title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Four more episodes were released on 15 September 2008 through the iTunes Store. This series was released all at once as an Audiobook, almost two hours in length and split into four half-hour episodes. This series differs because they were recorded at the same time. There are no contests or any interaction from the listeners as the previous series contained.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: A new series, called "The Ricky Gervais Guide to..." featured the trio discussing various topics in their entirety during individual 50 min episodes. The first volume "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Medicine" was released on 31 December 2008. This was followed by "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Natural History" on 21 January 2009. This in turn was followed by "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... The Arts" on 18 February 2009. The 4th episode, "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Philosophy" aired on 17 March while the 5th and final episode of season 1, "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... The English" followed on 21 April (2 days prior to St. George's Day).


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: It was announced on Gervais's blog that the first episode of the new series, "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Society", was recorded on 6 September 2009; it was released on 3 November 2009. The second audiobook of the new series, "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Law and Order," was released on 1 December 2009. A third audiobook, entitled "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... The Future", was released on 29 December 2009. A fourth audiobook, entitled "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... The Human Body" was released on 26 January 2010. The fifth and final audiobook of the second season, entitled "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... The Earth" was released on 23 February 2010.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: On 12 June 2010 "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... The World Cup" released. This was followed later that year by a podcast entitled "A day in the Life of Karl Pilkington" following a format more associated with the Ricky Gervais Show podcasts.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Comic Relief" was released as a free podcast on 6 March 2011 in aid of Red Nose Day (18 March 2011).


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: On 24 March 2006, an "irregular run of free video podcasts" was launched through the iTunes podcast directory. The video podcasts do not follow the format of the earlier audio shows and the content varies greatly from podcast to podcast. The first video was a conversation between Pilkington and Gervais, with Gervais enthusing about the idea of Pilkington becoming a human crab or having massive reconstructive surgery. The second podcast served as an advertisement for Pilkington and Gervais's new book, "The World of Karl Pilkington" (a series of excerpts from the previous podcasts and various musings and drawings produced by Karl). The third on the series was an audio clip from a previous edition of Monkey News, synchronised with a flash animation. The fourth video podcast features a controversial audio advertisement for The Prostate Cancer Charity and Gervais talking about his Aerial Award. The fifth is Gervais and Merchant making Pilkington watch "Brokeback Mountain". The sixth podcast was another conversation over Pilkington's book "The World of Karl Pilkington". The seventh podcast was about a story Pilkington told in series one, episode one, about his bizarre journey in an abandoned asylum and rehabilitation clinic. The eighth video shows Gervais showing the viewer around the various sets during the filming of the second series of "Extras," followed by Pilkington giving his opinion on Gervais's latest book, "Flanimals of the Deep." The ninth was Pilkington talking about Gervais's cat; Ollie. The tenth was Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington announcing the new series of the show beginning on 22 August.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: In August 2012 Ricky Gervais produced a pilot for a new series of video podcasts, titled "Learn English with Ricky Gervais". The show features Gervais and Pilkington engaging in English dialogue, and translated captions have been provided in many languages by his fans.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: In November 2010, Ricky announced that a new series of podcasts would be recorded in 2011 and a new audiobook series where Karl will be an agony aunt answering listeners' problems.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: However, in October 2011 on his online blog Gervais revealed that the new audiobook will consist of Karl reading the book "Flanimals" written by Gervais himself. In the blog, Gervais said both himself and Stephen Merchant will be present during the reading to "help him with long words". However, this idea was eventually scrapped as well.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "The Ricky Gervais Show" audiobooks have been developed into "The Ricky Gervais Show", an animated series which premiered on 19 February 2010, on the American channel HBO and on the British channel Channel 4 on 23 April 2010.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: The show consists of past audiobooks with animation, drawn in a style similar to classic era Hanna-Barbera cartoons, describing jokes in a literal context. Series one, two and three are available on DVD and streaming services.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Monkey News" was a popular feature that began in the early XFM days and was originally referred to as "Chimpanzee That". "Monkey News" segments typically came near the end of the broadcasts and featured Karl Pilkington relating stories of chimps (referred to by Pilkington interchangeably as "monkeys") performing absurd and often impossible feats. Some of the stories, such as the 'chimp that flew a rocket' would be highly exaggerated tales based on actual real events. The "monkey" is often a mysterious protagonist until he is revealed at the conclusion of the story, although in most cases, it is immediately obvious to Gervais, Merchant, and the audience how the monkey/chimp will figure into the tale (a segment about horse racing will have Pilkington saying that the chimp was the jockey, for example). The stories are rarely sourced by Pilkington who is always accused by Gervais of "talking shit" or possibly having extrapolated misinformation from a news story. Sometimes listeners would email "Monkey News" stories to Pilkington.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Despite its popularity, "Monkey News" almost always led to Gervais becoming furious at Pilkington for the obviously fatuous nature of the stories, which Pilkington insisted were true. He would often interrupt Pilkington to express outrage and disbelief. In one XFM show, he became so frustrated that he left the room before Karl finished the segment. Stephen Merchant was often more patient and frequently admonished Gervais by shouting, "Let him finish!" or "Shut up!", insisting that Karl be allowed to deliver the story in full. On one occasion he told Karl to cut Gervais' microphone when Ricky would not cease his interruptions. However, even Merchant has been driven to verbally abuse Karl during the most obviously nonsensical and extreme stories. Despite the far-fetched nature of "Monkey News", Pilkington always insists he is accurately recounting the facts. The confrontational interactions among Gervais, Merchant, and Pilkington often result in "Monkey News" becoming a sort of collaborative shaggy dog story.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: During their podcast, Ricky and Steve try to disprove monkey news by "casually" talking of the story being told and how the central character could not possibly be a monkey due to the need for high intelligence, specialized knowledge, or the fact that a monkey would be immediately recognized by onlookers, etc. Gervais incorrectly stated that chimpanzees do not have opposable thumbs, when trying to prove that a chimp could not use a tool to perform surgery.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: On the 20 February 2006 podcast, Pilkington announced that "Monkey News" would no longer be a featured segment in future podcasts, claiming that there were no more "Monkey News" stories to report. However, it came back for a brief reprise at the end of the third series. "Monkey News" was introduced on both the XFM radio show and the podcasts with a "jingle" performed by Gervais shouting, "Ooh, Chimpanzee That! Monkey News!", which was sometimes followed by a muttered obscenity.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Knob News" has a format which is an amalgam of Monkey News and Educating Ricky. It features only in the latest 2005 XFM shows. Early versions had Ricky giving the news, though later it involved Karl giving a series of headlines of a male genital nature, from which Ricky and Steve would choose. A one-off show feature, similarly related, was Fanny Facts – where Karl presented news about or related to vaginas.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: 'Knob' was used as a non-offensive slang term for penis throughout. The jingle for it was Ricky shouting 'Ooh! You're gonna have someone's eye out! Knob News!' in a very similar fashion to Monkey News.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Rockbusters" was conceived by Karl Pilkington and was played on Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's long running XFM radio show between 2002–2004 and brought back in 2005. It debuted on 12 October 2002 as a phone-in, but converted to an e-mail competition the following week. Despite punning in its title, the game has very little in common with "Blockbusters". It is played as follows: Karl gives three clues, which he considers "cryptic" but are in reality convoluted colloquialisms which often depend on the answer being mispronounced. Along with the "clue", Karl includes the initials of the answer. Merchant sometimes referred to the clues as 'craptic'. The feature is often accompanied with Gervais's extreme frustration at the terrible quality of the clues and him encouraging Pilkington to get through the feature as quickly as possible.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Clue: That Jamaican fella doesn't want anything. Initials: ND. Artist or band. That Jamaican fella doesn't want anything. What's going on there?


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: As a means of reminding listeners how the game is played, Ricky and Steve often referred to what they considered the textbook example of Karl's cryptic clues:


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: For the XFM broadcasts, Rockbusters was not typically prefaced with an introductory "jingle" (usually a phrase shouted by Gervais) like some other features such as Monkey News. However, for the podcasts, Ricky would introduce the segment by screaming, "Rockbusters!" in the style of Block Buster! by Sweet.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Introduced along with "Rockbusters" on 12 October 2002 and lasting throughout the autumn, "Educating Ricky" was a feature in which Karl tries to teach Ricky several facts every week by catching his attention with a made-up headline, usually a pun. At the time, Gervais described "Educating Ricky" as being his favourite segment because the puns often left him in hysterics. Some classic stories include a man who was abducted by aliens for three days and he grew a beard, a man who was beheaded and his corpse took 32 steps after decapitation, the infamous tale of the hairy Chinese kid and the origin of the phrase "don't let the cat out of the bag".


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Described mockingly by Merchant as their "biggest fan" although "not afraid to offer some constructive criticism", someone calling himself "Richard Anderson" would e-mail the show regularly in the early days of the Xfm show. His first mail was read by Steve in the 2 November 2002 episode: ""Ricky, your show is appalling. Are you actually aware you are on the radio or has someone just secretly stuck a microphone on you?"" Ricky and Steve from then on referred to him as "Dickie Anders", "Dickers", "The Dick Machine", "The Dickmeister General", "The Big Dick" and several other nickname variations.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Another listener calling himself "Paul "The Party Animal" Parker" would send in various facts and news stories during the early podcasts in late 2005/early 2006. Gervais immediately picked up on his self-proclaimed nickname, and imagined he looked like Milhouse from "The Simpsons".


