title: Jack Kent Cooke

text: Cooke's third marriage on July 24, 1987, to Suzanne Elizabeth Martin, a college dropout aged 31 at the time and 43 years his junior, was even shorter at 73 days. Cooke agreed to marry Martin if she signed a prenuptial agreement and aborted the first-trimester fetus she was carrying (as a result of having skipped taking one or two birth control pills). It would have been her third abortion in two years. After their wedding, Martin told Cooke she had changed her mind, deciding to keep the baby, and she and Cooke separated four weeks later. After they divorced, Martin gave birth to a girl who was named Jacqueline Kent Cooke. In her divorce action, where her lawyers used the child as a "wedge", Martin sought $15 million ($ in current dollar terms) from Cooke, plus $18,000 ($ in current dollar terms) a month in alimony and child support. In Fauquier County Circuit Court, a judge rejected Martin's request that he ignore the prenuptial agreement, and improve her financial settlement in which she received a $75,000 ($ in current dollar terms) annual stipend, a Jaguar, and the use for five years of an apartment in the Watergate complex. Cooke's lawyer Milton Gould said: "This is a conspiracy to try to use a little kid as a means of getting money. Well, we're not going to abandon this child. She will get money but the woman doesn't deserve any...there have been few courtesans in the history of the world who have been as well rewarded as this one."


title: Jack Kent Cooke

text: Cooke married his fourth wife, Marlene Ramallo Chalmers, who had been jailed for three months for a 1986 arrest for cocaine trafficking, on May 5, 1990. They were divorced in late 1993 after she made headlines in September by driving drunk in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. with a man holding onto the hood and pounding on the windshield of her car. They remarried in 1995 and remained together until his death.


title: Jack Kent Cooke

text: Cooke, who had famously informed a reporter that "I don't intend to die," died of congestive heart failure on April 6, 1997, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. A memorial service was held at Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville, Virginia, on April 10 and was attended by more than 400 Washington and sports dignitaries.


title: Jack Kent Cooke

text: Cooke's will, which revealed his many changes of heart regarding his wives and children, received considerable public attention. His will gave his daughter Jacqueline a trust fund of $5 million ($ in current dollar terms) but nothing to her mother, Suzanne Elizabeth Martin, "because of her misconduct and behavior which were calculated to harm me". His final wife, Marlene Ramallo Chalmers, was also cut out of his will; she filed a lawsuit against Cooke's estate and reportedly received $20 million in a settlement about a year after Cooke's death.


title: Jack Kent Cooke

text: The bulk of Cooke's $825 million estate went into establishing the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, whose stated mission was to "help young people of exceptional promise reach their full potential through education."


title: Jack Kent Cooke

text: In February 2007, his daughter Jacqueline filed a $275 million lawsuit against the estate, seeking more money than her $5 million trust fund.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: The Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics YF-22 is an American single-seat, twin-engine fighter aircraft technology demonstrator designed for the United States Air Force (USAF). The design was a finalist in the USAF's Advanced Tactical Fighter competition, and two prototypes were built for the demonstration/validation phase of the competition. The YF-22 won the contest against the Northrop YF-23, and entered production as the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. The YF-22 has a similar aerodynamic layout and configuration as the F-22, but with differences in the position and design of the cockpit, tail fins and wings, and in internal structural layout.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: In the 1980s, the USAF began looking for a replacement for its fighter aircraft, especially to counter the advanced Su-27 and MiG-29. A number of companies, divided into two teams, submitted their proposals. Northrop and McDonnell Douglas submitted the YF-23. Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics proposed and built the YF-22, which, although marginally slower and having a larger radar cross-section, was more agile than the YF-23. Primarily, for this reason, it was picked by the Air Force as the winner of the ATF in April 1991. Following the selection, the first YF-22 was retired to a museum, while the second prototype continued flying until an accident relegated it to the role of an antenna test vehicle.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: In 1981, the U.S. Air Force developed a requirement for an Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) as a new air superiority fighter to replace the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon. This was made more crucial by the emerging worldwide threats, including development and proliferation of Soviet MiG-29 and Su-27 "Flanker"-class fighter aircraft. It would take advantage of the new technologies in fighter design on the horizon including composite materials, lightweight alloys, advanced flight-control systems, more powerful propulsion systems and stealth technology.<ref name="YF F/S"></ref> In September 1985, the Air Force sent out technical request for proposals (RFP) to a number of aircraft manufacturing teams. The seven bids were submitted in July 1986, and two companies, Lockheed and Northrop, were selected on 31 October 1986. The two teams, Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics and Northrop/McDonnell Douglas, undertook a 50-month demonstration phase, culminating in the flight test of the two teams' prototypes, the YF-22 and the YF-23.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: The YF-22 was designed to meet USAF requirements for survivability, supercruise, stealth, and ease of maintenance. Because Lockheed's submission was selected as one of the winners, the company, through its Skunk Works division, assumed leadership of the program partners. It would be responsible for the forward cockpit and fuselage, as well as final assembly at Palmdale, California. Meanwhile, the wings and aft fuselage would be built by Boeing, with the center fuselage, weapons bays, tail and landing gear built by General Dynamics. Compared with its Northrop/McDonnell Douglas counterpart, the YF-22 has a more conventional design – its wings have larger control surfaces, such as full-span trailing edge, and, whereas the YF-23 had two tail surfaces, the YF-22 had four, which made it more maneuverable than its counterpart. Two examples of each prototype air vehicle (PAV) were built for the Demonstration-Validation phase: one with General Electric YF120 engines, the other with Pratt & Whitney YF119 engines.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: The YF-22 was given the unofficial name "Lightning II" after Lockheed's World War II-era fighter, the P-38 Lightning, which persisted until the mid-1990s when the USAF officially named the aircraft "Raptor". The F-35 later received the "Lightning II" name in 2006.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: The first YF-22 (PAV-1, serial number 87-0700, N22YF), with the GE YF120, was rolled out on 29 August 1990 and first flew on 29 September 1990, taking off from Palmdale piloted by David L. Ferguson. During the 18-minute flight, PAV-1 reached a maximum speed of and a height of , before landing at Edwards AFB. Following the flight, Ferguson said that the remainder of the YF-22 test program would be concentrated on "the manoeuvrability of the aeroplane, both supersonic and subsonic". The second YF-22 (PAV-2, s/n 87-0701, N22YX) with the P&W YF119 made its maiden flight on 30 October at the hands of Tom Morgenfeld.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: During the flight test program, unlike the YF-23, weapon firings and high (60°) angle of attack (AoA, or high-alpha) flights were carried out on the YF-22. Though not a requirement, the aircraft fired AIM-9 Sidewinder and AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles from internal weapon bays. Flight testing also demonstrated that the YF-22 with its thrust vectoring nozzles achieved pitch rates more than double that of the F-16 at low-speed maneuvering. The first prototype, PAV-1, achieved Mach 1.58 in supercruise, while PAV-2 reached a maximum supercruise speed of Mach 1.43; maximum speed was in excess of Mach 2.0. Flight testing continued until 28 December 1990, by which time 74 flights were completed and 91.6 airborne hours were accumulated. Following flight testing, the contractor teams submitted proposals for ATF production.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: On 23 April 1991, the YF-22 was announced by Secretary of the Air Force Donald Rice as the winner of the ATF competition. The YF-23 design was stealthier and faster, but the YF-22 was more agile. It was speculated in the aviation press that the YF-22 was also seen as more adaptable to the Navy's Navalized Advanced Tactical Fighter (NATF), but the US Navy abandoned NATF by 1992. Instead of being retired, as with the case of PAV-1, PAV-2 subsequently flew sorties following the competition – it amassed another 61.6 flying hours during 39 flights. On 25 April 1992, the aircraft sustained serious damage during a landing attempt as a result of pilot-induced oscillations. It was repaired but never flew again, and instead served as a static test vehicle thereafter. In 1991, it was anticipated that 650 production F-22s would be procured.


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: As the Lockheed team won the ATF competition, it was awarded the engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) contract, which would ultimately allow it to proceed with production of operational aircraft. The EMD called for seven single-seat F-22A and two twin-seat F-22Bs. On 9 April 1997, the first of these, "Spirit of America", was rolled out. During the ceremony, the F-22 was officially named "Raptor". Due to limited funding, the first flight, which had previously been scheduled for mid-1996, occurred on 7 September 1997. Flight testing for the F-22 continued until 2005, and on 15 December 2005 the USAF announced that the Raptor had reached its initial operational capability (IOC).


