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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_minister_of_Israel] | [TOKENS: 2926] |
Contents Prime Minister of Israel The prime minister of Israel (Hebrew: רֹאשׁ הַמֶּמְשָׁלָה, romanised: Rosh HaMemshala, lit. 'Head of the Government', Hebrew abbreviation: רה״מ; Arabic: رئيس الحكومة, romanised: Ra'īs al-Ḥukūma) is the head of government and chief executive of the State of Israel. Israel is a parliamentary republic with a president as the head of state. The president's powers are largely ceremonial, while the prime minister holds the executive power. The official residence of the prime minister, Beit Aghion, is in Jerusalem. The current prime minister is Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, the ninth person to hold the position (excluding caretakers). Following an election, the president nominates a member of the Knesset to become prime minister after asking party leaders whom they support for the position. The first candidate the president nominates has 28 days to form a viable government that can command a majority in the Knesset. He then presents a government platform and must receive a vote of confidence from the Knesset to take office. In practice, the prime minister is usually the leader of the largest party in the governing coalition. Since it is all but impossible for one party to win a majority in the Knesset, all Israeli governments have been coalitions between two or more parties. Between 1996 and 2001, the prime minister was directly elected, separately from the Knesset. The prime minister's position is greatly enhanced compared to his counterparts in other parliamentary republics because he is both de jure and de facto chief executive. This is because Basic Law: The Government explicitly vests executive power in the Government, of which the prime minister is the leader. In most other parliamentary republics, the president is at least nominal chief executive, while usually required by convention to act on the advice of the cabinet. History The office of Prime Minister came into existence on 14 May 1948, the date of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, when the provisional government was created. David Ben-Gurion, leader of Mapai and head of the Jewish Agency, became Israel's first prime minister. The position became permanent on 8 March 1949, when the first government was formed. Ben-Gurion retained his role until late 1953, when he resigned to settle in the Kibbutz of Sde Boker. He was replaced by Moshe Sharett. However, Ben-Gurion returned in a little under two years to reclaim his position. He resigned for a second time in 1963, breaking away from Mapai to form Rafi. Levi Eshkol took over as head of Mapai and prime minister. He became the first prime minister to head the country under the banner of two parties when Mapai formed the Alignment with Ahdut HaAvoda in 1965. In 1968 he also became the only party leader to command an absolute majority in the Knesset, after Mapam and Rafi merged into the Alignment, giving it 63 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. On 26 February 1969, Eshkol became the first prime minister to die in office. He was temporarily replaced by Yigal Allon, whose stint lasted less than a month, as the party persuaded Golda Meir to return to political life and become prime minister in March 1969. Meir was Israel's first woman prime minister, and the third in the world (after Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Indira Gandhi). Meir resigned in 1974 after the Agranat Commission published its findings on the Yom Kippur War, even though it had absolved her of blame. Yitzhak Rabin took over, though he also resigned towards the end of the eighth Knesset's term following a series of scandals. Those included the suicide of Housing Minister Avraham Ofer after police began investigating allegations that he had used party funds illegally, and the affair involving Asher Yadlin (the governor-designate of the Bank of Israel), who was sentenced to five years in prison for having accepted bribes. Rabin's wife, Leah, was also found to have had an overseas bank account, which was illegal in Israel at the time. Menachem Begin became the first right-wing prime minister when his Likud won the 1977 elections, and retained the post in the 1981 elections. He resigned in 1983 for health reasons, passing the reins of power to Yitzhak Shamir. After the 1984 elections had proved inconclusive with neither the Alignment nor Likud able to form a government, a national unity government was formed with a rotating prime ministership – Shimon Peres took the first two years, and was replaced by Shamir midway through the Knesset term. Although the 1988 elections produced another national unity government, Shamir was able to take the role alone. Peres made an abortive bid to form a left-wing government in 1990, but failed, leaving Shamir in power until 1992. Rabin became prime minister for the second time when he led Labour to victory in the 1992 elections. After his assassination on 4 November 1995, Peres took over as prime minister. During the thirteenth Knesset (1992–1996) it was decided to hold a separate ballot for prime minister modelled after American presidential elections. This system was instituted in part because the Israeli electoral system makes it all but impossible for one party to win a majority. While only two parties—Mapai/Labour and Likud—had ever led governments, the large number of parties or factions in a typical Knesset usually prevents one party from winning the 61 seats needed for a majority. In 1996, when the first such election took place, the outcome was a surprise win for Benjamin Netanyahu after election polls predicted that Peres was the winner. However, in the Knesset election held at the same time, Labour won more votes than any other party (27%). Thus Netanyahu, despite his theoretical position of power, needed the support of the religious parties to form a viable government. Ultimately Netanyahu failed to hold the government together, and early elections for both prime minister and the Knesset were called in 1999. Although five candidates intended to run, the three representing minor parties (Benny Begin of Herut – The National Movement, Azmi Bishara of Balad, and Yitzhak Mordechai of the Centre Party) dropped out before election day, and Ehud Barak beat Netanyahu in the election. However, the new system again appeared to have failed; although Barak's One Israel alliance (an alliance of Labour, Gesher, and Meimad) won more votes than any other party in the Knesset election, they garnered only 26 seats, the lowest ever by a winning party or alliance. Barak needed to form a coalition with six smaller parties to form a government. In early 2001, Barak resigned following the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada. However, the government was not brought down, and only elections for prime minister were necessary. In the election itself, Ariel Sharon of Likud comfortably beat Barak, taking 62.4% of the vote. However, because Likud only had 21 seats in the Knesset, Sharon had to form a national unity government. Following Sharon's victory, it was decided to do away with separate elections for prime minister and return to the previous system. The 2003 elections were carried out in the same manner as prior to 1996. Likud won 38 seats, the highest by a party for over a decade, and as party leader Sharon was duly appointed Prime Minister. However, towards the end of his term and largely as a result of the deep divisions within Likud over Israel's unilateral disengagement plan, Sharon broke away from his party to form Kadima, managing to maintain his position as prime minister and also becoming the first prime minister not to be a member of either Labour or Likud (or their predecessors). However, he suffered a stroke in January 2006, in the midst of election season, leading Ehud Olmert to become acting prime minister in the weeks leading to the elections. He was voted by the cabinet to be interim prime minister just after the 2006 elections, when Sharon had reached 100 days of incapacitation. He thus became Israel's third interim prime minister, only days before forming his own new government as the official Prime Minister of Israel. In 2008, amid accusations of corruption and challenges from his own party, Olmert resigned. However, his successor Tzipi Livni was unable to form a coalition government. In the election in the following year, while Kadima won the most seats, it was the Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu who was given the task of forming a government. He was able to do so, thus beginning his second term as Prime Minister of Israel. In the 2013 election, the Likud Yisrael Beiteinu alliance emerged as the largest faction. After forming a coalition, Netanyahu secured his third prime ministership. In 2015, Netanyahu managed to stay in power. Multiple disagreements with his coalition members led to the 2019–2022 Israeli political crisis. In 2021, Naftali Bennett became prime minister. He was succeeded in July 2022 by his coalition partner, Yair Lapid. In December 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the prime ministership, as a result of the previous month's election. Order of succession If the prime minister dies in office, the cabinet chooses an interim prime minister to run the government until a new government is placed in power. Yigal Allon served as interim prime minister following Levi Eshkol's death, as did Shimon Peres following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. According to Israeli law, if a prime minister is temporarily incapacitated rather than dies (as was the case following Ariel Sharon's stroke in early 2006), power is transferred to the acting prime minister, until the prime minister recovers (Ehud Olmert took over from Sharon), for up to 100 days. If the prime minister is declared permanently incapacitated, or that period expires, the president of Israel oversees the process of assembling a new governing coalition, and in the meantime the acting prime minister or other incumbent minister is appointed by the cabinet to serve as interim prime minister. In the case of Sharon, elections were already due to occur within 100 days of the beginning of his coma; thus, the post-election coalition-building process pre-empted the emergency provisions for the selection of a new prime minister. Nevertheless, Olmert was appointed interim prime minister on 16 April 2006, after the elections, just days before he formed a government on 4 May 2006, becoming the official prime minister. Aside from the position of Acting Prime Minister, there are also vice prime ministers and deputy prime ministers. The interim prime minister (Hebrew: ראש הממשלה בפועל, Rosh HaMemshala Ba-foal lit. "prime minister de facto") is appointed by the government if the incumbent is dead or permanently incapacitated, or if his tenure was ended due to a criminal conviction. Israeli law distinguishes the terms acting prime minister (מלא מקום ראש הממשלה), filling in for the incumbent prime minister, temporarily, and acting in the incumbent's office, while the incumbent is in office, and an interim prime minister in office. Only if the incumbent prime minister becomes temporarily incapacitated will the acting prime minister act in the incumbent's office and will be standing in for him for up to 100 consecutive days, while the incumbent is in office. Legally, the "100 consecutive days" limit, in the language of the law, only stipulates that the incumbent then is deemed to be permanently incapacitated and that the limited time for an acting prime minister to act in the incumbent's office is over. In 2006, Ehud Olmert, after standing in for Prime Minister Sharon for 100 consecutive days, as acting prime minister, did not automatically assume office as an interim prime minister. The government voted to appoint him, and in addition, he was also a member of prime minister's party, which enabled them to appoint him to the role. Shimon Peres was the foreign minister when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and was voted unanimously to assume office as an interim prime minister until a new Government would be placed in power (that he later formed by himself). Yigal Allon was also voted to be the interim prime minister after Prime Minister Levi Eshkol suddenly died and served until Golda Meir formed her government. Both the interim and acting prime ministers' authorities are identical to those of a prime minister, with the exception of not having the authority to dissolve the Knesset. An 'interim government' (Hebrew: ממשלת מעבר, Memshelet Ma'avar lit. "transitional government") is the same government, having been changed in their legal status, after the death, resignation, permanent incapacitation, or criminal conviction of the prime minister, as well as after the prime minister's request to dissolve the Knesset (Israeli parliament) was published through the president's decree, or after it was defeated by a motion of no confidence (these actions are regarded by the law as "the Government shall be deemed to have resigned"), or after election and before the forming of a new government. Prime Minister's residence Since 1974, the official residence of the prime minister is Beit Aghion, at the corner of Balfour and Smolenskin streets in Rehavia, Jerusalem. List of prime ministers of Israel See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#cite_note-145] | [TOKENS: 9291] |
Contents Internet The Internet (or internet)[a] is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP)[b] to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, discussion groups, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing. Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching, and the design of computer networks for data communication. The set of communication protocols to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage. Each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the non-profit Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Terminology The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The word Internet was used in 1945 by the United States War Department in a radio operator's manual, and in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks. The word Internet may be capitalized as a proper noun, although this is becoming less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services. It is the global collection of web pages, documents and other web resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs. History In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of computer resources. J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Research into packet switching,[c] one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran at RAND in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory in 1965. After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network was incorporated into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network proposed by ARPA. ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 29 October 1969. The third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. By the end of 1971, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. Other user networks and research networks, such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to Norway (NORSAR and, later, NDRE) and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, the first internetwork for resource sharing. ARPA projects, the International Network Working Group and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network, or a network of networks. In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". Cerf and his graduate students used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675. The Internet Experiment Notes and later RFCs repeated this use. The work of Louis Pouzin and Robert Metcalfe had important influences on the resulting TCP/IP design. National PTTs and commercial providers developed the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which facilitated worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet. Steady advances in semiconductor technology and optical networking created new economic opportunities for commercial involvement in the expansion of the network in its core and for delivering services to the public. In mid-1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve established connections to the Internet, delivering email and public access products to the half million users of the Internet. Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites. Later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee began writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server, and the first Web pages that described the project itself. In 1991 the Commercial Internet eXchange was founded, allowing PSInet to communicate with the other commercial networks CERFnet and Alternet. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online Internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996, OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic. As technology advanced and commercial opportunities fueled reciprocal growth, the volume of Internet traffic started experiencing similar characteristics as that of the scaling of MOS transistors, exemplified by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months. This growth, formalized as Edholm's law, was catalyzed by advances in MOS technology, laser light wave systems, and noise performance. Since 1995, the Internet has tremendously impacted culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by email, instant messaging, telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP), two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever-greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking services. During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders. As of 31 March 2011[update], the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30% of world population). It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication. By 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet. Modern smartphones can access the Internet through cellular carrier networks, and internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October 2016. As of 2018[update], 80% of the world's population were covered by a 4G network. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that, by the end of 2017, 48% of individual users regularly connect to the Internet, up from 34% in 2012. Mobile Internet connectivity has played an important role in expanding access in recent years, especially in Asia and the Pacific and in Africa. The number of unique mobile cellular subscriptions increased from 3.9 billion in 2012 to 4.8 billion in 2016, two-thirds of the world's population, with more than half of subscriptions located in Asia and the Pacific. The limits that users face on accessing information via mobile applications coincide with a broader process of fragmentation of the Internet. Fragmentation restricts access to media content and tends to affect the poorest users the most. One solution, zero-rating, is the practice of Internet service providers allowing users free connectivity to access specific content or applications without cost. Social impact The Internet has enabled new forms of social interaction, activities, and social associations, giving rise to the scholarly study of the sociology of the Internet. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 390 million to 1.9 billion. By 2010, 22% of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube. In 2014 the world's Internet users surpassed 3 billion or 44 percent of world population, but two-thirds came from the richest countries, with 78 percent of Europeans using the Internet, followed by 57 percent of the Americas. However, by 2018, Asia alone accounted for 51% of all Internet users, with 2.2 billion out of the 4.3 billion Internet users in the world. China's Internet users surpassed a major milestone in 2018, when the country's Internet regulatory authority, China Internet Network Information Centre, announced that China had 802 million users. China was followed by India, with some 700 million users, with the United States third with 275 million users. However, in terms of penetration, in 2022, China had a 70% penetration rate compared to India's 60% and the United States's 90%. In 2022, 54% of the world's Internet users were based in Asia, 14% in Europe, 7% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11% in Africa, 4% in the Middle East and 1% in Oceania. In 2019, Kuwait, Qatar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and Iceland had the highest Internet penetration by the number of users, with 93% or more of the population with access. As of 2022, it was estimated that 5.4 billion people use the Internet, more than two-thirds of the world's population. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (25%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%). Modern character encoding standards, such as Unicode, allow for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain. Several neologisms exist that refer to Internet users: Netizen (as in "citizen of the net") refers to those actively involved in improving online communities, the Internet in general or surrounding political affairs and rights such as free speech, Internaut refers to operators or technically highly capable users of the Internet, digital citizen refers to a person using the Internet in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation. The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly.[citation needed] Educational material at all levels from pre-school (e.g. CBeebies) to post-doctoral (e.g. scholarly literature through Google Scholar) is available on websites. The internet has facilitated the development of virtual universities and distance education, enabling both formal and informal education. The Internet allows researchers to conduct research remotely via virtual laboratories, with profound changes in reach and generalizability of findings as well as in communication between scientists and in the publication of results. By the late 2010s the Internet had been described as "the main source of scientific information "for the majority of the global North population".: 111 Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. The United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web and ranks in the top 10 among all sites in terms of traffic. The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos. Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer. Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Streaming companies (such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon's Prime Video, Mubi, Hulu, and Apple TV+) now dominate the entertainment industry, eclipsing traditional broadcasters. Audio streamers such as Spotify and Apple Music also have significant market share in the audio entertainment market. Video sharing websites are also a major factor in the entertainment ecosystem. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more than two billion users. It uses a web player to stream and show video files. YouTube users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands, of videos daily. Other video sharing websites include Vimeo, Instagram and TikTok.[citation needed] Although many governments have attempted to restrict both Internet pornography and online gambling, this has generally failed to stop their widespread popularity. A number of advertising-funded ostensible video sharing websites known as "tube sites" have been created to host shared pornographic video content. Due to laws requiring the documentation of the origin of pornography, these websites now largely operate in conjunction with pornographic movie studios and their own independent creator networks, acting as de-facto video streaming services. Major players in this field include the market leader Aylo, the operator of PornHub and numerous other branded sites, as well as other independent operators such as xHamster and Xvideos. As of 2023[update], Internet traffic to pornographic video sites rivalled that of mainstream video streaming and sharing services. Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videotelephony, and VoIP so that work may be performed from any location, such as the worker's home.[citation needed] The spread of low-cost Internet access in developing countries has opened up new possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their choice. A popular twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use of peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills have made collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of collaborative software, which allow groups to easily form, cheaply communicate, and share ideas. An example of collaborative software is the free software movement, which has produced, among other things, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (later forked into LibreOffice).[citation needed] Content management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work.[citation needed] The internet also allows for cloud computing, virtual private networks, remote desktops, and remote work.