title: Michelle Lujan Grisham

text: In April 2021, it was publicized that Lujan Grisham and her gubernatorial campaign, while denying the allegations, had reached a $62,500 settlement with the law firm representing Hallinan. The payment was made in monthly installments of $12,500 from November 2020 to March 2021. Her political committee paid another $87,500 over six months, bringing the total payout to $150,000.


title: Michelle Lujan Grisham

text: In February 2021, an investigative team from Albuquerque TV station KOB found reports of more than $6,500 worth of groceries bought from the governor's contingency fund, which is intended for travel or official functions to promote the state. According to public receipts through an Inspection of Public Records Act request, the items include anything from laundry detergent to Wagyu beef, tuna steaks, top sirloin and hundreds of dollars in alcohol purchases."


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: The Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant (stylized as "SB>1"; company designation S-100) is the Sikorsky Aircraft and Boeing entry for the United States Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program to replace the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk. It is a compound helicopter with rigid coaxial rotors, powered by two Honeywell T55 turboshaft engines; it first flew on 21 March 2019.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: On 5 December 2022, the US Army selected the rival Bell V-280 Valor as the winner of the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: Sikorsky Aircraft and Boeing are jointly producing a medium-lift-sized demonstrator they named "SB>1 Defiant" (also widely known as "SB-1") for phase one of the program. Originally planned to fly in late 2017, its first flight was delayed in April 2017 to early 2018. Once flight testing begins, the aircraft will be evaluated by the Army for further development. Sikorsky is leading the development of phase one with an aircraft based on their previous Sikorsky X2 design.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: Boeing plans to lead phase two, which is the mission systems demonstrator phase. The Boeing-Sikorsky team is seen to have an advantage with their large industrial base that may result in wider support from Congress. Their transport helicopters are the most-used in the Army currently.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: Up to 2013, Sikorsky and partners have spent $250 million on X2 and Raider. The team and aircraft will be separate from the S-97 Raider. The team feels confident in the SB-1 Defiant and is paying for more than half of its design costs. The last project the companies teamed up for was the RAH-66 Comanche, which started in the 1980s and cost $7 billion before being cancelled in 2004. They say that factors outside their control, like budget cuts, "requirement creep", and a long development period caused problems with the Comanche and not team dysfunctionality. Under the Comanche program, each company built different parts of the aircraft. For JMR, employees from both companies will work together. The team named the suppliers in 2015. Swift Engineering Inc. supports the program with a major portion of the airframe structure designed and manufactured at the company's facility in San Clemente, California by an integrated team of Swift and Boeing employees.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: The timeline for the first flight has slipped several times. Originally scheduled for 2017, delays arose due to a requirement to implement automated fiber placement blade manufacture at the request of the U.S. Army. Further delays resulted in the first flight slipping past summer 2018. Dynamic systems like turboshafts, transmission, and rotors were scheduled to be tested at West Palm Beach, Florida, by the end of October 2018, before ground runs in November, then first flight to reach within six months.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: The first prototype was unveiled in December 2018, and the first flight was pushed to early 2019. Ground runs began in January 2019; 15 hours of ground tests were needed before the first flight.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: The first flight took place on 21 March 2019 at Sikorsky West Palm Beach site in Florida. In the summer of 2019, flights were suspended to address a bearing issue with the main rotor. Flight testing resumed on 24 September 2019. The aircraft reached a speed of 211 knots during level flight in October 2020. By December 2020, the demonstrator had logged 26 flight hours in 31 flights over the 21 months since first flight.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: In January 2021, Sikorsky-Boeing announced the Defiant X variant, specifically designed for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program. In February 2022, Sikorsky-Boeing picked Honeywell's new HTS7500 engine, a derivative of the Honeywell T55 engine that powered the SB-1 demonstrator, as the powerplant.In March 2022, Sikorsky-Boeing has selected Collins Aerospace to provide all three seating platforms and its Perigon as flight control computer.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: Sikorsky and Boeing state the design is to have a cruise speed of , but less range due to using the "old" T55 engine. A new engine, the Future Affordable Turbine Engine (FATE), is to meet the radius requirement of . Compared to conventional helicopters, the counter-rotating coaxial main rotors and pusher propeller offer a speed increase, a 60% combat radius extension, and 50% better performance in high-hot hover operations.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: Sikorsky has said that the X2 design is not suitable for heavy-lift size, and instead suggests the CH-53K for heavy-lift and tiltrotor for the ultra-class. However, Sikorsky plans to build the JMR-TD (with a cabin 50% larger than the Black Hawk) at full scale to remove doubts about the scalability of the X-2 technology.


title: Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 Defiant

text: Sikorsky–Boeing states the SB-1 will be quick and nimble, with fast acceleration and deceleration, fast side-to-side movement, and the capability to hover with the tail up and nose down. The Defiant demonstrator will be powered by the Honeywell T55, which powers the CH-47 Chinook. It will be slightly modified to better operate at slower propeller speeds, down to 85% rpm.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: The Legend of Bagger Vance is a 2000 American sports film directed by Robert Redford, and starring Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron. The screenplay by Jeremy Leven is based on Steven Pressfield's 1995 book "The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life". The film is set in 1931 Georgia. It was the final film starring Jack Lemmon and Lane Smith. The film was a box office bomb, grossing almost $40 million worldwideonly half of its budgetand received mixed reviews; it was criticized by several African American commentators and reviewers for employing the "Magical Negro" stereotype.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: As an old man having his sixth heart attack while playing golf, Hardy Greaves (Jack Lemmon) contemplates how his late wife used to ask him why he kept playing "a game that seems destined to kill" him. Explaining his love for the game, he begins the story of his childhood idol: Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon).


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Junuh is the favorite son of Savannah, Georgia: a noteworthy golfer from a wealthy family; he and his beautiful girlfriend Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron) seem to have it all. While serving as a captain in the U.S. Army during World War I, Junuh is traumatized when his entire company is wiped out in battle. Though he earns the Medal of Honor, he disappears after the war, returning to Georgia years later as a broken-down alcoholic.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: At the start of the Great Depression (circa 1930), Adele is trying to recover her family's lost fortune by holding a four-round, two-day exhibition match between Bobby Jones (Joel Gretsch) and Walter Hagen (Bruce McGill), the best golfers of the era, with a grand prize of $10,000, at the golf resort her family opened as the Depression struck. However, needing a local participant to gain local interest, a young Greaves (J. Michael Moncrief) speaks up for his hero, Junuh, prompting Adele to ask her estranged lover to play.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Junuh is approached by a mysterious traveler carrying a suitcase, who appears while he is trying to hit golf balls into the dark void of the night. The man identifies himself as Bagger Vance (Will Smith) and says he will be his caddie. With Greaves as assistant caddie, Bagger helps Junuh come to grips with his personal demons and play golf again.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: When the match starts, Jones and Hagen each play well in their distinctive ways, but the disengaged Junuh plays poorly and is far behind after the first round. With Bagger caddying for him and giving advice, Junuh rediscovers his "authentic swing" in the second round and makes up some ground. In the third round, he closes the gap even more, hitting a hole in one in the process. Meanwhile, Junuh and Adele rekindle their romance.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Late in the final round, an overconfident Junuh disregards Bagger's advice at a crucial point and, after that, plays poorly. He hits a ball into a forest, which triggers a war flashback, but Bagger's words help him focus on the game. Junuh pulls back to a tie with Jones and Hagen, then has a chance to win on the final hole, but has the integrity to call a penalty on himself when his ball moves after trying to remove a loose impediment.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Seeing Junuh has grown and matured, Bagger decides that his golfer does not need him any more. With the 18th hole left unfinished, Bagger gives the position of caddie to Greaves and leaves as mysteriously as he came.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Though losing a chance to win because of the penalty, Junuh sinks an improbable putt and the match ends in a gentlemanly three-way tie. The three golfers shake hands with all of Savannah cheering. Junuh and Adele get back together.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: The old Greaves wakes up and sees Bagger Vance, not aged a day, on the golf course. As Bagger beckons, Greaves follows.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: The plot is loosely based on the Hindu sacred text the "Bhagavad Gita", part of the Hindu epic "Mahabharata", where the Warrior/Hero Arjuna (R. Junuh) refuses to fight. The god Krishna appears as Bhagavan (Bagger Vance) to help him follow his path as the warrior and hero that he was meant to be. This relationship was explained by Steven J. Rosen in his 2000 book "Gita on the Green: The Mystical Tradition Behind Bagger Vance", for which Pressfield wrote the foreword.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Portions of the exhibition match were set at the Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina, United States, considered one of the toughest in the country. The scene in which Greaves has a heart attack was shot on No. 11 of the resort's Cougar Point golf course. The final hole in the film was temporary, so the filming did not interfere with the club activities, and cost US$200,000 to build. Most of the golf scenes were filmed at Colleton River Plantation, just off Hilton Head Island. Certain segments were filmed in Savannah and Jekyll Island, Georgia.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 43% based on reviews from 130 critics, with an average rating of 5.23/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Despite the talent involved in "The Legend of Bagger Vance", performances are hindered by an inadequate screenplay full of flat characters and bad dialogue. Also, not much happens, and some critics are offended by how the film glosses over issues of racism." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B+ on scale of A to F.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: Film critic Roger Ebert, who gave it 3½ stars, said, "It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story. Redford and his writer, Jeremy Leven, starting from a novel by Steven Pressfield, are very clear in their minds about what they want to do. They want to explain why it is possible to devote your life to the love of golf, and they want to hint that golf and life may have a lot in common". The BBC's George Perry called it a "sumptuously photographed film" but added that "in spite of being lovely to look at, it is pretentious piffle, although Will Smith shows skill and subtlety in his ludicrous role".