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: In many respects, the YF-22s were different from production F-22s. Contrary to the F-117 Nighthawk, which was initially difficult to control because of small vertical stabilizers, Lockheed over-specified the fin area on its YF-22. Therefore, the company reduced the size of those on F-22s by 20–30 percent. Lockheed recontoured the shape of the wing and stabilator trailing edges to improve aerodynamics, strength, and stealth characteristics; the wing and stabilitor sweep was reduced by 6° from 48°. Finally, to improve pilot visibility, the canopy was moved forward , and the engine intakes were moved rearward .


title: Lockheed YF-22

text: In April 1992, the second YF-22 crashed while landing at Edwards AFB. The test pilot, Tom Morgenfeld, escaped without injury. The cause of the crash was found to be a flight control software error that failed to prevent a pilot-induced oscillation.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is the debut solo album by English musician John Lennon. Backed by the Plastic Ono Band, it was released by Apple Records on 11 December 1970 in tandem with the similarly titled album by his wife, Yoko Ono. At the time of its issue, "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" received mixed reviews overall, but later came to be widely regarded as Lennon's best solo album.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Co-produced by Lennon, Ono and Phil Spector, it followed Lennon's recording of three experimental releases with Ono and a live album from the 1969 version of the Plastic Ono Band. "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" contains a largely raw production sound with songs heavily influenced by Lennon's recent primal scream therapy. Its lyrics reflect Lennon's personal issues and includes themes of child-parent abandonment and psychological suffering. The tracks were recorded in September and October 1970 at Abbey Road Studios in London, simultaneously with Ono's similarly titled solo album.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" peaked at number eight on the UK Albums Chart and number six on the US "Billboard" 200. In 1987, "Rolling Stone" ranked it fourth in its list "The 100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years" and in 2012, ranked it number 23 in their list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". It was voted number 244 in Colin Larkin "All Time Top 1000 Albums" (2000). In 2000, the album was remixed with two bonus tracks, "Power to the People" and "Do the Oz". The album's 2021 "Ultimate Mixes" reissue, in the eight-disc "Ultimate Collection" box set, features 159 previously unreleased mixes, demos, outtakes, and isolated track elements.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Following the break-up of the Beatles in April 1970, John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono undertook primal therapy with the guidance of Arthur Janov for four weeks at his London offices. The three then flew to Los Angeles to continue the therapy for four months. Janov's therapy technique emphasised emotionally reliving repressed childhood traumas rather than analytical discussion.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon and Ono stayed in a rented house in Bel Air, keeping a low profile and committing fully to Janov's course. Lennon embraced the discipline as he had Transcendental Meditation in the late 1960s, and the act of engaging with past traumas became "too primal". Ono later commented that primal therapy helped curb his possessiveness towards her, as he recognised that his feelings of jealousy stemmed from events that took place long before they met.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: With the experience he received from the therapy, Lennon was able to channel his emotions into an album's worth of self-revelatory material. In July, he started to record demos of songs that would show up on "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band". On 26 July, he taped numerous demos of "God", which includes the line "I don't believe in Beatles". "When a Boy Meets a Girl" was among the songs Lennon demoed at this time, but he did not record it for the album.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon's therapy was never completed due to the expiry of his US visa. Janov had intended that Lennon's treatment would require a minimum of a year, such was the severity of his trauma. Janov expressed concern that the therapy had ended prematurely and that Lennon's rediscovered anger over his childhood remained unresolved.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon's experience in primal therapy strongly influenced both the lyrical content of the album, pushing him toward themes of child–parent relationships and psychological suffering, and the simple yet intense style of the album's music. Throughout the album Lennon touches on many personal issues: his abandonment by his parents, in "Mother"; the means by which young people are made into soldiers, in "Working Class Hero"; a reminder that, despite his rage and pain, Lennon still embraces "Love"; and "God", a renunciation of external saviours. In the piano-driven climax of "God", after listing a handful of things he does not believe in, including Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, Elvis, "Zimmerman" (Bob Dylan) and Beatles, Lennon proclaims that he believes only in himself and Ono.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: "Look at Me" dates from the period of the White Album (1968), and is built on a fingerpicking guitar pattern very similar to the one Lennon used in "Dear Prudence", "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "Julia". Donovan claimed that he taught Lennon this technique while the two were in Rishikesh in 1968. "Remember" uses the same piano riff that Lennon played in the discarded coda to the Beatles' July 1969 recording of "Something".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: "My Mummy's Dead", which closes "Plastic Ono Band", is partly set to the tune of the nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice". The recording used on the album was taken from Lennon's Los Angeles demos.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Having exhausted the extensions of their American visas, Lennon and Ono returned from the US on 15 September 1970. Soon afterwards, Ono miscarried at close to eight months pregnant, and Lennon's equilibrium was tested when his father, Alf Lennon, resumed contact, having recently remarried and become a father again. At Alf's request, they met up at Tittenhurst Park for Lennon's 30th birthday, but Lennon launched into a primal therapy-inspired tirade against him and, according to the account Alf left with his solicitor, threatened to kill him.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Recording for the album took place at Abbey Road Studios in London, beginning on 26 September. Lennon played guitar or piano on the songs, with bassist Klaus Voormann and drummer Ringo Starr as the other core musicians. The album title refers to the Plastic Ono Band, the conceptual band Lennon and Ono formed in 1969 of various supporting musicians they would use on their various solo albums. Lennon asked Phil Spector, who had produced Lennon's hit "Instant Karma!" earlier that year, to co-produce the new album. Since they were unable to contact Spector before recording began, Allen Klein, Lennon's manager, took out an advertisement in "Billboard" magazine that read: "Phil! John is ready this weekend."


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Spector and Apple artist Billy Preston each played piano on a track. During the sessions, Lennon, Voormann and Starr jammed on a variety of songs in between recording the new tracks: "When a Boy Meets a Girl", "That's All Right Mama", "Glad All Over", "Honey Don't", "Don't Be Cruel", "Hound Dog" and "Matchbox". They also taped the basic track for Starr's "Early 1970" in which the drummer describes his relationship with each of his former bandmates; in the verse dedicated to Lennon, Starr sings, "They screamed and they cried, now they're free".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: As longstanding friends of Lennon, Voormann and Starr were disturbed by his emotional behaviour in the studio. In his 2004 book "Postcards from the Boys", Starr recalls that Lennon would burst out crying or start screaming midway through recording a track. Voormann said that Lennon would change from being upbeat to highly emotional and would discuss his feelings with Ono as they listened to playbacks in the studio control room. In Voormann's view, the effects of Lennon's therapy were especially confronting to Starr, since "The old John was gone; it was a different John. It wasn't the one he was used to."


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: According to music critic Richie Unterberger, bootlegs from the sessions suggest that Lennon was far from the despondent artist reflected in the finished album. As the ensemble recorded "Remember" on 9 October, Lennon's 30th birthday, George Harrison visited the studio and delivered a tape of "It's Johnny's Birthday", after Ono had asked Lennon's friends for musical greetings to mark the occasion. The session tapes reveal Lennon and Starr's delight at Harrison's arrival. In author Robert Rodriguez's description, the meeting reflects the three former Beatles' closeness, at the expense of Paul McCartney, as well as Lennon's playfulness while making "Plastic Ono Band".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon and Ono produced "Plastic Ono Band" largely on their own, as Spector was absent for much of the recording sessions. Spector mixed the album for three days towards the end of October. All work on the record was completed by 27 October, when Lennon and Ono flew to New York to publicise primal therapy and collaborate on the experimental films "Up Your Legs Forever" and "Fly".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon's album cover is almost identical to Ono's companion piece, the sole difference being that on Ono's cover, she is lying on Lennon's body. The photo was taken at Lennon's Tittenhurst Park estate with a consumer-grade Instamatic camera by actor Dan Richter, who also worked as an assistant for the Lennons at the time. The initial compact disc issue of the album listed the title and artist, while the 2000 remixed version restores the original artwork. In addition, the original LP had no track listing on the back cover, which instead showed a school photo of Lennon in his youth.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: The LP included a lyric sheet on one side of its inner sleeve. Despite Capitol Records' concerns over Lennon's profanities in "I Found Out" and "Working Class Hero", the lyrics appeared uncensored in the US album package. In the UK, EMI ensured that each mention of "fucking" in "Working Class Hero" was bowdlerised through the use of asterisks.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" was released in both the UK and US on 11 December 1970, the same day as Ono's matching album. Lennon considered issuing "Love" as a single in the US but settled on "Mother". The song was edited down to under four minutes through the removal of the opening funeral bells and an early fadeout. Backed by Ono's track "Why", the single was released there on 28 December. In Japan, the album's title was , which translates as "John's Soul". Several US radio stations banned "Working Class Hero" because of the song's repeated use of the word "fucking".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon viewed "Plastic Ono Band" as his best work up to that point. He called it "Sgt. Lennon", referring to the Beatles' 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". His promotion for the album included a lengthy interview with Jann Wenner of "Rolling Stone", recorded in New York on 8 December and published in two instalments under the title "Lennon Remembers". As with his new music, Lennon's comments reflected the effects of primal therapy. He used the opportunity to discuss his troubled childhood, debunk the Beatles as a myth, and denigrate his former bandmates' solo albums. He also dismissed the effectiveness of the 1960s cultural revolution as a "dream" and committed to political protest as his new artistic direction. Together with the sentiments of "God", the interview ended any hope of the Beatles reuniting, and was followed soon after by McCartney filing suit in a London court to dissolve the group as a legal partnership.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: The album and Lennon's political stance furthered his credibility among underground radicals, as the New Left welcomed his debunking of the Beatles' image. Its commercial performance nevertheless paled beside Harrison's concurrently released "All Things Must Pass" and McCartney's self-titled solo album, issued in April. "Plastic Ono Band" peaked at number 8 in the UK and number 6 in the US, spending eighteen weeks in the top 100. In the Netherlands, it was number 1 for seven weeks.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Lennon was especially aggrieved that his LP was overshadowed by the acclaim afforded "All Things Must Pass". According to ABKCO executive Allan Steckler, neither Klein nor promotions man Pete Bennett knew how to go about marketing "Plastic Ono Band" in the US, where it received minimal AM airplay. Starr attributed the muted public response to the album's paucity of "toe-tappers".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Although "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" received some highly favourable reviews, critical reception to the album was mixed overall. Andy Gray of the "NME" said it offered truths that would resonate with most listeners but that Lennon was governed by "a great big chip on his shoulder about class consciousness and the unfairness of the world". Gray also wrote: "I have rarely heard so much anguish and suffering put into a track as in the first song, 'Mother'." "The Guardian"s Geoffrey Cannon opined that Lennon had taken the self-centredness of "McCartney" to an obsessive level. He predicted that the songs would have limited interest but added: "Lennon's album makes a deep impression, if more on him than us. He screams and cries, desolation, bitterness, anguish. This is the album of a man of black bile. This is declamation, not music." Writing in "The Times", Richard Williams described "Plastic Ono Band" as "almost unbearably stark" and "not an album I can put on for pleasure".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Reviewing for "Creem", Dave Marsh found it "totally enthralling to see that Lennon has once again unified, to some degree, his life and his music into a truly whole statement". He deemed Lennon's perspective "elitist" and less adventurous than Ono's on her LP, but nevertheless likened the album to the highly political statements made by jazz artists such as Archie Shepp, Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus in their music. Don Heckman of "The New York Times" was unimpressed by "Plastic Ono Band", calling it a "group of empty selections" that, like McCartney's album, showed its creator to be overly preoccupied with himself and weakened artistically as a solo performer. "Billboard"s reviewer described the album as "Self determination music, intensely analytical of self with production values kept down to the minimum", and predicted it would remain the subject of analysis for years like "Sgt. Pepper".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: John Gabree of "High Fidelity" deemed the LP "a tremendously exciting listening experience, perhaps the best any Beatle has ever offered". He praised the musicianship, sparse arrangements and Lennon's directness, and said that on the strength of "Plastic Ono Band" and Harrison's "All Things Must Pass", he was not bothered if the Beatles ever reunited as a band. Robert Christgau named "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" the best album of 1970 in his year-end list for "The Village Voice", and in a decade-end list, he ranked it 21st best from the 1970s.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: "Plastic Ono Band" is widely considered to be Lennon's best solo album and one of his most influential works. The record became known as "the Primal Album". Janov incorporated it into his therapy course, although he rued that Lennon had cut off his therapy prematurely and that "We had opened him up, and we didn't have time to put him back together again."


