title: Roman Gaul

text: Villas were usually centres of agricultural production, and were often closely associated with vineries and wine production. The owners were probably mainly local Gallic elites who became quickly romanised after the conquest, and sometimes Romans and Italians who wished to exploit rich local resources. The villas would have been the centre of complex relationships with the local area. Much of the work would have been undertaken by slave labour or by local "coloni" ("tenant farmers"). There would also have been a farm manager in addition to the inhabiting family.


title: Tom Flores

text: Thomas Raymond Flores (born March 21, 1937) is a former American football coach and quarterback. After his retirement as a coach, he was a radio announcer for more than twenty years.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores won a total of four Super Bowls in his playing and coaching careers. He and Mike Ditka are the only two people in National Football League history to win a Super Bowl as a player, assistant coach, and head coach (Flores won Super Bowl IV as a player for the Kansas City Chiefs, Super Bowl XI as an assistant coach of the Raiders, and Super Bowl XV and Super Bowl XVIII as head coach of the Raiders). Flores was also the first Mexican starting quarterback and the first minority head coach in professional football history to win a Super Bowl. Although it may not be officially sourced, Flores is also noted as the only head coach to win a Super Bowl with the same team in two cities in Oakland (1980) and Los Angeles (1983).


title: Tom Flores

text: From 1997 until 2018, Flores served as radio announcer for the Raiders Radio Network. Flores was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2021.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores played quarterback for two seasons at Fresno City College, beginning in 1955. He was active off the field too, serving on the Student Council and as President of the Associated Men's Students. He received an academic scholarship to study at the College (now University) of the Pacific and graduated from the University of the Pacific in 1958. Flores came to Pacific from Fresno City College and started for the Tigers as quarterback. Following his playing career with the Tigers, he was hired as an assistant coach at Pacific and worked toward his master's degree.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores was unable to find a job in professional football. He was cut by the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL in 1958, after which he played with the Bakersfield Spoilers (Semi-Pro) football team (Source: Fire in the Iceman, autobiography written by Tom Flores and Frank Cooney, 1992). A second attempt to break into pro football with the Washington Redskins of the National Football League (NFL) in 1959 also failed. In 1960, Flores finally landed a position as a quarterback with the American Football League's Oakland Raiders, who began play in 1960 as a charter member of the league. He was named the Raiders' starter early that season, becoming the first-ever Hispanic starting quarterback in professional football.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores had his most productive season in 1966. Although he completed only 49.3 percent of his attempts, he passed for 2,638 yards and 24 touchdowns in 14 games. Oakland traded him to the Buffalo Bills in 1967. After serving as Jack Kemp's backup that year, he had a chance to be the Bills' starter when Kemp suffered a season-ending injury during training camp. However, Flores hurt his shoulder before the first game, and his season was limited to a five-pass appearance in Week 6. After another five-pass appearance in the first game of 1969, the Bills released Flores and he signed with the Kansas City Chiefs. There he was third-string quarterback behind fellow Hall of Famer Len Dawson and Mike Livingston on the Chiefs' Super Bowl Championship team. He officially retired as a player after not playing a single game in the 1970 season. He was one of only twenty players who were in the AFL for its entire ten-year existence. He is the fifth-leading passer in the AFL's history.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores is a member of the Sid Gillman coaching tree. After stints as an assistant coach in Buffalo and Oakland (he won a Super Bowl XI ring as an assistant coach under John Madden), Flores became the Raiders' head coach in 1979, following Madden's retirement. In 1980, Flores led the Raiders as a wild card playoff team to win the Super Bowl XV championship over the Philadelphia Eagles, 27-10. This was the first wild card team to win the Super Bowl and the only team to win four postseason games en route to a title, until Denver accomplished the same feat in 1997. Flores then moved with the team to Los Angeles in 1982. In the 1983 season Flores lead the Raiders to another Super Bowl (XVIII) victory over the Washington Redskins, 38-9. He was named AFC Coach of the year by United Press International and the Football Writer's Association in 1982.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores was the NFL's first minority head coach to win a Super Bowl, winning twice – Super Bowl XV with the Oakland Raiders and Super Bowl XVIII with the Los Angeles Raiders.


title: Tom Flores

text: After a 5–10 finish to the 1987 season, Flores moved to the Raiders' front office, but left after just one year to become the president and general manager of the Seattle Seahawks. He returned to coaching as the Seahawks head coach in 1992, but was fired after the 1994 season following three disappointing seasons.


title: Tom Flores

text: His 83 wins with the Raiders are the second-most in franchise history, behind only Madden. Flores left pro football with a lifetime coaching record of 97–87 (52.7%), as well as an 8–3 playoff record, with two Super Bowl victories.


title: Tom Flores

text: From 1997 until his dismissal in 2018, Flores served as color commentator alongside play-by-play announcer Greg Papa for the Raiders Radio Network.


title: Tom Flores

text: In 1961 Flores married Barbara Fridell, who he met while a student at University of the Pacific. Together, they have twin sons and a daughter, three grandsons, and two granddaughters.


title: Tom Flores

text: Sanger High School's football stadium is named Tom Flores Stadium in honor of Flores, who was a graduate of Sanger. He heads the Tom Flores Youth Foundation, which benefits the K-8th grades in the Sanger School district in the fields of art, science, and sports.


title: Tom Flores

text: Flores graduated from University of the Pacific in 1958. He was the starting quarterback while at Pacific and following his playing career with the Tigers, Flores was hired as an assistant coach at Pacific as he worked toward his master's degree.


title: Tom Flores

text: His biography, "Fire in the Ice Man", was released in 1992. Flores also coauthored "Tales of the Oakland Raiders" (2002).


title: Tom Flores

text: In 1982, Flores was inducted as a charter member of the University of the Pacific Athletics Hall of Fame. In 1988, he was inducted into the Fresno County Athletic Hall of Fame. In 2007, Flores was inducted into the California Sports Hall of Fame. In 2011, he was also inducted into the California Community College Athletic Association Hall of Fame. In July 2011, Flores received the Roberto Clemente Award for Sports Excellence that is given by the National Council of La Raza for contributions in society by an Hispanic athlete. In 2012, he was also inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame.


title: Tom Flores

text: On February 6, 2021, it was announced that Tom Flores would be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, joining the Class of 2021 alongside former Raiders player Charles Woodson, Peyton Manning and 5 others.


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao ( or ) is a fictional character in the "Mortal Kombat" fighting game franchise by Midway Games and NetherRealm Studios. A Shaolin monk, he debuted in "Mortal Kombat II" (1993). He is depicted as a primary hero in the series, including as one of the protagonists of the action-adventure spin-off "" (2005). The character is also a descendant of the Great Kung Lao, the first Earthrealm champion of the Mortal Kombat tournament. His main weapon is a metal hat, which he uses for both melee and projectile attacks.


title: Kung Lao

text: Outside of the games, Kung Lao has appeared in various related media. Reception to the character has been generally positive, particularly in respect to his appearance, special abilities, and Fatality finishing moves.


title: Kung Lao

text: Introduced in "Mortal Kombat II" (1993), Kung Lao is one of the last known descendants of the Great Kung Lao, a Mortal Kombat champion who lost the title and his life to the Shokan Prince Goro 500 years previously, resulting in the start of corrupt sorcerer Shang Tsung's rule over the tournament. Kung Lao was originally chosen to represent the Shaolin in the Mortal Kombat tournament, but he declined due to the consequences of becoming champion. As a result, his friend Liu Kang was chosen and emerged as the winner. When a portal leading to the otherworldly dimension Outworld is opened and the Shaolin temple is attacked by Baraka and his Tarkatan soldiers, Liu Kang and Kung Lao resolve to travel through the portal themselves and avenge their fallen Shaolin brothers. Kung Lao's ultimate goal however was to rebuild the White Lotus Society at the Wu Shi Academy in order to train a new generation of warriors for the coming ages. Following Liu Kang's victory over the Outworld tyrant Shao Kahn, the monks return to Earth and begin training the next generation of Shaolin warriors.


title: Kung Lao

text: When Shao Kahn invades Earthrealm in "Mortal Kombat 3" (1995), Kung Lao temporarily scraps his plans for reforming the White Lotus Society. While he faces the Kahn in battle, he is ultimately defeated and presumed dead. Enraged by his friend's apparent death, Liu Kang challenges Shao Kahn and defeats him a second time.


title: Kung Lao

text: With Outworld driven back during "Mortal Kombat Gold" (1999), Kung Lao decides not to return to the Shaolin; allowing everyone to believe that he was dead so he can live a life of peace in respect to the beliefs of his ancestors. This would not last long however, as he is drawn away from his newfound peace to help fight against the fallen Elder God Shinnok's forces when word reaches him that Goro is still alive. After Shinnok's defeat, Kung Lao attacks Goro with a ceremonial strike of vengeance for the Great Kung Lao's death. With this act, the two warriors shake hands, ending their conflict.


title: Kung Lao

text: After enjoying peace for a few years, when Shang Tsung allied himself with fellow sorcerer Quan Chi to murder Liu Kang during the events of "" (2002), Kung Lao finds his corpse. After the thunder god Raiden brings him up to speed on what happened, an enraged Kung Lao vows revenge; abandoning his pacifist Shaolin beliefs once more. However, he believes his current skills were insufficient to defeat the Deadly Alliance after meeting with several other Earthrealm warriors and traveling to Outworld. Along the way, Kung Lao seeks out advice and training from Outworld martial arts teacher Bo' Rai Cho.