[citation needed] The online disinhibition effect describes the tendency of many individuals to behave more stridently or offensively online than they would in person. A significant number of feminist women have been the target of various forms of harassment, including insults and hate speech, to, in extreme cases, rape and death threats, in response to posts they have made on social media. Social media companies have been criticized in the past for not doing enough to aid victims of online abuse. Children also face dangers online such as cyberbullying and approaches by sexual predators, who sometimes pose as children themselves. Due to naivety, they may also post personal information about themselves online, which could put them or their families at risk unless warned not to do so. Many parents choose to enable Internet filtering or supervise their children's online activities in an attempt to protect their children from pornography or violent content on the Internet. The most popular social networking services commonly forbid users under the age of 13. However, these policies can be circumvented by registering an account with a false birth date, and a significant number of children aged under 13 join such sites.[citation needed] Social networking services for younger children, which claim to provide better levels of protection for children, also exist. Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness. Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.[citation needed] Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; employees spend a significant amount of time surfing the Web while at work. Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Nicholas G. Carr believes that Internet use has other effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity. Electronic business encompasses business processes spanning the entire value chain: purchasing, supply chain management, marketing, sales, customer service, and business relationship. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners. According to International Data Corporation, the size of worldwide e-commerce, when global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are combined, equate to $16 trillion in 2013. A report by Oxford Economics added those two together to estimate the total size of the digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales. While much has been written of the economic advantages of Internet-enabled commerce, there is also evidence that some aspects of the Internet such as maps and location-aware services may serve to reinforce economic inequality and the digital divide. Electronic commerce may be responsible for consolidation and the decline of mom-and-pop, brick and mortar businesses resulting in increases in income inequality. A 2013 Institute for Local Self-Reliance report states that brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales, while Amazon employs only 14. Similarly, the 700-employee room rental start-up Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in 2014, about half as much as Hilton Worldwide, which employs 152,000 people. At that time, Uber employed 1,000 full-time employees and was valued at $18.2 billion, about the same valuation as Avis Rent a Car and The Hertz Corporation combined, which together employed almost 60,000 people. Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce. Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising. In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded those of broadcast television.: 19 Many common online advertising practices are controversial and increasingly subject to regulation. The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing for carrying out their mission, having given rise to Internet activism. Social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the Arab Spring, by helping activists organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information. Many have understood the Internet as an extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, observing how network communication technologies provide something like a global civic forum. However, incidents of politically motivated Internet censorship have now been recorded in many countries, including western democracies. E-government is the use of technological communications devices, such as the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers opportunities for more direct and convenient citizen access to government and for government provision of services directly to citizens. Cybersectarianism is a new organizational form that involves: highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in the collective study via email, online chat rooms, and web-based message boards. In particular, the British government has raised concerns about the prospect of young British Muslims being indoctrinated into Islamic extremism by material on the Internet, being persuaded to join terrorist groups such as the so-called "Islamic State", and then potentially committing acts of terrorism on returning to Britain after fighting in Syria or Iraq.[citation needed] Applications and services The Internet carries many applications and services, most prominently the World Wide Web, including social media, electronic mail, mobile applications, multiplayer online games, Internet telephony, file sharing, and streaming media services. The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents, images, multimedia, applications, and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which provide a global system of named references. URIs symbolically identify services, web servers, databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. Web services also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging business data and logistics and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet. World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, enable users to navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content. Client-side scripts can include animations, games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Email is an important communications service available via the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties, analogous to mailing letters or memos, predates the creation of the Internet. Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principal internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).[citation needed] VoIP systems now dominate many markets, being as easy and convenient as a traditional telephone, while having substantial cost savings, especially over long distances. File sharing is the practice of transferring large amounts of data in the form of computer files across the Internet, for example via file servers. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networks. Access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by a digital signature. Governance The Internet is a global network that comprises many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been assumed by the IETF. The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. The resulting contributions and standards are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices when implementing Internet technologies. To maintain interoperability, the principal name spaces of the Internet are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. The organization coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including domain names, IP addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name spaces are essential for maintaining the global reach of the Internet. This role of ICANN distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body for the global Internet. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, had final approval over changes to the DNS root zone until the IANA stewardship transition on 1 October 2016. Regional Internet registries (RIRs) were established for five regions of the world to assign IP address blocks and other Internet parameters to local registries, such as Internet service providers, from a designated pool of addresses set aside for each region:[citation needed] The Internet Society (ISOC) was founded in 1992 with a mission to "assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". Its members include individuals as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and universities. Among other activities ISOC provides an administrative home for a number of less formally organized groups that are involved in developing and managing the Internet, including: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG). On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.[citation needed] Infrastructure The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture. As with any computer network, the Internet physically consists of routers, media (such as cabling and radio links), repeaters, and modems. However, as an example of internetworking, many of the network nodes are not necessarily Internet equipment per se. Internet packets are carried by other full-fledged networking protocols, with the Internet acting as a homogeneous networking standard, running across heterogeneous hardware, with the packets guided to their destinations by IP routers.