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: Music critic Greil Marcus remarked, "John's singing in the last verse of 'God' may be the finest in all of rock." In a retrospective review for "Rolling Stone", Robert Christgau wrote that the album's lyrics are political, existential, and carefully thought out, while Spector's production is elegantly simple so that each instrument resonates. Christgau added: "Left out in the open, without protective harmonies or racket, Lennon's singing takes on an expressive specificity that anyone in search of the century's great vocal performances would be foolish to overlook." Garry Mulholland of "Uncut" describes it as a "masterpiece" that "remains the most profound and perfectly realised confessional album that rock'n'roll has produced".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: "Mojo" critic John Harris includes "Plastic Ono Band" among "the trilogy of truly essential post-Beatles solo albums", along with "All Things Must Pass" and Wings' "Band on the Run". In 2008, it was the subject of a documentary film by Matthew Longfellow as part of Eagle Rock's "Classic Albums" series. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Lennon and Ono's twin 1970 albums, Thames & Hudson published the book "John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band", which includes illustrations by Voormann.<ref name="Moran/SMH"></ref>


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: In 2000, "Q" placed "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" at number 62 in its list of the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever". In 1987, the album was ranked fourth on "Rolling Stone"s list of the 100 best albums of the period 1967–87, and in 2003, it was placed at number 22 in the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, 23 in a 2012 revised list, and 85 in a 2020 revised list. In 2006, the album was placed by "Pitchfork" at number 60 of its Top 100 Albums of the 1970s. In 2006, the album was chosen by "Time" as one of the 100 best albums of all time.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: After Lennon's death, EMI's Parlophone label reissued "Plastic Ono Band", along with seven other Lennon albums, as part of a box set, which was released in the UK on 15 June 1981. In 2000, Ono supervised a remixing of "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" for its remastered CD reissue, including two bonus tracks: Lennon's 1971 hit "Power to the People", and "Do the Oz", originally released as the B-side to "God Save Us" under the name Elastic Oz Band and later part of the 1998 box set "John Lennon Anthology".


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: In 2003, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab reissued the album in 24-karat Gold CD audio and 180-gram half-speed mastered GAIN 2 Ultra Analog in vinyl reissues. In 2010, a digital remaster of Lennon's entire discography was released, using original mixes and artwork.


title: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

text: A 50th Anniversary reissue of the album was released on 23 April 2021, under the title "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band: The Ultimate Collection". The eight-disc box set spreads over six CDs and two Blu-ray HD discs, and features 159 new mixes, including previously unreleased demos, studio outtakes, and isolated track elements, along with 5.1 surround and Dolby Atmos mixes.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Medical ultrasound includes diagnostic techniques (mainly imaging techniques) using ultrasound, as well as therapeutic applications of ultrasound. In diagnosis, it is used to create an image of internal body structures such as tendons, muscles, joints, blood vessels, and internal organs, to measure some characteristics (e.g. distances and velocities) or to generate an informative audible sound. Its aim is usually to find a source of disease or to exclude pathology. The usage of ultrasound to produce visual images for medicine is called medical ultrasonography or simply sonography. The practice of examining pregnant women using ultrasound is called obstetric ultrasonography, and was an early development of clinical ultrasonography.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound is composed of sound waves with frequencies which are significantly higher than the range of human hearing (>20,000 Hz). Ultrasonic images, also known as sonograms, are created by sending pulses of ultrasound into tissue using a probe. The ultrasound pulses echo off tissues with different reflection properties and are returned to the probe which records and displays them as an image.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Many different types of images can be formed. The most common is a B-mode image (Brightness), which displays the acoustic impedance of a two-dimensional cross-section of tissue. Other types display blood flow, motion of tissue over time, the location of blood, the presence of specific molecules, the stiffness of tissue, or the anatomy of a three-dimensional region.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Compared to other medical imaging modalities, ultrasound has several advantages. It provides images in real-time, is portable, and can consequently be brought to the bedside. It is substantially lower in cost than other imaging strategies and does not use harmful ionizing radiation. Drawbacks include various limits on its field of view, the need for patient cooperation, dependence on patient physique, difficulty imaging structures obscured by bone, air or gases, and the necessity of a skilled operator, usually with professional training.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Owing to these drawbacks, novel wearable ultrasound implementations are gaining popularity. These miniature devices continuously monitor vitals and alert at the emergence of early signs of abnormality.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Sonography (ultrasonography) is widely used in medicine. It is possible to perform both diagnosis and therapeutic procedures, using ultrasound to guide interventional procedures such as biopsies or to drain collections of fluid, which can be both diagnostic and therapeutic. Sonographers are medical professionals who perform scans which are traditionally interpreted by radiologists, physicians who specialize in the application and interpretation of medical imaging modalities, or by cardiologists in the case of cardiac ultrasonography (echocardiography). Increasingly, physicians and other healthcare professionals who provide direct patient care are using ultrasound in office and hospital practice (point-of-care ultrasound).


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Sonography is effective for imaging soft tissues of the body. Superficial structures such as muscle, tendon, testis, breast, thyroid and parathyroid glands, and the neonatal brain are imaged at higher frequencies (7–18 MHz), which provide better linear (axial) and horizontal (lateral) resolution. Deeper structures such as liver and kidney are imaged at lower frequencies (1–6 MHz) with lower axial and lateral resolution as a price of deeper tissue penetration.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: A general-purpose ultrasound transducer may be used for most imaging purposes but some situations may require the use of a specialized transducer. Most ultrasound examination is done using a transducer on the surface of the body, but improved visualization is often possible if a transducer can be placed inside the body. For this purpose, special-use transducers, including transvaginal, endorectal, and transesophageal transducers are commonly employed. At the extreme, very small transducers can be mounted on small diameter catheters and placed within blood vessels to image the walls and disease of those vessels.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In anesthesiology, ultrasound is commonly used to guide the placement of needles when injecting local anesthetic solutions in the proximity of nerves identified within the ultrasound image (nerve block). It is also used for vascular access such as cannulation of large central veins and for difficult arterial cannulation. Transcranial Doppler is frequently used by neuro-anesthesiologists for obtaining information about flow-velocity in the basal cerebral vessels.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In angiology or vascular medicine, duplex ultrasound (B Mode imaging combined with Doppler flow measurement) is used to diagnose arterial and venous disease. This is particularly important in potential neurologic problems, where carotid ultrasound is commonly used for assessing blood flow and potential or suspected stenosis in the carotid arteries, while transcranial Doppler is used for imaging flow in the intracerebral arteries.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Intravascular ultrasound ("IVUS") uses a specially designed catheter with a miniaturized ultrasound probe attached to its distal end, which is then threaded inside a blood vessel. The proximal end of the catheter is attached to computerized ultrasound equipment and allows the application of ultrasound technology, such as a piezoelectric transducer or capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer, to visualize the endothelium of blood vessels in living individuals.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In the case of the common and potentially, serious problem of blood clots in the deep veins of the leg, ultrasound plays a key diagnostic role, while ultrasonography of chronic venous insufficiency of the legs focuses on more superficial veins to assist with planning of suitable interventions to relieve symptoms or improve cosmetics.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Echocardiography is an essential tool in cardiology, assisting in evaluation of heart valve function, such as stenosis or insufficiency, strength of cardiac muscle contraction, and hypertrophy or dilatation of the main chambers. (ventricle and atrium)