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: "Time" called it one of the most "embarrassing" films of recent years for its treatment of African Americans and the use of a "Magical African-American Friend". The film would later be used by Spike Lee as an example of a film with a Magical Negro.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: "The Legend of Bagger Vance" opened at No. 3 at the U.S. box office behind "Charlie's Angels" and "Meet the Parents", grossing $11,516,712 from 2,061 theaters. According to the Internet Movie Database, the film's total gross came to $30,695,227, far short of its estimated $80 million budget.


title: The Legend of Bagger Vance

text: The now out-of-print soundtrack to "The Legend of Bagger Vance" was released on November 7, 2000. It was mostly written by Rachel Portman, except for tracks one ("My Best Wishes"), thirteen ("Bluin' the Blues") and fourteen ("Mood Indigo"), which were written by Fats Waller, Muggsy Spanier and Duke Ellington, respectively. The score for this movie was the last to be recorded at CTS Studios in Wembley, England, before the scoring stage's closure and demolition.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Death Valley National Park is an American national park that straddles the California–Nevada border, east of the Sierra Nevada. The park boundaries include Death Valley, the northern section of Panamint Valley, the southern section of Eureka Valley and most of Saline Valley. The park occupies an interface zone between the arid Great Basin and Mojave deserts, protecting the northwest corner of the Mojave Desert and its diverse environment of salt-flats, sand dunes, badlands, valleys, canyons and mountains. Death Valley is the largest national park in the contiguous United States, as well as the hottest, driest and lowest of all the national parks in the United States. It contains Badwater Basin, the second-lowest point in the Western Hemisphere and lowest in North America at below sea level. More than 93% of the park is a designated wilderness area. The park is home to many species of plants and animals that have adapted to this harsh desert environment including creosote bush, Joshua tree, bighorn sheep, coyote, and the endangered Death Valley pupfish, a survivor from much wetter times. UNESCO included Death Valley as the principal feature of its Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve in 1984.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: A series of Native American groups inhabited the area from as early as 7000 BC, most recently the Timbisha around 1000 AD who migrated between winter camps in the valleys and summer grounds in the mountains. A group of European Americans, trapped in the valley in 1849 while looking for a shortcut to the gold fields of California, gave the valley its name, even though only one of their group died there. Several short-lived boom towns sprang up during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to mine gold and silver. The only long-term profitable ore to be mined was borax, which was transported out of the valley with twenty-mule teams. The valley later became the subject of books, radio programs, television series, and movies. Tourism expanded in the 1920s when resorts were built around Stovepipe Wells and Furnace Creek. Death Valley National Monument was declared in 1933 and the park was substantially expanded and became a national park in 1994.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The natural environment of the area has been shaped largely by its geology. The valley is actually a graben with the oldest rocks being extensively metamorphosed and at least 1.7 billion years old. Ancient, warm, shallow seas deposited marine sediments until rifting opened the Pacific Ocean. Additional sedimentation occurred until a subduction zone formed off the coast. The subduction uplifted the region out of the sea and created a line of volcanoes. Later the crust started to pull apart, creating the current Basin and Range landform. Valleys filled with sediment and, during the wet times of glacial periods, with lakes, such as Lake Manly.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Death Valley is the fifth-largest American national park and the largest in the contiguous United States. It is also larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and nearly as large as Puerto Rico. In 2013, Death Valley National Park was designated as a dark sky park by the International Dark-Sky Association.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: There are two major valleys in the park, Death Valley and Panamint Valley. Both of these valleys were formed within the last few million years and both are bounded by north–south-trending mountain ranges. These and adjacent valleys follow the general trend of Basin and Range topography with one modification: there are parallel strike-slip faults that perpendicularly bound the central extent of Death Valley. The result of this shearing action is additional extension in the central part of Death Valley which causes a slight widening and more subsidence there.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Uplift of surrounding mountain ranges and subsidence of the valley floor are both occurring. The uplift on the Black Mountains is so fast that the alluvial fans (fan-shaped deposits at the mouth of canyons) there are small and steep compared to the huge alluvial fans coming off the Panamint Range. Fast uplift of a mountain range in an arid environment often does not allow its canyons enough time to cut a classic V-shape all the way down to the stream bed. Instead, a V-shape ends at a slot canyon halfway down, forming a 'wine glass canyon.' Sediment is deposited on a small and steep alluvial fan.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: At below sea level at its lowest point, Badwater Basin on Death Valley's floor is the second-lowest depression in the Western Hemisphere (behind Laguna del Carbón in Argentina), while Mount Whitney, only to the west, rises to and is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States. This topographic relief is the greatest elevation gradient in the contiguous United States and is the terminus point of the Great Basin's southwestern drainage. Although the extreme lack of water in the Great Basin makes this distinction of little current practical use, it does mean that in wetter times the lake that once filled Death Valley (Lake Manly) was the last stop for water flowing in the region, meaning the water there was saturated in dissolved materials. Thus, the salt pans in Death Valley are among the largest in the world and are rich in minerals, such as borax and various salts and hydrates. The largest salt pan in the park extends from the Ashford Mill Site to the Salt Creek Hills, covering some of the valley floor. The best known playa in the park is the Racetrack, known for its moving rocks.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: According to the Köppen climate classification system, Death Valley National Park has a hot desert climate ("BWh"). The plant hardiness zone at Badwater Basin is 9b with an average annual extreme minimum temperature of 28.0 °F (–2.2 °C).


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Death Valley is the hottest and driest place in North America due to its lack of surface water and low relief. It is so frequently the hottest spot in the United States that many tabulations of the highest daily temperatures in the country omit Death Valley as a matter of course.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a high temperature of 134 °F (56.7 °C) at Greenland Ranch (now Furnace Creek) in Death Valley. This temperature stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded at the surface of the Earth. (A report of a temperature of 58 °C (136.4 °F) recorded in Libya in 1922 was later determined to be inaccurate.) Daily summer temperatures of or greater are common, as well as below freezing nightly temperatures in the winter. July is the hottest month, with an average high of and an average low of . December is the coldest month, with an average high of and an average low of . The record low is . There are an average of 197.3 days annually with highs of or higher and 146.9 days annually with highs of or higher. Freezing temperatures of or lower occur on an average of 8.6 days annually.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Several of the larger Death Valley springs derive their water from a regional aquifer, which extends as far east as southern Nevada and Utah. Much of the water in this aquifer has been there for many thousands of years, since the Pleistocene ice ages, when the climate was cooler and wetter. Today's drier climate does not provide enough precipitation to recharge the aquifer at the rate at which water is being withdrawn.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The highest range within the park is the Panamint Range, with Telescope Peak being its highest point at . The Death Valley region is a transitional zone in the northernmost part of the Mojave Desert and consists of five mountain ranges removed from the Pacific Ocean. Three of these are significant barriers: the Sierra Nevada, the Argus Range, and the Panamint Range. Air masses tend to lose moisture as they are forced up over mountain ranges, in what climatologists call a rainshadow effect.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The exaggerated rain shadow effect for the Death Valley area makes it North America's driest spot, receiving about of rainfall annually at Badwater, and some years fail to register any measurable rainfall. Annual average precipitation varies from overall below sea level to over in the higher mountains that surround the valley. When rain does arrive it often does so in intense storms that cause flash floods which remodel the landscape and sometimes create very shallow ephemeral lakes.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The hot, dry climate makes it difficult for soil to form. Mass wasting, the down-slope movement of loose rock, is therefore the dominant erosive force in mountainous areas, resulting in "skeletonized" ranges (mountains with very little soil on them). Sand dunes in the park, while famous, are not nearly as widespread as their fame or the dryness of the area may suggest. The Mesquite Flat dune field is the most easily accessible from the paved road just east of Stovepipe Wells in the north-central part of the valley and is primarily made of quartz sand. Another dune field is just to the north but is instead mostly composed of travertine sand. The highest dunes in the park, and some of the highest in North America, are located in the Eureka Valley about to the north of Stovepipe Wells, while the Panamint Valley dunes and the Saline Valley dunes are located west and northwest of the town, respectively. The Ibex dune field is near the seldom-visited Ibex Hill in the southernmost part of the park, just south of the Saratoga Springs marshland. All the latter four dune fields are accessible only via unpaved roads. Prevailing winds in the winter come from the north, and prevailing winds in the summer come from the south. Thus, the overall position of the dune fields remains more or less fixed.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: There are rare exceptions to the dry nature of the area. In 2005, an unusually wet winter created a 'lake' in the Badwater Basin and led to the greatest wildflower season in the park's history. In October 2015, a "1000 year flood event" with over three inches of rain caused major damage in Death Valley National Park. A similar widespread storm in August 2022 damaged pavement and deposited debris on nearly every road, trapping 1,000 residents and visitors overnight.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Four Native American cultures are known to have lived in the area during the last 10,000 years. The first known group, the Nevares Spring People, were hunters and gatherers who arrived in the area perhaps 9,000 years ago (7000 BC) when there were still small lakes in Death Valley and neighboring Panamint Valley. A much milder climate persisted at that time, and large game animals were still plentiful. By 5,000 years ago (3000 BC) the Mesquite Flat People displaced the Nevares Spring People. Around 2,000 years ago the Saratoga Spring People moved into the area, which by then was probably already a hot, dry desert. This culture was more advanced at hunting and gathering and was skillful at handcrafts. They also left mysterious stone patterns in the valley.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: One thousand years ago, the nomadic Timbisha (formerly called Shoshone and also known as Panamint or Koso) moved into the area and hunted game and gathered mesquite beans along with pinyon pine nuts. Because of the wide altitude differential between the valley bottom and the mountain ridges, especially on the west, the Timbisha practiced a vertical migration pattern. Their winter camps were located near water sources in the valley bottoms. As the spring and summer progressed and the weather warmed, grasses and other plant food sources ripened at progressively higher altitudes. November found them at the very top of the mountain ridges where they harvested pine nuts before moving back to the valley bottom for winter.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The California Gold Rush brought the first people of European descent known to visit the immediate area. In December 1849 two groups of California Gold Country-bound travelers with perhaps 100 wagons total stumbled into Death Valley after getting lost on what they thought was a shortcut off the Old Spanish Trail. Called the Bennett-Arcane Party, they were unable to find a pass out of the valley for weeks; they were able to find fresh water at various springs in the area, but were forced to eat several of their oxen to survive. They used the wood of their wagons to cook the meat and make jerky. The place where they did this is today referred to as "Burnt Wagons Camp" and is located near Stovepipe Wells.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: After abandoning their wagons, they eventually were able to hike out of the valley. Just after leaving the valley, one of the women in the group turned and said, "Goodbye Death Valley," giving the valley its name. Included in the party was William Lewis Manly whose autobiographical book "Death Valley in '49" detailed this trek and popularized the area (geologists later named the prehistoric lake that once filled the valley after him).