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: This competition, initially named Crosswords before adopting a listener's suggestion, was introduced when Karl was finding it hard to come up with new "Rockbusters" clues. A well-known phrase from the show, such as "You never see an old man having a Twix" was split up into words of different songs. The competition was to guess the songs played. In this instance Gerry & The Pacemakers' cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone" made up the first two words of the phrase. Problems arose in this case when Karl couldn't find a song with "Twix" in it, and so he substituted the alternative chocolate bar "Mars", using the lyrics to David Bowie's "Life on Mars". Songs of Phrase was a feature present throughout the later series of the XFM shows.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: The quality of this contest varied greatly from broadcast to broadcast, sometimes drawing praise from Gervais and Merchant when they felt Karl had done an especially good job picking the songs and editing them together. Other times, they felt the phrase was too elaborate and/or the editing of the songs was too muddled for the listeners to clearly understand. On such occasions, Karl would draw harsh criticism from Ricky and Steve, and Ricky would threaten to cancel the feature.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: At the time, "The Sun" ran a feature called "White Van Man" whereby questions on the stories of that week were put to white van drivers across the country, just to gain an insight into their views and opinions. Stephen Merchant posed the same questions to Karl, to find out more about him. The best aspect of this was Karl's bizarre beliefs and theories. Gervais and Merchant also found humour in the very mundane answers the "White Van Man" of the week would give. This feature was mainly used as a way to introduce new listeners to the mind of Karl Pilkington and was only used during the earlier days of the XFM shows.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Karl started keeping a record of his thoughts and experiences whilst on holiday in Gran Canaria with his girlfriend, Suzanne. The segment first appeared in episode 8 of the Guardian Unlimited podcasts (23 January 2006). Karl compared his literary efforts to those of Anne Frank, claiming that "If she's sat in a, you know, a loft knockin' stuff up, not much goin' on in 'er life at that point, yet she was still writin' it down...I thought well I'm on holiday an' I have got stuff goin' on...start a diary".


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Gervais and Merchant were amused when Karl first showed them the diary, revealing to be a large desk-diary and not a smaller pocket-diary that would have been easier to carry. Gervais correctly predicted that the extracts from Karl's diary would become an instant hit with fans, and encouraged Pilkington's efforts to maintain a record of his thoughts and experiences. Gervais and Merchant often lapsed into fits of hysteria while reading Karl's diary owing to the absurd, pedantic, and often mindless nature of Karl's day-to-day experiences (such as rescuing insects from a swimming pool, watching a local cat lick its testicles and going to the cobbler's).


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Memorable diary moments include: conceptualizing a wristwatch that counts down the remainder of your life, the large number of cross-eyed people at the hotel on Gran Canaria, a cat licking its testicles outside of a pub, a bar called "Tattoos" where the landlord did not appear to have any visible tattoos but Karl "never saw the landlord's wife", the time Karl refused to wash his hands after eating lemon cake at Ricky's house leading to a major argument, Karl thinking that both himself and Ricky Gervais are bored when they go to meetings as "after twenty minutes he (Ricky) was trying to wrestle me to the ground", Karl's idea for a television program "Look what we can do with Science" in which parts of a person's body are gradually removed until just the head remains, the post Karl received that was addressed to "Mr. K. Dilkington", the time Karl was carrying a lamp and wastebasket while moving to a new house and people thought he was a novelty entrant in a marathon, the tongue twister "if you can't treat a cheerful tramp, what sort of tramp can you treat?", certain tribes of cavemen allegedly waving their "tackle" (genitals) about when they want visitors to leave, and the 'experimental' mirrored wall in Karl's flat that he has partially covered with wallpaper.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: For the third series of the podcasts, Pilkington’s diary focused mainly on his experiences in the hospital while being treated for kidney stones. Also in this series, Karl became intrigued with poetry and would occasionally author brief poems based on his daily experiences and learnings. Gervais and Merchant were both shocked and delighted by Pilkington's foray into poetry. Poetry topics included jellyfish, being in the hospital, the body of a caveman allegedly discovered with hair gel in his hair, and blind moths.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Gervais usually introduced the diary segments with the jingle, “Oh, I don’t believe it! He’s only gone and written it down!” This was sometimes followed by muttered obscenities in similar fashion to the Monkey News jingle.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: As part of the comedy, Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais bullied Karl – claiming that "he's got a head like a fucking orange". In the NME test Radio Broadcast Stephen Merchant claims he met a man in Vietnam who shouted at him, "Oy oy, Karl Pilkington's got a head like a fucking orange". Moreover, Gervais would routinely insult Karl by using some varying collection of the words "little", "stupid", "bald", "Manc" and "twat". Other phrases include "I don't understand" often referring to Karl's preposterous ideas and theories, or "play a record" in an attempt to bring a link to a quick end, usually due to the ridiculousness of whatever Karl is saying. More recently, after a particularly nonsensical statement or one containing no evidence, Ricky will repeatedly state "It's unbelievable", or simply yell "Bollocks!" Ricky also routinely says "You're talking shit" when Karl says something particularly ridiculous, often during Monkey News. Despite Gervais being his primary antagonist, in the XFM shows Karl would sometimes lash out at the more patient Merchant, commenting on his gangly appearance and, at the time, lack of success with women, with Gervais often egging the pair on with comments such as 'he's done you again!' Karl also often mumbles "I'm sick of it" or, alternatively, "...sick of it," after he expresses one of his grievances (such as "useless" animals or human nature). He also asks "Do we need 'em?" when discussing an animal or thing he deems unnecessary. He also says "Forget it" when Ricky and Stephen dismiss a statement of his out of hand. During the XFM shows, some of the more explicit taglines would have to be altered as to not create trouble with the "radio authorities". The use of profanities on the show would often make Karl uneasy and worried.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: As music was played on the XFM show, Gervais and Merchant often came up with "features" for choosing songs to play. Some of the frequent ones include:


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "A Song for the Lovers" was a feature Gervais ran in the days of the XFM show where he played a favourite song of his which he dedicated it to couples listening.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "A Song for the Ladies" was a feature Merchant ran, similar to Gervais's feature, however as he is single he would dedicate a favourite song of his to the ladies listening.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Hip Hop Hooray" was another Merchant feature originally entitled "That Hip-Hop Track". He would play a track of the hip-hop genre to Gervais and Karl. In one show, Jonathan Ross popped in live on the air to give Gervais some tickets to an Awards Ceremony, and claimed that "Hip Hop Hooray" was the "worst feature on British radio" featuring "instantly forgettable" songs.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "That Film Sounds Good" was a feature run by Gervais, where he picked a song from a film and played that (not to be confused with his film review).


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Under the Covers/Run for Cover/Cover Me Up/Duck for Cover/Cover Me Bad/Between The Covers/OOh You Got Me Covered/OOh I Like Covers/Here Come The Covers/Mmmm Covers/This Was Done By Someone Else/I Like Cover Songs" was most commonly a Merchant feature in which he simply played a cover version of a famous song. The feature was short lived.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Songs That I'd Like To Play/Songs That I Like/Song's That I'd Like To Hear on the Radio" was a Merchant feature in which (as explained by Gervais) they admit that there are a lot of songs in the world, but that for this particular feature, you will only hear songs that Merchant likes.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "The Education of Karl": Following the revelation of Karl's GCSE results, a sole E in History, Gervais decides to give Karl a piece of homework, usually a short biography of an important historic figure, which Karl must report on each week. Subjects included Rasputin, Che Guevara, Hitler, Winston Churchill and Aesop's Fables. Karl soon became bored and annoyed with his homework since it reminded him of school, and abandoned the feature. This was one of the first recurring features, along with "White Van Karl", which principally revolved around Karl relating his opinions on various topics.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Song with a Story": This feature ran in the final shows of XFM. Karl doesn't particularly enjoy a song unless it has a story to go with it, and in this feature he chose one of his favourite songs with a story and would play them on the show. The songs were often accompanied by commentary from Gervais, Merchant and Karl. A classic example of this feature is when Karl believed that Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight" was about a disabled man in a wheel chair, while having little evidence for this belief.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: Perhaps the most notable song included in this feature is Rod Stewart's "The Killing of Georgie", which Karl says is his favourite song.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Do We Need 'Em?": A feature from the middle years of the XFM series, which originally was simply called 'Pilkington' where Karl interviewed a woman who claimed to have had a ghostly experience, prompting him to ask "You're not on crack?". This morphed into "Do We Need 'Em?", in which Karl would call an animal expert and argue for the extinction of a certain animal species, which he felt was useless and "getting in the way". Karl became dismayed by the opposition he faced from the experts, believing there was a conspiracy to keep every animal from extinction, and thus ended the feature. At the beginning and end of the feature, the theme tune to Michael Parkinson's chat show was played.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Cheap as Chimps": Karl provides information concerning the economy of raising apes. As with several other of his short-lived features, Karl had come up with the title before the actual concept of the feature, and it was discontinued when Karl, upon viewing a most likely illegal animal poaching website, realised that raising chimps wasn't as cheap as he'd originally hoped. After dropping the feature Karl became convinced that Donal MacIntyre had stolen "Cheap as Chimps" and put it on Channel Five. The Donal McIntyre show was in fact called "The Trade in Rare Mountain Gorillas – Rwanda" and was broadcast as part of his "MacIntyre Investigates" series, televised in April 2003.


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Cheeky Freak of the Week": For this feature, Karl discussed his favourite freak of the week chosen from the tabloids, internet or the "Fortean Times". "Cheeky Freak of the Week" was a relatively short-lived feature, which only existed during the earlier days of the XFM shows. Karl ended up having to stop this feature as he was worried about people thinking he was "having a go".