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Point of care ultrasound has many applications in emergency medicine. These include differentiating cardiac from pulmonary causes of acute breathlessness, and the Focused Assessment with Sonography for Trauma (FAST) exam, extended to include assessment for significant hemoperitoneum or pericardial tamponade after trauma (EFAST). Other uses include assisting with differentiating causes of abdominal pain such as gallstones and kidney stones. Emergency Medicine Residency Programs have a substantial history of promoting the use of bedside ultrasound during physician training.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Both abdominal and endoanal ultrasound are frequently used in gastroenterology and colorectal surgery. In abdominal sonography, the major organs of the abdomen such as the pancreas, aorta, inferior vena cava, liver, gall bladder, bile ducts, kidneys, and spleen may be imaged. However, sound waves may be blocked by gas in the bowel and attenuated to differing degrees by fat, sometimes limiting diagnostic capabilities. The appendix can sometimes be seen when inflamed (e.g.: appendicitis) and ultrasound is the initial imaging choice, avoiding radiation if possible, although it frequently needs to be followed by other imaging methods such as CT. Endoanal ultrasound is used particularly in the investigation of anorectal symptoms such as fecal incontinence or obstructed defecation. It images the immediate perianal anatomy and is able to detect occult defects such as tearing of the anal sphincter. Ultrasonography of liver tumors allows for both detection and characterization.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Gynecologic ultrasonography examines female pelvic organs (specifically the uterus, ovaries, and Fallopian tubes) as well as the bladder, adnexa, and Pouch of Douglas. It uses transducers designed for approaches through the lower abdominal wall, curvilinear and sector, and specialty transducers such as Transvaginal ultrasound.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Obstetrical sonography was originally developed in the late 1950s and 1960s by Sir Ian Donald and is commonly used during pregnancy to check the development and presentation of the fetus. It can be used to identify many conditions that could be potentially harmful to the mother and/or baby possibly remaining undiagnosed or with delayed diagnosis in the absence of sonography. It is currently believed that the risk of delayed diagnosis is greater than the small risk, if any, associated with undergoing an ultrasound scan. However, its use for non-medical purposes such as fetal "keepsake" videos and photos is discouraged.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Nonetheless, care should be taken to use low power settings and avoid pulsed wave scanning of the fetal brain unless specifically indicated in high risk pregnancies.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Figures released for the period 2005–2006 by the UK Government (Department of Health) show that non-obstetric ultrasound examinations constituted more than 65% of the total number of ultrasound scans conducted.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Blood velocity can be measured in various blood vessels, such as middle cerebral artery or descending aorta, by relatively inexpensive and low risk ultrasound Doppler probes attached to portable monitors. These provide non-invasive or transcutaneous (non-piercing) minimal invasive blood flow assessment. Common examples are, Transcranial Doppler, Esophageal Doppler and Suprasternal Doppler.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Most structures of the neck, including the thyroid and parathyroid glands, lymph nodes, and salivary glands, are well-visualized by high-frequency ultrasound with exceptional anatomic detail. Ultrasound is the preferred imaging modality for thyroid tumors and lesions, and its use is important in the evaluation, preoperative planning, and postoperative surveillance of patients with thyroid cancer. Many other benign and malignant conditions in the head and neck can be differentiated, evaluated, and managed with the help of diagnostic ultrasound and ultrasound-guided procedures.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In neonatology, transcranial Doppler can be used for basic assessment of intracerebral structural abnormalities, suspected hemorrhage, ventriculomegaly or hydrocephalus and anoxic insults (Periventricular leukomalacia). It can be performed through the soft spots in the skull of a newborn infant (Fontanelle) until these completely close at about 1 year of age by which time they have formed a virtually impenetrable acoustic barrier to ultrasound. The most common site for cranial ultrasound is the anterior fontanelle. The smaller the fontanelle, the more the image is compromised.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound is used to assess the lungs in a variety of settings including critical care, emergency medicine, trauma surgery, as well as general medicine. This imaging modality is used at the bedside or examination table to evaluate a number of different lung abnormalities as well as to guide procedures such as thoracentesis, (drainage of pleural fluid (effusion)), needle aspiration biopsy, and catheter placement. Although air present in the lungs does not allow good penetration of ultrasound waves, interpretation of specific artifacts created on the lung surface can be used to detect abnormalities.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound is routinely used in urology to determine the amount of fluid retained in a patient's bladder. In a pelvic sonogram, images include the uterus and ovaries or urinary bladder in females. In males, a sonogram will provide information about the bladder, prostate, or testicles (for example to urgently distinguish epididymitis from testicular torsion). In young males, it is used to distinguish more benign testicular masses (varicocele or hydrocele) from testicular cancer, which is curable but must be treated to preserve health and fertility. There are two methods of performing pelvic sonography – externally or internally. The internal pelvic sonogram is performed either transvaginally (in a woman) or transrectally (in a man). Sonographic imaging of the pelvic floor can produce important diagnostic information regarding the precise relationship of abnormal structures with other pelvic organs and it represents a useful hint to treat patients with symptoms related to pelvic prolapse, double incontinence and obstructed defecation. It is also used to diagnose and, at higher frequencies, to treat (break up) kidney stones or kidney crystals (nephrolithiasis).


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Scrotal ultrasonography is used in the evaluation of testicular pain, and can help identify solid masses.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound is an excellent method for the study of the penis, such as indicated in trauma, priapism, erectile dysfunction or suspected Peyronie's disease.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Musculoskeletal ultrasound is used to examine tendons, muscles, nerves, ligaments, soft tissue masses, and bone surfaces.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: It is helpful in diagnosing ligament sprains, muscles strains and joint pathology. It is an alternative or supplement to x-ray imaging in detecting fractures of the wrist, elbow and shoulder for patients up to 12 years (Fracture sonography).


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Quantitative ultrasound is an adjunct musculoskeletal test for myopathic disease in children; estimates of lean body mass in adults; proxy measures of muscle quality (i.e., tissue composition) in older adults with sarcopenia


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound can also be used for needle guidance in muscle or joint injections, as in ultrasound-guided hip joint injection.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In nephrology, ultrasonography of the kidneys is essential in the diagnosis and management of kidney-related diseases. The kidneys are easily examined, and most pathological changes are distinguishable with ultrasound. It is an accessible, versatile, relatively economic, and fast aid for decision-making in patients with renal symptoms and for guidance in renal intervention. Using B-mode imaging, assessment of renal anatomy is easily performed, and US is often used as image guidance for renal interventions. Furthermore, novel applications in renal US have been introduced with contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS), elastography and fusion imaging. However, renal US has certain limitations, and other modalities, such as CT (CECT) and MRI, should be considered for supplementary imaging in assessing renal disease.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Intravenous access, for the collection of blood samples to assist in diagnosis or laboratory investigation including blood culture, or for administration of intravenous fluids for fluid maintenance of replacement or blood transfusion in sicker patients, is a common medical procedure. The need for intravenous access occurs in the outpatient laboratory, in the inpatient hospital units, and most critically in the Emergency Room and Intensive Care Unit. In many situations, intravenous access may be required repeatedly or over a significant time period. In these latter circumstances, a needle with an overlying catheter is introduced into the vein and the catheter is then inserted securely into the vein while the needle is withdrawn.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The chosen veins are most frequently selected from the arm, but in challenging situations, a deeper vein from the neck (external jugular vein) or upper arm (subclavian vein) may need to be used.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: These include, but are not limited to, obesity, previous injury to veins from inflammatory reaction to previous 'blood draws', previous injury to veins from recreational drug use.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In these challenging situations, the insertion of a catheter into a vein has been greatly assisted by the use of ultrasound. The ultrasound unit may be 'cart-based' or 'handheld' using a linear transducer with a frequency of 10 to 15 megahertz. In most circumstances, choice of vein will be limited by the requirement that the vein is within 1.5 cms. from the skin surface.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The creation of an image from sound has three steps – transmitting a sound wave, receiving echoes, and interpreting those echoes.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: A sound wave is typically produced by a piezoelectric transducer encased in a plastic housing. Strong, short electrical pulses from the ultrasound machine drive the transducer at the desired frequency. The frequencies can vary between 1 and 18 MHz, though frequencies up to 50–100 megahertz have been used experimentally in a technique known as biomicroscopy in special regions, such as the anterior chamber of the eye.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Older technology transducers focused their beam with physical lenses. Contemporary technology transducers use digital antenna array techniques (piezoelectric elements in the transducer produce echoes at different times) to enable the ultrasound machine to change the direction and depth of focus. Near the transducer, the width of the ultrasound beam almost equals to the width of the transducer, after reaching a distance from the transducer (near zone length or Fresnel zone), the beam width narrows to half of the transducer width, and after that the width increases (far zone length or Fraunhofer's zone), where the lateral resolution decreases. Therefore, the wider the transducer width and the higher the frequency of ultrasound, the longer the Fresnel zone, and the lateral resolution can be maintained at a greater depth from the transducer. Ultrasound waves travel in pulses. Therefore, a shorter pulse length requires higher bandwidth (greater number of frequencies) to constitute the ultrasound pulse.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: As stated, the sound is focused either by the shape of the transducer, a lens in front of the transducer, or a complex set of control pulses from the ultrasound scanner, in the beamforming or spatial filtering technique. This focusing produces an arc-shaped sound wave from the face of the transducer. The wave travels into the body and comes into focus at a desired depth.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Materials on the face of the transducer enable the sound to be transmitted efficiently into the body (often a rubbery coating, a form of impedance matching). In addition, a water-based gel is placed between the patient's skin and the probe to facilitate ultrasound transmission into the body. This is because air causes total reflection of ultrasound; impeding the transmission of ultrasound into the body.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The sound wave is partially reflected from the layers between different tissues or scattered from smaller structures. Specifically, sound is reflected anywhere where there are acoustic impedance changes in the body: e.g. blood cells in blood plasma, small structures in organs, etc. Some of the reflections return to the transducer.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The return of the sound wave to the transducer results in the same process as sending the sound wave, in reverse. The returned sound wave vibrates the transducer and the transducer turns the vibrations into electrical pulses that travel to the ultrasonic scanner where they are processed and transformed into a digital image.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Once the ultrasonic scanner determines these two, it can locate which pixel in the image to illuminate and with what intensity.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Transforming the received signal into a digital image may be explained by using a blank spreadsheet as an analogy. First picture a long, flat transducer at the top of the sheet. Send pulses down the 'columns' of the spreadsheet (A, B, C, etc.). Listen at each column for any return echoes. When an echo is heard, note how long it took for the echo to return. The longer the wait, the deeper the row (1,2,3, etc.). The strength of the echo determines the brightness setting for that cell (white for a strong echo, black for a weak echo, and varying shades of grey for everything in between.) When all the echoes are recorded on the sheet, a greyscale image has been accomplished.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Images from the ultrasound scanner are transferred and displayed using the DICOM standard. Normally, very little post processing is applied.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasonography (sonography) uses a probe containing multiple acoustic transducers to send pulses of sound into a material. Whenever a sound wave encounters a material with a different density (acoustical impedance), some of the sound wave is scattered but part is reflected back to the probe and is detected as an echo. The time it takes for the echo to travel back to the probe is measured and used to calculate the depth of the tissue interface causing the echo. The greater the difference between acoustic impedances, the larger the echo is. If the pulse hits gases or solids, the density difference is so great that most of the acoustic energy is reflected and it becomes impossible to progress further.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The frequencies used for medical imaging are generally in the range of 1 to 18 MHz Higher frequencies have a correspondingly smaller wavelength, and can be used to make more detailed sonograms. However, the attenuation of the sound wave is increased at higher frequencies, so penetration of deeper tissues necessitates a lower frequency (3–5 MHz).