[citation needed] Internet service providers (ISPs) establish worldwide connectivity between individual networks at various levels of scope. At the top of the routing hierarchy are the tier 1 networks, large telecommunication companies that exchange traffic directly with each other via very high speed fiber-optic cables and governed by peering agreements. Tier 2 and lower-level networks buy Internet transit from other providers to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though they may also engage in peering. End-users who only access the Internet when needed to perform a function or obtain information, represent the bottom of the routing hierarchy.[citation needed] An ISP may use a single upstream provider for connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy and load balancing. Internet exchange points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs. Large organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend to interconnect with large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and the UK's national research and education network, JANET.[citation needed] Common methods of Internet access by users include broadband over coaxial cable, fiber optics or copper wires, Wi-Fi, satellite, and cellular telephone technology.[citation needed] Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services that cover large areas are available in many cities, such as New York, London, Vienna, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh. Most servers that provide internet services are today hosted in data centers, and content is often accessed through high-performance content delivery networks. Colocation centers often host private peering connections between their customers, internet transit providers, cloud providers, meet-me rooms for connecting customers together, Internet exchange points, and landing points and terminal equipment for fiber optic submarine communication cables, connecting the internet. Internet Protocol Suite The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite (also called TCP/IP, based on the first two components.) This is a suite of protocols that are ordered into a set of four conceptional layers by the scope of their operation, originally documented in RFC 1122 and RFC 1123:[citation needed] The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol. IP enables internetworking, essentially establishing the Internet itself. Two versions of the Internet Protocol exist, IPv4 and IPv6.[citation needed] Aside from the complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (e.g., peering agreements), and by technical specifications or protocols that describe the exchange of data over the network.[citation needed] For locating individual computers on the network, the Internet provides IP addresses. IP addresses are used by the Internet infrastructure to direct internet packets to their destinations. They consist of fixed-length numbers, which are found within the packet. IP addresses are generally assigned to equipment either automatically via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or are configured.[citation needed] Domain Name Systems convert user-inputted domain names (e.g. "en.wikipedia.org") into IP addresses.[citation needed] Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed in 1981 to address up to ≈4.3 billion (109) hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011, when the global IPv4 address allocation pool was exhausted. Because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP IPv6, was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the IP address and was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s and is currently in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion. By design, IPv6 is not directly interoperable with IPv4. Instead, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. Thus, translation facilities exist for internetworking, and some nodes have duplicate networking software for both networks. Essentially all modern computer operating systems support both versions of the Internet Protocol.[citation needed] Network infrastructure, however, has been lagging in this development.[citation needed] A subnet or subnetwork is a logical subdivision of an IP network.: 1, 16 Computers that belong to a subnet are addressed with an identical most-significant bit-group in their IP addresses. This results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields, the network number or routing prefix and the rest field or host identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface.[citation needed] The routing prefix may be expressed in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation written as the first address of a network, followed by a slash character (/), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, 198.51.100.0/24 is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range 198.51.100.0 to 198.51.100.255 belong to this network. The IPv6 address specification 2001:db8::/32 is a large address block with 296 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix.[citation needed] For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an address. For example, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask for the prefix 198.51.100.0/24.[citation needed] Computers and routers use routing tables in their operating system to forward IP packets to reach a node on a different subnetwork. Routing tables are maintained by manual configuration or automatically by routing protocols. End-nodes typically use a default route that points toward an ISP providing transit, while ISP routers use the Border Gateway Protocol to establish the most efficient routing across the complex connections of the global Internet.[citation needed] The default gateway is the node that serves as the forwarding host (router) to other networks when no other route specification matches the destination IP address of a packet. Security Internet resources, hardware, and software components are the target of criminal or malicious attempts to gain unauthorized control to cause interruptions, commit fraud, engage in blackmail or access private information. Malware is malicious software used and distributed via the Internet. It includes computer viruses which are copied with the help of humans, computer worms which copy themselves automatically, software for denial of service attacks, ransomware, botnets, and spyware that reports on the activity and typing of users.[citation needed] Usually, these activities constitute cybercrime. Defense theorists have also speculated about the possibilities of hackers using cyber warfare using similar methods on a large scale. Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet. According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016. Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy US$6 trillion in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year. Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms. The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies. Under the Act, all U.S. telecommunications providers are required to install packet sniffing technology to allow Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intercept all of their customers' broadband Internet and VoIP traffic.[d] The large amount of data gathered from packet capture requires surveillance software that filters and reports relevant information, such as the use of certain words or phrases, the access to certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with certain parties. Agencies, such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, GCHQ and the FBI, spend billions of dollars per year to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems for interception and analysis of data. Similar systems are operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress dissidents. The required hardware and software were allegedly installed by German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia. Some governments, such as those of Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, restrict access to content on the Internet within their territories, especially to political and religious content, with domain name and keyword filters. In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden resources is supposed to contain only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret. Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet but do not mandate filter software. Many free or commercially available software programs, called content-control software are available to users to block offensive specific on individual computers or networks in order to limit access by children to pornographic material or depiction of violence.[citation needed] Performance As the Internet is a heterogeneous network, its physical characteristics, including, for example the data transfer rates of connections, vary widely. It exhibits emergent phenomena that depend on its large-scale organization. PB per monthYear020,00040,00060,00080,000100,000120,000140,000199019952000200520102015Petabytes per monthGlobal Internet Traffic Volume The volume of Internet traffic is difficult to measure because no single point of measurement exists in the multi-tiered, non-hierarchical topology. Traffic data may be estimated from the aggregate volume through the peering points of the Tier 1 network providers, but traffic that stays local in large provider networks may not be accounted for.[citation needed] An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to the small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia. Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests. Estimates of the Internet's electricity usage have been the subject of controversy, according to a 2014 peer-reviewed research paper that found claims differing by a factor of 20,000 published in the literature during the preceding decade, ranging from 0.0064 kilowatt hours per gigabyte transferred (kWh/GB) to 136 kWh/GB. The researchers attributed these discrepancies mainly to the year of reference (i.e. whether efficiency gains over time had been taken into account) and to whether "end devices such as personal computers and servers are included" in the analysis. In 2011, academic researchers estimated the overall energy used by the Internet to be between 170 and 307 GW, less than two percent of the energy used by humanity. This estimate included the energy needed to build, operate, and periodically replace the estimated 750 million laptops, a billion smart phones and 100 million servers worldwide as well as the energy that routers, cell towers, optical switches, Wi-Fi transmitters and cloud storage devices use when transmitting Internet traffic. According to a non-peer-reviewed study published in 2018 by The Shift Project (a French think tank funded by corporate sponsors), nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions could be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure. The study also said that online video streaming alone accounted for 60% of this data transfer and therefore contributed to over 300 million tons of CO2 emission per year, and argued for new "digital sobriety" regulations restricting the use and size of video files. See also Notes References Sources Further reading External links |
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Contents Xbox Game Studios Xbox Game Studios (previously known as Microsoft Studios, Microsoft Game Studios, and Microsoft Games) is an American video game publisher based in Redmond, Washington. It was established in March 2000, spun out from an internal Games Group, for the development and publishing of video games for Microsoft Windows. It has since expanded to include games and other interactive entertainment for the namesake Xbox platforms, other desktop operating systems, Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms, web-based portals, and other game consoles. Xbox Game Studios, alongside ZeniMax Media and Activision Blizzard, are part of the Microsoft Gaming division led by Phil Spencer, who is chief executive officer of the division. History Early in the history of Microsoft the software company published video games like Olympic Decathlon, but Steve Ballmer reportedly persuaded Bill Gates to deemphasize them to professionalize the company's image. By the early 1990s, Microsoft published subLOGIC's Microsoft Flight Simulator and several Microsoft Entertainment Pack compilations of minigames, but was best known for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. In 1992, the company began increasing its focus on games. It announced Microsoft Golf for Windows, based on Access Software's Links, and expanded the games division from two to six people with the intention of commissioning more products from other developers. Microsoft acquired FASA Interactive in 1999 for its MechWarrior game series, Access Software, and Aces Game Studio, which worked on Flight Simulator. The Games Group had also established long-term publishing deals with developers like Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires, Age of Mythology), and Digital Anvil (Starlancer). Under Microsoft, FASA Interactive was renamed FASA Studio, and Access Software became Salt Lake Games Studio. Microsoft transitioned the Games Group into a wholly separate division named Microsoft Games around March 2000, along with other consolidation of games-related projects within Microsoft. This came alongside the public announcement of the first Xbox console, with Microsoft Games to serve as a developer and publisher of titles for both Xbox and Windows. Robbie Bach, who held executive positions in Microsoft's entertainment divisions, was named senior vice-president while Ed Fries, a member of the former Games Group and instrumental for some of its acquisitions, was named as vice-president of the new division. Shane Kim served as the division's general manager. In 2001, the division was renamed Microsoft Game Studios (MGS). FASA Studio and Salt Lake Games Studio remained with Microsoft Game Studios. Digital Anvil and Ensemble Studios were acquired by Microsoft in 2000 and 2001, respectively. One of the first major studio acquisitions following the division's formation was Bungie in June 2000, in the midst of its development of Halo: Combat Evolved. With the acquisition, Halo, which had been planned for release on personal computers, became a Microsoft-published title as well as a launch title for the Xbox on its release in 2001. Turn 10 Studios was established in 2001 for work on the Forza series of racing games. In September 2002, Microsoft Game Studios acquired Rare, who had previously extensively developed for Nintendo platforms. In 2003, Microsoft recognized that the EA Sports label was in a far stronger position to develop sports games for the Xbox console, and among realignment steps, laid off about 78 employees within Microsoft Game Studios that were developing sports games in-house, and sold Salt Lake Games Studio, now named Indie Games to Take-Two Interactive in 2004, where it became Indie Built. Peter Moore was named in 2003 as vice-president of Microsoft's Home and Entertainment Division, which included MGS, the Xbox division, and Microsoft's home hardware market, reporting to Bach. In addition to pulling big publishers like Electronic Arts to the Xbox platform, Moore tried to push the Xbox in Japan by courting Japanese developers with support from MGS publishing. Such games included Phantom Dust and Blinx: The Time Sweeper. Around 2004, MGS established Carbonated Games as an internal studio for the development of casual games for Microsoft's web games portal MSN Games, on the chat client MSN Messenger, and on the Xbox Live platform. Kim and Fries were instrumental for securing MGS' publishing deal with Lionhead Studios for their 2004 game Fable, which would serve as the first major role-playing game on the Xbox platform. Subsequently, in 2006, MGS acquired Lionhead Studios along with the Fable properties, as it sought to secure a Fable sequel for the upcoming Xbox 360. MGS folded the staff of Digital Anvil into the larger studio in 2005, following the release of 2003's Brute Force, and closed down the studio entirely in 2006. FASA Studio was closed three-and-a-half months after the May 2007 release of their last game, Shadowrun. In 2007, MGS announced the opening of a European office in Reading, England, headed by general manager Phil Spencer. Moore opted to leave Microsoft in July 2007, so to move back to the San Francisco Bay area with his family and to rejoin Electronic Arts. Don Mattrick was named as his replacement as the new vice-president of the Xbox and Games Business, which included MGS. Later in 2007, Bungie amicably split from MGS to become a privately held independent company, with MGS retaining the rights to the Halo property. Bungie continued to develop two additional Halo games for MGS, Halo 3: ODST (2009) and Halo: Reach (2010). Simultaneously, MGS founded 343 Industries as an internal studio to develop future Halo games without Bungie. In 2008, MGS