, Pavel's children were given new family names while attending the theological seminary, with Ivan getting the family name Mendeleev after the name of a local landlord. Maria Kornilieva came from a well-known family of Tobolsk merchants, founders of the first Siberian printing house who traced their ancestry to Yakov Korniliev, a 17th-century posad man turned a wealthy merchant.

In 1889, a local librarian published an article in the Tobolsk newspaper where he claimed that Yakov was a baptized Teleut, an ethnic minority known as "white Kalmyks" at the time. Since no sources were provided and no documented facts of Yakov's life were revealed, biographers dismiss it as a myth. In 1908, shortly after Mendeleev's death, one of his nieces published Family Chronicles. Memories about D. I. Mendeleev where she voiced "a family legend" about Maria's grandfather who married "a Kyrgyz or Tatar beauty whom he loved so much that when she died, he died from grief". This, contradicts the documented family chronicles, neither of those legends is supported by Mendeleev's autobiography, his daughter's or his wife's memoirs, yet some Western scholars still refer to Mendeleev's supposed "Mongol", "Tatar", "Tartarian" or "Asian" ancestry as a fact. Mendeleev was raised as an Orthodox Christian, his mother encouraging him to "patiently search divine and scientific truth", his son would inform that he departed from the Church and embraced a form of "romanticized deism".

Mendeleev was the youngest of 17 siblings, of whom "only 14 stayed alive to be baptized" according to Mendeleev's brother Pavel, meaning the others died soon after their birth. The exact number of Mendeleev's siblings differs among sources and is still a matter of some historical dispute. For the family's financial well-being, his father became blind and lost his teaching position, his mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned glass factory. At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk. In 1849, his mother took Mendeleev across Russia from Siberia to Moscow with the aim of getting Mendeleev enrolled at the Moscow University; the university in Moscow did not accept him. The mother and son continued to Saint Petersburg to the father's alma mater; the now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg, where he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After graduation, he contracted tuberculosis, causing him to move to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1855.

While there, he became a science master of the 1st Simferopol Gymnasium. In 1857, he returned to Saint Petersburg with restored health. Between 1859 and 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope in Heidelberg. In 1861, he published a textbook named Organic Chemistry; this won him the Demidov Prize of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. On 4 April 1862, he became engaged to Feozva Nikitichna Leshcheva, they married on 27 April 1862 at Nikolaev Engineering Institute's church in Saint Petersburg. Mendeleev became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute and Saint Petersburg State University in 1864, 1865, respectively. In 1865, he became Doctor of Science for his dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol", he achieved tenure in 1867 at St. Petersburg University and started to teach inorganic chemistry, while succeeding Voskresenskii to this post. In 1863, there were 56 known elements with a new element being discovered at a rate of one per year.

Other scientists had identified periodicity of elements. John Newlands described a Law of Octaves, noting their periodicity according to relative atomic weight in 1864, publishing it in 1865, his proposal identified the potential for new elements such as germanium. The concept was criticized and his innovation was not recognized by the Society of Chemists until 1887. Another person to propose a periodic table was Lothar Meyer, who published a paper in 1864 describing 28 elements classified by their valence, but with no predictions of new elements. After becoming a teacher in 1867, Mendeleev wrote the definitive textbook of his time: Principles of Chemistry, it was written. This is; as he attempted to classify the elements according to their chemical properties, he noticed patterns that led him to postulate his periodic table.

Lupinus excubitus is a species of lupine known as the grape soda lupine. Its common name refers to its sweet scent, said to be reminiscent of grape soda; this species and its variants are found in Southwestern United States in California and Nevada, e.g. Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks, northwestern Mexico. Lupinus excubitus is a small shrub with gray-green foliage; the fan-shaped leaves may be clustered at the base. Covered with silvery hairs, each is made up of 7 to 10 narrow 5–50 millimetres leaflets; the raceme inflorescence is a tall stalk of each with a bright yellow spot. The occasional variant has white flowers; the fruit is a silky legume pod up to 5 centimetres in length containing mottled brown seeds. There are several named variants of this species, including: L. e. var. austromontanus - southern mountain lupine L. e. var. excubitus - grape soda lupine, Inyo bush lupine L. e. var. hallii - Hall's bush lupine L. e. var. johnstonii - interior bush lupine L. e. var. medius - Mountain Springs bush lupine, Colorado bush lupine Media related to Lupinus excubitus at Wikimedia Commons Photo gallery: Lupinus excubitus Photo gallery: Lupinus excubitus var. austromontanus Photo gallery: Lupinus excubitus var. excubitus

Wigwag was an American magazine published from 1988 until 1991. Founded by Alexander "Lex" Kaplen, who worked at The New Yorker, Wigwag eschewed celebrity coverage in favor of personal and literary writing. A test issue was put on newsstands in the summer of 1988, the magazine formally debuted in October 1989; the magazine attracted writers such as Peter Matthiessen, Terry McMillan, Garry Wills, Alex Heard, Sousa Jamba and Nancy Franklin, but despite a circulation of 120,000, despite being financially successful, ceased publication when the Gulf War broke out in 1991 and the economy entered a recession. It published its last issue in February 1991. In its brief lifetime it reached a circulation of close to 200,000 and became a brand name signifying family-feeling and an appreciation of the qualities of non-metropolitan America; the legend of Wigwag's founding by a group of young exiles from The New Yorker – an exodus which followed The New Yorker's acquisition by Conde Nast and Conde Nast's subsequent dismissal of The New Yorker's longtime editor William Shawn – attracted an enormous amount of attention to its launch and early publication.

Once launched, it became a success d'estime, critics called it the "Anti-Spy" – in reference to the funny and cynical New York magazine of that name. Many saw the two magazines as rivals for media attention – neither survived the 1991 recession. Contemporary observers thought that the "parent ship," The New Yorker itself edited by Robert Gottlieb saw itself as threatened by Wigwag during Wigwag's lifetime. Wigwag proposed a kind of counter-reality to the sophistication which magazines like The New Yorker and Spy aspired to – offering, instead of The New Yorker's famed "Talk of the Town" section, its own titled opening section, "Letters from Home." Notable staffers at Wigwag include Nancy Holyoke, who went on to found American Girl magazine at Pleasant Company in Wisconsin, Caroline Fraser, the author of a noted history of the Christian Science Church, Evan Cornog, now dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University. One of the most significant contributors to Wigwag's identity was its art director, the illustrator and designer Paul Davis.

Many have observed that Wigwag's editorial and design innovations under Kaplen and Davis were adopted by Tina Brown and implemented at The New Yorker when she became its editor. List of defunct American magazines "A Great One Remembered: Wigwag, 1988-1991" Remembrance by publisher Samuel E. Schulman DesigningMagazines.com on Wigwag's design legacy Wigwag: The Magazine That Lex Built