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Karl's Film Quiz": This feature involved a clip of a famous film with Karl's voice dubbed over one of the main character's. He would often change the storyline and chronology of the film to match recent events in his life. At the end, Karl would ask a trivia question relating to the film, and would typically award a prize to a listener who e-mailed in the correct answer. The prize was usually a VHS copy of the film featured in the segment. Gervais and Merchant often made fun awarding VHS tapes as prizes, complaining that Karl and XFM were too cheap to purchase the films on DVD. The feature also was never given a proper name and Karl often described it as merely 'the film thing'. However, this feature was a consistent favourite of both Gervais and Merchant. Films featured in the segment included: "The Graduate", "Pulp Fiction", "The Shining", "When Harry Met Sally...", "Kes", and "A Few Good Men".


title: The Ricky Gervais Show

text: "Ricky's World-Famous Film Review": Gervais's film review was one of the earliest features included in the show in which he reviewed a film he had recently seen. Often the reviews contained very little opinion and were often just a summary of what had happened in the film. Gervais almost always gave films 9/10. He decided to end this feature because he wanted his average film score to stay as 9.5/10. The last film Gervais reviewed was "", which he hadn't even seen at the time, claiming "Robbie Coltrane is probably in it, because he's in that 'other one' "; Gervais still gave the film a 9/10 even though he said "It's about wizards called Gonads with beards."


title: Billiard table

text: A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which cue sports are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables (whether for carom billiards, pool, pyramid or snooker) provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth (usually of a tightly woven worsted wool called baize), and surrounded by vulcanized rubber cushions, with the whole thing elevated above the floor. More specific terms are used for specific sports, such as snooker table and pool table, and different-sized billiard balls are used on these table types. An obsolete term is billiard board, used in the 16th and 17th centuries.


title: Billiard table

text: Cushions (also sometimes called "rail cushions", "cushion rubber", or rarely "bumpers") are located on the inner sides of a table's wooden . There are several different materials and design philosophies associated with cushion rubber. These cushions are made from an elastic material such as vulcanized rubber (gum or synthetic). The purpose of the cushion rubber is to cause the billiard balls to rebound off the rubber while minimizing the loss of kinetic energy.


title: Billiard table

text: The "profile" of the rail cushion, which is the cushion's angle in relation to the bed of the table, varies between table types. The standard on American pool tables is the K-66 profile, which as defined by the Billiard Congress of America (BCA) has a base of and a nose height of . When installed properly the distance from the nose of the cushion to the covered slate surface is while using a regulation ball set.


title: Billiard table

text: On a carom table, the K-55 profile is used (with a somewhat sharper angle than pool cushions). K-55 cushions have cloth, usually canvas, vulcanized into the top of the rubber to adjust rebound accuracy and speed.


title: Billiard table

text: The bed table – the cloth-covered, horizontal playing surface – is, on high-quality equipment, made of solid, smooth slabs of slate, most often from Italy, Brazil or China. Small pool tables may use only one or two pieces of slate, while carom, English billiards and tournament-size pool tables use three. Full-size snooker tables require five. The gap between slates is filled with a hard-drying putty, epoxy or resin, then sanded to produce a seamless surface, before being covered with the cloth. When several pieces of slate are joined poorly it is possible for the resin to deform and cause an uneven playing surface; it can also be difficult to move once joined.


title: Billiard table

text: Tables for the home market usually use slate beds as well, but the slate is often thinner, down to about . The early table beds were made of cloth-covered wooden boards. Today, inexpensive but not very rigid or durable materials used for the beds of low-end tables (e.g. for children's recreation rooms) still include wood, especially medium-density fibreboard and plywood, as well as plastics and other synthetic materials under various trade names.


title: Billiard table

text: Billiard cloth (sometimes erroneously called felt) is a specific type of cloth that covers the top of the table's "playing area". Both the rails and slate beds are covered with 21–24-ounce billiard cloth (although some less expensive 19-ounce cloths are available) which is most often green in colour (representing the grass of the original lawn games that billiards evolved from), and consists of either a woven wool or wool-nylon blend called baize.


title: Billiard table

text: Most bar tables, which get much use, use the slower, thicker blended felt because it is cheaper. This type of cloth is called a woollen cloth. By contrast, high-quality pool cloth is usually made of a napless weave such as worsted wool, which gives a much faster roll to the balls. This "speed" of the cloth affects the amounts of and of the balls, among other aspects of game finesse. Snooker cloth traditionally has a directional nap, upon which the balls behave differently when rolling against vs. running with the direction of the nap.


title: Billiard table

text: , also known as (for their traditional shape), are inlaid at precise, evenly spaced positions along the rails of some tables (not usually on snooker tables) to aid in the aiming of bank or kick shots. There are seven along each long rail (with the side pocket interfering with where the seventh one would go, on pocket billiard tables) and three along each short rail, with each of the four corners counting as another in the mathematical systems that the diamonds are used to calculate. These sights divide the playing surface into equal squares. Books, even entire series of books, have been written on geometric and algebraic systems of aiming using the diamonds.


title: Billiard table

text: Spots are often used to mark the and on the cloth. Other markings may be a line drawn across the (or across the with , in British-style pool). Another case is the outline of the behind the foot spot where the balls are in straight pool, since the outline of this area is strategically important throughout the game. In artistic pool, lines may be drawn between opposite sights putting a grid on the playing surface. Other grid patterns are used in various forms of balkline billiards. A recent table marking convention, in European nine-ball, is the .


title: Billiard table

text: Pocketless carom billiards tables are used for such games as straight rail, balkline, one-cushion billiards, three-cushion caroms, and artistic billiards.


title: Billiard table

text: Regulation 10 × 5-foot carom billiards tables have a playing surface (measured between the noses of the cushions) of 2.84 metres by 1.42 metres (9.32 × 4.65 feet) with a 5-millimetre allowance. The standard height range of the table, measured from the playing surface to the ground is between 75 and 80 centimetres.


title: Billiard table

text: The slate bed of a carom billiard table must have a minimum thickness of 45 millimetres and in tournaments recommended heating temperatures is 33–37 °C (91–99 °F), which helps to keep moisture out of the cloth to aid the balls rolling and rebounding in a consistent manner, and generally makes a table play faster. A heated table is required under international carom rules and is an especially important requirement for the games of three-cushion billiards and artistic billiards.


title: Billiard table

text: A pool table, or pocket billiards table, has six – one at each corner of the table () and one at the midpoint of each of the longer sides ( or ).


title: Billiard table

text: Pool tables come in different sizes, typically referred to as , , , or tables. In all cases, the table is rectangular with a ratio (e.g. ).


title: Billiard table

text: There are only two sizes approved for tournament play by the International Olympic Committee–recognized sport governing body of pool, the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA), and its various regional and national affiliates; under the world standardized rules of pool, these are the and models. For a table, the playing surface (the dimensions between the noses of the cushions) measures by with a (3.2 mm) margin of error for either dimension. For an , the playing surface measures by , with the same inch variance allowed.


title: Billiard table

text: In the UK as well as a number of other British Commonwealth and European countries, the typical pool table is a 7 × 3.5 ft (2.13 × 1.07 m), although 6-foot (1.83 m) tables for the pub and home market are also common. These are the sizes used by internationally standardized blackball and the amateur World Eightball Pool Federation, as well as informal pub pool. The 7-foot size is also frequently used in North American amateur leagues, and are common coin-operated fixtures in bars and other venues. The playing surface for a 7-foot table is by .


title: Billiard table

text: Pockets, typically rimmed at the back with leather or plastic traditionally have "drop pockets", which are small receptacles below each pocket to contain the balls. More modern tables may instead employ "ball return pockets", a series of gutters inside the table, which deliver the balls into a collection compartment on one side of the table, in a similar manner to the ball return on a bowling alley. On a coin-operated table, the object balls are deposited inside an inaccessible window until the table is paid again, allowing the balls to be released into the compartment, while the cue ball is usually separated into its own ball return, often utilizing a different sized ball. A possible result of drop pockets is that if too many balls go into the same pocket, it would fill up the receptacle and prevent any more balls from going in that pocket, requiring that some be moved out of the pocket manually before shooting again.


title: Billiard table

text: Regardless of table size, the WPA standard (sometimes informally called "American-style") table has wide, angular pockets that funnel notably inward, generally 1.75 to 2.25 times as wide at the opening as the diameter of the balls, wider at the side (middle) pockets than the corners. WEPF pool (sometimes informally called "British-style" or "Commonwealth-style") is played with balls, and this type of table has smaller, narrow pockets (the width is calculated as the ball diameter multiplied by 1.6, and is consistent at all six pockets), with rounded entrances and nearly parallel sides, like those on a snooker table. One tactical consequence of this design difference is that the jaws of the WPA-type pocket are often used exactly like a horizontal version of the backboard of a basketball goal, to rebound the ball into the pocket; this technique does not work on blackball tables, and even shots down the cushion into a corner pocket are more difficult.


title: Billiard table

text: For tournament competition under WPA world-standardized rules (and league play under derived rulesets), the bed of the pocket billiard table must be made of slate no less than thick. The flatness of the table must be divergent by no greater than lengthwise and across the width.


title: Billiard table

text: A table designed for the games snooker and English billiards is usually called a snooker table or a plane.


title: Billiard table

text: The playing area of a tournament snooker table, as standardized by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) and the amateur International Billiards and Snooker Federation (IBSF), measures 11 feet 8.5 inches by 5 ft 10 in (3569 mm by 1778 mm) with a tolerance of ± 0.5 in (13 mm), though commonly referred to as 12 ft by 6 ft, the nominal outer dimensions including the rails. Smaller tables, approximately 10 ft by 5 ft down to half size, are also sometimes used in pubs, homes and smaller snooker halls. The height from the floor to the top of the cushion is between 2 ft 9.5 in and 2 ft 10.5 in (851 mm and 876 mm).