title: Kung Lao

text: However, this would not be enough, as Kung Lao and most of his allies fell to the Deadly Alliance before they were resurrected by the dragon king Onaga to become his slaves during the events of "" (2004). He and the rest of his brainwashed allies were later released from Onaga's spell by a partially resurrected Liu Kang and reformed ninja Ermac.


title: Kung Lao

text: In the action-adventure game "" (2005), an alternate depiction of the events between the first and second "Mortal Kombat" games, Kung Lao's character was explored to a greater degree than had been shown in previous titles. In this game, he is portrayed as feeling almost resentful of Liu Kang's victory in the Shaolin tournament. Though they are shown to be friends, Kung Lao constantly baits his fellow Shaolin monk, especially regarding Princess Kitana, and the tournament that Shang Tsung disguised as Raiden has sent them to compete in. A rivalry between the two monks was hence established for the first time. As the two fighters defeated Shang Tsung's warriors, they formed a race of sorts to become the Mortal Kombat champion. Kung Lao, especially, took time to gloat about how he will win. This rivalry escalated until the two warriors become convinced that the other has been corrupted by Outworld.


title: Kung Lao

text: The wind god Fujin's bio for "" (2006) describes Kung Lao as having joined forces with him to bring their former comrades Raiden and Liu Kang under control, with the God of Thunder becoming "as ruthless as Shao Kahn" and Liu Kang's corpse selectively slaying various people. Fujin then goes on to state in his bio that if no solution was found to revert the two corrupted warriors back to normal, both he and Kung Lao would be forced to finish them. During the course of the game, Kung Lao kills Baraka in battle, but is slain by a clone of Shinnok.


title: Kung Lao

text: In the rebooted continuity of "Mortal Kombat" (2011), Raiden receives foreboding visions from his future self and attempts to change the timeline of events that lead to Armageddon. He allows Kung Lao to fight in the second tournament. Kung Lao defeats Shang Tsung, Quan Chi, and the Shokan Kintaro, but he is killed by Shao Kahn. This enrages Liu Kang, who mortally wounds the tyrant in retaliation. Following Shao Kahn's failed invasion of Earthrealm, Kung Lao is resurrected as one of Quan Chi's undead revenant slaves. Kung Lao's non-canonical ending shows him at his ancestor's burial site with Raiden, where he is given a vision of the past that reveals he is the reincarnation of the Great Kung Lao.


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao returns in "Mortal Kombat X" (2015), continuing to serve Quan Chi and Shinnok in the Netherrealm. His younger cousin, Kung Jin, appears in the story as a thief turned Shaolin archer and member of the Special Forces after his family fell on hard times following Kung Lao's death.


title: Kung Lao

text: In "Mortal Kombat 11" (2019), past iterations of Kung Lao and Liu Kang are brought to the present due to the machinations of the keeper of time Kronika. After learning the Shaolin Temple was attacked by Kronika's forces, the Shaolin monks head out to investigate, only to encounter their revenant selves and fail to stop Kronika's henchman Geras from stealing vials of Earth's lifeforce. They later help Kitana defeat Shao Kahn and lead the surviving Shaolin monks alongside the combined Earthrealm/Outworld armies in assaulting Kronika's Keep while their revenants attempt to stop them. In his non-canonical arcade ending, Kung Lao uses Kronika's Hourglass to save the Great Kung Lao from his defeat at Goro's hands. Within years, the Great Kung Lao became the undisputed Mortal Kombat champion. Millions of people later join the White Lotus Society and inspire rebels to mutiny against Shao Kahn, bringing peace to the realms. By the time Onaga awakens, he is no match for Kung Lao's power.


title: Kung Lao

text: As stated in Kung Lao's bio card that after the first "Mortal Kombat" game, the creators wanted a monk character other than Liu Kang. According to "Mortal Kombat" co-creator John Tobias, Kung Lao's hat was inspired by the 1964 James Bond movie "Goldfinger", in which a villain Oddjob threw his special derby hat as a deadly weapon. Kung Lao was portrayed by Anthony Marquez in "Mortal Kombat II" and "Mortal Kombat 3"; Ed Boon said Marquez was ”one of the best martial artists we worked with."


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao can be seen in "Mortal Kombat II", "Mortal Kombat 3", and "Shaolin Monks" wearing the Chinese character 武 which means military/wu shu/martial arts. However, when asked about this character, John Tobias stated that it is Chinese for "war".


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao's attacks are based on wind-type moves. His most notable attack is the Hat Toss, which could be directed in "Mortal Kombat II", but could not be directed since "Mortal Kombat Gold", until "Mortal Kombat" (2011). Many of his Fatalities involve the use of his hat to some extent, such as slicing the body in half and decapitation.


title: Kung Lao

text: According to Prima Games, Kung Lao is one of the cheapest Mortal Kombat characters, where they observe "He can combo almost any jumping attack into his Dive Kick. He even has multiple projectile attacks, one of which he can aim up or down, meaning you can't reliably crouch under or jump over it. In "Mortal Kombat 3", he even had one of the longest dial-a-combos, because his damage clearly wasn't high enough already."


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao made several appearances in Malibu's' "Mortal Kombat" comic series. His story is slightly altered, stating he is an exile in Outworld due to the failure of his ancestor, and the fall of his lineage. During the comics, he shares a very close relation with Kitana. During the "Mortal Kombat: Blood & Thunder" miniseries he has a minor participation rescuing a near-death Liu Kang after he was stabbed by Kano. In the "Battlewave" miniseries, he joins with Kitana, Baraka and Sub-Zero in an attempt to overthrow the Emperor Shao Kahn.


title: Kung Lao

text: He was also featured in his own one-shot issue from Malibu in the summer of 1995. The comic, entitled "Rising Son", showed his struggle against Shang Tsung and his shapeshifting mind tricks, using his friends' forms (Kitana, Baraka and Sub-Zero) as well as his ancestor's form to kill him.


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao was also the centerpiece of Jeff Rovin's novelization of the first "Mortal Kombat" game, but his description therein completely differed from that of the games. In the novel, he is depicted as being tall, bald save for a queue of long black hair (similar to Goro's), barefoot, and wearing a long white robe.


title: Kung Lao

text: Max Huang, a member of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, portrays Kung Lao in the 2021 "Mortal Kombat" reboot film. In the reboot, Liu Kang calls him "shī xiōng," (师兄) which means senior male student or an older male student studying under the same master. Although the English subtitles translate this as "cousin," Ludi Lin, who plays Liu Kang, clarifies that the relationship between the two is more of a "found family" one, and that "cousin" can be considered a term of endearment for a close friend, but the two are not, in fact, related by blood.


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao appears in "" voice by Matthew Yang King. He's one of the new champions of Earth's Warriors to take part in the Tournament. However, while fighting Shao Khan, he throws his Hat at him, but Shao Khan throws it back and it cut Kung Lao in half.


title: Kung Lao

text: Kung Lao's ancestor, the Great Kung Lao, was raised in the Order of Light, a monastery of Shaolin monks. While he lived happily with his family and friends, he prepared his entire life to fight in the Mortal Kombat tournament. He was trained thoroughly under the monastery’s martial artists, teaching him moves many would think impossible. All of Kung Lao's training made him the monastery’s best fighter. Being the first person from Earthrealm to represent the Order of Light, he would do battle with the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung 500 years before Liu Kang would do the same. Despite Shang Tsung having the advantage of winning nine consecutive Mortal Kombat tournaments, Kung Lao defeated him and became the ageless Grand Champion, saving Earthrealm in the process. While it is common for the victor to take his opponent's life, Kung Lao spared the sorcerer. Fifty years later, he was defeated by the Shokan prince Goro before Shang Tsung returned to take his soul.


title: Kung Lao

text: In Kung Lao's "Mortal Kombat II" ending (non-canonical) for winning the Outworld Tournament, this is said to have finally avenged the Great Kung Lao's death. The ghost of the Great Kung Lao is in this cutscene as his descendant Kung Lao stands against a mountain backdrop.


title: Kung Lao

text: In "Deception" the Great Kung Lao's soul was presumed to have been freed after Shang Tsung was killed by Raiden's failed attempt to destroy the Dragon King Onaga, giving the Shaolin monk peace after more than five centuries of torment. In the good ending of the DLC expansion "Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath", Fire God Liu Kang goes back in time to meet the Great Kung Lao and give him special training for his future battles.


title: Kung Lao

text: The Great Kung Lao briefly appeared in animated film "" during a flashback sequence detailing his battle with Goro and ultimate defeat at the hands of the Shokan warrior.


title: Kung Lao

text: The Great Kung Lao is mentioned by name in the first "Mortal Kombat" film. When Liu Kang challenges Shang Tsung to Mortal Kombat, he calls himself a "descendant of Kung Lao."


title: Kung Lao

text: The Great Kung Lao was featured in the television show "" as the main protagonist and was portrayed by Paolo Montalbán. He is the great-great-great-grandfather of Kung Lao and Liu Kang, who follow his teachings. After becoming Grand Champion, the thunder god Raiden tells him that, because he was the last defending warrior of Earthrealm, Lao is now destined to train new warriors to compete against Kahn's forces for the next "Mortal Kombat". He initially rejects this responsibility because he desired to marry his girlfriend Jen, despite her father's refusal. While this took place, Shang Tsung, who was now imprisoned in the Cobalt Mines by Shao Kahn after he failed to beat Kung Lao, sought his revenge and sends the undead warrior Scorpion to kill Kung Lao. Scorpion fails to defeat Kung Lao, but manages to kill Jen during the battle. After losing her, Kung Lao commits to training new warriors to defend Earthrealm and fight in "Mortal Kombat" when the time comes. He is joined by Jen’s bodyguard Siro and by Taja, a thief who (with Raiden's persuasion) saved Kung Lao's life from Jen’s father. Kung Lao is killed by the Shadow Priests along with Taja and Siro in the final episode of "Mortal Kombat: Conquest".