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The ores that are most famously associated with the area were also the easiest to collect and the most profitable: evaporite deposits such as salts, borate, and talc. Borax was found by Rosie and Aaron Winters near The Ranch at Death Valley (then called Greenland) in 1881. Later that same year, the Eagle Borax Works became Death Valley's first commercial borax operation. William Tell Coleman built the Harmony Borax Works plant and began to process ore in late 1883 or early 1884, continuing until 1888. This mining and smelting company produced borax to make soap and for industrial uses. The end product was shipped out of the valley to the Mojave railhead in 10-ton-capacity wagons pulled by "twenty-mule teams" that were actually teams of 18 mules and two horses each.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The teams averaged two miles (3 km) an hour and required about 30 days to complete a round trip. The trade name "20-Mule Team Borax" was established by Francis Marion Smith's Pacific Coast Borax Company after Smith acquired Coleman's borax holdings in 1890. A memorable advertising campaign used the wagon's image to promote the Boraxo brand of granular hand soap and the Death Valley Days radio and television programs. In 1914, the Death Valley Railroad was built to serve mining operations on the east side of the valley. Mining continued after the collapse of Coleman's empire, and by the late 1920s the area was the world's number one source of borax. Some four to six million years old, the Furnace Creek Formation is the primary source of borate minerals gathered from Death Valley's playas.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Other visitors stayed to prospect for and mine deposits of copper, gold, lead, and silver. These sporadic mining ventures were hampered by their remote location and the harsh desert environment. In December 1903, two men from Ballarat were prospecting for silver. One was an out-of-work Irish miner named Jack Keane and the other was a one-eyed Basque butcher named Domingo Etcharren. Quite by accident, Keane discovered an immense ledge of free-milling gold by the duo's work site and named the claim the Keane Wonder Mine. This started a minor and short-lived gold rush into the area. The Keane Wonder Mine, along with mines at Rhyolite, Skidoo and Harrisburg, were the only ones to extract enough metal ore to make them worthwhile. Outright shams such as Leadfield also occurred, but most ventures quickly ended after a short series of prospecting mines failed to yield evidence of significant ore (these mines now dot the entire area and are a significant hazard to anyone who enters them). The boom towns which sprang up around these mines flourished during the first decade of the 1900s, but soon declined after the Panic of 1907.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The first documented tourist facilities in Death Valley were a set of tent houses built in the 1920s where Stovepipe Wells is now located. People flocked to resorts built around natural springs thought to have curative and restorative properties. In 1927, Pacific Coast Borax turned the crew quarters of its Furnace Creek Ranch into a resort, creating the Furnace Creek Inn and resort. The spring at Furnace Creek was harnessed to develop the resort, and as the water was diverted, the surrounding marshes and wetlands started to shrink.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Soon the valley was a popular winter destination. Other facilities started off as private getaways but were later opened to the public. Most notable among these was Death Valley Ranch, better known as Scotty's Castle. This large ranch home built in the Spanish Revival style became a hotel in the late 1930s and, largely because of the fame of Death Valley Scotty, a tourist attraction. Death Valley Scotty, whose real name was Walter Scott, was a gold miner who pretended to be the owner of "his castle", which he claimed to have built with profits from his gold mine. Neither claim was true, but the real owner, Chicago millionaire Albert Mussey Johnson, encouraged the myth. When asked by reporters what his connection was to Walter Scott's castle, Johnson replied that he was Mr. Scott's banker.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: President Herbert Hoover proclaimed a national monument in and around Death Valley on February 11, 1933, setting aside almost two million acres (8,000 km) of southeastern California and small parts of Nevada.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) developed infrastructure in Death Valley National Monument during the Great Depression and on into the early 1940s. The CCC built barracks, graded of roads, installed water and telephone lines, and a total of 76 buildings. Trails in the Panamint Range were built to points of scenic interest, and an adobe village, laundry and trading post were constructed for the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe. Five campgrounds, restrooms, an airplane landing field and picnic facilities were also built.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The creation of the monument resulted in a temporary closing of the lands to prospecting and mining. However, Death Valley was quickly reopened to mining by Congressional action in June 1933. As improvements in mining technology allowed lower grades of ore to be processed, and new heavy equipment allowed greater amounts of rock to be moved, mining in Death Valley changed. Gone were the days of the "single-blanket, jackass prospector" long associated with the romantic west. Open pit and strip mines scarred the landscape as international mining corporations bought claims in highly visible areas of the national monument. The public outcry that ensued led to greater protection for all national park and monument areas in the United States. In 1976, Congress passed the Mining in the Parks Act, which closed Death Valley National Monument to the filing of new mining claims, banned open-pit mining and required the National Park Service to examine the validity of tens of thousands of pre-1976 mining claims. Mining was allowed to resume on a limited basis in 1980 with stricter environmental standards. The last mine in the park, Billie Mine, closed in 2005.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Death Valley National Monument was designated a biosphere reserve in 1984. On October 31, 1994, the monument was expanded by 1.3 million acres (5,300 km) and re-designated as a national park, via congressional passage of the California Desert Protection Act (Public Law 103–433). Consequently, the elevated status for Death Valley made it the largest national park in the contiguous United States. On March 12, 2019, the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act added to the park.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Many of the larger cities and towns within the boundary of the regional groundwater flow system that the park and its plants and animals rely upon are experiencing some of the fastest growth rates of any place in the United States. Notable examples within a radius of Death Valley National Park include Las Vegas and Pahrump, Nevada. In the case of Las Vegas, the local Chamber of Commerce estimates that 6,000 people are moving to the city every month. Between 1985 and 1995, the population of the Las Vegas Valley increased from 550,700 to 1,138,800.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: In 1977, parts of Death Valley were used by director George Lucas as a filming location for "Star Wars", providing the setting for the fictional planet Tatooine.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The park has a diverse and complex geologic history. Since its formation, the area that comprises the park has experienced at least four major periods of extensive volcanism, three or four periods of major sedimentation, and several intervals of major tectonic deformation where the crust has been reshaped. Two periods of glaciation (a series of ice ages) have also had effects on the area, although no glaciers ever existed in the ranges now in the park.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Little is known about the history of the oldest exposed rocks in the area due to extensive metamorphism (alteration of rock by heat and pressure). Radiometric dating gives an age of 1,700 million years for the metamorphism during the Proterozoic. About 1,400 million years ago a mass of granite now in the Panamint Range intruded this complex. Uplift later exposed these rocks to nearly 500 million years of erosion.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The Proterozoic sedimentary formations of the Pahrump Group were deposited on these basement rocks. This occurred following uplift and erosion of any earlier sediments from the Proterozoic basement rocks. The Pahrump is composed of arkose conglomerate (quartz clasts in a concrete-like matrix) and mudstone in its lower part, followed by dolomite from carbonate banks topped by algal mats as stromatolites, and finished with basin-filling sediment derived from the above, including possible glacial till from the hypothesized Snowball Earth glaciation. The very youngest rocks in the Pahrump Group are basaltic lava flows.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: A rift opened and subsequently flooded the region as part of the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia in the Neoproterozoic (by about 755 million years ago) and the creation of the Pacific Ocean. A shoreline similar to the present Atlantic Ocean margin of the United States lay to the east. An algal mat-covered carbonate bank was deposited, forming the Noonday Dolomite. Subsidence of the region occurred as the continental crust thinned and the newly formed Pacific widened, forming the Ibex Formation. An angular unconformity (an uneven gap in the geologic record) followed.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: A true ocean basin developed to the west, breaking all the earlier formations along a steep front. A wedge of clastic sediment then began to accumulate at the base of the two underwater precipices, starting the formation of opposing continental shelves. Three formations developed from sediment that accumulated on the wedge. The region's first known fossils of complex life are found in the resulting formations. Notable among these are the Ediacara fauna and trilobites, the evolution of the latter being part of the Cambrian Explosion of life.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The sandy mudflats gave way about 550 million years ago to a carbonate platform (similar to the one around the present-day Bahamas), which lasted for the next 300 million years of Paleozoic time (refer to the middle of the ). Death Valley's position was then within ten or twenty degrees of the Paleozoic equator. Thick beds of carbonate-rich sediments were periodically interrupted by periods of emergence. Although details of geography varied during this immense interval of time, a north-northeastern coastline trend generally ran from Arizona up through Utah. The resulting eight formations and one group are thick and underlay much of the Cottonwood, Funeral, Grapevine, and Panamint ranges.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: In the early-to-mid- Mesozoic the western edge of the North American continent was pushed against the oceanic plate under the Pacific Ocean, creating a subduction zone. A subduction zone is a type of contact between different crustal plates where heavier crust slides below lighter crust. Erupting volcanoes and uplifting mountains were created as a result, and the coastline was pushed to the west. The Sierran Arc started to form to the northwest from heat and pressure generated from subduction, and compressive forces caused thrust faults to develop.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: A long period of uplift and erosion was concurrent with and followed the above events, creating a major unconformity, which is a large gap in the geologic record. Sediments worn off the Death Valley region were carried both east and west by wind and water. No Jurassic- to Eocene-aged sedimentary formations exist in the area, except for some possibly Jurassic-age volcanic rocks (see the top of the ).