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Penetrating deep into the body with sonography is difficult. Some acoustic energy is lost each time an echo is formed, but most of it (approximately formula_1) is lost from acoustic absorption. (See Acoustic attenuation for further details on modeling of acoustic attenuation and absorption.)


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The speed of sound varies as it travels through different materials, and is dependent on the acoustical impedance of the material. However, the sonographic instrument assumes that the acoustic velocity is constant at 1540 m/s. An effect of this assumption is that in a real body with non-uniform tissues, the beam becomes somewhat de-focused and image resolution is reduced.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: To generate a 2-D image, the ultrasonic beam is swept. A transducer may be swept mechanically by rotating or swinging or a 1-D phased array transducer may be used to sweep the beam electronically. The received data is processed and used to construct the image. The image is then a 2-D representation of the slice into the body.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: 3-D images can be generated by acquiring a series of adjacent 2-D images. Commonly a specialized probe that mechanically scans a conventional 2-D image transducer is used. However, since the mechanical scanning is slow, it is difficult to make 3D images of moving tissues. Recently, 2-D phased array transducers that can sweep the beam in 3-D have been developed. These can image faster and can even be used to make live 3-D images of a beating heart.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Doppler ultrasonography is used to study blood flow and muscle motion. The different detected speeds are represented in color for ease of interpretation, for example leaky heart valves: the leak shows up as a flash of unique color. Colors may alternatively be used to represent the amplitudes of the received echoes.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: An additional expansion of ultrasound is bi-planar ultrasound, in which the probe has two 2D planes perpendicular to each other, providing more efficient localization and detection. Furthermore, an omniplane probe can rotate 180° to obtain multiple images. In 3D ultrasound, many 2D planes are digitally added together to create a 3-dimensional image of the object.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Doppler ultrasonography employs the Doppler effect to assess whether structures (usually blood) are moving towards or away from the probe, and their relative velocity. By calculating the frequency shift of a particular sample volume, flow in an artery or a jet of blood flow over a heart valve, its speed and direction can be determined and visualized, as an example. "Color Doppler" is the measurement of velocity by color scale. Color Doppler images are generally combined with gray scale (B-mode) images to display "duplex ultrasonography" images. Uses include:


title: Medical ultrasound

text: A contrast medium for medical ultrasonography is a formulation of encapsulated gaseous microbubbles to increase echogenicity of blood, discovered by Dr. Raymond Gramiak in 1968 and named contrast-enhanced ultrasound. This contrast medical imaging modality is used throughout the world, for echocardiography in particular in the United States and for ultrasound radiology in Europe and Asia.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Microbubbles-based contrast media is administrated intravenously into the patient blood stream during the ultrasonography examination. Due to their size, the microbubbles remain confined in blood vessels without extravasating towards the interstitial fluid. An ultrasound contrast media is therefore purely intravascular, making it an ideal agent to image organ microvasculature for diagnostic purposes. A typical clinical use of contrast ultrasonography is detection of a hypervascular metastatic tumor, which exhibits a contrast uptake (kinetics of microbubbles concentration in blood circulation) faster than healthy biological tissue surrounding the tumor. Other clinical applications using contrast exist, as in echocardiography to improve delineation of left ventricle for visualizing contractibility of heart muscle after a myocardial infarction. Finally, applications in quantitative perfusion (relative measurement of blood flow) have emerged for identifying early patient response to anti-cancerous drug treatment (methodology and clinical study by Dr. Nathalie Lassau in 2011), enabling the best oncological therapeutic options to be determined.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In oncological practice of medical contrast ultrasonography, clinicians use 'parametric imaging of vascular signatures' invented by Dr. Nicolas Rognin in 2010. This method is conceived as a cancer aided diagnostic tool, facilitating characterization of a suspicious tumor (malignant versus benign) in an organ. This method is based on medical computational science to analyze a time sequence of ultrasound contrast images, a digital video recorded in real-time during patient examination. Two consecutive signal processing steps are applied to each pixel of the tumor:


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Once signal processing in each pixel is completed, a color spatial map of the parameter is displayed on a computer monitor, summarizing all vascular information of the tumor in a single image called a parametric image (see last figure of press article as clinical examples). This parametric image is interpreted by clinicians based on predominant colorization of the tumor: red indicates a suspicion of malignancy (risk of cancer), green or yellow – a high probability of benignity. In the first case (suspicion of malignant tumor), the clinician typically prescribes a biopsy to confirm the diagnostic or a CT scan examination as a second opinion. In the second case (quasi-certain of benign tumor), only a follow-up is needed with a contrast ultrasonography examination a few months later. The main clinical benefits are to avoid a systemic biopsy (with inherent risks of invasive procedures) of benign tumors or a CT scan examination exposing the patient to X-ray radiation. The parametric imaging of vascular signatures method proved to be effective in humans for characterization of tumors in the liver. In a cancer screening context, this method might be potentially applicable to other organs such as breast or prostate.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The current future of contrast ultrasonography is in molecular imaging with potential clinical applications expected in cancer screening to detect malignant tumors at their earliest stage of appearance. Molecular ultrasonography (or ultrasound molecular imaging) uses targeted microbubbles originally designed by Dr Alexander Klibanov in 1997; such targeted microbubbles specifically bind or adhere to tumoral microvessels by targeting biomolecular cancer expression (overexpression of certain biomolecules that occurs during neo-angiogenesis or inflammation in malignant tumors). As a result, a few minutes after their injection in blood circulation, the targeted microbubbles accumulate in the malignant tumor; facilitating its localization in a unique ultrasound contrast image. In 2013, the very first exploratory clinical trial in humans for prostate cancer was completed at Amsterdam in the Netherlands by Dr. Hessel Wijkstra.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In molecular ultrasonography, the technique of acoustic radiation force (also used for shear wave elastography) is applied in order to literally push the targeted microbubbles towards microvessels wall; first demonstrated by Dr. Paul Dayton in 1999. This allows maximization of binding to the malignant tumor; the targeted microbubbles being in more direct contact with cancerous biomolecules expressed at the inner surface of tumoral microvessels. At the stage of scientific preclinical research, the technique of acoustic radiation force was implemented as a prototype in clinical ultrasound systems and validated "in vivo" in 2D and 3D imaging modes.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound is also used for elastography, which is a relatively new imaging modality that maps the elastic properties of soft tissue. This modality emerged in the last two decades. Elastography is useful in medical diagnoses as it can discern healthy from unhealthy tissue for specific organs/growths. For example, cancerous tumors will often be harder than the surrounding tissue, and diseased livers are stiffer than healthy ones.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Interventional ultrasonography involves biopsy, emptying fluids, intrauterine Blood transfusion (Hemolytic disease of the newborn).