title: Kung Lao

text: In the 2021 film "Mortal Kombat", The Great Kung Lao is mentioned by his descendant of the same name and a mural is shown of him beating Shang Tsung.


title: Kung Lao

text: Despite being stated as a fan favorite by CNET in 2006, he has been referred to as an "obscure" character by CBS that same year. In 2008, IGN listed him as a character they would like to see as downloadable content for "Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe", noting him to be a fan favorite character and praising his appearance and his decapitating moves made with his hat. In 2010, IGN mistakenly noted Kung Lao as Liu Kang's brother and died early in the film (this character was actually Chan Kang) and said that Liu Kang and Kung Lao make the franchise "at its best" when they join forces. In UGO's 2012 list of the top "Mortal Kombat" characters, Kung Lao placed fifth.


title: Kung Lao

text: Much of the reception regarded his Fatality moves and his famous hat. In a CNET review of "Shaolin Monks", it was stated that Kung Lao's body-dividing Fatality "simply doesn't get old." This Fatality was the only death move from the "Mortal Kombat" series added to the "Top 10 Death Moves" segment of the "GamesMaster" Gore Special episode and was voted at number four with a comment that no such list "will be complete without a death move from "Mortal Kombat", but with so many to choose from, we ended up with a split decision." In 2009, "GamePro" listed Kung Lao's hat as the ninth best piece of headwear in gaming. His "Bunny Beatdown" from the same game was ranked as the 43rd craziest finishing move in the gaming by Complex.com in 2010, while the hat slice was ranked fifth. That same year, Kung Lao's hat slice Fatality ranked as the 35th most gruesome finishing move ever by UGO.com. "Mortal Kombat" co-creator Ed Boon commented that Kung Lao's "MK2011" 'buzzsaw-on-the-ground' was "probably the most painful-looking Fatality ever made;" it was included by "FHM" on their list of nine most brutal Fatalities in the game. In 2012, Cheat Code Central's Shelby Reiches included the "Jewel Splitter" Fatality among the four worst cinematic scenes in games, commenting: "Every time he does this to a male fighter, I can hardly watch. I try not to fight against Kung Lao anymore." That same year, IGN ranked his hat as 79th top weapon in video game history.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Battle of the Bulge is a 1965 American widescreen epic war film produced in Spain, directed by Ken Annakin, and starring Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, Telly Savalas, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, and Charles Bronson. The feature was filmed in Ultra Panavision 70 and exhibited in 70 mm Cinerama. "Battle of the Bulge" had its world premiere on December 16, 1965, the 21st anniversary of the titular battle, at the Pacific Cinerama Dome Theatre in Hollywood, California.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The film is a highly fictionalized account of the battle. The filmmakers attempted to condense the Ardennes Counteroffensive, a World War II battle that stretched across parts of Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg and lasted nearly a month, into under three hours, and shot parts of the film on terrain, and in weather, that did not remotely resemble the actual battle conditions. That left them open to criticism for lack of historical accuracy, but they claimed in the end credits that they had "re-organized" the chronological order of events to maximize the dramatic story.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Unlike most other World War II epics, "Battle of the Bulge" contains virtually no portrayals of actual senior Allied leaders, civilian or military. That is presumably because of controversies surrounding the battle, both during the war and afterward. Allied forces ultimately won the battle, but the initial German counteroffensive caught them by surprise and caused many casualties.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: In December 1944, Military Intelligence officer Lt. Col. Daniel Kiley and his pilot, Joe, are flying a reconnaissance mission over the Ardennes forest that spans easternmost Belgium, northern Luxembourg, and parts of bordering France and Germany. They locate a German staff car and photograph its occupants, buzzing low enough for a close-up to cause its shell-shocked driver to flee the car without stopping its engine. His commanding officer scolds him for wasting petrol, extremely precious to the German war effort.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The officer, Col. Hessler, continues on to his new underground base, where General Kohler briefs him on the top secret plan to pierce American lines and recapture Antwerp. At the same time, English-speaking German paratroopers, led by Lt. Schumacher, are dropped behind American lines disguised as American MPs to confuse and disrupt the Allies. Hessler's orderly and driver, Conrad, remarks upon the staggering losses Germany has sustained during the war, pointing out to his superior that his new young tank commanders are not the men he had trained and led through the campaigns in Poland, France, and the Crimea. Upon a review of the Panzer commanders, all of whom are, as Conrad said, young and inexperienced, both men are skeptical until the commanders break into a chorus of "Panzerlied", showing him their fighting spirit. Hessler is tentatively won over.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Meanwhile, Kiley returns to U.S. headquarters and warns once again that the Germans are planning a new offensive. His superiors, Maj. Gen. Grey and his executive officer, Col. Pritchard, do not listen, believing Germany lacks the resources and manpower to mount an attack, especially in winter, let alone with the Christmas holidays looming immediately ahead. Seeking proof, Kiley is sent to an outpost on the Siegfried Line to capture prisoners for interrogation. At the loose disciplined American base, Maj. Wolenski sends callow Lt. Weaver and gung-ho Sgt. Duquesne on patrol. They capture young, green German soldiers. Rather than proof of German desperation, Kiley believes they are keeping their more experienced men back for an offensive, but is again dismissed by his superiors as a "crackpot".


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Hessler launches his attack the next day, leading columns of German King Tigers, the largest and most powerful tanks of World War II. The main Allied tank, the Sherman, was less than half its weight and could not penetrate its armor in a head-to-head fight. Wolenski leads his men into the wooded area of the Schnee Eifel to fight back, but they are overrun. A group of Allied tanks, led by Sgt. Guffy, also attempts to slow the Panzers, but their tanks' weak guns and thin armor make them ineffective. On the trip back to Amblève, Guffy's crew moves black market goods from a nearby farmhouse. Lt. Schumacher and his disguised troops capture the only bridge over the Our River that can carry heavy tanks, and Hessler continues toward Amblève, secretly observed by Kiley. Guffy meets up with his Belgian girlfriend, Louise, and they split the proceeds of their racket. They also discuss their feelings for each other, implying they will marry when the war is over.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Schumacher later takes control of a vital intersection of three roads that connect Amblève, Malmedy, and the Siegfried Line. He sabotages the road signs, and the rear echelon of Wolenski's troops takes the wrong road to Malmedy. They are captured and massacred by SS troops, though a wounded Weaver escapes. Other US soldiers become suspicious when they observe Schumacher's "MPs" pretending to be demolishing the Our bridge, but laying the explosives incorrectly.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: As the Americans have improvised a strong defense at Amblève, Kohler orders Hessler to bypass it, but Hessler wishes to break the Americans' will to fight, and Kohler relents. Grey assigns Wolenski to cover an Allied evacuation. Hessler's tanks and infantry lay siege to Amblève, then occupy its ruins. Although many Americans, including Wolenski, are captured, senior staff safely escapes to the Meuse River to regroup for a counterattack. Guffy learns that Louise died in the shelling.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Despite the dangers of flying in fog and at night, Col. Kiley conducts an aerial reconnaissance. He and Joe find Hessler's tanks through a gap in the fog and radio in the coordinates. German fire causes the plane to crash near an American fuel depot, killing Joe and wounding Kiley.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: In Hessler's command caravan, an exasperated Conrad confronts the Colonel, calls him a warmonger, and demands a transfer. Hessler transfers him to the fuel battalion.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Meanwhile, Grey's division, the Meuse at their backs, prepare to fight off Hessler's determined effort to capture the fuel depot. In a headlong tank confrontation the Americans employ a gambit to lure the Germans into using up the last of their fuel. The American tanks are savaged, but the strategy works. Weaver, Guffy and a few soldiers kill off Schumacher and his disguised MPs before the arrival of Hessler's tanks. A wounded Kiley then staggers out of hiding and urges the men to burn the depot. Desperate, Hessler makes a last ditch effort to capture the depot. In defense, the Americans flood the road leading to it with gasoline and set it alight with grenades, immolating the German tanks and their crews. Hessler's tank takes a fuel drum rolled directly at it, incinerating him. General Grey arrives in time to see the panzers afire.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: With no alternative, the surviving German soldiers abandon their vehicles and begin a long walk back to Germany. Conrad, bringing up the rear, throws aside his weapons, done with the war.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The film's opening narration by William Conrad inaccurately states "to the north, stood Montgomery's Eighth Army..." In fact, the British Eighth Army, Montgomery's previous command, was in Italy at the time; Montgomery's northern command was the 21st Army Group. The narration continued, "...To the south, Patton's Third Army." Although Patton's Third Army was indeed to the south it was not tasked in any way with defending the Ardennes. Instead, it was dug in on the west bank of the Rhine River, a component of a much larger force of four American armies of the 12th Army Group under General Omar Bradley poised to cross it into Germany.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: After the introduction there is no reference to British forces in the area, though they were largely kept behind the Meuse River and thus almost entirely out of the fighting. Consequently, there is no mention of General Eisenhower's decision to split the Bulge front into two, transferring temporary command of two American armies to Field Marshal Montgomery in the northern half of the Bulge. As a result, the film implies an all-American operation.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The film was shot on location in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range and Madrid, Spain, which bear no resemblance to the rugged, heavily wooded Ardennes of Belgium, Luxembourg, and western Germany. Aside from the initial American encounters with the German offensive the weather during filming was also at odds with the actual battle, which was fought during waves of heavy snow. The film's major tank battle scene, and some battle scenes, were fought in flat, bare, arid territory.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The aviation reconnaissance scenes with Henry Fonda were filmed with one or more Cessna L-19 aircraft, which did not fly until December 1949, instead of the Piper L-4 that was widely used during World War II.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The final tank battle is a rough depiction of the Battle of Celles on December 26, 1944, where the U.S. 2nd Armored Div. smashed the German 2nd Panzer Division. The film creates the false impression that large numbers of American tanks sacrificed themselves against heavy Tiger IIs and, in the process, lured the enemy off course, which caused them to run out of gas. In reality, they were already stranded. The tanks that were used, despite the claims of the producer in an interview in one of the DVD extras, are not historically accurate. Although the M24 Chaffee light tanks used in the movie in lieu of the ubiquitous M4 Sherman were introduced during World War II-, they were not used in the scale shown in the film but were relatively rare.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: U.S. M47 Pattons were used to represent German King Tiger tanks (of which none existed to use), in spite of being over 20 tons lighter.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Absent from the movie is the response of the U.S. Third Army under General George Patton in relief of the bypassed but encircled city of Bastogne.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: There is also no mention of the key turning point in the battle, which was not an armor and infantry effort but Allied air power hitting the Germans spearhead hard at the first sign of clear weather, only the German HQ receiving word that the weather was set to clear.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The characters of Kiley, an American lieutenant colonel, and Hessler, a regular Wehrmacht tank commander, were loosely based on Colonel Benjamin Abbott "Monk" Dickson and "Waffen-SS" lieutenant colonel Joachim Peiper. However, the fictional characters bore marked differences. For example, Peiper did not die in a kamikaze tank attack. He was tried and sentenced to death at the War Crimes Tribunal for his role in the Malmedy massacre, but released after serving twelve years in prison. He lived until 1976, when he was murdered in France by French vigilantes.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Screenwriter Bernard Gordon claims to have rewritten John Melson's original screenplay. Some of the original choices for director were the experienced and successful Richard Fleischer, who turned it down, and Edward Dmytryk, with whom Jack L. Warner of Warner Bros. refused to work. Ultimately, the job went to Ken Annakin. The technical advisor on the film was Maj. Gen. (then Col.) Meinrad von Lauchert, who commanded the German tank division that made the most headway in the actual battle.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: For an economical price and with no restrictions, the Spanish army provided an estimated 500 fully-equipped soldiers and 75 tanks and vehicles, some of which were World War II vintage.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: A contentious matter in 1964-65 was another "Bulge" film—never completed—slated by Columbia Pictures, to have been called "The 16th of December: The Battle of the Bulge" and co-produced by Tony Lazzarino. The Columbia effort had the cooperation of the Pentagon, which offered to Lazzarino "an unpublished battle history running to thousands of pages," and Eisenhower's assistance as well. The film would have been shot largely in upper New York State at the Army's Fort Drum, which would have offered authentic winter weather conditions. The proposed Columbia film had the cooperation of many officers who were part of the battle, including Germany's General Hasso von Manteuffel (commander of the Fifth Panzer Army) and U.S. General Robert W. Hasbrouck (who had led Seventh Armored Division).