title: Billiard table

text: A snooker table has six pockets, one at each corner and one at the centre of each of the longest side cushions. The pockets are around 86 mm (3.5 in), though high-class tournaments may use slightly smaller pockets to increase difficulty. The amount of (trimmed underside of the rubber cushion's protruding at the pocket opening), if any, has a strong effect on how easily a ball is accepted by the pocket (the ""). On snooker and English billiards tables, the pocket entries are rounded, while pool tables have sharp "". This affects how accurate shots need to be to get into a pocket, and how fast they can be when not dead-on, including shots that run along and against a cushion, making snooker more difficult to play than pool. According to the WPBSA official rule book, "the pocket openings shall conform to the owned and authorised by The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA)". The WPBSA and IBSF rule books' equipment sections do not actually specify the measurements and shapes of these proprietary templates which change from time to time, requiring that the templates be dated. The organizations do not recognize tournament play or records (maximum breaks, etc.) if not performed on tables that conform to then-current templates.


title: Billiard table

text: The cushions (sometimes known as rails, though that term properly applies to the wood sections to which the cushions are attached) are usually made of vulcanized rubber.


title: Billiard table

text: The area is marked by a drawn on the cloth across the width of the table at 29 inches (737 mm) from and parallel to the face of the . A semicircle with a radius of 11.5 inches (292 mm) centred on this line within baulk forms in which the cue ball must be placed when breaking or after the cue ball has been or shot off the table. The position of four of are marked along the (lengthwise centre) of the table, perpendicular to the baulk line: the , 12.75 inches (324 mm) from the ; the or , located at the midpoint between the bottom and top ; the or , located midway between the centre spot and the top cushion; and the or , located at the midpoint of the baulk line (and, thus of the "D"). Due to its obviousness, the brown spot is not always marked (neither are the unmistakable and , at the left and right intersections, respectively, of the baulk line and the "Ds curve. The exact placing of these markings are different on smaller tables, but proportional to the full-size model.


title: Billiard table

text: The of a good quality snooker table has a of slate and is covered with baize cloth, traditionally green, though many other colours are now available. The thickness of this cloth determines the table's (lack of friction) and responsiveness to , thicker cloths being longer lasting but slower and less responsive. The nap of the cloth can affect the run of the balls, especially on slower shots and shots played with applied to the . A snooker table traditionally has the nap running from the baulk to the top end and is brushed and ironed in this direction.


title: Billiard table

text: Other types of billiard tables are used for specific games, such as Russian pyramid which uses a '12 ft by 6 ft' table (similar to a snooker table but with much smaller pockets), and Asian four ball which uses a pocketless 8 ft by 4 ft table. Games such as bagatelle often had more than six holes, including straight through the bed in the middle of the table, a feature still found in bar billiards and bumper pool.


title: Billiard table

text: There are novelty billiard tables, often for pool, that come in various shapes including zig-zag, circular, and (especially for bumper pool) hexagonal. A circular table featured prominently in the 1972 film "Silent Running". For the home market, many manufacturers have produced convertible billiard tables (in the broad sense) that double as dining tables or as table tennis, foosball, or air hockey, tables, with removable hard tops. Home pool tables, which often lack a ball-return system, are commonly either 4 × 8 ft or 3.5 × 7 ft models, a medium between 3 × 6 ft. bar/pub tables and 4.5 × 9 ft tournament-size models. Low-end tables tend toward the smaller range, and may have MDF or wood beds as an alternative to slate; those with light-weight beds may be foldable for storage, as with table tennis. Miniature tables range in size from tabletop 1 × 1.6 ft to free-standing 2.5 × 5 ft models, and use scaled-down cues and balls.


title: Billiard table

text: Billiard table beds are commonly heated with electricity, in order to keep the cloth dry, and allow the balls to roll better. Queen Victoria (1819–1901) had a billiard table that was heated using zinc tubes, although the aim at that time was chiefly to keep the then-used ivory balls from warping. The first use of electric heating was for an 18.2 balkline tournament held in December 1927 between Welker Cochran and Jacob Schaefer Jr. "The New York Times" announced it with fanfare: "For the first time in the history of world's championship balkline billiards a heated table will be used..."


title: Billiard table

text: An electrically heated table is required under international carom billard tournament rules 'in order to ensure the best possible rolling', although temperatures are not specified. In tournaments, carom billiard tables have recommended heating temperatures of 33–37 °C (91–99 °F), while billiard associations may heat their carom tables to as much as 45 °C (113 °F). An average modern billiard heater has an output of 600 watts. If it is not switched off outside operating hours, consumption is 3,500 kilowatt-hour (kWh) per year, costing 525 euros (0.15 EUR/kWh). Switching off a billard table heater whenever it is not used can save more than 50% in energy consumption and costs; this can be done automatically with timers. Another way to reduce energy consumption and costs is to use synthetic cloth rather than wool cloth, which requires much more energy to warm up. A disadvantage of synthetic cloth may be that certain types of games, such as balkline, may result in damaging the synthetic cloth too quickly because of the way players hit the balls.


title: Billiard table

text: The 2022 Russia–European Union gas dispute caused rising energy costs around Europe, making heating billiard tables almost prohibitively expensive. The Royal Dutch Billiards Federation's director said in October 2022 that 'billiard and snooker localities are simply incapable of affording these energy prices anymore, as heating a billiard costs about 3,500 kilowatts a year (...). At current energy prices, that is about 2,400 to 2,500 euros a year per billiard table.'


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: An odd-eyed cat is a cat with one blue eye and one eye either green, yellow, or brown. This is a feline form of complete heterochromia, a condition that occurs in some other animals, including humans. There is also partial heterochromia, where there can be one blue eye and one eye that is partially blue and partially another color. The condition most commonly affects white cats, but may be found in a cat of any color, provided that it possesses the white spotting gene.


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: The odd-eyed coloring is caused when either the epistatic (recessive) white gene (which masks any other color genes and turns a cat completely white) or the white spotting gene (which is the gene responsible for bicolor and tuxedo cats) prevents melanin (pigment) granules from reaching one eye during development, resulting in a cat with one blue eye and one green, yellow, or brown eye. The condition only rarely occurs in cats that lack both the dominant white and the white spotting gene.


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: As with some other newborn mammals, all cats are blue-eyed as kittens, and may change as the newborn ages. The differences in an odd-eyed kitten's eye color might not be noticeable, except upon close inspection. Odd-eyed kittens have a different shade of blue in each eye. The color of the odd eye changes over a period of months, for example, from blue to green to yellow or from green to blue to yellow, until it reaches its final, adult color.


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: Odd-eyed cats are popular within several breeds, including Van cat, Turkish Van, Turkish Angora, Sphynx, Persian, Oriental Shorthair, Japanese Bobtail and Khao Manee.


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: In Turkey, Ankara Zoo has a breeding program to preserve pure white Turkish Angora cats with blue and amber eyes. The zoo specifically prized the odd-eyed Angoras who had one blue eye and one amber eye, as the Turkish folklore suggests that "the eyes must be as green as the lake and as blue as the sky". The mascot of the 2010 FIBA World Championship, hosted by Turkey, was an anthropomorphized odd-eyed Van Cat named ""Bascat"".


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: Muhammad's pet Angora, Muezza, was reputed to be an odd-eyed cat. In the Japanese Bobtail, odd-eyed cats are most frequently found in calico individuals.


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: There is a common misconception that all odd-eyed cats are born deaf in one ear. This is not true, as about 60–70% of odd-eyed cats can hear. About 10–20% of normal-eyed cats are born deaf or become deaf as part of the feline aging process. White cats with one or two blue eyes do, however, have a higher incidence of genetic deafness, with the white gene occasionally causing the degeneration of the cochlea, beginning a few days after birth.


title: Odd-eyed cat

text: In flash photographs, odd-eyed cats typically show a red-eye effect in the blue eye, but not in the other eye. This is due to the combined effect of the (normal) presence of a tapetum lucidum in both eyes and the absence of melanin in the blue eye. The tapetum lucidum produces eyeshine in both eyes, but in the non-blue eye a layer of melanin over the tapetum lucidum selectively removes some colors of light.


title: Torr

text: The torr (symbol: Torr) is a unit of pressure based on an absolute scale, defined as exactly of a standard atmosphere (). Thus one torr is exactly (≈ ).


title: Torr

text: Historically, one torr was intended to be the same as one "millimeter of mercury", but subsequent redefinitions of the two units made them slightly different (by less than ). The torr is not part of the International System of Units (SI). It is often combined with the metric prefix milli to name one millitorr (mTorr) or 0.001 Torr.


title: Torr

text: The unit was named after Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist and mathematician who discovered the principle of the barometer in 1644.


title: Torr

text: The unit name "torr" is written in lower case, while its symbol ("Torr") is always written with upper-case initial; including in combinations with prefixes and other unit symbols, as in "mTorr" (millitorr) or "Torr⋅L/s" (torr-litres per second). The symbol (uppercase) should be used with prefix symbols (thus, mTorr and millitorr are correct, but mtorr and milliTorr are not).


title: Torr

text: The torr is sometimes incorrectly denoted by the symbol "T", which is the SI symbol for the tesla, the unit measuring the strength of a magnetic field. Although frequently encountered, the alternative spelling "Tor" is incorrect.


title: Torr

text: Torricelli attracted considerable attention when he demonstrated the first mercury barometer to the general public. He is credited with giving the first modern explanation of atmospheric pressure. Scientists at the time were familiar with small fluctuations in height that occurred in barometers. When these fluctuations were explained as a manifestation of changes in atmospheric pressure, the science of meteorology was born.