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Basin and Range-associated stretching of large parts of crust below southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico started around 16 million years ago and the region is still spreading. This stretching began to affect the Death and Panamint valleys area by 3 million years ago. Before this, rocks now in the Panamint Range were on top of rocks that would become the Black Mountains and the Cottonwood Mountains. Lateral and vertical transport of these blocks was accomplished by movement on normal faults. Right-lateral movement along strike-slip faults that run parallel to and at the base of the ranges also helped to develop the area. Torsional forces, probably associated with northwesterly movement of the Pacific Plate along the San Andreas Fault (west of the region), is responsible for the lateral movement.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Igneous activity associated with this stretching occurred from 12 million to 4 million years ago. Sedimentation is concentrated in valleys (basins) from material eroded from adjacent ranges. The amount of sediment deposited has roughly kept up with this subsidence, resulting in the retention of more or less the same valley floor elevation over time.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Pleistocene ice ages started 2 million years ago, and melt from alpine glaciers on the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains fed a series of lakes that filled Death and Panamint valleys and surrounding basins (see the top of the ). The lake that filled Death Valley was the last of a chain of lakes fed by the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers, and possibly also the Owens River. The large lake that covered much of Death Valley's floor, which geologists call Lake Manly, started to dry up 10,500 years ago. Salt pans and playas were created as ice age glaciers retreated, thus drastically reducing the lakes' water source. Only faint shorelines are left.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Habitat varies from salt pan at below sea level to the sub-alpine conditions found on the summit of Telescope Peak, which rises to . Vegetation zones include creosote bush, desert holly, and mesquite at the lower elevations and sage up through shadscale, blackbrush, Joshua tree, pinyon-juniper, to limber pine and bristlecone pine woodlands. The salt pan is devoid of vegetation, and the rest of the valley floor and lower slopes have sparse cover, although where water is available, an abundance of vegetation is usually present.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: These zones and the adjacent desert support a variety of wildlife species, including 51 species of native mammals, 307 species of birds, 36 species of reptiles, 3 species of amphibians, and 2 species of native fish.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Small mammals are more numerous than large mammals, such as bighorn sheep, coyotes, bobcats, kit foxes, cougars, and mule deer. Mule deer are present in the pinyon/juniper associations of the Grapevine, Cottonwood, and Panamint ranges. Bighorn sheep are a rare species of mountain-dwelling sheep that exist in isolated bands in the Sierra and in Death Valley. These are highly adaptable animals and can eat almost any plant. They have no known predators, but humans and burros compete for habitat.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The ancestors of the Death Valley pupfish swam to the area from the Colorado River via a long-since dried-up system of rivers and lakes (see Lake Manly). They now live in two separate populations: one in Salt Creek and another in Cottonball Marsh. Death Valley is one of the hottest and driest places in North America, yet it is home to over 1,000 species of plants; 23 of which, including the very rare rock lady ("Holmgrenanthe"), are not found anywhere else.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Adaptation to the dry environment is key. For example, creosote bush and mesquite have tap-root systems that can extend down in order to take advantage of a year-round supply of ground water. The diversity of Death Valley's plant communities results partly from the region's location in a transition zone between the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin Desert and the Sonoran Desert. This location, combined with the great relief found within the park, supports vegetation typical of three biotic life zones: the lower Sonoran, the Canadian, and the arctic/alpine in portions of the Panamint Range. Based on the Munz and Keck (1968) classifications, seven plant communities can be categorized within these life zones, each characterized by dominant vegetation and representative of three vegetation types: scrub, desert woodland, and coniferous forest. Microhabitats further subdivide some communities into zones, especially on the valley floor.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Unlike more typical locations across the Mojave Desert, many of the water-dependent Death Valley habitats possess a diversity of plant and animal species that are not found anywhere else in the world. The existence of these species is due largely to a unique geologic history and the process of evolution that has progressed in habitats that have been isolated from one another since the Pleistocene epoch.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Sightseeing is available by personal automobile, four-wheel drive, bicycle, mountain bike (on established roadways only), and hiking. Riding through the park on motorcycle is also a popular pastime. State Route 190, the Badwater Road, the Scotty's Castle Road, and paved roads to Dante's View and Wildrose provide access to the major scenic viewpoints and historic points of interest. More than of unpaved and four-wheel-drive roads provide access to wilderness hiking, camping, and historical sites. All vehicles must be licensed and street legal. Unlike many other national parks in the U.S. there are no formal entrance stations, and instead entry fees can be paid at the visitor centers, ranger stations, or various fee machines around the park. There are hiking trails of varying lengths and difficulties, but most backcountry areas are accessible only by cross-country hiking. There are thousands of hiking possibilities. The normal season for visiting the park is from October 15 to May 15, avoiding summer extremes in temperature. Costumed living history tours of the historic Death Valley Scotty's Castle were conducted for a fee, but were suspended in October 2015 due to extensive flood damage to the buildings and grounds. It remains closed to the public.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: There are nine designated campgrounds within the park, and overnight backcountry camping permits are available at the Visitor Center. Xanterra Parks & Resorts owns and operates a private resort, the Oasis at Death Valley, which comprises two separate and distinct hotels: the Inn at Death Valley is a four-star historic hotel, and the Ranch at Death Valley is a three-star ranch-style property reminiscent of the mining and prospecting days. Panamint Springs Resort is in the western part of the park. Death Valley Lodging Company operates the Stovepipe Wells Resort under a concession permit. There are a few motels near entrances to the park, in Shoshone, Death Valley Junction, Beatty, and Pahrump.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Furnace Creek Visitor Center is located on CA-190. A 22-minute introductory slide program is shown every 30 minutes. During the winter season—November through April—rangers offer interpretive tours and a wide variety of walks, talks, and slide presentations about Death Valley cultural and natural history. The visitor center has displays dealing with the park's geology, climate, wildlife and natural history. There are also specific sections dealing with the human history and pioneer experience. The Death Valley Natural History Association maintains a bookstore specifically geared to the natural and cultural history of the park.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: The northeast corner of Saline Valley has several developed hot spring pools. The pools can be accessed by driving on the unpaved Saline Valley Road for several hours, or by flying a personal aircraft to the Chicken Strip—an uncharted airstrip a short walk from the springs.


title: Death Valley National Park

text: Death Valley National Park is a popular location for stargazing as it has one of the darkest night skies in the United States. Despite its remote location, air quality and night visibility are threatened by civilization. In particular, light pollution is introduced by nearby Las Vegas. The darkest skies are, in general, located in the northwest of the park. The northwestern area of the park, including sites such as Ubehebe Crater, is a Bortle class 1 or "excellent dark sky" site. The Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy are visible to the unaided eye under these conditions, and the Milky Way casts shadows; optical phenomena such as zodiacal light or "false dawn" and gegenschein are also visible to the unaided eye under these conditions. Most southern regions of the park are Bortle class 2 or "average dark sky" sites.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a 1999 martial arts crime thriller film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Forest Whitaker stars as the title character, the mysterious "Ghost Dog", a hitman in the employ of the Mafia, who follows the ancient code of the samurai as outlined in the book of Yamamoto Tsunetomo's recorded sayings, "Hagakure". Critics have noted similarities between the movie and Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 film "Le Samouraï".


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: The film opened to largely positive critical reception, and was nominated for both an Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and a César Award for Best Foreign Film.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Ghost Dog sees himself as a retainer of Louie, a local mobster, who saved Ghost Dog's life years earlier. While living as a hitman for the American Mafia, he adheres to the code of the samurai, and interprets and applies the wisdom of the "Hagakure".


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Louie tells Ghost Dog to kill a gangster, Handsome Frank, who is sleeping with the daughter of local mafia boss Vargo. Ghost Dog arrives and kills the gangster, before seeing that the girl is also in the room; he leaves her alive. To avoid being implicated in the murder of a made man, Vargo and his associate Sonny Valerio decide to get rid of Ghost Dog. Louie knows practically nothing about Ghost Dog, as the hitman communicates only by homing pigeon. The mobsters start by tracing all the pigeon coops in town. They find Ghost Dog's cabin atop a building and kill his pigeons. Ghost Dog realizes he must kill Vargo and his men or they will kill him and his master.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: During the day, Ghost Dog frequently visits the park to see his best friend, a French-speaking ice cream man named Raymond. Ghost Dog does not understand French and Raymond does not understand English but the two nonetheless seem to connect with each other. Ghost Dog also befriends a little girl named Pearline, to whom he lends the book "Rashōmon".