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: As late as December 1965 – the month the Warner film was released – there were still plans to make the Columbia film. Casting announcements included Van Heflin as Eisenhower, John Wayne as General Patton, David Niven as General Montgomery, and Laurence Olivier as Hitler. Columbia issued a 1964 injunction against Warner's for registering its "Battle of the Bulge" title with the MPAA; to get Columbia to drop it, Warners agreed not to mention such actual names as Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley, Patton, MacAuliffe (the U.S. general who issued the dumbfounding "Nuts!" response to the German request for surrender), and ten others "whose stories have been contributed to the Morgan-Lazzarino version." Early in 1964, the press had announced a $1 million award to Columbia from the Warner production, also forbidden from "seeking support from agencies and individuals with whom Columbia Pictures and Gotham Rhodes had already made agreements."


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The original VHS release of the film for home video use was heavily edited to fit on one VHS tape and used a full-screen "pan and scan" technique, which is often used in network telecasts of widescreen motion pictures. The 1992 Laserdisc and 2005 DVD releases run at their full length and are presented letterboxed in the original 2.76:1 aspect ratio. A Blu-ray release followed in 2007, also in the original 2.76:1 aspect ratio. In 2018, a new film, "Wunderland", retold the story of the Battle of the Bulge.


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: The film receives mostly mixed reviews from critics. Reviewers were impressed by the big-name cast, however, they were unafraid to point out historical inaccuracies, as Bosley Crowther raged in his assessment of the film for "The New York Times":


title: Battle of the Bulge (1965 film)

text: Eisenhower came out of retirement and held a press conference to denounce the film for what he considered its gross historical inaccuracy.


title: Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope

text: The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST; ), nicknamed Tianyan (, lit. "Sky's/Heaven's Eye"), is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression (), a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China. FAST has a diameter dish constructed in a natural depression in the landscape. It is the world's largest filled-aperture radio telescope and the second-largest single-dish aperture, after the sparsely-filled RATAN-600 in Russia.


text: It has a novel design, using an active surface made of 4,500 metal panels which form a moving parabola shape in real time. The cabin containing the feed antenna, suspended on cables above the dish, can move automatically by using winches to steer the instrument to receive signals from different directions. It observes at wavelengths of 10 cm to 4.3 m.


text: Construction of FAST began in 2011. It observed first light in September 2016. After three years of testing and commissioning, it was declared fully operational on 11 January 2020.


text: The telescope made its first discovery, of two new pulsars, in August 2017. The new pulsars PSR J1859-01 and PSR J1931-02—also referred to as FAST pulsar #1 and #2 (FP1 and FP2), were detected on 22 and 25 August 2017; they are 16,000 and 4,100 light years away, respectively. Parkes Observatory in Australia independently confirmed the discoveries on 10 September 2017. By September 2018, FAST had discovered 44 new pulsars, and by 2021, 500.


text: The telescope was first proposed in 1994. The project was approved by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in July 2007. A 65-person village was relocated from the valley to make room for the telescope and an additional 9,110 people living within a 5 km radius of the telescope were relocated to create a radio-quiet area. The Chinese government spent around $269 million in poverty relief funds and bank loans for the relocation of the local residents, while the construction of the telescope itself cost .


text: On 26 December 2008, a foundation laying ceremony was held on the construction site. Construction started in March 2011, and the last panel was installed on the morning of 3 July 2016.


text: Originally budgeted for , the final cost was (). Significant difficulties encountered were the site's remote location and poor road access, and the need to add shielding to suppress radio-frequency interference (RFI) from the primary mirror actuators. In 2015, the actuators have been redesigned and installed in FAST site. Since then no more radio interference from the actuators are detected.


text: Testing and commissioning began with first light on 25 September 2016. The first observations are being done without the active primary reflector, configuring it in a fixed shape and using the Earth's rotation to scan the sky. Subsequent early science took place mainly in lower frequencies while the active surface is brought to its design accuracy; longer wavelengths are less sensitive to errors in reflector shape. It took three years to calibrate the various instruments so it can become fully operational.


text: Local government efforts to develop a tourist industry around the telescope are causing some concern among astronomers worried about nearby mobile telephones acting as sources of RFI. A projected 10 million tourists in 2017 will force officials to decide on the scientific mission versus the economic benefits of tourism.


text: The primary driving force behind the project was Nan Rendong, a researcher with the Chinese National Astronomical Observatory, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He held the positions of chief scientist and chief engineer of the project. He died on 15 September 2017 in Boston due to lung cancer.


text: On 14 June 2022, astronomers, working with China's FAST telescope, reported the possibility of having detected artificial (presumably alien) signals, but cautioned that further studies are required to determine if some kind of natural radio interference may be the source. More recently, on 18 June 2022, Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for several SETI-related projects, noted, "These signals are from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from E.T."


text: FAST has a reflecting surface 500 meters in diameter located in a natural sinkhole in the karst rock landscape, focusing radio waves on a receiving antenna in a "feed cabin" suspended above it. The reflector is made of perforated aluminium panels supported by a mesh of steel cables hanging from the rim.


text: FAST's surface is made of 4450 triangular panels, on a side, in the form of a geodesic dome. 2225 winches located underneath make it an active surface, pulling on joints between panels, deforming the flexible steel cable support into a parabolic antenna aligned with the desired sky direction.


text: Above the reflector is a lightweight feed cabin moved by a cable robot using winch servomechanisms on six support towers. The receiving antennas are mounted below this on a Stewart platform which provides fine position control and compensates for disturbances like wind motion. This produces a planned pointing precision of 8 arcseconds.


text: The maximum zenith angle is 40 degrees when the effective illuminated aperture is reduced to 200 m, while it is 26.4 degrees when the effective illuminated aperture is 300 m without loss.


text: Although the reflector diameter is , only a circle of 300 m diameter is used (held in the correct parabolic shape and "illuminated" by the receiver) at any one time. The telescope can be pointed to different positions on the sky by illuminating a 300-meter section of the 500 meter aperture. [As such FAST has a smaller effective aperture than the Jicamarca Radio Observatory, which has a filled aperture of equivalent diameter of 338 m].