title: Torr

text: Over time, 760 millimeters of mercury at 0 °C came to be regarded as the standard atmospheric pressure. In honour of Torricelli, the torr was defined as a unit of pressure equal to one millimeter of mercury at 0 °C. However, since the acceleration due to gravity – and thus the weight of a column of mercury – is a function of elevation and latitude (due to the rotation and non-sphericity of the Earth), this definition is imprecise and varies by location.


title: Torr

text: In 1954, the definition of the "atmosphere" was revised by the (10th CGPM) to the currently accepted definition: one atmosphere is equal to . The torr was then redefined as of one atmosphere. This yields a precise definition that is unambiguous and independent of measurements of the density of mercury or the acceleration due to gravity on Earth.


title: Torr

text: "Manometric units" are units such as "millimeters of mercury" or "centimeters of water" that depend on an assumed density of a fluid and an assumed acceleration due to gravity. The use of these units is discouraged. Nevertheless, manometric units are routinely used in medicine and physiology, and they continue to be used in areas as diverse as weather reporting and scuba diving.


title: Torr

text: The millimeter of mercury by definition is ( × × ), which is approximated with known accuracies of density of mercury and standard gravity.


title: Torr

text: The torr is defined as of one standard atmosphere, while the atmosphere is defined as pascals. Therefore, 1 Torr is equal to  Pa. The decimal form of this fraction () is an infinitely long, periodically repeating decimal (repetend length: 18).


title: Torr

text: The difference between one millimeter of mercury and one torr, as well as between one atmosphere (101.325 kPa) and 760 mmHg (), is less than one part in seven million (or less than ). This small difference is negligible for most applications outside metrology.


title: Torr

text: These four pressure units are used in different settings. For example, the bar is used in meteorology to report atmospheric pressures. The torr is used in high-vacuum physics and engineering.


title: Animal echolocation

text: and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects. Echolocation is used for navigation, foraging, and hunting in various environments.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocating animals include some mammals (most notably Laurasiatheria) and a few birds, especially some bat species and odontocetes (toothed whales and dolphins), but also in simpler forms in other groups such as shrews, and two cave-dwelling bird groups, the so-called cave swiftlets in the genus "Aerodramus" (formerly "Collocalia") and the unrelated oilbird "Steatornis caripensis".


title: Animal echolocation

text: The term "echolocation" was coined in 1938 by the American zoologist Donald Griffin, who, with Robert Galambos, first demonstrated the phenomenon in bats. As Griffin described in his book, the 18th century Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani had, by means of a series of elaborate experiments, concluded that when bats fly at night, they rely on some sense besides vision, but he did not discover that the other sense was hearing. The Swiss physician and naturalist Louis Jurine repeated Spallanzani's experiments (using different species of bat), and concluded that when bats hunt at night, they rely on hearing. In 1908, Walter Louis Hahn confirmed Spallanzani's and Jurine's findings.


title: Animal echolocation

text: In 1912, the inventor Hiram Maxim independently proposed that bats used sound below the human auditory range to avoid obstacles. In 1920, the English physiologist Hamilton Hartridge correctly proposed instead that bats used frequencies above the range of human hearing.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocation in odontocetes (toothed whales) was not properly described until two decades after Griffin and Galambos' work, by Schevill and McBride in 1956. However, in 1953, Jacques Yves Cousteau suggested in his first book, "", that porpoises had something like sonar, judging by their navigational abilities.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocation is the same as active sonar, using sounds made by the animal itself. Ranging is done by measuring the time delay between the animal's own sound emission and any echoes that return from the environment. The relative intensity of sound received at each ear as well as the time delay between arrival at the two ears provide information about the horizontal angle (azimuth) from which the reflected sound waves arrive.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Unlike some human-made sonars that rely on many extremely narrow beams and many receivers to localize a target (multibeam sonar), animal echolocation has only one transmitter and two receivers (the ears) positioned slightly apart. The echoes returning to the ears arrive at different times and at different intensities, depending on the position of the object generating the echoes. The time and loudness differences are used by the animals to perceive distance and direction. With echolocation, the bat or other animal can see not only where it is going but also how big another animal is, what kind of animal it is, and other features.


title: Animal echolocation

text: At the most basic level, echolocation is based on the neural anatomy of auditory brain circuitry. In essence, ascending brain pathways in the brain stem allow the brain to calculate the difference between the two ears to very small fractions of a second.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocating bats use echolocation to navigate and forage, often in total darkness. They generally emerge from their roosts in caves, attics, or trees at dusk and hunt for insects into the night. Using echolocation, bats can determine how far away an object is, the object's size, shape and density, and the direction (if any) that an object is moving. Their use of echolocation, along with powered flight, allows them to occupy a niche where there are often many insects (that come out at night since there are fewer predators then), less competition for food, and fewer species that may prey on the bats themselves.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocating bats generate ultrasound via the larynx and emit the sound through the open mouth or, much more rarely, the nose. The latter is most pronounced in the horseshoe bats ("Rhinolophus spp."). Bat echolocation calls range in frequency from 14,000 to well over 100,000 Hz, mostly beyond the range of the human ear (typical human hearing range is considered to be from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz). Bats may estimate the elevation of targets by interpreting the interference patterns caused by the echoes reflecting from the tragus, a flap of skin in the external ear.


title: Animal echolocation

text: There are two hypotheses about the evolution of echolocation in bats. The first suggests that laryngeal echolocation evolved twice, or more, in Chiroptera, at least once in the Yangochiroptera and at least once in the horseshoe bats (Rhinolophidae). The second proposes that laryngeal echolocation had a single origin in Chiroptera, was subsequently lost in the family Pteropodidae. Later, the genus "Rousettus" in the Pteropodidae family developed a different mechanism of echolocation using a system of tongue-clicking.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Individual bat species echolocate within specific frequency ranges that suit their environment and prey types. This has sometimes been used by researchers to identify bats flying in an area simply by recording their calls with ultrasonic recorders known as "bat detectors". However echolocation calls are not always species specific and some bats overlap in the type of calls they use so recordings of echolocation calls cannot be used to identify all bats. In recent years researchers in several countries have developed "bat call libraries" that contain recordings of local bat species that have been identified known as "reference calls" to assist with identification.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Since the 1970s there has been an ongoing controversy among researchers as to whether bats use a form of processing known from radar termed coherent cross-correlation. Coherence means that the phase of the echolocation signals is used by the bats, while cross-correlation just implies that the outgoing signal is compared with the returning echoes in a running process. Today most – but not all – researchers believe that they use cross-correlation, but in an incoherent form, termed a filter bank receiver.


title: Animal echolocation

text: When searching for prey they produce sounds at a low rate (10–20 clicks/second). During the search phase the sound emission is coupled to respiration, which is again coupled to the wingbeat. This coupling appears to dramatically conserve energy as there is little to no additional energetic cost of echolocation to flying bats. After detecting a potential prey item, echolocating bats increase the rate of pulses, ending with the terminal buzz, at rates as high as 200 clicks/second. During approach to a detected target, the duration of the sounds is gradually decreased, as is the energy of the sound.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocating bats occupy a diverse set of ecological conditions ; they can be found living in environments as different as Europe and Madagascar, and hunting for food sources as different as insects, frogs, nectar, fruit, and blood. Additionally, the characteristics of an echolocation call are adapted to the particular environment, hunting behavior, and food source of the particular bat. However, this adaptation of echolocation calls to ecological factors is constrained by the phylogenetic relationship of the bats, leading to a process known as descent with modification, and resulting in the diversity of the Chiroptera today.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Flying insects are a common source of food for echolocating bats and some insects (moths in particular) can hear the calls of predatory bats. There is evidence that moth hearing has evolved in response to bat echolocation to avoid capture. Furthermore, these moth adaptations provide selective pressure for bats to improve their insect-hunting systems and this cycle culminates in a moth-bat "evolutionary arms race".


title: Animal echolocation

text: Describing the diversity of bat echolocation calls requires examination of the frequency and temporal features of the calls. It is the variations in these aspects that produce echolocation calls suited for different acoustic environments and hunting behaviors.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Bat call frequencies range from as low as 11 kHz to as high as 212 kHz. Insectivorous aerial-hawking bats have a call frequency between 20 kHz and 60 kHz because it is the frequency that gives the best range and image acuity and makes them less conspicuous to insects. However, low frequencies are adaptive for some species with different prey and environments. "Euderma maculatum", a species that feeds on moths, uses a particularly low frequency of 12.7 kHz that cannot be heard by moths.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocation calls can be composed of two different types of frequency structure: frequency modulated (FM) sweeps, and constant frequency (CF) tones. A particular call can consist of one, the other, or both structures. An FM sweep is a broadband signal – that is, it contains a downward sweep through a range of frequencies. A CF tone is a narrowband signal: the sound stays constant at one frequency throughout its duration.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocation calls have been measured at intensities anywhere between 60 and 140 decibels. Certain bat species can modify their call intensity mid-call, lowering the intensity as they approach objects that reflect sound strongly. This prevents the returning echo from deafening the bat. High-intensity calls such as those from aerial-hawking bats (133 dB) are adaptive to hunting in open skies. Their high intensity calls are necessary to even have moderate detection of surroundings because air has a high absorption of ultrasound and because insects' size only provide a small target for sound reflection. Additionally, the so-called "whispering bats" have adapted low-amplitude echolocation so that their prey, moths, which are able to hear echolocation calls, are less able to detect and avoid an oncoming bat.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Calls can be composed of one frequency or multiple frequencies comprising a harmonic series. In the latter case, the call is usually dominated by a certain harmonic ("dominant" frequencies are those present at higher intensities than other harmonics present in the call).