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Eventually, Ghost Dog invades Vargo's mansion and kills almost everyone single-handedly, sparing only Louie and Vargo's daughter. That night, Ghost Dog kills Sonny Valerio at his home by shooting him through a pipe. Ghost Dog expects that Louie will attack him (as he feels that Louie is obliged to avenge the murder of his boss, Vargo). He goes to the park and gives Raymond all his money, helping him to stay in the country. Pearline appears and gives back "Rashōmon" to Ghost Dog, saying that she liked it. Ghost Dog gives Pearline his copy of "Hagakure" and encourages her to read it.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Though Louie feels some loyalty to Ghost Dog, he finally confronts him at Raymond's ice cream stand with Raymond and Pearline watching. Ghost Dog is unwilling to attack his master and allows Louie to kill him. His last act is to give Louie the copy of "Rashōmon" and encourage him to read it. Pearline takes Ghost Dog's empty gun and aims at Louie as he flees. Ghost Dog dies peacefully with Raymond and Pearline at his side; Louie gets into a car with Vargo's daughter (who now has replaced her father as his boss). Later, Pearline reads the "Hagakure".


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: The film was shot mostly in Jersey City, New Jersey, but the movie never mentions where the story is set. License plates reveal it is in "The Industrial State" and a vehicle from another state has on its license plate "The Highway State", both of which are fictional state nicknames.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Critical response to the film was largely positive. On the Rotten Tomatoes review site, the film has an 82% "Certified Fresh" rating, based on reviews from 95 critics. The website's critical consensus was that the movie is "An innovative blend of samurai and gangster lifestyles." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 67 based on 31 critics' reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews."


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, describing it as "truly, profoundly weird." Ebert's review proposed "Ghost Dog" made the most sense if Whitaker's character were insane: "In a quiet, sweet way, he is totally unhinged and has lost all touch with reality. His profound sadness, which permeates the touching Whitaker performance, comes from his alienation from human society, his loneliness, his attempt to justify inhuman behavior (murder) with a belief system (the samurai code) that has no connection with his life or his world." J. Hoberman of "The Village Voice" described it as "an impeccably shot and sensationally scored deadpan parody of two current popular modes" (hitman films and mafia films).


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: The film was nominated for the Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics, the César Award for Best Foreign Film of 2000 and the Palme d'Or award at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for Best Feature at the 16th Independent Spirit Awards.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: US and Japanese versions of the soundtrack album have been released, each with a different set of tracks. The Japanese release also has some songs not in the film. Songs in the film that don't appear on either soundtrack album include "From Then Till Now" performed by Killah Priest, "Armagideon Time" performed by Willi Williams, "Nuba One" performed by Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons and "Cold Lampin With Flavor" performed by Public Enemy.


title: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

text: The film has been interpreted by critics as an homage to "Le Samouraï", a 1967 crime-drama by Jean-Pierre Melville starring Alain Delon. That movie opens with a quote from an invented "Book of Bushido" and features a meditative, loner hero, Jef Costello. In the same manner that Ghost Dog has an electronic "key" to break into luxury cars, Costello has a huge ring of keys that enable him to steal any Citroën DS. The endings share a key similarity. The peculiar relationship between the protagonists of both movies and birds, as companions and danger advisers, is another common theme. The film contains a number of references to Seijun Suzuki's "Branded to Kill", such as when a bird lands in front of Ghost Dog's rifle scope, referencing the incident with a butterfly in Suzuki's film. Ghost Dog shooting Sonny Valerio up the drain pipe is taken from "Branded to Kill".


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Chlamydia trachomatis (), commonly known as chlamydia, is a bacterium that causes chlamydia, which can manifest in various ways, including: trachoma, lymphogranuloma venereum, nongonococcal urethritis, cervicitis, salpingitis, pelvic inflammatory disease. "C. trachomatis" is the most common infectious cause of blindness and the most common sexually transmitted bacterium.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Different types of "C. trachomatis" cause different diseases. The most common strains cause disease in the genital tract, while other strains cause disease in the eye or lymph nodes. Like other "Chlamydia" species, the "C. trachomatis" life cycle consists of two morphologically distinct life stages: elementary bodies and reticulate bodies. Elementary bodies are spore-like and infectious, whereas reticulate bodies are in the replicative stage and are seen only within host cells.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "Chlamydia trachomatis" is a gram-negative bacterium that can replicate only within a host cell. Over the course of the "C. trachomatis" life cycle, the bacteria take on two distinct forms. Elementary bodies are 200 to 400 nanometers across, and are surrounded by a rigid cell wall that allows them to survive outside of a host cell. This form can initiate a new infection if it comes into contact with a susceptible host cell. Reticulate bodies are 600 to 1500 nanometers across, and are found only within host cells. Neither form is motile.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: The "C. trachomatis" genome is substantially smaller than that of many other bacteria at approximately 1.04 megabases, encoding approximately 900 genes. Several important metabolic functions are not encoded in the "C. trachomatis" genome, and instead, are likely scavenged from the host cell. In addition to the chromosome that contains most of the genome, nearly all "C. trachomatis" strains carry a 7.5 kilobase plasmid that contains 8 genes. The role of this plasmid is unknown, though strains without the plasmid have been isolated, suggesting it is not required for survival of the bacterium.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Like other "Chlamydia" species, "C. trachomatis" has a life cycle consisting of two morphologically distinct forms. First, "C. trachomatis" attaches to a new host cell as a small spore-like form called the elementary body. The elementary body enters the host cell, surrounded by a host vacuole, called an inclusion. Within the inclusion, "C. trachomatis" transforms into a larger, more metabolically active form called the reticulate body. The reticulate body substantially modifies the inclusion, making it a more hospitable environment for rapid replication of the bacteria, which occurs over the following 30 to 72 hours. The massive number of intracellular bacteria then transition back to resistant elementary bodies, before causing the cell to rupture and being released into the environment. These new elementary bodies are then shed in the semen or released from epithelial cells of the female genital tract, and attach to new host cells.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" are bacteria in the genus "Chlamydia", a group of obligate intracellular parasites of eukaryotic cells. Chlamydial cells cannot carry out energy metabolism and they lack biosynthetic pathways.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" strains are generally divided into three biovars based on the type of disease they cause. These are further subdivided into several serovars based on the surface antigens recognized by the immune system. Serovars A through C cause trachoma, which is the world's leading cause of preventable infectious blindness. Serovars D through K infect the genital tract, causing pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancies, and infertility. Serovars L1 through L3 cause an invasive infection of the lymph nodes near the genitals, called lymphogranuloma venereum.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" is thought to have diverged from other "Chlamydia" species around 6 million years ago. This genus contains a total of nine species: "C. trachomatis", "C. muridarum", "C. pneumoniae", "C. pecorum", "C. suis", "C. abortus", "C. felis", "C. caviae", and "C. psittaci". The closest relative to "C. trachomatis" is "C. muridarum", which infects mice. "C. trachomatis" along with "C. pneumoniae" have been found to infect humans to a greater extent. "C. trachomatis" exclusively infects humans. "C. pneumoniae" is found to also infect horses, marsupials, and frogs. Some of the other species can have a considerable impact on human health due to their known zoonotic transmission.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Clinical signs and symptoms of "C. trachomatis" infection in the genitalia present as the chlamydia infection, which may be asymptomatic or may resemble a gonorrhea infection.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Both are common causes of multiple other conditions including pelvic inflammatory disease and urethritis.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" is the single most important infectious agent associated with blindness (trachoma), and it also affects the eyes in the form of inclusion conjunctivitis and is responsible for about 19% of adult cases of conjunctivitis.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" in the lungs presents as the chlamydia pneumoniae respiratory infection and can affect all ages.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Elementary bodies are generally present in the semen of infected men and vaginal secretions of infected women. When they come into contact with a new host cell, the elementary bodies bind to the cell via interaction between adhesins on their surface and several host receptor proteins and heparan sulfate proteoglycans. Once attached, the bacteria inject various effector proteins into the host cell using a type three secretion system. These effectors trigger the host cell to take up the elementary bodies and prevent the cell from triggering apoptosis. Within 6 to 8 hours after infection, the elementary bodies transition to reticulate bodies and a number of new effectors are synthesized. These effectors include a number of proteins that modify the inclusion membrane, called Inc proteins, as well as proteins that redirect host vesicles to the inclusion. 8 to 16 hours after infection, another set of effectors are synthesized, driving acquisition of nutrients from the host cell. At this stage, the reticulate bodies begin to divide, coinciding with the expansion of the inclusion. If several elementary bodies have infected a single cell, their inclusions will fuse at this point to create a single large inclusion in the host cell. From 24 to 72 hours after infection, reticulate bodies transition to elementary bodies which are released either by lysis of the host cell or extrusion of the entire inclusion into the host genital tract.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Most people infected with "C. trachomatis" are asymptomatic. However, the bacteria can present in one of three ways: genitourinary (genitals), pulmonary (lungs), and ocular (eyes).