text: Its working frequency ranges from 70 MHz to 3.0 GHz, with the upper limit set by the precision with which the primary can approximate a parabola. It could be improved slightly, but the size of the triangular segments limits the shortest wavelength which can be received. The original plan was to cover the frequency range with 9 receivers. During the construction phase, a commissioning ultra-wide band receiver covering 260 MHz to 1620 MHz was proposed and built, which produced the first pulsar discovery from FAST. At the moment, only the FAST L-band Receiver-array of 19 beams (FLAN) is installed and is operational between 1.05 GHz and 1.45 GHz.


text: The Next Generation Archive System (NGAS), developed by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Australia and the European Southern Observatory will store and maintain the large amount of data that it collects.


text: A 5-kilometre zone near the telescope forbids tourists from using mobile phones and other radio-emitting devices


text: The FAST telescope joined the Breakthrough Listen SETI project in October 2016 to search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the Universe.


text: China's "Global Times" reported that its 500-meter (1,600 foot) FAST telescope will be open to the global scientific community starting in April 2021 (when applications will be reviewed), and becoming effective in August 2021. Foreign scientists will be able to submit applications to China's National Astronomical Observatories online.


text: The basic design of FAST is similar to the former Arecibo Telescope. Both designs had reflectors installed in natural hollows within karst limestone, made of perforated aluminium panels with a movable receiver suspended above; and both have an effective aperture smaller than the physical size of the primary. There are however significant differences in addition to the size.


text: First, Arecibo's dish was fixed in a spherical shape. Although it was also suspended from steel cables with supports underneath for fine-tuning the shape, they were manually operated and adjusted only during maintenance. It had a fixed spherical shape with two additional suspended reflectors in a Gregorian configuration to correct for spherical aberration.


text: Second, Arecibo's receiver platform was fixed in place. To support the greater weight of the additional reflectors, the primary support cables were static, with the only motorised portion being three hold-down winches which compensated for thermal expansion. The antennas could move along a rotating arm below the platform, to allow limited adjustment of azimuth. [Arecibo was not limited in azimuth, only in zenith angle]. This smaller range of motion limited it to viewing objects within 19.7° of the zenith.


text: Third, Arecibo could receive higher frequencies. The finite size of the triangular panels making up FAST's primary reflector limits the accuracy with which it can approximate a parabola, and thus the shortest wavelength it can focus. Arecibo's more rigid design allowed it to maintain sharp focus down to 3 cm wavelength (10 GHz); FAST is limited to 10 cm (3 GHz). Improvements in position control of the secondary might be able to push that to 6 cm (5 GHz), but then the primary reflector becomes a hard limit.


text: Fourth, the FAST dish is significantly deeper, contributing to a wider field of view. Although 100*(500 / - 1) round 0% larger in diameter, FAST's radius of curvature is , barely larger than Arecibo's , so it forms a 360/pi*asin(500/2/300) round 0° arc (vs. 360/pi*asin(1000/2/870) round 0° for Arecibo). Although Arecibo's full aperture of could be used when observing objects at the zenith, this was only possible with the line feed which had a very narrow frequency range and had been unavailable due to damage since 2017. Most Arecibo observations used the Gregorian feeds, where the effective aperture was approximately at zenith.


text: Fifth, Arecibo's larger secondary platform also housed several "transmitters", making it one of the few instruments in the world capable of radar astronomy. (Planetary radar is also possible at the Jicamarca and Millstone and Altair observatories.) The NASA-funded Planetary Radar System allowed Arecibo to study solid objects from Mercury to Saturn, and to perform very accurate orbit determination on near-earth objects, particularly potentially hazardous objects. Arecibo also included several NSF funded radars for ionospheric studies (ionosondes). Such powerful transmitters are too large and heavy for FAST's small receiver cabin, so it will not be able to participate in planetary defense although in principle it could serve as a receiver in a bistatic radar system. (Arecibo has been used in several multi-static experiments with an auxiliary 100 meter dish, including S-band radar experiments in the stratosphere, and ISAR mapping of Venus.)


text: It appeared in the episode "The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth" of the 2020 television series "" presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson.


title: ATP Challenger Tour

text: The ATP Challenger Tour, known until the end of 2008 as the ATP Challenger Series, is a series of international men's professional tennis tournaments. The Challenger Tour events are the second-highest tier of tennis competition, behind the ATP Tour. The ITF World Tennis Tour tournaments are on the entry-level of international professional tennis competition. The ATP Challenger Tour is administered by the Association of Tennis Professionals. Players who succeed on the ATP Challenger Tour earn sufficient ranking points to become eligible for main draw or qualifying draw entry at ATP Tour tournaments. Players on the Challenger Tour are usually young players looking to advance their careers, those who fail to qualify for ATP events, or former ATP players looking to get back into the big tour.


title: ATP Challenger Tour

text: The first challenger events were held in 1978, with eighteen events taking place. Two were held on the week beginning January 8, one in Auckland and another in Hobart. The next events were held one at a time beginning June 18 and ending August 18 in the following U.S. locations, in order: Shreveport, Birmingham, Asheville, Raleigh, Hilton Head, Virginia Beach, Wall, Cape Cod, and Lancaster.Events continued after a one-month hiatus with two begun September 24 and 25, one in Tinton Falls, New Jersey and in Lincoln, Nebraska respectively. The following week saw one event played, in Salt Lake City, then two played simultaneously in Tel Aviv and San Ramon, California, then one played the following week in Pasadena. A final event was played a month later in Kyoto. In comparison, the 2008 schedule saw 178 events played in more than 40 countries.


title: ATP Challenger Tour

text: Challenger tournaments offer total prize money ranging from $30,000 up to $168,000+, which, along with whether the tournament provides "hospitality" (food and lodging) to the players, determines the number of points a player gets for winning each match in the tournament."Hospitality" moves the points distribution up one level and the points to the overall winner range from 80 points for a $40,000 tournament to 125 points for a $220,000 tournament with "hospitality". In contrast, the ATP-level tournaments offer total prize money from $400,000 to over $6 million and points to the overall winners from 250 to 1500.As a point of reference, player rankings are based on points accumulated in the previous 52 weeks, and as of February 2016, a player who has earned 550 points in the last 52 weeks would be ranked just below the 100th position. 250 points would get him a ranking just below 200th, while with 100 points he would get to around 425th, and 50 points would put him just below 600th. So rankings points earned in Challengers can help a low-ranked player to move up in the rankings quickly.


title: ATP Challenger Tour

text: Players have usually had success at the Futures tournaments of the ITF Men's Circuit before competing in Challengers. Due to the lower level of points and money available at the Challenger level, most players in a Challenger have a world ranking of 100 to 500 for a $35K tournament and 50 to 250 for a $150K tournament.An exception happens during the second week of a Grand Slam tournament, when top-100 players who have already lost in the Slam try to take a wild card entry into a Challenger tournament beginning that second week.


title: ATP Challenger Tour

text: In February 2007, Tretorn became the official ball of the Challenger Series, and the sponsor of a new series consisting of those Challenger tournaments with prize money of $100,000 or more. They renewed the sponsorship with the ATP in 2010 and extended it until the end of 2011.


title: Renin

text: Renin (etymology and pronunciation), also known as an angiotensinogenase, is an aspartic protease protein and enzyme secreted by the kidneys that participates in the body's renin–angiotensin–aldosterone system (RAAS)—also known as the renin–angiotensin–aldosterone axis—that increases the volume of extracellular fluid (blood plasma, lymph and interstitial fluid) and causes arterial vasoconstriction. Thus, it increases the body's mean arterial blood pressure.


title: Renin

text: Renin is not commonly referred to as a hormone, albeit it having a receptor, the (pro)renin receptor, also known as the renin receptor and prorenin receptor (see also below), as well as enzymatic activity with which it hydrolyzes angiotensinogen to angiotensin I.


title: Renin

text: The primary structure of renin precursor consists of 406 amino acids with a pre- and a pro-segment carrying 20 and 46 amino acids, respectively. Mature renin contains 340 amino acids and has a mass of 37 kDa.


title: Renin

text: The enzyme renin is secreted by pericytes in the vicinity of the afferent arterioles and similar microvessels of the kidney from specialized cells of the juxtaglomerular apparatus—the juxtaglomerular cells, in response to three stimuli:


title: Renin

text: Human renin is secreted by at least 2 cellular pathways: a constitutive pathway for the secretion of the precursor prorenin and a regulated pathway for the secretion of mature renin.


title: Renin

text: The renin enzyme circulates in the bloodstream and hydrolyzes (breaks down) angiotensinogen secreted from the liver into the peptide angiotensin I.


title: Renin

text: Angiotensin I is further cleaved in the lungs by endothelial-bound angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) into angiotensin II, the most vasoactive peptide. Angiotensin II is a potent constrictor of all blood vessels. It acts on the smooth muscle and, therefore, raises the resistance posed by these arteries to the heart. The heart, trying to overcome this increase in its 'load', works more vigorously, causing the blood pressure to rise. Angiotensin II also acts on the adrenal glands and releases aldosterone, which stimulates the epithelial cells in the distal tubule and collecting ducts of the kidneys to increase re-absorption of sodium, exchanging with potassium to maintain electrochemical neutrality, and water, leading to raised blood volume and raised blood pressure. The RAS also acts on the CNS to increase water intake by stimulating thirst, as well as conserving blood volume, by reducing urinary loss through the secretion of vasopressin from the posterior pituitary gland.