title: Animal echolocation

text: A single echolocation call (a call being a single continuous trace on a sound spectrogram, and a series of calls comprising a sequence or pass) can last anywhere from 0.2 to 100 milliseconds in duration, depending on the stage of prey-catching behavior that the bat is engaged in. For example, the duration of a call usually decreases when the bat is in the final stages of prey capture – this enables the bat to call more rapidly without overlap of call and echo. Reducing duration comes at the cost of having less total sound available for reflecting off objects and being heard by the bat.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The time interval between subsequent echolocation calls (or pulses) determines two aspects of a bat's perception. First, it establishes how quickly the bat's auditory scene information is updated. For example, bats increase the repetition rate of their calls (that is, decrease the pulse interval) as they home in on a target. This allows the bat to get new information regarding the target's location at a faster rate when it needs it most. Secondly, the pulse interval determines the maximum range that bats can detect objects. This is because bats can only keep track of the echoes from one call at a time; as soon as they make another call they stop listening for echoes from the previously made call. For example, a pulse interval of 100 ms (typical of a bat searching for insects) allows sound to travel in air roughly 34 meters so a bat can only detect objects as far away as 17 meters (the sound has to travel out and back). With a pulse interval of 5 ms (typical of a bat in the final moments of a capture attempt), the bat can only detect objects up to 85 cm away. Therefore, the bat constantly has to make a choice between getting new information updated quickly and detecting objects far away.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The major advantage conferred by an FM signal is extremely precise range discrimination, or localization, of the target. J. A. Simmons demonstrated this effect with a series of experiments that showed how bats using FM signals could distinguish between two separate targets even when the targets were less than half a millimeter apart. This ability is due to the broadband sweep of the signal, which allows for better resolution of the time delay between the call and the returning echo, thereby improving the cross correlation of the two. Additionally, if harmonic frequencies are added to the FM signal, then this localization becomes even more precise.


title: Animal echolocation

text: One possible disadvantage of the FM signal is a decreased operational range of the call. Because the energy of the call is spread out among many frequencies, the distance at which the FM-bat can detect targets is limited. This is in part because any echo returning at a particular frequency can only be evaluated for a brief fraction of a millisecond, as the fast downward sweep of the call does not remain at any one frequency for long.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The structure of a CF signal is adaptive in that it allows the CF-bat to detect both the velocity of a target, and the fluttering of a target's wings as Doppler shifted frequencies. A Doppler shift is an alteration in sound wave frequency, and is produced in two relevant situations: when the bat and its target are moving relative to each other, and when the target's wings are oscillating back and forth. CF-bats must compensate for Doppler shifts, lowering the frequency of their call in response to echoes of elevated frequency – this ensures that the returning echo remains at the frequency to which the ears of the bat are most finely tuned. The oscillation of a target's wings also produces amplitude shifts, which gives a CF-bat additional help in distinguishing a flying target from a stationary one.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Additionally, because the signal energy of a CF call is concentrated into a narrow frequency band, the operational range of the call is much greater than that of an FM signal. This relies on the fact that echoes returning within the narrow frequency band can be summed over the entire length of the call, which maintains a constant frequency for up to 100 milliseconds.


title: Animal echolocation

text: A frequency modulated (FM) component is excellent for hunting prey while flying in close, cluttered environments. Two aspects of the FM signal account for this fact: the precise target localization conferred by the broadband signal, and the short duration of the call. The first of these is essential because in a cluttered environment, the bats must be able to resolve their prey from large amounts of background noise. The 3D localization abilities of the broadband signal enable the bat to do exactly that, providing it with what Simmons and Stein (1980) call a "clutter rejection strategy". This strategy is further improved by the use of harmonics, which, as previously stated, enhance the localization properties of the call. The short duration of the FM call is also best in close, cluttered environments because it enables the bat to emit many calls extremely rapidly without overlap. This means that the bat can get an almost continuous stream of information – essential when objects are close, because they will pass by quickly – without confusing which echo corresponds to which call.


title: Animal echolocation

text: A constant frequency (CF) component is often used by bats hunting for prey while flying in open, clutter-free environments, or by bats that wait on perches for their prey to appear. The success of the former strategy is due to two aspects of the CF call, both of which confer excellent prey-detection abilities. First, the greater working range of the call allows bats to detect targets present at great distances – a common situation in open environments. Second, the length of the call is also suited for targets at great distances: in this case, there is a decreased chance that the long call will overlap with the returning echo. The latter strategy is made possible by the fact that the long, narrowband call allows the bat to detect Doppler shifts, which would be produced by an insect moving either towards or away from a perched bat.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Because bats use echolocation to orient themselves and to locate objects, their auditory systems are adapted for this purpose, highly specialized for sensing and interpreting the stereotyped echolocation calls characteristic of their own species. This specialization is evident from the inner ear up to the highest levels of information processing in the auditory cortex.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Both CF and FM bats have specialized inner ears which allow them to hear sounds in the ultrasonic range, far outside the range of human hearing. Although in most other aspects, the bat's auditory organs are similar to those of most other mammals, certain bats (horseshoe bats, "Rhinolophus spp." and the moustached bat, "Pteronotus parnelii") with a constant frequency (CF) component to their call (known as high duty cycle bats) do have a few additional adaptations for detecting the predominant frequency (and harmonics) of the CF vocalization. These include a narrow frequency "tuning" of the inner ear organs, with an especially large area responding to the frequency of the bat's returning echoes.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The basilar membrane within the cochlea contains the first of these specializations for echo information processing. In bats that use CF signals, the section of the membrane that responds to the frequency of returning echoes is much larger than the region of response for any other frequency. For example, in the greater horseshoe bat, "Rhinolophus ferrumequinum", there is a disproportionately lengthened and thickened section of the membrane that responds to sounds around 83 kHz, the constant frequency of the echo produced by the bat's call. This area of high sensitivity to a specific, narrow range of frequency is known as an "acoustic fovea".


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocating bats have also been found to have cochlear hairs that are especially resistant to intense noise. Cochlear hair cells are essential for hearing sensitivity, and can be damaged by intense noise. As the bats are regularly exposed to intense noise through echolocation, resistance to degradation by intense noise is important for bats to be able to echolocate.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Odontocetes (toothed whales and dolphins) have similar cochlear specializations to those found in bats. Odontocetes also have the highest neural investment of any cochleae reported to date with ratios of greater than 1500 ganglion cells/mm of basilar membrane.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Further along the auditory pathway, the movement of the basilar membrane results in the stimulation of primary auditory neurons. Many of these neurons are specifically "tuned" (respond most strongly) to the narrow frequency range of returning echoes of CF calls. Because of the large size of the acoustic fovea, the number of neurons responding to this region, and thus to the echo frequency, is especially high.


title: Animal echolocation

text: In the Inferior colliculus, a structure in the bat's midbrain, information from lower in the auditory processing pathway is integrated and sent on to the auditory cortex. As George Pollak and others showed in a series of papers in 1977, the interneurons in this region have a very high level of sensitivity to time differences, since the time delay between a call and the returning echo tells the bat its distance from the target object. While most neurons respond more quickly to stronger stimuli, collicular neurons maintain their timing accuracy even as signal intensity changes.


title: Animal echolocation

text: These interneurons are specialized for time sensitivity in several ways. First, when activated, they generally respond with only one or two action potentials. This short duration of response allows their action potentials to give a very specific indication of the exact moment of the time when the stimulus arrived, and to respond accurately to stimuli that occur close in time to one another. In addition, the neurons have a very low threshold of activation – they respond quickly even to weak stimuli. Finally, for FM signals, each interneuron is tuned to a specific frequency within the sweep, as well as to that same frequency in the following echo. There is specialization for the CF component of the call at this level as well. The high proportion of neurons responding to the frequency of the acoustic fovea actually increases at this level.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The auditory cortex in bats is quite large in comparison with other mammals. Various characteristics of sound are processed by different regions of the cortex, each providing different information about the location or movement of a target object. Most of the existing studies on information processing in the auditory cortex of the bat have been done by Nobuo Suga on the mustached bat, "Pteronotus parnellii". This bat's call has both CF tone and FM sweep components.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Suga and his colleagues have shown that the cortex contains a series of "maps" of auditory information, each of which is organized systematically based on characteristics of sound such as frequency and amplitude. The neurons in these areas respond only to a specific combination of frequency and timing (sound-echo delay), and are known as combination-sensitive neurons.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The systematically organized maps in the auditory cortex respond to various aspects of the echo signal, such as its delay and its velocity. These regions are composed of "combination sensitive" neurons that require at least two specific stimuli to elicit a response. The neurons vary systematically across the maps, which are organized by acoustic features of the sound and can be two dimensional. The different features of the call and its echo are used by the bat to determine important characteristics of their prey. The maps include:


title: Animal echolocation

text: Biosonar is valuable to both toothed whales (suborder Odontoceti), including dolphins, porpoises, river dolphins, killer whales and sperm whales, and baleen whales (suborder Mysticeti), including right, bowhead, pygmy right, and gray whales and rorquals, because they live in an underwater habitat that has favourable acoustic characteristics and where vision is often extremely limited in range due to absorption or turbidity. Odontocetes are generally able to hear sounds at ultrasonic frequencies while mysticetes hear sounds within the infrasonic frequency regime.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Cetacean evolution consisted of three main radiations. Throughout the middle and late Eocene periods (49-31.5 million years ago), archaeocetes, primitive toothed Cetacea that arose from terrestrial mammals, were the only known cetaceans. These primitive aquatic mammals did not possess the ability to echolocate, although they did have slightly adapted underwater hearing. The morphology of acoustically isolated ear bones in basilosaurid archaeocetes indicates that this order had directional hearing underwater at low to mid frequencies by the late middle Eocene. However, with the extinction of archaeocetes at the onset of the Oligocene, two new lineages composed a second radiation. These early mysticetes (baleen whales) and odontocetes can be dated back to the middle Oligocene in New Zealand. Based on past phylogenies, it has been found that extant odontocetes are monophyletic; however, echolocation evolved twice, convergently, along the odontocete lineage: once in "Xenorophus", an oligocene stem odontocete, and once in the crown odontecetes Dispersal rates routes of early odontocetes included transoceanic travel to new adaptive zones. The third radiation occurred later in the Neogene, when present dolphins and their relatives evolved to be the most common species in the modern sea.