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Genitourinary cases can include genital discharge, vaginal bleeding, itchiness (pruritus), painful urination (dysuria), among other symptoms. Often, symptoms are similar to those of a urinary tract infection.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: When "C. trachomatis" presents in the eye in the form of trachoma it begins by gradually thickening the eyelids, and eventually begins to pull the eyelashes into the eyelid. In the form of inclusion conjunctivitis the infection presents with redness, swelling, mucopurulent discharge from the eye, and most other symptoms associated with adult conjunctivitis.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: When "C. trachomatis" is in the lungs in the form of a respiratory infection it typically has symptoms of a runny or stuffy nose, low-grade fever, hoarseness of voice, as well as other symptoms associated with general pneumonia.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" may latently infect the chorionic villi tissues of pregnant women, thereby impacting pregnancy outcome.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Three times as many women are diagnosed with genitourinary "C. trachomatis" infections than men. Women aged 15–19 have the highest prevalence, followed by women aged 20–24, although the rate of increase of diagnosis is greater for men than for women. Risk factors for genitourinary infections include unprotected sex with multiple partners, lack of condom use, and low socioeconomic status living in urban areas.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Pulmonary infections can occur in infants born to women with active chlamydia infections, although the rate of infection is less than 10%.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Ocular infections take the form of inclusion conjunctivitis or trachoma, both in adults and children. About 84 million worldwide develop "C. trachomatis" eye infections and 8 million are blinded as a result of the infection. Trachoma is the primary source of infectious blindness in some parts of rural Africa and Asia and is a neglected tropical disease that has been targeted by the World Health Organization for elimination by 2020. Inclusion conjunctivitis from "C. trachomatis" is responsible for about 19% of adult cases of conjunctivitis.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Treatment depends on the infection site, age of the patient, and whether another infection is present. Having a "C. trachomatis" and one or more other sexually transmitted infections at the same time is possible. Treatment is often done with both partners simultaneously to prevent reinfection. "C. trachomatis" may be treated with several antibiotic medications, including azithromycin, erythromycin, ofloxacin, and tetracycline.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Tetracycline is the most preferred antibiotic to treat "C.trachomatis" and has the highest success rate"." Azithromycin and doxycycline have equal efficacy to treat "C. trachomatis" with 97 and 98 percent success, respectively. Azithromycin is dosed as a 1 gram tablet that is taken by mouth as a single dose, primarily to help with concerns of non-adherence. Treatment with generic doxycycline 100  mg twice a day for 7 days has equal success with expensive delayed-release doxycycline 200 mg once a day for 7 days. Erythromycin is less preferred as it may cause gastrointestinal side effects, which can lead to non-adherence. Levofloxacin and ofloxacin are generally no better than azithromycin or doxycycline and are more expensive.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: If treatment is necessary during pregnancy, levofloxacin, ofloxacin, tetracycline, and doxycycline are not prescribed. In the case of a patient who is pregnant, the medications typically prescribed are azithromycin, amoxicillin, and erythromycin. Azithromycin is the recommended medication and is taken as a 1 gram tablet taken by mouth as a single dose. Despite amoxicillin having fewer side effects than the other medications for treating antenatal "C. trachomatis" infection, there have been concerns that pregnant women who take penicillin-class antibiotics can develop a chronic persistent chlamydia infection. Tetracycline is not used because some children and even adults can not withstand the drug, causing harm to the mother and fetus. Retesting during pregnancy can be performed three weeks after treatment. If the risk of reinfection is high, screening can be repeated throughout pregnancy.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: If the infection has progressed, ascending the reproductive tract and pelvic inflammatory disease develops, damage to the fallopian tubes may have already occurred. In most cases, the "C. trachomatis" infection is then treated on an outpatient basis with azithromycin or doxycycline. Treating the mother of an infant with "C. trachomatis" of the eye, which can evolve into pneumonia, is recommended. The recommended treatment consists of oral erythromycin base or ethylsuccinate 50 mg/kg/day divided into 4 doses daily for two weeks while monitoring for symptoms of infantile hypertrophic pyloric stenosis (IHPS) in infants less than 6 weeks old.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: There have been a few reported cases of "C.trachomatis" strains that were resistant to multiple antibiotic treatments. However, as of 2018, this is not a major cause of concern as antibiotic resistance is rare in "C.trachomatis" compared to other infectious bacteria.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "Chlamydia" species are readily identified and distinguished from other "Chlamydia" species using DNA-based tests. Tests for Chlamydia can be ordered from a doctor, a lab or online.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Most strains of "C. trachomatis" are recognized by monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to epitopes in the VS4 region of MOMP. However, these mAbs may also cross-react with two other "Chlamydia" species, "C. suis" and "C. muridarum".


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Due to its significance to human health, "C. trachomatis" is the subject of research in laboratories around the world. The bacteria are commonly grown in immortalised cell lines such as McCoy cells (see RPMI 1640) and HeLa cells. Infectious particles can be quantified by infecting cell layers and counting the number of inclusions, analogous to a plaque assay. Recent research has found that a pair of disulfide bond proteins, which are necessary for "C. trachomatis" to be able to infect host cells, is very similar to a homologous pair of proteins found in Escherichia coli (E. coli), though the reaction's speed is slower in "C. trachomatis".


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Other research has been conducted to try to get a feel for how to create a vaccine against "C. trachomatis," finding that it would be very difficult to create a fully effective or even partially effective vaccine since the host's response to infection involves complex immunological pathways that must first be fully understood to ensure that adverse effects are avoided.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: In August 2016 a Phase I, double-blind, parallel, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was undertaken by the Danish Statens Serum Institut at Hammersmith Hospital in London, UK, in healthy women aged 19–45 years. The trial aimed to assess the safety and ability to provoke an immune response of the CTH522 chlamydia vaccine. 35 women not infected with chlamydia were included in the trial. The trial included two adjuvants and a saline control group. The vaccine was found to be safe, and all women who received the vaccine regardless of adjuvant developed an immune response against chlamydia.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: The Serum Institute has announced that it will continue to pursue funding to move the vaccine into a Phase II trial.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" was first described in 1907 by Stanislaus von Prowazek and Ludwig Halberstädter in scrapings from trachoma cases. Thinking they had discovered a "mantled protozoan", they named the organism "Chlamydozoa" from the Greek "Chlamys" meaning mantle. Over the next several decades, "Chlamydozoa" was thought to be a virus as it was small enough to pass through bacterial filters and unable to grow on known laboratory media. However, in 1966 electron microscopy studies showed "C. trachomatis" to be a bacterium. This is essentially due to the fact that they were found to possess DNA, RNA, and ribosomes like other bacteria. It was originally believed that Chlamydia lacked peptidoglycan because researchers were unable to detect muramic acid in cell extracts. Subsequent studies determined that "C. trachomatis" synthesizes both muramic acid and peptidoglycan, but relegates it to the microbe's division septum and does not utilize it for construction of a cell wall. The bacterium is still classified as gram-negative


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: "C. trachomatis" agent was first cultured and isolated in the yolk sacs of eggs by Tang Fei-fan "et al." in 1957. This was a significant milestone because it became possible to preserve these agents which could then be used for future genomic and phylogenetic studies. The isolation of "C. trachomatis" coined the term isolate to describe how "C. trachomatis" has been isolated from an in vivo setting into a "strain" in cell culture. Only a few "isolates" have been studied in detail, limiting the information that can be found on the evolutionary history of "C. trachomatis".


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: In the 1990s it was shown that there are several species of "Chlamydia". "Chlamydia trachomatis" was first described in historical records in Ebers papyrus written between 1553 and 1550 BC. In the ancient world, it was known as the blinding disease trachoma. The disease may have been closely linked with humans and likely predated civilization. It is now known that "C. trachomatis" comprises 19 serovars which are identified by monoclonal antibodies that react to epitopes on the major outer-membrane protein (MOMP). Comparison of amino acid sequences reveals that MOMP contains four variable segments: S1,2 ,3 and 4. Different variants of the gene that encodes for MOMP, differentiate the genotypes of the different serovars. The antigenic relatedness of the serovars reflects the homology levels of DNA between MOMP genes, especially within these segments.


title: Chlamydia trachomatis

text: Furthermore, there have been over 220 Chlamydia vaccine trials done on mice and other non-human host species to target "C. muridarum" and "C. trachomatis" strains. However, it has been difficult to translate these results to the human species due to physiological and anatomical differences. Future trials are working with closely related species to the human.


title: Jerry Yan

text: Jerry Yan (), born Liao Yangzhen (), is a Taiwanese actor, model and singer. He is well known for his lead role as Daoming Si in the Taiwanese dramas "Meteor Garden" and "Meteor Garden II", an adaptation of a Japanese shōjō manga. He is also a former member of the boy band group F4.


title: Jerry Yan

text: Yan became a model in 2000, after winning the 1998 TVBS Modelling Competition and Men's UNO modelling competition. He began filming advertisements and starring in music videos. In 2000, Jerry began his acting career. His first role is a supporting role in "".


title: Jerry Yan

text: With his role as "Daoming Si" in the highly popular Taiwanese drama "Meteor Garden" and its sequel "Meteor Garden II", Jerry shot to fame and became popular across Asia. At the conclusion of the series, Jerry along with the other cast members of "Meteor Garden"; Vic Chou, Vanness Wu and Ken Chu continued to perform together and released three studio albums as the quartet boy band F4.


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2004, Jerry released his debut solo album, "Jerry for You". The album was awarded as one of the "Top 10 Selling Mandarin Albums of the Year" at the IFPI Hong Kong Album Sales Awards, presented by the Hong Kong branch of IFPI. He also won the "Best Album" and "Best Newcomer" (for the Hong Kong/Taiwan region) awards at the China Top Music Awards. The same year, he starred in the Hong Kong romantic comedy "Magic Kitchen" alongside Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng, marking his film debut.


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2006, Jerry starred in the critically acclaimed Taiwanese medical drama "The Hospital". It was the first Taiwanese series to be imported by Japan's NHK for broadcast.


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2009, Jerry starred in "Starlit", co-produced by China's China Central Television, Taiwan's Jam Entertainment and Japan's Geneon Entertainment. Broadcasting rights to the show were sold to 15 countries. The series also won "Best Overseas Drama" at the Sky Perfect TV Award.


title: Jerry Yan

text: The same year, Jerry released his second solo album titled, "Freedom". According to Taiwan's G-Music chart the album is the ninth best selling album in Taiwan in 2009. The Japanese version ranked No. 2 on the daily chart and No. 8 on the weekly chart in Japan's Oricon Chart. He then held a solo concert in Japan; Due to high demand, two additional shows were added. Jerry became the only Taiwanese artist to win "Best International Artist" at the Best Jeanist Awards. He also won "Asia's Most Popular Singer" at the South East Music Chart Awards.