title: Renin

text: Renin activates the renin–angiotensin system by using its endopeptidase activity to cleave angiotensinogen, produced by the liver, to yield angiotensin I, which is further converted into angiotensin II by ACE, the angiotensin–converting enzyme primarily within the capillaries of the lungs. Angiotensin II then constricts blood vessels, increases the secretion of ADH and aldosterone, and stimulates the hypothalamus to activate the thirst reflex, each leading to an increase in blood pressure. Renin's primary function is therefore to eventually cause an increase in blood pressure, leading to restoration of perfusion pressure in the kidneys.


title: Renin

text: Renin is secreted from juxtaglomerular kidney cells, which sense changes in renal perfusion pressure, via stretch receptors in the vascular walls. The juxtaglomerular cells are also stimulated to release renin by signaling from the macula densa. The macula densa senses changes in sodium delivery to the distal tubule, and responds to a drop in tubular sodium load by stimulating renin release in the juxtaglomerular cells. Together, the macula densa and juxtaglomerular cells comprise the juxtaglomerular complex.


title: Renin

text: Renin secretion is also stimulated by sympathetic nervous stimulation, mainly through β adrenoreceptor activation.


title: Renin

text: The (pro)renin receptor to which renin and prorenin bind is encoded by the gene ATP6ap2, ATPase H(+)-transporting lysosomal accessory protein 2, which results in a fourfold increase in the conversion of angiotensinogen to angiotensin I over that shown by soluble renin as well as non-hydrolytic activation of prorenin via a conformational change in prorenin which exposes the catalytic site to angiotensinogen substrate. In addition, renin and prorenin binding results in phosphorylation of serine and tyrosine residues of ATP6AP2.


title: Renin

text: The level of renin mRNA appears to be modulated by the binding of HADHB, HuR and CP1 to a regulatory region in the 3' UTR.


title: Renin

text: The gene for renin, "REN", spans 12 kb of DNA and contains 8 introns. It produces several mRNA that encode different REN isoforms.


title: Renin

text: Mutations in the "REN" gene can be inherited, and are a cause of a rare inherited kidney disease, so far found to be present in only 2 families. This disease is autosomal dominant, meaning that it is characterized by a 50% chance of inheritance and is a slowly progressive chronic kidney disease that leads to the need for dialysis or kidney transplantation. Many—but not all—patients and families with this disease have an elevation in serum potassium and unexplained anemia relatively early in life. Patients with a mutation in this gene can have a variable rate of loss of kidney function, with some individuals going on dialysis in their 40s while others may not go on dialysis until into their 70s. This is a rare inherited kidney disease that exists in less than 1% of people with kidney disease.


title: Renin

text: Model organisms have been used in the study of REN function. A knockout mouse line, called "Ren1" was generated. Male and female animals underwent a standardized phenotypic screen to determine the effects of deletion. Twenty four tests were carried out on mutant mice and two significant abnormalities were observed. Homozygous mutant animals had a decreased heart rate and an increased susceptibility to bacterial infection. A more detailed analysis of this line indicated plasma creatinine was also increased and males had lower mean arterial pressure than controls.


title: Renin

text: An over-active renin-angiotension system leads to vasoconstriction and retention of sodium and water. These effects lead to hypertension. Therefore, renin inhibitors can be used for the treatment of hypertension. This is measured by the plasma renin activity (PRA).


title: Renin

text: In current medical practice, the renin–angiotensin–aldosterone system's overactivity (and resultant hypertension) is more commonly reduced using either ACE inhibitors (such as ramipril and perindopril) or angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs, such as losartan, irbesartan or candesartan) rather than a direct oral renin inhibitor. ACE inhibitors or ARBs are also part of the standard treatment after a heart attack.


title: Renin

text: The differential diagnosis of kidney cancer in a young patient with hypertension includes juxtaglomerular cell tumor (reninoma), Wilms' tumor, and renal cell carcinoma, all of which may produce renin.


title: Renin

text: Renin is usually measured as the plasma renin activity ("PRA"). PRA is measured specially in case of certain diseases that present with hypertension or hypotension. PRA is also raised in certain tumors. A PRA measurement may be compared to a plasma aldosterone concentration (PAC) as a "PAC/PRA ratio".


title: Renin

text: The name "renin" = "ren" + "-in", "kidney" + "compound". The most common pronunciation in English is (long "e"); (short "e") is also common, but using allows one to reserve for "rennin". Renin was discovered, characterized, and named in 1898 by Robert Tigerstedt, Professor of Physiology, and his student, Per Bergman, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.


title: Written Chinese

text: Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great number of characters: college-educated Chinese speakers know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets or other complementary systems as auxiliary means of representing Chinese.


title: Written Chinese

text: Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC, but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy. As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to the standard spoken language ("Mandarin"). Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.


title: Written Chinese

text: Some Chinese characters have been adopted into writing systems of other neighbouring East Asian languages, but are currently used only in Japanese and to a lesser extent in Korean, as Vietnamese is now written using alphabetic script.


title: Written Chinese

text: Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are glyphs whose components may depict objects or represent abstract notions. Occasionally a character consists of only one component; more commonly two or more components are combined to form more complex characters, using a variety of different principles. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the "Shuowen Jiezi", compiled by Xu Shen around 120 AD. Since Xu Shen did not have access to Chinese characters in their earliest forms, his analysis cannot always be taken as authoritative. Nonetheless, no later work has supplanted the "Shuowen Jiezi" in terms of breadth, and it is still relevant to etymological research today.


title: Written Chinese

text: According to the "Shuowen Jiezi", Chinese characters are developed on six basic principles. (These principles, though popularized by the "Shuowen Jiezi", were developed earlier; the oldest known mention of them is in the "Rites of Zhou", a text from about 150 BC.) The first two principles produce simple characters, known as 文 "wén":


title: Written Chinese

text: The remaining four principles produce complex characters historically called 字 "zì" (although this term is now generally used to refer to all characters, whether simple or complex). Of these four, two construct characters from simpler parts:


title: Written Chinese

text: In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95% of the characters in the "Shuowen Jiezi") are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes. In fact, some phonetic complexes were originally simple pictographs that were later augmented by the addition of a semantic root. An example is 炷 "zhù" "candle" (now archaic, meaning "lampwick"), which was originally a pictograph of a lampstand, 主, a character that is now pronounced "zhǔ" and means "host", or the character 火 "huǒ" "fire" was added to indicate that the meaning is fire related.


title: Written Chinese

text: The last two principles do not produce new written forms Instead, they transfer new meanings to existing forms:


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese characters are written to fit into a square, even when composed of two simpler forms written side-by-side or top-to-bottom. In such cases, each form is compressed to fit the entire character into a square.


title: Written Chinese

text: Character components can be further subdivided into "strokes". The strokes of Chinese characters fall into eight main categories: horizontal (一), vertical (丨), left-falling (丿), right-falling (丶), rising (lower element of 冫), dot (、), hook (亅), and turning (乛, 乚, 乙, etc.).


title: Written Chinese

text: Since Chinese characters conform to a roughly square frame and are not linked to one another, they do not require a set orientation in writing. Traditionally, Chinese text was written in vertical columns which were read from top to bottom, right-to-left; the first column being on the right side of the page, and the last column on the left. Text written in Classical Chinese also uses little or no punctuation, with sentence and phrase breaks being determined by context and rhythm.


title: Written Chinese

text: In modern times, the familiar Western layout used for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scriptsleft-to-right orientation on horizontal lines advancing from top to bottom on the pagehas become more popular in regions using Simplified Chinese such as in the People's Republic of China, where the government mandated left-to-right writing in 1955, although the vertical format is still used for effect or where space requires it, such as signs or on spines of books. The government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) followed suit in 2004 for official documents, but vertical writing on lines advancing from right to left on the page remains popular everywhere else, such as in print.


title: Written Chinese

text: The use of punctuation has also become more common, whether the text is written in columns or rows. The punctuation marks used in Simplified Chinese are clearly influenced by their Western counterparts, although some marks are particular to Asian languages: for example, the double and single quotation marks (『 』 and 「 」); the hollow period dot (。), which is otherwise used just like an ordinary period full-stop; and a special kind of comma called an "enumeration comma" (、), which is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to clauses in a sentence. Traditional Chinese retains the use of these quotation marks while Simplified Chinese has abandoned them for western ones.