disbanded Carbonated Games and announced the formation of internal studio Xbox Live Productions to develop "high-quality digital content" for Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft as a whole announced layoffs of up to 5,000 jobs across all divisions in January 2009 due to slowing sales of personal computers as a result of the Great Recession. Within MGS, the studio had already planned to disband Ensemble Studios after the completion of Halo Wars in early 2009, while the new layoffs led MGS to also disband Aces Game Studio. Microsoft acquired Vancouver-based BigPark in May 2009, using the studio to develop some of the first games for the upcoming Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360. Later in 2009, Phil Spencer was promoted to corporate vice-president of MGS, in order to replace the retiring Shane Kim. In 2010, MGS formed a mobile gaming studio, MGS Mobile Gaming, focused on developing gaming and entertainment multimedia for Windows Phone devices. It also expanded Rare with a second studio in Digbeth, Birmingham. By the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011 in June 2011, Microsoft Game Studios was quietly renamed to Microsoft Studios. Later in 2011, Microsoft Studios acquired Twisted Pixel Games. In early December 2011, Microsoft Studios created Microsoft Casual Games, a division to revamp its past casual games for Windows (like Windows Solitaire and MSN Games) using more up-to-date software delivery platforms. In 2012, Phil Harrison, the former Sony worldwide studios head, joined Microsoft as head of Microsoft Studios Europe and IEB. Microsoft Studios acquired developer Press Play, known for developing Tentacles and Max & the Magic Marker. They also announced a new development studio in London, England. Later in 2012, Microsoft downsized Microsoft Game Studios Vancouver due to the cancellation of the Kinect family title Project Columbia and announced that the ongoing development of free-to-play title Microsoft Flight had been ceased due to portfolio evaluation. The reduced Vancouver studios were renamed to Black Tusk Studios and tasked with making similar franchise-building title as Halo. In 2013, Microsoft established European studio Lift London, a studio that would create cloud-based games for tablets, mobiles and TVs. Later, they created a new "Deep Tech" team inside its Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) unit; the new team is charged with working with top developers outside the company to build next-generation applications on top of Microsoft platforms. While Mattrick had overseen much of the development of Microsoft's next console, the Xbox One, he left in July 2013, prior to its release, to take over as CEO of Zynga. Mattrick was succeeded by Julie Larson-Green, who was named the president of the Devices and Studios Engineering Group, following a realignment of Microsoft's divisions, overseeing both the Xbox hardware divisions and Microsoft Studios. Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in February 2014. At this time, Microsoft was facing strong competition in the consumer market, and within the gaming sector, the Xbox One (released in 2013) was more expensive than competitors and had too much focus on non-gaming functions. Under Nadella's direction, Phil Spencer was named the new head of Microsoft Studios to replace Jason Holtman, who had only been its lead for the prior six months. Spencer began looking for ways to expand Microsoft Studios to make it a profitable division for Microsoft, and began negotiations for the acquititions of Mojang, the developers behind Minecraft, in late 2014. Microsoft spent US$2.5 billion to acquire the studio, and upon the deal's completion in November, the studio's key founding personnel, Markus Persson, Jakob Porsér and Carl Manneh, departed Mojang. As a result, Persson became valued around US$1.3 billion. Microsoft Studios committed to keeping Minecraft available across multiple platforms, including rival PlayStation consoles. Matt Booty, the studio's corporate vice-president in 2020, said the acquisition of Mojang served as the template for later acquisitions, as Mojang was left to run as an "unplugged studio" with limited integration into the Microsoft corporation, minimizing the disruption of Mojang's normal day-to-day business matters nor impeding on the studio's freedom. Additional intellectual property (IP) acquisitions by Microsoft Studios in 2014 included a publishing contract with Undead Labs for their game State of Decay, the rights to the Gears of War series from Epic Games, and the Rise of IP (Rise of Nations and Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends) from Big Huge Games. Microsoft Studios assigned Gears of War to Black Tusk Studios, which was later rebranded in 2015 as The Coalition. In July 2014, it was announced that Xbox Entertainment Studios would be closed in the following months; the closure was completed by October 29. On March 4, 2015, Microsoft announced that they were merging UK-based studios, Lift London and Soho Productions for further games development, with the amalgam continuing to operate under the Lift London name. On March 7, Microsoft announced at the Game Developers Conference that HoloLens games were coming to Xbox One. On March 9, Microsoft announced that Kudo Tsunoda's role was expanding and that he would be the new studio team leader for studios such as Press Play, Lift London and a new internal studio called Decisive Games. Decisive Games was previously mentioned in job postings, saying that they were hiring for work on a "beloved strategy game" for Xbox One and PC, but this is the first public acknowledgement of the team's existence as a first-party studio. Twisted Pixel and Microsoft Studios agreed to split in September 2015. Kudo Tsunoda left the Xbox division in November 2015 for the development of HoloLens and Microsoft Edge, and other projects that could improve means of human interaction, including voice and gesture. Tsunoda's role was filled by Hanno Lemke and Shannon Loftis. In 2016, Microsoft was perceived as "unifying PC and Xbox One" platforms. In March 2016, Microsoft canceled development of two major projects: Lionhead's Fable Legends and Press Play's Project Knoxville, shuttering both studios in the following months. Around the same time, changes to Microsoft Studios' website indicated that further studios—BigPark, Good Science Studio, Leap Experience Pioneers (LXP), Function Studios and State of the Art (SOTA)—had been closed, Microsoft Studios clarified that all of them had been consolidated into other Microsoft Studios teams over the past several years. In September 2017, Spencer was promoted to the senior leadership team, gaining the title of "executive vice-president of gaming". At this point, Microsoft Studios directly reported to Nadella. In January 2018, Matt Booty was promoted from leader in the Minecraft games business to corporate vice-president of Microsoft Studios. On June 10, 2018, during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018, Microsoft announced the acquisitions of Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs and Compulsion Games, as well as the opening of a new studio in Santa Monica, California, entitled The Initiative, which would be led by the former Crystal Dynamics studio head Darrell Gallagher. In November, Microsoft Studios announced further acquisitions with Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment. The studio rebranded itself on February 5, 2019, as Xbox Game Studios, as to reflect Microsoft's intent to use the Xbox brand to support gaming across all the devices it supports. At E3 2019, Xbox Game Studios announced it had acquired Double Fine, and established a new internal studio dedicated to Age of Empires headed by Shannon Loftis, bringing their total studio count to fifteen. This studio, later named World's Edge, does not directly develop any games, but oversees efforts from external studios, such as Relic Entertainment, Forgotten Empires and Tantalus Media, to assure the series is being developed in the right direction, according to creative director Adam Isgreen. Booty has stated that with studios like Obsidian, Ninja Theory, and Double Fine, which have traditionally supported multiplatform games, they will determine if it makes sense for their future products to be treated as Microsoft-exclusive content for Xbox and Windows computers, or to allow these to be published across multiple platforms. That decision will be based on a "network effect", whether having these games on other platforms will better support the franchise and thus