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2010, Jerry starred in the China-Taiwan co-production "Down with Love" alongside Ella Chen of S.H.E. Despite having its episodes leaked in Taiwan, it still managed to reach the first-place spot among TV show ratings. He then released his third album, "My Secret Lover", which included soundtracks of "The Hospital" and "Hot Shot" sung by Jerry. At the Yahoo! Asia Buzz Awards, Jerry was chosen as "Most Popular Taiwan Singer in Korea". He was also named as one of the "Top 10 Singers" in Singapore and Taiwan. He placed 6th on Channel V's Fresh Asia Charts, being the highest ranking for Taiwanese singers.


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2011, Jerry starred in "My Splendid Life", a remake of the 2009 Korean hit drama "Brilliant Legacy". The series reached 100 million views on Youku, and topped the ratings charts for numerous weeks. The same year, he won Best Asian Star at the Asia Model Awards held in Seoul.


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2014, Jerry starred in the romance melodrama "Loving, Never Forgetting" opposite Chinese actress Tong Liya, playing a single father. The same year, he starred in the Japanese heist film "Lupin III: Necklace of Cleopatra" based on the manga of the same name alongside Shun Oguri, the lead actor of the Japanese version of "Meteor Garden", and Kim Joon, one of the lead actors of the Korean version of "Meteor Garden".


title: Jerry Yan

text: In 2015, Jerry made a special appearance in the highly popular youth movie "Our Times" as the adult version of the male protagonist, Xu Taiyu. He then starred in the Chinese television series "My Best Ex-Boyfriend".


title: Jerry Yan

text: Jerry was in an on and off relationship with model Lin Chi-ling for many years. Jerry admitted to reuniting with Lin on 2017-11-10. This was neither confirmed nor denied by Lin.


title: Pokkiri

text: Pokkiri () is a 2007 Indian Tamil-language action film directed by Prabhu Deva. It is the Tamil remake of the 2006 Telugu film "Pokiri" starring Mahesh Babu. The film stars Vijay and Asin with Prakash Raj, Nassar, Mukesh Tiwari, Vadivelu, Sriman and Napoleon playing supporting roles. Mumaith Khan and Prabhu Deva make guest appearances. Nirav Shah handled cinematography while Kola Bhaskar was the film's editor. Filming took place in India and Australia. Set in Chennai, the film revolves around a thug, Tamizh, willing to do anything for the sake of money, including killing. His killer instincts help him win the attention of two rival gangs, out of which he joins one and helps its members finish off their rivals. On the other hand, he also attempts to save his girlfriend, who disapproves of his violent behavior, from a corrupt cop hellbent on marrying her against her will.


title: Pokkiri

text: The film was released theatrically on 12 January 2007 and received generally positive reviews with praise for its action sequences, performances, humor and score. It became a commercial success, running for more than 200 days at the Tamil Nadu box office. Six years later, it was dubbed in Hindi as "Wanted Baghi" and it was also dubbed in Odia as "Wanted Police".


title: Pokkiri

text: The city of Chennai is rifed with the nefarious activities of land mafia. There are two rival gangs: one under Ali Bhai, who resides in Dubai where he controls the India operations through his brothers Guru and Korattur, Logu as well as his girlfriend Mona; and another operated by a local goon named Narasimhan. They threaten builders and landowners into giving them protection money or property through force, extortion, or murder. Mohammed Maideen Khan IPS takes charge as the new Police Commissioner of Chennai and starts cracking down on crime.


title: Pokkiri

text: Tamizh, a thug, is abducted by Logu and his henchmen. Tamizh has taken a contract from Narasimhan to beat up Logu, which he does. However, Guru and Mona invite Tamizh to join their gang. Tamizh declines stating that he does not work for any gang, but is ready to do anything for money. Meanwhile, Tamizh falls in love with Shruthi, an aerobic teacher, when he visits his friend Saravanan's aerobics class, but she mistakes him for a pervert. Shruthi lives with her widowed mother Lakshmi and younger brother Pappu. Body Soda, a bogus kung fu master, lives above Shruthi's house and frequently, albeit comically and unsuccessfully, tries to convince her to marry him. Govindan is a corrupt police inspector in the colony where Tamizh and Shruthi live and is on Ali Bhai's payroll. He lusts for Shruthi and decides to make her his mistress, even after she rejects him multiple times.


title: Pokkiri

text: Tamizh's first assignment with Ali Bhai's gang is to kill a member of Narasimhan's gang. However, police show up at the spot where Tamizh and the other gangsters are waiting. Tamizh engages the cops long enough for the others to finish the task and flee. He also helps Shruthi escape from Govindan. She is impressed by his kindness, and a friendship soon blossoms between the two, leading to the development of unspoken romantic feelings for each other. When Shruthi tries to express her feelings to Tamizh, they are attacked by members of Narasimhan's gang, whom Tamizh finishes off. Shruthi is shocked to learn that Tamizh is a gangster with no qualms about killing people. Later, Govindan arranges for some thugs to pretend to assault Shruthi so that no decent family will want to take her as their daughter-in-law, as a result of which with no other option, Shruthi and Lakshmi will accept his demands. Tamizh learns of this and thrashes Govindan incognito. After much ado and mental anguish, Shruthi accepts Tamizh's love. Soon, Guru is found dead, presumably killed by Narasimhan in retaliation against the death of his gang members at the hands of Tamizh earlier, which forces Ali Bhai to come to Chennai from Dubai and kill Narasimhan. He also meets Tamizh to discuss the killing of a minister by blowing up a school. Tamizh disagrees with Ali Bhai's method as it would involve killing innocents including women and children.


title: Pokkiri

text: In the middle of their argument, the police raids the club and arrests Ali Bhai. His gang members retaliate by kidnapping Maidenn's daughter, drugging her, and creating a lewd video of her which they threaten to release to the media if Ali Bhai is not released, forcing the embattled commissioner to release Ali Bhai. However, in her drugged state, Maideen's daughter reveals that her father had placed an undercover officer as a mole in Ali Bhai's gang. The gang members find out that an IPS police officer by the name of Satyamoorthy, the son of a retired police inspector Shanmugavel, has gone undercover to finish off the underworld mafia gangs and is now a part of their gang. Ali Bhai kills Saravanan, believing he is Satyamoorthy. However, it is revealed that Saravanan was actually Shanmugavel's adopted son. Ali Bhai then kills Shanmugavel to lure the real Satyamoorthy. When Satyamoorthy actually turns up, everyone, especially Shruthi and Govindan, are shocked to see that he is Tamizh. Satyamoorthy had gone undercover by posing himself as a Thamizh. It is further revealed that Satyamoorthy was the one who killed Guru and not Narasimhan. He killed Guru under the Commissioner's direction. After Shanmugavel and Saravanan's funerals, Satyamoorthy forces Govindan to call Ali Bhai to find out his location, which is Binny Mills. He goes there and starts to kill Ali Bhai's gang members one by one, rescuing the commissioner's daughter in the process. In a final confrontation, Satyamoorthy thrashes and kills Ali Bhai by slashing his throat with a broken glass window, following which he shoots Govindan and says the following words: "Oru vaati mudivu panniten na, yaen pecha naanae kekamaatten" ().


title: Pokkiri

text: After his film "Aathi" in January 2006, for nearly six months Vijay was listening to stories, but none had appealed; he was supposed to do a Tamil Remake of Dharani's "Bangaram", until that film's failure made him look at other options. That's when he got to watch the Telugu "Pokiri" – he felt that it would work. After difficulty in finding directors, Prabhudeva was selected as director, directing his first film in Tamil after the failure of his Telugu film "Pournami".


title: Pokkiri

text: The movie was launched on 6 July 2006. Vijay's father SAC conducted special puja at the Sri Arunachaleswarar Temple in Tiruvannamalai. On Saturday night, which was the full moon day, an auspicious occasion for the presiding deity there, he spent a full hour before the Lord seeking his blessings. He also prayed at the Sacred Church at Velankanni. Asin was selected, pairing with Vijay for the second time after "Sivakasi" (2005).


title: Pokkiri

text: The first day of shoot for the film was held at the new Pillayar Kovil at AVM studios, with various dignitaries gracing the occasion. Vijay's mother Shobha Chandrasekhar gave the clap for the first shot. The first scene shot was with Asin and Vijay, the lead pair in the film, in an elevator that was specially designed for the film. Principal photography was completed in late November.


title: Pokkiri

text: The soundtrack has 8 songs composed by Mani Sharma. Two of the songs from the original Telugu version were retained and remade in Tamil. The soundtrack also features a remix of the song "Vasantha Mullai" from "Sarangadhara" (1958).


title: Pokkiri

text: The film was released on 12 January 2007 at the festival of Pongal weekend, alongside Ajith's "Aalwar" and Vishal's "Thaamirabharani". The USA's premiere happened on 11 January 2007, a day before its worldwide release. The film grossed 6.1 crore in Tamil Nadu in opening week from 142 screens.


title: Pokkiri

text: The satellite rights were bought by Sun TV. Ayngaran International released the DVD of the film in 2008. The film also had a Blu-ray release in United Kingdom on 21 June 2009.


title: Pokkiri

text: The film was commercial success and ran for over 200 days in Tamil Nadu. The film completed a 50-day run in 146 centres and a 100-day run in 60 centres. The film completed a 175-day run in 15 centres, and a 275-day run at one theatre. The film ran for 100 days in one centre at Kerala. The film was the third highest grossing Tamil film at that time in Kerala box office after Chandramukhi and Anniyan.