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Compression ultrasonography is when the probe is pressed against the skin. This can bring the target structure closer to the probe, increasing spatial resolution of it. Comparison of the shape of the target structure before and after compression can aid in diagnosis.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: It is used in ultrasonography of deep venous thrombosis, wherein absence of vein compressibility is a strong indicator of thrombosis. Compression ultrasonography has both high sensitivity and specificity for detecting proximal deep vein thrombosis in symptomatic patients. Results are not reliable when the patient is asymptomatic, for example in high risk postoperative orthopedic patients.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Panoramic ultrasonography is the digital stitching of multiple ultrasound images into a broader one. It can display an entire abnormality and show its relationship to nearby structures on a single image.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Multiparametric ultrasonography (mpUSS) combines multiple ultrasound techniques to produce a composite result. For example, one study combined B-mode, colour Doppler, real-time elastography, and contrast-enhanced ultrasound, achieving an accuracy similar to that of multiparametric MRI.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Speed-of-sound (SoS) imaging aims to find the spatial distribution of the SoS within the tissue. The idea is to find relative delay measurements for different transmission events and solve the limited-angle tomographic reconstruction problem using delay measurements and transmission geometry. Compared to shear-wave elastography, SoS imaging has better ex-vivo tissue differentiation for benign and malignant tumors.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Diagnostic ultrasound studies of the fetus are generally considered to be safe during pregnancy. However, this diagnostic procedure should be performed only when there is a valid medical indication, and the lowest possible ultrasonic exposure setting should be used to gain the necessary diagnostic information under the "as low as reasonably practicable" or ALARP principle.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Although there is no evidence that ultrasound could be harmful to the fetus, medical authorities typically strongly discourage the promotion, selling, or leasing of ultrasound equipment for making "keepsake fetal videos".


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Diagnostic and therapeutic ultrasound equipment is regulated in the US by the Food and Drug Administration, and worldwide by other national regulatory agencies. The FDA limits acoustic output using several metrics; generally, other agencies accept the FDA-established guidelines.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Currently, New Mexico, Oregon, and North Dakota are the only US states that regulate diagnostic medical sonographers. Certification examinations for sonographers are available in the US from three organizations: the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonography, Cardiovascular Credentialing International and the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The primary regulated metrics are Mechanical Index (MI), a metric associated with the cavitation bio-effect, and Thermal Index (TI) a metric associated with the tissue heating bio-effect. The FDA requires that the machine not exceed established limits, which are reasonably conservative in an effort to maintain diagnostic ultrasound as a safe imaging modality. This requires self-regulation on the part of the manufacturer in terms of machine calibration.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Ultrasound-based pre-natal care and sex screening technologies were launched in India in the 1980s. With concerns about its misuse for sex-selective abortion, the Government of India passed the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (PNDT) in 1994 to distinguish and regulate legal and illegal uses of ultrasound equipment. The law was further amended as the Pre-Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) (PCPNDT) Act in 2004 to deter and punish prenatal sex screening and sex selective abortion. It is currently illegal and a punishable crime in India to determine or disclose the sex of a fetus using ultrasound equipment.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: After the French physicist Pierre Curie's discovery of piezoelectricity in 1880, ultrasonic waves could be deliberately generated for industry. In 1940, the American acoustical physicist Floyd Firestone devised the first ultrasonic echo imaging device, the Supersonic Reflectoscope, to detect internal flaws in metal castings. In 1941, Austrian neurologist Karl Theo Dussik, in collaboration with his brother, Friedrich, a physicist, was likely the first person to image the human body ultrasonically, outlining the ventricles of a human brain. Ultrasonic energy was first applied to the human body for medical purposes by Dr George Ludwig at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, in the late 1940s. English-born physicist John Wild (1914–2009) first used ultrasound to assess the thickness of bowel tissue as early as 1949; he has been described as the "father of medical ultrasound". Subsequent advances took place concurrently in several countries but was not until 1961 when David Robinson and George Kossoff's work at the Australian Department of Health resulted in the first commercially practical water bath ultrasonic scanner. In 1963 Meyerdirk & Wright launched production of the first commercial, hand-held, articulated arm, compound contact B-mode scanner, which made ultrasound generally available for medical use.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Léandre Pourcelot, a researcher and teacher at INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées), Lyon, co-published a report in 1965 at the Académie des sciences, "Effet Doppler et mesure du débit sanguin" ("Doppler effect and measure of the blood flow"), the basis of his design of a Doppler flow meter in 1967.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Parallel developments in Glasgow, Scotland by Professor Ian Donald and colleagues at the Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital (GRMH) led to the first diagnostic applications of the technique. Donald was an obstetrician with a self-confessed "childish interest in machines, electronic and otherwise", who, having treated the wife of one of the company's directors, was invited to visit the Research Department of boilermakers Babcock & Wilcox at Renfrew. He adapted their industrial ultrasound equipment to conduct experiments on various morbid anatomical specimens and assess their ultrasonic characteristics. Together with the medical physicist . and fellow obstetrician Dr. John MacVicar, Donald refined the equipment to enable differentiation of pathology in live volunteer patients. These findings were reported in "The Lancet" on 7 June 1958 as "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound" – possibly one of the most important papers published in the field of diagnostic medical imaging.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: At GRMH, Professor Donald and Dr. James Willocks then refined their techniques to obstetric applications including fetal head measurement to assess the size and growth of the fetus. With the opening of the new Queen Mother's Hospital in Yorkhill in 1964, it became possible to improve these methods even further. Dr. Stuart Campbell's pioneering work on fetal cephalometry led to it acquiring long-term status as the definitive method of study of foetal growth. As the technical quality of the scans was further developed, it soon became possible to study pregnancy from start to finish and diagnose its many complications such as multiple pregnancy, fetal abnormality and "placenta praevia". Diagnostic ultrasound has since been imported into practically every other area of medicine.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Medical ultrasonography was used in 1953 at Lund University by cardiologist Inge Edler and Gustav Ludwig Hertz's son Carl Hellmuth Hertz, who was then a graduate student at the university's department of nuclear physics.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: Edler had asked Hertz if it was possible to use radar to look into the body, but Hertz said this was impossible. However, he said, it might be possible to use ultrasonography. Hertz was familiar with using ultrasonic reflectoscopes of the American acoustical physicist Floyd Firestone's invention for nondestructive materials testing, and together Edler and Hertz developed the idea of applying this methodology in medicine.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The first successful measurement of heart activity was made on October 29, 1953, using a device borrowed from the ship construction company Kockums in Malmö. On December 16 the same year, the method was applied to generate an echo-encephalogram (ultrasonic probe of the brain). Edler and Hertz published their findings in 1954.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In 1962, after about two years of work, Joseph Holmes, William Wright, and Ralph Meyerdirk developed the first compound contact B-mode scanner. Their work had been supported by U.S. Public Health Services and the University of Colorado. Wright and Meyerdirk left the university to form Physionic Engineering Inc., which launched the first commercial hand-held articulated arm compound contact B-mode scanner in 1963. This was the start of the most popular design in the history of ultrasound scanners.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: In the late 1960s Dr Gene Strandness and the bio-engineering group at the University of Washington conducted research on Doppler ultrasound as a diagnostic tool for vascular disease. Eventually, they developed technologies to use duplex imaging, or Doppler in conjunction with B-mode scanning, to view vascular structures in real time while also providing hemodynamic information.


title: Medical ultrasound

text: The first demonstration of color Doppler was by Geoff Stevenson, who was involved in the early developments and medical use of Doppler shifted ultrasonic energy.


title: Quasi-War

text: The Quasi-War () was an undeclared naval war fought from 1798 to 1800 between the United States and the French First Republic, primarily in the Caribbean and off the East Coast of the United States. The ability of Congress to authorize military action without a formal declaration of war was later confirmed by the Supreme Court and formed the basis of many similar actions since, including American participation in the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War.


title: Quasi-War

text: In 1793, Congress suspended repayments of French loans incurred during the American Revolutionary War. The dispute escalated further due to different interpretations of the 1778 treaties of Alliance and Commerce between the two countries. France, then engaged in the 1792–1797 War of the First Coalition, which included Great Britain, viewed the 1794 Jay Treaty between the United States and Britain as incompatible with those treaties, and retaliated by seizing American ships trading with Britain.


title: Quasi-War

text: Diplomatic negotiations failed to resolve these differences, and in October 1796 French privateers began attacking merchant ships sailing in American waters, regardless of nationality. The dissolution of Federal military forces following independence left the US unable to mount an effective response and by October 1797, over 316 American ships had been captured. In March 1798, Congress reassembled the United States Navy and in July authorized the use of military force against France.


title: Quasi-War

text: In addition to a number of individual ship actions, by 1799 American losses had been significantly reduced through informal cooperation with the Royal Navy, whereby merchant ships from both nations were allowed to join each other's convoys. Diplomatic negotiations between the US and France continued, the establishment of the French Consulate in November 1799 led to the Convention of 1800, which ended the war.


title: Quasi-War

text: Under the Treaty of Alliance (1778), the United States had agreed to protect the French West Indies in return for their support in the American Revolutionary War. As the treaty had no termination date, France claimed this obligation included defending them against Great Britain and the Dutch Republic during the 1792 to 1797 War of the First Coalition. Despite popular enthusiasm for the French Revolution, especially among anti-British Jeffersonians, there was little support for this in Congress. Neutrality allowed New England shipowners to earn huge profits evading the British blockade, while Southern plantation owners feared the example set by France's abolition of slavery in 1794.


title: Quasi-War

text: In 1793, Congress suspended repayment of French loans incurred during the Revolutionary War, arguing the execution of Louis XVI and establishment of the French First Republic rendered existing agreements void. They further argued American military obligations under the Treaty of Alliance applied only to a "defensive conflict" and thus did not apply, since France had declared war on Britain and the Dutch Republic. To ensure the US did not become involved, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1794, while President George Washington issued an Executive Order forbidding American merchant ships from arming themselves. France accepted these acts, but on the basis of 'benevolent neutrality', which they interpreted as allowing French privateers access to US ports, and the right to sell captured British ships in American prize courts, but not vice versa. However, the US viewed 'neutrality' as the right to provide the same privileges to both.