title: Animal echolocation

text: There are several theories to explain the evolution of echolocation. There are two proposed drives for the hypotheses of cetacean radiation, one biotic and the other abiotic. The first, adaptive radiation, is the result of a rapid divergence into new adaptive zones. This results in diverse, ecologically different clades that are incomparable. Clade Neocete (crown cetacean) evolved from archaeocetes and dispersed across the world's oceans, estuaries, and rivers. These ecological opportunities were the result of abundant dietary resources with low competition for hunting. This hypothesis of lineage diversification, however, can be unconvincing due to a lack of support for rapid speciation early in cetacean history. A second, more abiotic drive is better supported.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Physical restructuring of the oceans has played a role in echolocation radiation. This was a result of global climate change at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary; from a greenhouse to an icehouse world. Tectonic openings created the Southern ocean with a free flowing Antarctic Circumpolar current. These events allowed for a selection regime characterized by the ability to locate and capture prey in turbid river waters, or allow odontocetes to invade and feed at depths below the photic zone. Further studies have found that echolocation below the photic zone could have been a predation adaptation to diel migrating cephalopods. Since its advent, there has been adaptive radiation especially in the family Delphinidae (dolphins) in which echolocation has become extremely derived.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Four proteins have been found to play a major role in toothed whale echolocation. Prestin, a motor protein of the outer hair cells of the inner ear of the mammalian cochlea, is associated with hearing sensitivity. It has undergone two clear episodes of accelerated protein evolution in cetaceans. The first episode of acceleration is connected to odontocete divergence, when echolocation first developed, and the second occurs with the increase in echolocation frequency seen in the family Delphinioidae. Tmc1 and Pjvk are also two proteins related to hearing sensitivity: Tmc1 is associated with hair cell development and Pjvk is associated with hair cell function. Adaptations in the protein Tmc1 are related to the evolution of high-frequency hearing and molecular evolution of Tmc1 and Pjvk are indicative of positive selection for echolocation in odontocetes. Cldn14, a member of the tight junction proteins which form barriers between inner ear cells, shows the same evolutionary pattern as Prestin. The two events of protein evolution, for Prestin and Cldn14, occurred at the same times as the tectonic opening of the Drake Passage (34–31 Ma) and Antarctic ice growth at the Middle Miocene climate transition (14 Ma), with the divergence of odontocetes and mysticetes occurring with the former, and the speciation of Delphinioidae with the latter.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The evolution of two cranial structures has been hypothesized to be linked to echolocation. Cranial telescoping developed first in xenorophids, evolving further in stem odontocetes, until the crown odontocetes show full cranial telescoping, with an overlap between the frontal and maxilla bones and a displacement of the external nares posteriorly. Movement of the external nares may have allowed for a larger nasal apparatus and melon for echolocation. This change occurred after the divergence of the neocetes from the basilosaurids. The first shift towards cranial asymmetry occurred in the Early Oligocene, prior to the xenorophids. A xenorophid fossil ("Cotylocara macei") has cranial asymmetry, and shows other indicators of echolocation. However, basal xenorophids lack cranial asymmetry, indicating that cranial asymmetry likely evolved twice. Extant odontocetes have asymmetric nasofacial regions; generally, the median plane is shifted to the left and structures on the right are larger. Both cranial telescoping and asymmetry are hypothesized to be associated with the sound production necessary for echolocation.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Thirteen species of extant odontocete evolved narrow-band high-frequency (NBHF) echolocation in four separate, convergent events. These species include the families Kogiidae (pygmy sperm whales) and Phocoenidae (porpoises), as well as some species of the genus "Lagenorhynchus", all of "Cephalorhynchus", and the La Plata dolphin. NBHF is thought to have evolved as a means of predator evasion; NBHF-producing species are small relative to other odontocetes, making them viable prey to large species such as the orca. However, because three of the groups developed NBHF prior to the emergence of the orca, predation by other, ancient, raptorial odontocetes must have been the driving force for the development of NBHF, not predation by the orca. Orcas, and, presumably, ancient, raptorial odontocetes such as "Acrophyseter", are unable to hear frequencies above 100 kHz.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Another reason for variation in echolocation is habitat. For all sonar systems the limiting factor deciding whether a returning echo is detected is the echo-to-noise ratio (ENR). The ENR is given by the emitted source level (SL) plus the target strength, minus the two-way transmission loss (absorption and spreading) and the received noise. Animals will adapt either to maximize range under noise-limited conditions (increase source level) or to reduce noise clutter in a shallow and/or littered habitat (decrease source level). In cluttered habitats, such as coastal areas, prey ranges are smaller, and species such as Commerson's dolphin ("Cephalorhynchus commersonii") have lowered source levels to better suit their environment.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Toothed whales emit a focused beam of high-frequency clicks in the direction that their head is pointing. Sounds are generated by passing air from the bony nares through the phonic lips. These sounds are reflected by the dense concave bone of the cranium and an air sac at its base. The focused beam is modulated by a large fatty organ known as the 'melon'. This acts like an acoustic lens because it is composed of lipids of differing densities. Most toothed whales use clicks in a series, or click train, for echolocation, while the sperm whale may produce clicks individually. Toothed whale whistles do not appear to be used in echolocation. Different rates of click production in a click train give rise to the familiar barks, squeals and growls of the bottlenose dolphin. A click train with a repetition rate over 600 per second is called a burst pulse. In bottlenose dolphins, the auditory brain response resolves individual clicks up to 600 per second, but yields a graded response for higher repetition rates.


title: Animal echolocation

text: It has been suggested that some smaller toothed whales may have their tooth arrangement suited to aid in echolocation. The placement of teeth in the jaw of a bottlenose dolphin, for example, are not symmetrical when seen from a vertical plane, and this asymmetry could possibly be an aid in the dolphin sensing if echoes from its biosonar are coming from one side or the other. However, this idea lacks experimental support.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echoes are received using complex fatty structures around the lower jaw as the primary reception path, from where they are transmitted to the middle ear via a continuous fat body. Lateral sound may be received through fatty lobes surrounding the ears with a similar density to water. Some researchers believe that when they approach the object of interest, they protect themselves against the louder echo by quietening the emitted sound. In bats this is known to happen, but here the hearing sensitivity is also reduced close to a target.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Oilbirds and some species of swiftlet are known to use a relatively crude form of echolocation compared to that of bats and dolphins. These nocturnal birds emit calls while flying and use the calls to navigate through trees and caves where they live.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Terrestrial mammals other than bats known or thought to echolocate include two shrew genera ("Sorex" and "Blarina"), the tenrecs of Madagascar and solenodons. These include the wandering shrew ("Sorex vagrans"), the common or Eurasian shrew ("Sorex araneus"), and the short-tailed shrew ("Blarina brevicauda"). The nature of shrew sounds unlike those of bats are low amplitude, broadband, multi-harmonic and frequency modulated. They contain no 'echolocation clicks' with reverberations and would seem to be used for simple, close range spatial orientation. In contrast to bats, shrews use echolocation only to investigate their habitat rather than additionally to pinpoint food.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Echolocation systems are susceptible to interference known as echolocation jamming or sonar jamming. Jamming occurs when non-target sounds interfere with target echoes. Jamming can be purposeful or inadvertent and can be caused by the echolocation system itself, other echolocating animals, prey, or humans. Echolocating animals have evolved to minimize jamming; however, echolocation avoidance behaviors are not always successful.


title: Animal echolocation

text: Background noise can also interfere with echolocation-based tasks via masking – a mechanism whereby noise interferes with the auditory perception of a signal – and via distraction – a mechanism whereby animals allocate finite attentional resources to noise rather than the signal.