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese is one of the oldest continually-used writing-systems still in use. The earliest generally accepted examples of Chinese writing date back to the reign of the Shang Dynasty king Wu Ding (1250–1192 BC). These were divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones, primarily ox scapulae and turtle shells. Characters were carved on the bones in order to frame a question; the bones were then heated over a fire and the resulting cracks were interpreted to determine the answer. Such characters are called 甲骨文 "jiǎgǔwén" "shell-bone script" or oracle bone script.


title: Written Chinese

text: In 2003, some 11 isolated symbols carved on tortoise shells were found at Jiahu, an archaeological site in the Henan province of China, some bearing a striking resemblance to certain modern characters, such as 目 "mù" "eye". Since the Jiahu site dates from about 6600 BC, it predates the earliest confirmed Chinese writing by more than 5,000 years. Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, who headed a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province, has suggested that these symbols were precursors of Chinese writing, but Professor David Keightley, of the University of California, Berkeley, US whose field of expertise is the origins of Chinese civilization in the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, employing archaeological and inscriptional evidence, suggests that the time gap is too great for a connection.


title: Written Chinese

text: From the late Shang Dynasty, Chinese writing evolved into the form found in cast inscriptions on Chinese ritual bronzes made during the Western Zhou Dynasty (c 1046–771 BC) and the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC), a kind of writing called 金文 "jīnwén" "metal script". Jinwen characters are less angular and angularized than the oracle bone script. Later, in the Warring States period (475–221 BC), the script became still more regular, and settled on a form, called 六國文字/六国文字 "liùguó wénzì" "script of the six states", that Xu Shen used as source material in the "Shuowen Jiezi". These characters were later embellished and stylized to yield the seal script, which represents the oldest form of Chinese characters still in modern use. They are used principally for signature seals, or chops, which are often used in place of a signature for Chinese documents and artwork. Li Si promulgated the seal script as the standard throughout the empire during the Qin dynasty, then newly unified.


title: Written Chinese

text: Seal script in turn evolved into the other surviving writing styles; the first writing style to follow was the clerical script. The development of such a style can be attributed to those of the Qin Dynasty who were seeking to create a convenient form of written characters for daily usage. In general, clerical script characters are "flat" in appearance, being wider than the seal script, which tends to be taller than it is wide. Compared with the seal script, clerical script characters are strikingly rectilinear. In running script, a semi-cursive form, the character elements begin to run into each other, although the characters themselves generally remain separate. Running script eventually evolved into grass script, a fully cursive form, in which the characters are often entirely unrecognizable by their canonical forms. Grass script gives the impression of anarchy in its appearance, and there is indeed considerable freedom on the part of the calligrapher, but this freedom is circumscribed by conventional "abbreviations" in the forms of the characters. Regular script, a non-cursive form, is the most widely recognized script. In regular script, each stroke of each character is clearly drawn out from the others. Even though both the running and grass scripts appear to be derived as semi-cursive and cursive variants of regular script, it is in fact the regular script that was the last to develop.


title: Written Chinese

text: Regular script is considered the archetype for Chinese writing and forms the basis for most printed forms. In addition, regular script imposes a stroke order, which must be followed in order for the characters to be written correctly. (Strictly speaking, this stroke order applies to the clerical, running, and grass scripts as well, but especially in the running and grass scripts, this order is occasionally deviated from.) Thus, for instance, the character 木 "mù" "wood" must be written starting with the horizontal stroke, drawn from left to right; next, the vertical stroke, from top to bottom; next, the left diagonal stroke, from top to bottom; and lastly the right diagonal stroke, from top to bottom.


title: Written Chinese

text: In the 20th century, written Chinese diverged into two canonical forms, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in Mainland China in order to reduce the number of characters and the average stroke count per character. The People's Republic of China claims that the rapid increase in literacy rates have been achieved as a result, but some external observers attribute the achievement to education reforms and the increase in standards of living instead. Little systematic research has been conducted to prove that simplified Chinese has affected literacy rates in any way as the only studies conducted in mainland China focused on arbitrary statistics quantifying the number of strokes saved on average in samples of running text.


title: Written Chinese

text: The simplified forms have also been widely criticized for being inconsistent. For instance, traditional 讓 "ràng" "allow" is simplified to 让, in which the phonetic on the right side is reduced from 17 strokes to just three. (The speech radical on the left has also been simplified.) However, the same phonetic component is used in its full form, even in simplified Chinese, in such characters as 壤 "rǎng" "soil" and 齉 "nàng" "snuffle"; these forms remained unmodified because they were relatively uncommon and would therefore represent a negligible stroke reduction. On the other hand, some simplified forms are simply long-standing calligraphic abbreviations, as for example 万 "wàn" "ten thousand", for which the traditional Chinese form is 萬.


title: Written Chinese

text: While Simplified Chinese became standard in Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia, Traditional Chinese continues to be the standard in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and other overseas Chinese communities. Throughout this article, Chinese text is given in both simplified and traditional forms when they differ, with the traditional forms being given first. The two forms are never mixed together when written.


title: Written Chinese

text: At the inception of written Chinese, spoken Chinese was monosyllabic; that is, Chinese words expressing independent concepts (objects, actions, relations, etc.) were usually one syllable. Each written character corresponded to one monosyllabic word. The spoken language has since become polysyllabic, but because modern polysyllabic words are usually composed of older monosyllabic words, Chinese characters have always been used to represent individual Chinese syllables.


title: Written Chinese

text: For over two thousand years, the prevailing written standard was a vocabulary and syntax rooted in Chinese as spoken around the time of Confucius (about 500 BC), called Classical Chinese, or 文言文 "wényánwén". Over the centuries, Classical Chinese gradually acquired some of its grammar and character senses from the various dialects. This accretion was generally slow and minor; however, by the 20th century, Classical Chinese was distinctly different from any contemporary dialect, and had to be learned separately. Once learned, it was a common medium for communication between people speaking different dialects, many of which were mutually unintelligible by the end of the first millennium AD. A Mandarin speaker might say "yī", a Cantonese "yāt", a Shanghainese "iq", and a Hokkien "chit", but all four will understand the character <> to mean "one".


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese languages and dialects vary by not only pronunciation, but also, to a lesser extent, vocabulary and grammar. Modern written Chinese, which replaced Classical Chinese as the written standard as an indirect result of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, is not technically bound to any single variety; however, it most nearly represents the vocabulary and syntax of Mandarin, by far the most widespread Chinese dialectal family in terms of both geographical area and number of speakers. This version of written Chinese is called Vernacular Chinese, or 白話/白话 "báihuà" (literally, "plain speech"). Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin language, Vernacular Chinese also permits some communication between people of different dialects, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in non-Mandarin dialects. This role may not differ substantially from the role of other linguae francae, such as Latin. For those trained in written Chinese, it serves as a common medium; for those untrained in it, the graphic nature of the characters is in general no aid to common understanding (characters such as "one" notwithstanding). In this regard, Chinese characters may be considered a large and inefficient phonetic script. However, Ghil'ad Zuckermann's exploration of phono-semantic matching in Standard Chinese concludes that the Chinese writing system is multifunctional, conveying both semantic and phonetic content.


title: Written Chinese

text: The variation in vocabulary among dialects has also led to the informal use of "dialectal characters", as well as standard characters that are nevertheless considered archaic by today's standards. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this language. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use Vernacular Chinese. To a lesser degree Hokkien is used in a similar way in Taiwan and elsewhere, although it lacks the level of standardization seen in Cantonese. However, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China is currently releasing a standard character set for Hokkien, which is to be taught in schools and promoted amongst the general population.


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium AD, probably from Chinese products imported into Japan through Korea. At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and Chinese characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations. A notable exception to this rule was the system of man'yōgana, which used a small set of Chinese characters to help indicate pronunciation. The man'yōgana later developed into the phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese characters are called "hànzì" in Mandarin, after the Han Dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced "kanji". In modern written Japanese, kanji are used for most nouns, verb stems, and adjective stems, while hiragana are used for grammatical elements and miscellaneous words that have no common kanji rendition; katakana are used for transliteration of loanwords from other languages, the names of plants, animals and certain scientific or technical words, onomatopoeia and emphasis. The Jōyō kanji, a list of kanji for common use standardized by the Japanese government, contains 2,136 characters—about half the number of characters commanded by literate Chinese speakers.


title: Written Chinese

text: When used for Korean, Chinese characters are called hanja, which served as the first writing system for the language. Many Chinese characters were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese. However, with the creation during the reign of King Sejong of Hangeul, an alphabetic writing system in which letters are grouped into syllabic square blocks, the use of hanja in Korean has largely been replaced by Hangeul in South Korea and almost exclusively replaced by Chosŏn'gŭl (the North Korean term for Hangeul) in North Korea.


title: Written Chinese

text: Similarly, Vietnamese was originally written using Chinese-derived characters called chữ nôm script, which has been supplanted by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in modern usage.


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese characters are also used within China to write non-Han languages. The largest non-Han group in China, the Zhuang, have for over 1300 years used Chinese characters. Despite both the introduction of an official alphabetic script in 1957 and lack of a corresponding official set of Chinese characters, more Zhuang people can read the Zhuang logograms than the alphabetic script.


title: Written Chinese

text: Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.


title: Written Chinese

text: Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or syllabary, so Chinese dictionaries, as well as dictionaries that define Chinese characters in other languages, cannot easily be alphabetized or otherwise lexically ordered, as English dictionaries are. The need to arrange Chinese characters in order to permit efficient lookup has given rise to a considerable variety of ways to organize and index the characters.


title: Written Chinese

text: A traditional mechanism is the method of radicals, which uses a set of character roots. These roots, or radicals, generally but imperfectly align with the parts used to compose characters by means of logical aggregation and phonetic complex. A canonical set of 214 radicals was developed during the rule of the Kangxi Emperor (around the year 1700); these are sometimes called the Kangxi radicals. The radicals are ordered first by stroke count (that is, the number of strokes required to write the radical); within a given stroke count, the radicals also have a prescribed order.


title: Written Chinese

text: Every Chinese character falls (sometimes arbitrarily or incorrectly) under the heading of exactly one of these 214 radicals. In many cases, the radicals are themselves characters, which naturally come first under their own heading. All other characters under a given radical are ordered by the stroke count of the character. Usually, however, there are still many characters with a given stroke count under a given radical. At this point, characters are not given in any recognizable order; the user must locate the character by going through all the characters with that stroke count, typically listed for convenience at the top of the page on which they occur.