title: Quasi-War

text: These differences were further exacerbated in November 1794 when the US and Britain signed a new trade agreement, which contradicted the 1778 Commercial Treaty granting France "most favoured nation" status. The Jay Treaty resolved outstanding issues from the American Revolution, and expanded trade between the two countries; between 1794 and 1801, American exports to Britain nearly tripled in value, from US$33 million to $94 million.


title: Quasi-War

text: As a result, in late 1796 French privateers began seizing American ships trading with the British. An effective response was hampered by the almost complete lack of a United States Navy, whose last warship had been sold in 1785, leaving only a small flotilla belonging to the United States Revenue Cutter Service and a few neglected coastal forts. This allowed French privateers to roam virtually unchecked; from October 1796 to June 1797, they captured 316 ships, 6% of the entire American merchant fleet, causing losses of $12 to $15 million. On March 2, 1797, the Directory issued a decree permitting the seizure of any neutral shipping without a "role d'equipage", a crew manifest which listed the nationalities of each crewmen. Since virtually no American merchantman carried such a document, this effectively initiated a French commerce war on American shipping.


title: Quasi-War

text: Efforts to resolve the conflict through diplomacy ended in the 1797 dispute known as the XYZ Affair. However, the hostilities created support for establishing a limited naval force, and on June 18, President John Adams appointed Benjamin Stoddert the first Secretary of the Navy. On July 7, 1798, Congress approved the use of force against French warships in American waters, but wanted to ensure conflict did not escalate beyond these strictly limited objectives. As a result, it was called a "limited" or "Quasi-War" and led to political debate over whether it was constitutional. A series of rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States established its legality and confirmed the ability of the US to conduct undeclared war or "police actions".


title: Quasi-War

text: Since battleships were expensive to build and required highly specialised construction facilities, in 1794 Congress compromised by ordering six large frigates. By 1798, the first three were nearly complete and on July 16, 1798, additional funding was approved for the , , and , plus the frigates and . The provision of naval stores and equipment by the British allowed these to be built relatively quickly, and all saw action during the war.


title: Quasi-War

text: The US Navy was further reinforced by so-called 'subscription ships', privately funded vessels provided by individual cities. These included five frigates, among them the , commanded by Stephen Decatur, and four merchantmen converted into sloops. Primarily intended to attack foreign shipping, these were noted for their speed, and earned huge profits for their owners; the captured over 80 enemy vessels, including the French corvette .


title: Quasi-War

text: With most of the French fleet confined to home ports by the Royal Navy, Secretary Stoddert was able to concentrate his forces against the limited number of frigates and smaller vessels that evaded the blockade and reached the Caribbean. The US also needed convoy protection, and while there was no formal agreement with the British, considerable co-operation took place at a local level. The two navies shared a signal system, and allowed their merchantmen to join each other's convoys, most of which were provided by the British, who had four to five times more escorts available.


title: Quasi-War

text: This allowed the US Navy to concentrate on attacking French privateers, most of very shallow draft and armed with between one and twenty guns. Operating from French and Spanish bases in the Caribbean, particularly Guadeloupe, they made opportunistic attacks on passing ships, before escaping back into port. To counter those tactics, the US used similarly sized vessels from the United States Revenue Cutter Service, as well as commissioning their own privateers. The first American ship to see action was the , a converted East Indiaman with 26 guns; most were far smaller.


title: Quasi-War

text: The Revenue cutter , commanded by Edward Preble, made two cruises to the West Indies and captured ten prizes. Preble turned command of "Pickering" over to Benjamin Hillar, who captured the much larger and more heavily armed French privateer "lEgypte Conquise" after a nine-hour battle. In September 1800, Hillar, "Pickering", and her entire crew were lost at sea in a storm. Preble next commanded the frigate , which he sailed around Cape Horn into the Pacific to protect U.S. merchantmen in the East Indies. He recaptured several U.S. ships that had been seized by French privateers.


title: Quasi-War

text: For various reasons, the role of the Royal Navy was minimised both at the time and later; the first significant study of the war by US naval historian Gardner W. Allen in 1909 focused exclusively on ship-to-ship actions, and this is how the war is often remembered. However, historian Michael Palmer argues American naval operations cannot be understood in isolation and when operating in the Caribbean


title: Quasi-War

text: From the perspective of the US Navy, the Quasi-War consisted of a series of ship-to-ship actions in US coastal waters and the Caribbean; one of the first was the Capture of "La Croyable" on 7 July 1798 by the outside Egg Harbor, New Jersey. On 20 November, a pair of French frigates, "Insurgente" and "Volontaire", captured the schooner , commanded by Lieutenant William Bainbridge; "Retaliation" would be recaptured on 28 June 1799.


title: Quasi-War

text: On 9 February 1799, the frigate captured the French Navy's frigate "L'Insurgente" and severely damaged the frigate "La Vengeance", largely due to . By 1 July, under the command of Stephen Decatur, had been refitted and repaired and embarked on its mission to patrol the South Atlantic coast and West Indies in search of French ships which were preying on American merchant vessels.


title: Quasi-War

text: On 1 January 1800, a convoy of American merchant ships and their escort, United States naval schooner , engaged a squadron of armed barges manned by French-allied Haitians known as picaroons off the coast of present-day Haiti. On 1 February, the American frigate unsuccessfully tried to capture the French frigate "La Vengeance" off the coast of Saint Kitts. In early May, Captain Silas Talbot organized a naval expedition to Puerto Plata on the island of Hispaniola in order to harass French shipping, capturing the Spanish coastal fort at Puerto Plata and a French corvette. Following the French invasion of Curaçao in July, the American sloops and began a blockade of the island in September that led to a French withdrawal. On 12 October, the frigate captured the corvette .


title: Quasi-War

text: On 25 October, the defeated the French brig "Flambeau" near the island of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea. "Enterprise" also captured eight privateers and freed eleven U.S. merchant ships from captivity, while captured the French privateers "Deux Amis" and "Diane" and liberated numerous American merchant ships. Although overall USN losses were light, by the time the war ended in 1800, the French had seized over 2,000 American merchant ships.


title: Quasi-War

text: By late 1800, the United States Navy and the Royal Navy, combined with a more conciliatory diplomatic stance by the government of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, had reduced the activity of the French privateers and warships. The Convention of 1800, signed on 30 September, ended the Quasi-War. It affirmed the rights of Americans as neutrals upon the sea and abrogated the alliance with France of 1778. However, it failed to provide compensation for the $20 million "French Spoliation Claims" of the United States. The agreement between the two nations implicitly ensured that the United States would remain neutral toward France in the wars of Napoleon and ended the "entangling" French alliance. This alliance had been viable only between 1778 and 1783.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Art Spiegelman (; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel "Maus". His work as co-editor on the comics magazines "Arcade" and "Raw" has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for "The New Yorker". He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly, and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman began his career with Topps (a bubblegum and trading card company) in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as "Wacky Packages" in the 1960s and "Garbage Pail Kids" in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection "Breakdowns" in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned focus to the book-length "Maus", about his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor. The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and ethnic Poles as pigs, and took 13 years to create until its completion in 1991. It won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman and Mouly edited eleven issues of "Raw" from 1980 to 1991. The oversized and graphics magazine helped introduce talents who became prominent in alternative comics, such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor, and introduced several foreign cartoonists to the English-speaking comics world. Beginning in the 1990s, the couple worked for "The New Yorker", which Spiegelman left to work on "In the Shadow of No Towers" (2004), about his reaction to the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman advocates for greater comics literacy. As an editor, a teacher, and a lecturer, Spiegelman has promoted better understanding of comics and has mentored younger cartoonists.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman's parents were Polish Jews (1906–1982) and (1912–1968) Spiegelman. His father was born Zeev Spiegelman, with the Hebrew name Zeev ben Avraham. Władysław was his Polish name, and Władek (or Vladek in anglicized form) was a diminutive of this name. He was also known as Wilhelm under the German occupation, and Anglicized his name to William upon immigration to the United States. His mother was born Andzia Zylberberg, with the Hebrew name Hannah. She changed her name to Anna upon immigrating to the United States. In Spiegelman's "Maus", from which the couple are best known, Spiegelman used the spellings "Vladek" and "Anja", which he believed would be easier for Americans to pronounce. The surname "Spiegelman" is German for "mirror man".