title: Pokkiri

text: "The Hindu" wrote, "After watching the Telugu "Pokkiri", one wondered how it could be rehashed to suit Vijay. Well, kudos to Prabhu Deva for doing a fine job of the remake". Sify said that the film was "enjoyable while it lasts". Indiaglitz stated that Vijay stole the show with his "typical 'Vijayisms' (action, humor and punch dialogues)" and that the show was "action-packed entertainer". Behindwoods review felt that Vadivelu and Prakash Raj's performances were lackluster, and stated that Raj " might do well to sit back and analyze the roles that he accepts," but concluded that the movie overall "packs a punch." Rediff.com gave the movie two stars, stating "there's nothing more tedious than a badly made remake." Nowrunning.com stated that ""Pokkiri" is attractively packaged and presented". Oneindia.in stated that ""Pokkiri" is a full length action movie of Vijay." "Ananda Vikatan" rated the film 42 out of 100.


title: Pokkiri

text: Some of the quotes from the film that became popular were: "Vada Poche", "Plan Panni Pannanum" spoken by Vadivelu and Vijay's dialogue "Oru Vaati Mudivu Panta, Yen Pecha Naane Kekka Maaten" () became popular. One of Vadivelu's dialogue "Vada Poche" inspired a comedy show in Sun Music with same name. The dialogue also inspired a song sung by Velmurugan and Powerstar Srinivasan in "Arya Surya" (2013). Other dialogue of Vadivelu, "Plan Panni Pannanum" () also inspired a film of the same name.


title: Pokkiri

text: The intro fight scene was shown in the Malayalam film "Daddy Cool" (2009). The scenes from the film were parodied in "Thamizh Padam" as hero being an undercover cop. The song "Pokkiri Pongal" is mentioned during the song "Adada" in "Pokkiri Simon" (2017), where Asin's jogging scene is also parodied. Vijay's dialogue before entry fight "Nee adicha piece naan adicha mass"() is referenced in the "Shylock" (2020) Malayalam movie during Mammootty's second entry fight. Nelson acknowledged "Pokkiri" as an inspiration for his directorial "Beast" (2022). "Pokkiri" was also parodied in the Star Vijay comedy series Lollu Sabha, in an episode named "Bakery".


title: Mind uploading

text: Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.


title: Mind uploading

text: Substantial mainstream research in related areas is being conducted in animal brain mapping and simulation, development of faster supercomputers, virtual reality, brain–computer interfaces, connectomics, and information extraction from dynamically functioning brains. According to supporters, many of the tools and ideas needed to achieve mind uploading already exist or are currently under active development; however, they will admit that others are, as yet, very speculative, but say they are still in the realm of engineering possibility.


title: Mind uploading

text: Mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: copy-and-upload or copy-and-delete by gradual replacement of neurons (which can be considered as a gradual destructive uploading), until the original organic brain no longer exists and a computer program emulating the brain takes control over the body. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by storing and copying, that information state into a computer system or another computational device. The biological brain may not survive the copying process or may be deliberately destroyed during it in some variants of uploading. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively, the simulated mind could reside in a computer inside (or either connected to or remotely controlled) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological or cybernetic body.


title: Mind uploading

text: Among some futurists and within the part of transhumanist movement, mind uploading is treated as an important proposed life extension or immortality technology (known as "digital immortality"). Some believe mind uploading is humanity's current best option for preserving the identity of the species, as opposed to cryonics. Another aim of mind uploading is to provide a permanent backup to our "mind-file", to enable interstellar space travel, and a means for human culture to survive a global disaster by making a functional copy of a human society in a computing device. Whole-brain emulation is discussed by some futurists as a "logical endpoint" of the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics fields, both about brain simulation for medical research purposes. It is discussed in artificial intelligence research publications as an approach to strong AI (artificial general intelligence) and to at least weak superintelligence. Another approach is seed AI, which would not be based on existing brains. Computer-based intelligence such as an upload could think much faster than a biological human even if it were no more intelligent. A large-scale society of uploads might, according to futurists, give rise to a technological singularity, meaning a sudden time constant decrease in the exponential development of technology. Mind uploading is a central conceptual feature of numerous science fiction novels, films, and games.


title: Mind uploading

text: Many neuroscientists believe that the human mind is largely an emergent property of the information processing of its neuronal network.


title: Mind uploading

text: Neuroscientists have stated that important functions performed by the mind, such as learning, memory, and consciousness, are due to purely physical and electrochemical processes in the brain and are governed by applicable laws. For example, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi wrote in "IEEE Spectrum":


title: Mind uploading

text: Eminent computer scientists and neuroscientists have predicted that advanced computers will be capable of thought and even attain consciousness, including Koch and Tononi, Douglas Hofstadter, Jeff Hawkins, Marvin Minsky, Randal A. Koene, and Rodolfo Llinás.


title: Mind uploading

text: Many theorists have presented models of the brain and have established a range of estimates of the amount of computing power needed for partial and complete simulations. Using these models, some have estimated that uploading may become possible within decades if trends such as Moore's law continue.


title: Mind uploading

text: In theory, if the information and processes of the mind can be disassociated from the biological body, they are no longer tied to the individual limits and lifespan of that body. Furthermore, information within a brain could be partly or wholly copied or transferred to one or more other substrates (including digital storage or another brain), thereby – from a purely mechanistic perspective – reducing or eliminating "mortality risk" of such information. This general proposal was discussed in 1971 by biogerontologist George M. Martin of the University of Washington.


title: Mind uploading

text: An "uploaded astronaut" could be used instead of a "live" astronaut in human spaceflight, avoiding the perils of zero gravity, the vacuum of space, and cosmic radiation to the human body. It would allow for the use of smaller spacecraft, such as the proposed StarChip, and it would enable virtually unlimited interstellar travel distances.


title: Mind uploading

text: The focus of mind uploading, in the case of copy-and-transfer, is on data acquisition, rather than data maintenance of the brain. A set of approaches known as loosely coupled off-loading (LCOL) may be used in the attempt to characterize and copy the mental contents of a brain. The LCOL approach may take advantage of self-reports, life-logs and video recordings that can be analyzed by artificial intelligence. A bottom-up approach may focus on the specific resolution and morphology of neurons, the spike times of neurons, the times at which neurons produce action potential responses.


title: Mind uploading

text: Advocates of mind uploading point to Moore's law to support the notion that the necessary computing power is expected to become available within a few decades. However, the actual computational requirements for running an uploaded human mind are very difficult to quantify, potentially rendering such an argument specious.


title: Mind uploading

text: Regardless of the techniques used to capture or recreate the function of a human mind, the processing demands are likely to be immense, due to the large number of neurons in the human brain along with the considerable complexity of each neuron.


title: Mind uploading

text: In 2004, Henry Markram, lead researcher of the Blue Brain Project, stated that "it is not [their] goal to build an intelligent neural network", based solely on the computational demands such a project would have.


title: Mind uploading

text: It will be very difficult because, in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today.


title: Mind uploading

text: Five years later, after successful simulation of part of a rat brain, Markram was much more bold and optimistic. In 2009, as director of the Blue Brain Project, he claimed that "A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years". Less than two years into it, the project was recognized to be mismanaged and its claims overblown, and Markram was asked to step down.


title: Mind uploading

text: When modelling and simulating the brain of a specific individual, a brain map or connectivity database showing the connections between the neurons must be extracted from an anatomic model of the brain. For whole brain simulation, this network map should show the connectivity of the whole nervous system, including the spinal cord, sensory receptors, and muscle cells. Destructive scanning of a small sample of tissue from a mouse brain including synaptic details is possible as of 2010.


title: Mind uploading

text: However, if short-term memory and working memory include prolonged or repeated firing of neurons, as well as intra-neural dynamic processes, the electrical and chemical signal state of the synapses and neurons may be hard to extract. The uploaded mind may then perceive a memory loss of the events and mental processes immediately before the time of brain scanning.


title: Mind uploading

text: A full brain map has been estimated to occupy less than 2 x 10 bytes (20,000 TB) and would store the addresses of the connected neurons, the synapse type and the synapse "weight" for each of the brains' 10 synapses. However, the biological complexities of true brain function (e.g. the epigenetic states of neurons, protein components with multiple functional states, etc.) may preclude an accurate prediction of the volume of binary data required to faithfully represent a functioning human mind.


title: Mind uploading

text: A possible method for mind uploading is serial sectioning, in which the brain tissue and perhaps other parts of the nervous system are frozen and then scanned and analyzed layer by layer, which for frozen samples at nano-scale requires a cryo-ultramicrotome, thus capturing the structure of the neurons and their interconnections. The exposed surface of frozen nerve tissue would be scanned and recorded, and then the surface layer of tissue removed. While this would be a very slow and labor-intensive process, research is currently underway to automate the collection and microscopy of serial sections. The scans would then be analyzed, and a model of the neural net recreated in the system that the mind was being uploaded into.


title: Mind uploading

text: There are uncertainties with this approach using current microscopy techniques. If it is possible to replicate neuron function from its visible structure alone, then the resolution afforded by a scanning electron microscope would suffice for such a technique. However, as the function of brain tissue is partially determined by molecular events (particularly at synapses, but also at other places on the neuron's cell membrane), this may not suffice for capturing and simulating neuron functions. It may be possible to extend the techniques of serial sectioning and to capture the internal molecular makeup of neurons, through the use of sophisticated immunohistochemistry staining methods that could then be read via confocal laser scanning microscopy. However, as the physiological genesis of 'mind' is not currently known, this method may not be able to access all of the necessary biochemical information to recreate a human brain with sufficient fidelity.