title: Written Chinese

text: Because the method of radicals is applied only to the written character, one need not know how to pronounce a character before looking it up; the entry, once located, usually gives the pronunciation. However, it is not always easy to identify which of the various roots of a character is the proper radical. Accordingly, dictionaries often include a list of hard to locate characters, indexed by total stroke count, near the beginning of the dictionary. Some dictionaries include almost one-seventh of all characters in this list. Alternatively, some dictionaries list "difficult" characters under more than one radical, with all but one of those entries redirecting the reader to the "canonical" location of the character according to Kangxi.


title: Written Chinese

text: Other methods of organization exist, often in an attempt to address the shortcomings of the radical method, but are less common. For instance, it is common for a dictionary ordered principally by the Kangxi radicals to have an auxiliary index by pronunciation, expressed typically in either hanyu pinyin or zhuyin fuhao. This index points to the page in the main dictionary where the desired character can be found. Other methods use only the structure of the characters, such as the four-corner method, in which characters are indexed according to the kinds of strokes located nearest the four corners (hence the name of the method), or the Cangjie method, in which characters are broken down into a set of 24 basic components. Neither the four-corner method nor the Cangjie method requires the user to identify the proper radical, although many strokes or components have alternate forms, which must be memorized in order to use these methods effectively.


title: Written Chinese

text: The availability of computerized Chinese dictionaries now makes it possible to look characters up by any of the indexing schemes described, thereby shortening the search process.


title: Written Chinese

text: Chinese characters do not reliably indicate their pronunciation, even for one dialect. It is therefore useful to be able to transliterate a dialect of Chinese into the Latin alphabet or the Perso-Arabic script Xiao'erjing for those who cannot read Chinese characters. However, transliteration was not always considered merely a way to record the sounds of any particular dialect of Chinese; it was once also considered a potential replacement for the Chinese characters. This was first prominently proposed during the May Fourth Movement, and it gained further support with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Immediately afterward, the mainland government began two parallel programs relating to written Chinese. One was the development of an alphabetic script for Mandarin, which was spoken by about two-thirds of the Chinese population; the other was the simplification of the traditional characters—a process that would eventually lead to simplified Chinese. The latter was not viewed as an impediment to the former; rather, it would ease the transition toward the exclusive use of an alphabetic (or at least phonetic) script.


title: Written Chinese

text: By 1958, however, priority was given officially to simplified Chinese; a phonetic script, hanyu pinyin, had been developed, but its deployment to the exclusion of simplified characters was pushed off to some distant future date. The association between pinyin and Mandarin, as opposed to other dialects, may have contributed to this deferment. It seems unlikely that pinyin will supplant Chinese characters anytime soon as the "sole" means of representing Chinese.


title: Written Chinese

text: Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet, along with a few diacritical marks, to represent the sounds of Mandarin in standard pronunciation. For the most part, pinyin uses vowel and consonant letters as they are used in Romance languages (and also in IPA). However, although 'b' and 'p', for instance, represent the voice/unvoiced distinction in some languages, such as French, they represent the unaspirated/aspirated distinction in Mandarin; Mandarin has few voiced consonants. Also, the pinyin spellings for a few consonant sounds are markedly different from their spellings in other languages that use the Latin alphabet; for instance, pinyin 'q' and 'x' sound similar to English 'ch' and 'sh', respectively. Pinyin is not the sole transliteration scheme for Mandarin—there are also, for instance, the zhuyin fuhao, Wade-Giles, Yale, EFEO and Gwoyeu Romatzyh systems—but it is dominant in the Chinese-speaking world. All transliterations in this article use the pinyin system.


title: Global cooling

text: Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing.


title: Global cooling

text: Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.


title: Global cooling

text: In the mid 1970s, the limited temperature series available suggested that the temperature had decreased for several decades up to then. As longer time series of higher quality became available, it became clear that global temperature showed significant increases overall.


title: Global cooling

text: By the 1970s, scientists were becoming increasingly aware that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945, as well as the possibility of large scale warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases. In the scientific papers which considered climate trends of the 21st century, less than 10% were inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming. The general public had little awareness of carbon dioxide's effects on climate, but "Science News" in May 1959 forecast a 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000, with a consequent warming trend. The actual increase in this period was 29%. Paul R. Ehrlich mentioned global warming from greenhouse gases as a counterforce to the cooling effect of aerosols in 1968. By the time the idea of global cooling reached the public press in the mid-1970s temperatures had stopped falling, and there was concern in the climatological community about carbon dioxide's warming effects. In response to such reports, the World Meteorological Organization issued a warning in June 1976 that "a very significant warming of global climate" was probable.


title: Global cooling

text: Currently, there are some concerns about the possible regional cooling effects of a slowdown or shutdown of thermohaline circulation, which might be provoked by an increase of fresh water mixing into the North Atlantic due to glacial melting. The probability of this occurring is generally considered to be very low, and the IPCC notes, "even in models where the THC weakens, there is still warming over Europe. For example, in all AOGCM integrations where the radiative forcing is increasing, the sign of the temperature change over north-west Europe is positive."


title: Global cooling

text: The cooling period is reproduced by current (1999 on) global climate models that include the physical effects of sulfate aerosols, and there is now general agreement that aerosol effects were the dominant cause of the mid-20th century cooling. At the time there were two physical mechanisms that were most frequently advanced to cause cooling: aerosols and orbital forcing.


title: Global cooling

text: Human activity — mostly as a by-product of fossil fuel combustion, partly by land use changes — increases the number of tiny particles (aerosols) in the atmosphere. These have a direct effect: they effectively increase the planetary albedo, thus cooling the planet by reducing the solar radiation reaching the surface; and an indirect effect: they affect the properties of clouds by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. In the early 1970s some speculated that this cooling effect might dominate over the warming effect of the CO release: see discussion of Rasool and Schneider (1971), below. As a result of observations and a switch to cleaner fuel burning, this no longer seems likely; current scientific work indicates that global warming is far more likely. Although the temperature drops foreseen by this mechanism have now been discarded in light of better theory and the observed warming, aerosols are thought to have contributed a cooling tendency (outweighed by increases in greenhouse gases) and also have contributed to global dimming.


title: Global cooling

text: Orbital forcing refers to the slow, cyclical changes in the tilt of Earth's axis and shape of its orbit. These cycles alter the total amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by a small amount and affect the timing and intensity of the seasons. This mechanism is thought to be responsible for the timing of the ice age cycles, and understanding of the mechanism was increasing rapidly in the mid-1970s.


title: Global cooling

text: The paper of Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages" qualified its predictions with the remark that "forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted ... the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate".


title: Global cooling

text: The idea that ice ages cycles were predictable appears to have become conflated with the idea that another one was due "soon" - perhaps because much of this study was done by geologists, who are accustomed to dealing with very long time scales and use "soon" to refer to periods of thousands of years. A strict application of the Milankovitch theory does not allow the prediction of a "rapid" ice age onset (i.e., less than a century or two) since the fastest orbital period is about 20,000 years. Some creative ways around this were found, notably one championed by Nigel Calder under the name of "snowblitz", but these ideas did not gain wide acceptance.


title: Global cooling

text: It is common to see it asserted that the length of the current interglacial temperature peak is similar to the length of the preceding interglacial peak (Sangamon/Eem), and from this conclude that we might be nearing the end of this warm period. This conclusion is mistaken. Firstly, because the lengths of previous interglacials were not particularly regular; see figure. Petit et al. note that "interglacials 5.5 and 9.3 are different from the Holocene, but similar to each other in duration, shape and amplitude. During each of these two events, there is a warm period of 4 kyr followed by a relatively rapid cooling". Secondly, future orbital variations will not closely resemble those of the past.


title: Global cooling

text: In 1923, there was concern about a new ice age and Captain Donald Baxter MacMillan sailed toward the Arctic sponsored by the National Geographical Society to look for evidence of advancing glaciers.


title: Global cooling

text: Concerns that a new ice age was approaching was revived in the 1950s. During the Cold War, there were concerns by Harry Wexler that setting off atom bombs could be hastening a new ice age from a nuclear winter scenario.


title: Global cooling

text: J. Murray Mitchell showed as early as 1963 a multidecadal cooling since about 1940. At a conference on climate change held in Boulder, Colorado in 1965, evidence supporting Milankovitch cycles triggered speculation on how the calculated small changes in sunlight might somehow trigger ice ages. In 1966, Cesare Emiliani predicted that "a new glaciation will begin within a few thousand years." In his 1968 book "The Population Bomb", Paul R. Ehrlich wrote "The greenhouse effect is being enhanced now by the greatly increased level of carbon dioxide ... [this] is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants ... At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump."


title: Global cooling

text: Concern peaked in the early 1970s, though "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then" (a cooling period began in 1945, and two decades of a cooling trend suggested a trough had been reached after several decades of warming). This peaking concern is partially attributable to the fact much less was then known about world climate and causes of ice ages. Climate scientists were aware that predictions based on this trend were not possible - because the trend was poorly studied and not understood (for example see reference). Despite that, in the popular press the possibility of cooling was reported generally without the caveats present in the scientific reports, and "unusually severe winters in Asia and parts of North America in 1972 and 1973 ... pushed the issue into the public consciousness".


title: Global cooling

text: In the 1970s, the compilation of records to produce hemispheric, or global, temperature records had just begun.


title: Global cooling

text: Spencer R. Weart's history of "The Discovery of Global Warming" says that: "While neither scientists nor the public could be sure in the 1970s whether the world was warming or cooling, "people were increasingly inclined to believe that global climate was on the move, and in no small way"" [emphasis added].


title: Global cooling

text: In 1972, Emiliani warned "Man's activity may either precipitate this new ice age or lead to substantial or even total melting of the ice caps".