Top-Secret Project Zebra was/is the only time in history that Soviet airmen were trained in America by Americans. Their mission: to fly a state-of-the-art amphibious warplane produced in Philadelphia. Incredibly, 185 of these huge, heavily-armed PBN-Nomad, painted with bright Red Army stars, were then ferried to the sleepy, patriotic town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, without a single media leak. There, 11 hand-picked Naval officers befriended and trained 300+ Soviet airmen over a period of 18 months before the planes were dispatched to the Atlantic and Pacific theaters where they destroyed numerous Nazi U-Boats and Japanese submarines without losing a single plane. Project Zebra was more than a military mission. It became a historic human event. The Soviet and American teams shared experiences that created bonds of trust and mutual respect, despite their language barriers and cultural differences -- something that might serve us well to model during these uncertain Russian-American moments. Project Zebra was declassified on December 31, 2012, and remains one of WWII's last never-been-told stories. Until now!

Common and exotic, glamorous and ferocious, sociable and sullen: zebras mean many things to many people. But one facet of zebras universally fascinates: their stripes. The extraordinary beauty of zebras’ striped coats has ensured their status as one of the world’s most recognizable and popular animals. Zebra print is everywhere in contemporary society—on beanbags and bikinis, car seats and pencil cases. Many zoos house a zebra or two, and they are a common feature of children’s books and films. Zebras have been immortalized in paint by artists, including George Stubbs and Lucian Freud, and they even have a road crossing named after them. But despite their ubiquity, the natural and cultural history of zebras remain a mystery to most. Zebra is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging survey ever published of the natural and cultural history of this cherished animal, exploring its biology and cultural relevance in Africa and beyond. Few know that there are three species of zebra (plains, mountain, and Grévy's), that one of these is currently endangered, or that among the many subspecies was once found the quagga, an animal that once roamed southern Africa in large numbers before dying out in the 1880s. Drawing on a range of examples as dizzying as the zebra’s stripes, this book shows how the zebra’s history engages and intersects with subjects as diverse and rich as eighteenth-century humor, imperialism, and technologies of concealment. Including more than one hundred illustrations, many previously unpublished, Zebra offers a new perspective on this much-loved, much-depicted, but frequently misunderstood animal.

Extinction of quagga zebras left behind historical records, art, literature, and DNA whose information led to their rebreeding.

These proceedings present papers on Additive Manufacturing, Composites Forming Processes, Extrusion and Drawing, Forging and Rolling, Formability of Metallic Materials, Friction and Wear in Metal Forming, Incremental and Sheet Metal Forming, Innovative Joining by Forming Technologies, Lionel Fourment MS on Optimization and Inverse Analysis in Forming, Machining and Cutting, Material Behavior Modelling, New and Advanced Numerical Strategies for Material Forming, Non-Conventional Processes, Polymer Processing and Thermomechanical Properties, Sustainability on Material Forming, and Property-Controlled Forming.