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In 1937, the Spiegelmans had one other son, Rysio (spelled "Richieu" in "Maus"), who died before Art was born, at the age of five or six. During the Holocaust, Spiegelman's parents sent Rysio to stay with an aunt with whom they believed he would be safe. In 1943, the aunt poisoned herself, along with Rysio and two other young family members in her care, so that the Nazis could not take them to the extermination camps. After the war, the Spiegelmans, unable to accept that Rysio was dead, searched orphanages all over Europe in the hope of finding him. Spiegelman talked of having a sort of sibling rivalry with his "ghost brother"; he felt unable to compete with an "ideal" brother who "never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble". Of 85 Spiegelman relatives alive at the beginning of World War II, only 13 are known to have survived the Holocaust.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman was born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 15, 1948. He immigrated with his parents to the US in 1951. Upon immigration his name was registered as Arthur Isadore, but he later had his given name changed to Art. Initially the family settled in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and then relocated to Rego Park, Queens, New York City, in 1957.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: He began cartooning in 1960 and imitated the style of his favorite comic books, such as "Mad". In the early 1960s, he contributed to early fanzines such as "Smudge" and Skip Williamson's "Squire", and in 1962—while at Russell Sage Junior High School, where he was an honors student—he produced the "Mad"-inspired fanzine "Blasé". He was earning money from his drawing by the time he reached high school and sold artwork to the original "Long Island Press" and other outlets. His talent caught the eyes of United Features Syndicate, who offered him the chance to produce a syndicated comic strip. Dedicated to the idea of art as expression, he turned down this commercial opportunity. He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan beginning in 1963. He met Woody Gelman, the art director of Topps Chewing Gum Company, who encouraged Spiegelman to apply to Topps after graduating from high school. At age 15, Spiegelman received payment for his work from a Rego Park newspaper.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: After he graduated in 1965, Spiegelman's parents urged him to pursue the financial security of a career such as dentistry, but he chose instead to enroll at Harpur College to study art and philosophy. While there, he got a freelance art job at Topps, which provided him with an income for the next two decades.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman attended Harpur College from 1965 until 1968, where he worked as staff cartoonist for the college newspaper and edited a college humor magazine. After a summer internship when he was 18, Topps hired him for Gelman's Product Development Department as a creative consultant making trading cards and related products in 1966, such as the "Wacky Packages" series of parodic trading cards begun in 1967.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman began selling self-published underground comix on street corners in 1966. He had cartoons published in underground publications such as the "East Village Other" and traveled to San Francisco for a few months in 1967, where the underground comix scene was just beginning to burgeon.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In late winter 1968, Spiegelman suffered a brief but intense nervous breakdown, which cut short his university studies. He has said that at the time he was taking LSD with great frequency. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital, and shortly after he exited it, his mother died by suicide following the death of her only surviving brother.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In 1971, after several visits, Spiegelman moved to San Francisco and became a part of the countercultural underground comix movement that had been developing there. Some of the he produced during this period include "The Compleat Mr. Infinity" (1970), a ten-page booklet of explicit comic strips, and "The Viper Vicar of Vice, Villainy and Vickedness" (1972), a transgressive work in the vein of fellow underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson. Spiegelman's work also appeared in underground magazines such as "Gothic Blimp Works", "Bijou Funnies", "Young Lust", "Real Pulp", and "Bizarre Sex", and were in a variety of styles and genres as Spiegelman sought his artistic voice. He also did a number of cartoons for men's magazines such as "Cavalier", "The Dude", and "Gent".


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In 1972, Justin Green asked Spiegelman to do a three-page strip for the first issue of "Funny " . He wanted to do one about racism, and at first considered a story with African-Americans as mice and cats taking on the role of the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust that his parents had survived. He titled the strip "Maus" and depicted the Jews as mice persecuted by "die Katzen", which were Nazis as cats. The narrator related the story to a mouse named "Mickey". With this story Spiegelman felt he had found his voice.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Seeing Green's revealingly autobiographical "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary" while in-progress in 1971 inspired Spiegelman to produce "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", an expressionistic work that dealt with his mother's suicide; it appeared in 1973 in "Short Order Comix" 1, which he edited. Spiegelman's work thereafter went through a phase of increasing formal experimentation; the "Apex Treasury of Underground Comics" in 1974 quotes him: "As an art form the comic strip is barely in its infancy. So am I. Maybe we'll grow up together." The often-reprinted "Ace Hole, Midget Detective" of 1974 was a Cubist-style nonlinear parody of hardboiled crime fiction full of non sequiturs. "A Day at the Circuits" of 1975 is a recursive single-page strip about alcoholism and depression in which the reader follows the character through multiple never-ending pathways. "Nervous Rex: The Malpractice Suite" of 1976 is made up of cut-out panels from the soap-opera comic strip "Rex Morgan, M.D." refashioned in such a way as to defy coherence.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In 1973, Spiegelman edited a pornographic and psychedelic book of quotations and dedicated it to his mother. Co-edited with Bob Schneider, it was called "Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations". In 1974–1975, he taught a studio cartooning class at the San Francisco Academy of Art.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: By the mid-1970s, the underground comix movement was encountering a slowdown. To give cartoonists a safe berth, Spiegelman co-edited the anthology "Arcade" with Bill Griffith, in 1975 and 1976. "Arcade" was printed by The Print Mint and lasted seven issues, five of which had covers by Robert Crumb. It stood out from similar publications by having an editorial plan, in which Spiegelman and Griffith attempt to show how comics connect to the broader realms of artistic and literary culture. Spiegelman's own work in "Arcade" tended to be short and concerned with formal experimentation. "Arcade" also introduced art from ages past, as well as contemporary literary pieces by writers such as William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. In 1975, Spiegelman moved back to New York City, which put most of the editorial work for "Arcade" on the shoulders of Griffith and his cartoonist wife, Diane Noomin. This, combined with distribution problems and retailer indifference, led to the magazine's 1976 demise. Spiegelman swore he would never edit another magazine.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Françoise Mouly, an architectural student on a hiatus from her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, arrived in New York in 1974. While looking for comics from which to practice reading English, she came across "Arcade". Avant-garde filmmaker friend Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly and Spiegelman, when Spiegelman was visiting, but they did not immediately develop a mutual interest. Spiegelman moved back to New York later in the year. Occasionally the two ran across each other. After she read "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" Mouly felt the urge to contact him. An eight-hour phone call led to a deepening of their relationship. Spiegelman followed her to France when she had to return to fulfill obligations in her architecture course.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman introduced Mouly to the world of comics and helped her find work as a colorist for Marvel Comics. After returning to the U.S. in 1977, Mouly ran into visa problems, which the couple solved by getting married. The couple began to make yearly trips to Europe to explore the comics scene, and brought back European comics to show to their circle of friends. Mouly assisted in putting together the lavish, oversized collection of Spiegelman's experimental strips "Breakdowns" in 1977.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: "Breakdowns" suffered poor distribution and sales, and 30% of the print run was unusable due to printing errors, an experience that motivated Mouly to gain control over the printing process. She took courses in offset printing and bought a printing press for her loft, on which she was to print parts of a new magazine she insisted on launching with Spiegelman. With Mouly as publisher, Spiegelman and Mouly co-edited "Raw" starting in July 1980. The first issue was subtitled "The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides". While it included work from such established underground cartoonists as Crumb and Griffith, "Raw" focused on publishing artists who were virtually unknown, avant-garde cartoonists such as Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, Ben Katchor, and Gary Panter, and introduced English-speaking audiences to translations of foreign works by José Muñoz, Chéri Samba, Joost Swarte, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Jacques Tardi, and others.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: With the intention of creating a book-length work based on his father's recollections of the Holocaust Spiegelman began to interview his father again in 1978 and made a research visit in 1979 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his parents had been imprisoned by the Nazis. The book, "Maus", appeared one chapter at a time as an insert in "Raw" beginning with the second issue in December 1980. Spiegelman's father did not live to see its completion; he died on 18 August 1982. Spiegelman learned in 1985 that Steven Spielberg was producing an animated film about Jewish mice who escape persecution in Eastern Europe by fleeing to the United States. Spiegelman was sure the film, "An American Tail" (1986), was inspired by "Maus" and became eager to have his unfinished book come out before the movie to avoid comparisons. He struggled to find a publisher until in 1986, after the publication in "The New York Times" of a rave review of the work-in-progress, Pantheon agreed to release a collection of the first six chapters. The volume was titled "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" and subtitled "My Father Bleeds History". The book found a large audience, in part because it was sold in bookstores rather than in direct-market comic shops, which by the 1980s had become the dominant outlet for comic books.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Spiegelman began teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1978, and continued until 1987, teaching alongside his heroes Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner. ": An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview", a Spiegelman essay, was published in "Print". Another Spiegelman essay, "High Art Lowdown", was published in "Artforum" in 1990, critiquing the "High/Low" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In the wake of the success of the Cabbage Patch Kids series of dolls, Spiegelman created the parodic trading card series "Garbage Pail Kids" for Topps in 1985. Similar to the "Wacky Packages" series, the gross-out factor of the cards was controversial with parent groups, and its popularity started a gross-out fad among children. Spiegelman called Topps his "Medici" for the autonomy and financial freedom working for the company had given him. The relationship was nevertheless strained over issues of credit and ownership of the original artwork. In 1989 Topps auctioned off pieces of art Spiegelman had created rather than returning them to him, and Spiegelman broke the relation.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: In 1991, "Raw" 2, 3 was published; it was to be the last issue. The closing chapter of "Maus" appeared not in "Raw" but in the second volume of the graphic novel, which appeared later that year with the subtitle "And Here My Troubles Began". "Maus" attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work of comics, including an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Hired by Tina Brown as a contributing artist in 1992, Spiegelman worked for "The New Yorker" for ten years. His first cover appeared on the February 15, 1993, Valentine's Day issue and showed a black West Indian woman and a Hasidic man kissing. The cover caused turmoil at "The New Yorker" offices. Spiegelman intended it to reference the Crown Heights riot of 1991 in which racial tensions led to the murder of a Jewish yeshiva student. Twenty-one "New Yorker" covers by Spiegelman were published, and he also submitted some which were rejected for being too outrageous.


title: Art Spiegelman

text: Within "The New Yorker"s pages, Spiegelman contributed strips such as a collaboration, "In the Dumps", with children's illustrator Maurice Sendak and an obituary to Charles M. Schulz, "Abstract Thought is a Warm Puppy". Another of Spiegelman's essays, "Forms Stretched to their Limits", in an issue was about Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man. It formed the basis for a book about Cole, "Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits" (2001).