title: Animal echolocation

text: The greater wax moth ("Galleria mellonella") exhibits predator avoidance behaviors such as dropping, looping, and freezing when emitters sent out ultrasound waves, indicating that "G. mellonella" can both detect and differentiate between ultrasound frequencies used by predators or from other members of their species. Members of the "Saturniidae" moth family, which include giant silk moths, have been observed using their large wings to deflect the ultrasonic signals of microbats.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: The Man Who Fell to Earth is a 1963 science fiction novel by American author Walter Tevis, about an extraterrestrial who lands on Earth seeking a way to ferry his people to Earth from his home planet, which is suffering from a severe drought. The novel served as the basis for the 1976 film by Nicolas Roeg as well as a 1987 television adaptation and a 2022 television series.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: Thomas Jerome Newton is a humanoid alien who comes to Earth seeking to construct a spaceship to ferry others from his home planet, Anthea, to Earth. Anthea is experiencing a terrible drought after many nuclear wars, and the population has dwindled to fewer than 300. Their own starships are unusable for lack of fuel and 500 years of neglect. The Antheans have no water, a supply of food that is slowly dwindling, and feeble solar power. Like all Antheans, Newton is super-intelligent, but he has been selected for this mission because he has the physical strength necessary to function in Earth's hotter climate and higher gravity.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: Arriving at Earth in a lifeboat, Newton first lands in the state of Kentucky. He quickly becomes familiar with the environment and forms a plan. Using advanced technology from his home planet, Newton patents many inventions, and amasses incredible wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate. He plans to use this wealth to construct space vehicles for the rest of the Anthean population.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: Along the way he meets Betty Jo, who falls in love with him. He does not return these feelings, but takes her and his curious fuel-technician Nathan Bryce as his friends, while he runs his company in the shadows. Betty Jo introduces Newton to many Earth customs, such as church, fashion, and alcohol. However, his appetite for alcohol soon leads to problems, as he begins to experience intense emotions unfamiliar to Antheans.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: Eventually, Newton's alien nature is discovered by Nathan Bryce, and it comes as a relief to Newton to be able to reveal his secret to someone. He expresses the hope that the Antheans he will ferry to Earth will flourish and use their superior intelligence to help Earth achieve peace, prosperity, and safety.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: However, the CIA arrests Newton, having followed him since his appearance on Earth and having recorded this private conversation with Bryce. They submit him to rigorous tests and analysis, resulting in conclusive evidence of his alien identity, but decide not to release the results for fear they would simply not be believed, and possibly even embarrass the government. Newton is released, but is immediately arrested by the FBI, which begins its own examinations. Their final examination is an X-ray of Newton's skull, through his eyes. Newton, whose eyes are sensitive to X-rays, is unable to stop them and is blinded. The story of Newton's blinding becomes a public scandal, but he does not pursue retaliation against the government and is left alone in turn.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: Newton, speaking to Bryce for the last time, explains bitterly that he is unable to continue his spaceship project because of his blindness and because of planetary alignments which have changed during his captivity. He records a message which he hopes to broadcast via radio to his home planet. Bryce leaves Newton to drink alone.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: James Sallis declared that "The Man Who Fell to Earth" was "among the finest science fiction novels," saying "Just beneath the surface it might be read as a parable of the Fifties and of the Cold War. Beneath that as an evocation of existential loneliness, a Christian fable, a parable of the artist. Above all, perhaps, as the wisest, truest representation of alcoholism ever written."


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: A made-for-television film of "The Man Who Fell to Earth" was first broadcast in the United States by ABC on August 23, 1987. Directed by Bobby Roth, the film was produced by MGM and was the pilot for an uncommissioned TV series. In this version, the alien (played by Lewis Smith) is renamed "John Dory" and forms a relationship with a woman, Eva Miller (Beverly D'Angelo), and her son, Billy (Wil Wheaton), a relationship similar to that of Klaatu, Helen Benson and her son Bobby in the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Other cast members include James Laurenson as businessman Felix Hawthorne, and Robert Picardo as government agent Richard Morse.


title: The Man Who Fell to Earth (novel)

text: On August 1, 2019, it was announced that CBS All Access (later Paramount+) had given a series order to a television series adaptation of the novel. Developed by Alex Kurtzman, the series will be a reimagining of Tevis' novel following an alien who arrives on Earth at the turning point of human evolution and must confront his own past to determine the future of mankind by introducing new technology that will help evolve mankind while also dealing with the consequences. On March 17, 2021, the series was moved from Paramount+ to Showtime. The series, which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Naomie Harris, premiered on April 24, 2022.


title: Gandharva

text: A gandharva () is a member of a class of celestial beings in Dharmic religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, whose males are divine performers such as musicians and singers, and the females are divine dancers. In Hinduism, they are regarded to be the celestial demigods who serve as the musicians of the devas.


title: Gandharva

text: In Hinduism, the gandharvas (, , , , , , ; , ) are a class of minor deities who serve as divine musicians in Hindu mythology. The term gandharva is present in Vedic sources (including in the Rigveda) as a singular deity. According to Oberlies, "In mandala I, IX and X the gandharva is presented as a celestial being (dwelling near the sun / in the heavenly waters) which watches over the Soma (apparently) for the benefit of the gods and the sacrificers." The gandharva also "receives the Soma from the ‘Daughter of the Sun' to put it into the Soma plant (RV 9.113.3), i.e., to bring it to this world." The gandharva also brings other things from the beyond, including humans (RV 10.10.4) and the horse (RV 1.163.2). As such, the function of the gandharva is "to escort things from ‘outside' into this world thereby divesting them of their (potential) dangerous nature." Later, the figure also came to be associated with fertility and virility.


title: Gandharva

text: The Atharvaveda mentions that there are 6333 gandharvas. The female gandharvas are called gandharvis, though gandharvas are generally the husbands of the apsaras. They are described to be handsome beings who wear fragrant attires. Some are part animal, usually a bird or horse. They have exceptional musical skills, and are described to be passionate about women. They guard the sacred Soma drink, and play beautiful music for the devas in their palaces. Gandharvas usually live in Indraloka and serve at Indra's court, though they also have their own realm, called the Gandharvaloka.


title: Gandharva

text: Gandharvas are mentioned extensively in the epic Mahabharata as associated with the devas (as dancers and singers) and with the yakshas, as formidable warriors. They are mentioned as spread across various territories.Some of the most prominent gandharvas include Tumburu, Visvavasu (who was the father of Pramadvara), Chitrangada (who killed Chitrangada, the son of Shantanu and Satyavati), Chitrasena (with whom the Kauravas and Pandavas fought in the "Ghosha-yatra"), Drumila (the biological father of Kamsa in some texts), and Candavega (king of gandharvas who invaded the city of Purañjana).


title: Gandharva

text: Various parentage is given for the gandharvas. They are called the creatures of Prajapati, of Brahma, of Kashyapa and Pradha, of the Munis, of Arishta, or of Vāc.


title: Gandharva

text: The Bhagavata Purana mentions that when Brahma, during creation, saw the activities of some sexually active asuras, he laughed. From his laughter were produced the gandharvas.


title: Gandharva

text: A gandharva (Sanskrit; Pali: "Gandhabba"; ) is one of the lowest-ranking Devas in Buddhist cosmology. They are classed among the Cāturmahārājakāyika Devas, and are subject to the Great King , Guardian of the East. Beings are reborn among the gandharvas as a consequence of having practiced the most basic form of ethics (Janavasabha Sutta, DN.18).


title: Gandharva

text: gandharvas can fly through the air, and are known for their skill as musicians. They are connected with trees and flowers, and are described as dwelling in the scents of bark, sap, and blossoms. They are among the beings of the wilderness that might disturb a monk meditating alone.


title: Gandharva

text: The terms and sometimes refer to the same entity. in these cases is the more general term, including a variety of lower deities.


title: Gandharva

text: In the "Mahātaṇhāsankhaya Sutta" of the "Majjhima Nikāya", the Buddha explains to the bhikkhus that an embryo develops when three conditions are met: the woman must be in the correct point of her menstrual cycle, the woman and man must have sexual intercourse, and a gandhabba must be present. According to the commentary of this sutta, the use of the word "gandhabba" doesn't refer to a celestial Deva, but a being enabled to be born by its karma. It is the state of a sentient being between rebirths.


title: Gandharva

text: Among the notable gandharvas mentioned (in DN.20 and DN.32) are Panāda, Opamañña, Nala, Cittasena, Mātali, and Janesabha. The last in this list is thought to be synonymous with Janavasabha, a rebirth of King Bimbisāra of Magadha. Mātali is the charioteer of Śakra.


title: Gandharva

text: Timbarū is a chieftain of the gandharvas. There is a romantic story told about the love between his daughter Bhaddā Suriyavacchasā (Sanskrit: ) and another gandharva, Pañcasikha (Sanskrit: ). Pañcasikha fell in love with Suriyavacchasā when he saw her dancing before Śakra, but she was then in love with Mātali's son Sikhandī (or Sikhaddi). Pañcasikha went to Timbarū's home and played a melody on his flute of beluva-wood, with which he had great skill, and sang a love song in which he interwove themes about the Buddha and the Arhats.


title: Gandharva

text: Śakra petitioned Pañcasikha to intercede with the Buddha so that he might have an audience with him. As a reward for Pañcasikha's services, Śakra was able to get Suriyavacchasā, already pleased with Pañcasikha's display of skill and devotion, to agree to marry Pañcasikha.


title: Gandharva

text: Pañcasikha also acts as a messenger for the Four Heavenly Kings, conveying news from them to Mātali, the latter representing Śakra and the Devas.


title: Gandharva

text: The Digambara sect describes the gandharvas as having a golden complexion while the Śvetāmbara tradition recognizes them as blackish. The Tumbaru is their sacred tree.


title: Ukraine–United States relations

text: The United States officially recognized the independence of Ukraine on December 25, 1991. The United States upgraded its consulate in the capital, Kyiv, to embassy status on January 21, 1992. In 2002, relations between the United States and Ukraine deteriorated after one of the recordings made during the Cassette Scandal revealed an alleged transfer of a sophisticated Ukrainian defense system to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Following the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, the USA became one of the largest defense partners of Ukraine.


title: Ukraine–United States relations

text: The current ambassador of the United States to Ukraine is Bridget A. Brink. The current Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States is Oksana Markarova.


title: Ukraine–United States relations

text: According to documents uncovered during the United States diplomatic cables leak, American diplomats defend Ukrainian sovereignty in meetings with other diplomats.


title: Ukraine–United States relations

text: Ukrainians have generally viewed the U.S. positively, with 80% expressing a favorable view in 2002, and 60% in 2011. According to the 2012 U.S. Global Leadership Report, 33% of Ukrainians approve of U.S. leadership, with 26% disapproving and 41% uncertain.


title: Ukraine–United States relations

text: In the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea, the United States began to supply military aid to Ukraine. This continued after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with the US massively increasing its supply of military aid, with US President Joe Biden heavily condemning the invasion and pledging support to Ukraine.