worthwhile for Microsoft to help dedicate resources towards it, such as they had with Minecraft. Xbox Game Studios has allowed some of the content developed by its studios or that was previously published exclusively for the Xbox and Windows systems to be released on Nintendo systems, notably the Nintendo Switch versions of Cuphead from Studio MDHR and Ori and the Blind Forest from Moon Studios, and allowing for the titular characters from Rare's Banjo-Kazooie into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. However, the division stated that these releases were generally "existing commitments to other platforms" that they allowed studios to honor, but they otherwise have "no plans to further expand our exclusive first party games to other consoles." Near the end of 2019, with the combined fifteen studios now under Xbox Game Studios, Booty stated that they now had more games than ever to handle, and were likely not going to acquire any additional studios in the near future, stating "we've been shifting our focus inside Xbox Game Studios from acquisition and growth, to a phase of execution and delivery". Additionally, as Microsoft started promotion of its fourth-generation of Xbox, including the Xbox Series X, Booty stated that titles developed by Xbox Game Studios in year or two following its release will not be exclusively for the new generation of consoles, but instead will support both Xbox One and the new console, with some games receiving enhanced performance when played on the new console lineup. Booty said that with the large number of studios they had recently acquired, as well as ongoing external partnerships and their Xbox Game Pass service, the Studios are able to support a "breadth of offerings in the portfolio" designed to attract a large number of players. Further, in an interview in November 2020, Phil Spencer said during an interview regarding the future of the Xbox brand that he intends to put more focus on outputting RPGs, which had to that point been underserved. Microsoft and ZeniMax Media announced on September 21, 2020, that Microsoft planned to acquire ZeniMax and its family of studios, which include Bethesda Game Studios, Arkane Studios, id Software, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, and ZeniMax Online Studios, for over US$7.5 billion in cash. According to Spencer, the ZeniMax acquisition was intended to give Microsoft a large library of games known around the world, and to expand the library of Xbox Game Pass and XCloud. However, during 2023 hearings regarding the Federal Trade Commission's concern over the proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, Spencer said that Sony Interactive Entertainment had made sways at Bethesda to keep Starfield as a PlayStation-exclusive, further prompting Microsoft to purchase Zenimax. Both U.S. and European Union regulatory agencies approved the acquisition by early March 2021, and the acquisition was formally completed by March 9, 2021. The total price of the deal was $8.1 billion Bethesda Softworks, the primarily publisher for all of ZeniMax's games, remained as an operational unit under Microsoft with the acquisition and retained all its current leadership. With the acquisition, future games from the studios will be exclusive to Xbox consoles, but existing commitments to other platforms (such as Arkane Studios' Deathloop and Tango Gameworks' Ghostwire: Tokyo, which are contractually exclusive to PlayStation 5 for a period of 12 months before their release on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S) will still be honored. Spencer stated that Game Pass was also fundamental driver for the acquisition. A preliminary injunction to block the acquisition had been sought in an ongoing class-action lawsuit that ZeniMax faced over Fallout 4, with the plaintiffs in the case arguing that Microsoft could shield ZeniMax's assets from damages should they be found liable after the acquisition. The ZeniMax Board of Directors was dissolved following the Microsoft purchase. On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal valued at $68.7 billion. Microsoft stated that this acquisition would make it the third-largest gaming company by revenue, following Tencent and Sony. With the announcement, Microsoft also announced a major change to its corporate structure, with Phil Spencer becoming CEO of the new division Microsoft Gaming, with Matt Booty leading Xbox Game Studios under it. Once approved, Activision Blizzard would then become a subdivision of Microsoft Gaming. The deal was cleared by various national regulators by October 13, 2023, with Microsoft closing the deal the same day. During litigation on the merger with the United States Federal Trade Commission, internal documents from Microsoft c. 2020 show strong interest in re-acquiring Bungie, or acquiring Sega's game development companies, Supergiant Games, Niantic, Inc., Thunderful Group, Zynga, IO Interactive, Scopely, or Playrix as part of Xbox Game Studios, as well as publisher Square Enix to help bolster its Asian presence and mobile market share. In January 2023, Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees, which represented about 5% of its global workforce. Included in those layoffs were many employees from 343 Industries, The Coalition, and Bethesda Game Studios. On October 26, 2023, Microsoft announced the promotion of several employees in the company, including Sarah Bond being promoted to president of Xbox, overseeing all Xbox platform, business, and hardware work, and Matt Booty promoted from president of Xbox to president of Game Content and Studios, including the new responsibility of overseeing ZeniMax and Bethesda, with Jamie Leder still running Zenimax as a limited integration entity, but now reporting to Matt. In the wake of Matt Booty's promotion, Alan Hartman, then the head of Turn 10, was subsequently promoted to head of Xbox Game Studios. On October 6, 2024, 343 Industries officially announced their rebranding as Halo Studios, additionally confirming that multiple Halo games were in development and that said projects would now use Unreal Engine 5 as opposed to the proprietary Slipspace Engine that powered Halo Infinite. On October 14, Rare creative lead Craig Duncan was announced to be succeeding Alan Hartman as head of Xbox Game Studios beginning in November 2024, with Hartman retiring after a three-decade tenure at Microsoft. In July 2025, Microsoft Gaming performed a business restructuring ahead of the new financial year, which resulted in layoffs at Xbox Game Studios Rare, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs and Turn 10 Studios. The latter, who conceived and developed the Forza Motorsport series, was reported to have lost almost half of its workforce and was anticipated to be restructured as a support studio for Motorsport's sister series Forza Horizon and developments for the ForzaTech engine, according to former content coordinator Fred Russell. In addition, Rare's action-adventure game Everwild ceased production, while Microsoft also canceled the Perfect Dark reboot and closed its developer The Initiative simultaneously. Alongside Everwild's cancelation, Rare veteran and designer Gregg Mayles also departed the company after 35 years, alongside producer Louise O'Connor. Over 2024 and 2025, a series of video games published by Microsoft Gaming divisions, most notably Xbox Game Studios' titles, were released on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles under an initiative to pivot focus from the Xbox series of consoles and eventually cease to produce exclusive titles for the consoles like Sega. Xbox Game Studios had also released Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo 64 video games on the Nintendo Switch Online service in 2024, all of whom were developed by Rare and in some cases, formerly published by Nintendo. Studios Games published References External links |
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Contents Meta Platforms Meta Platforms, Inc. (doing business as Meta) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads and Manus. The company also operates an advertising network for its own sites and third parties; as of 2023[update], advertising accounted for 97.8 percent of its total revenue. Meta has been described as a part of Big Tech, which refers to the largest six tech companies in the United States, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Nvidia, which are also the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. The company was originally established in 2004 as TheFacebook, Inc., and was renamed Facebook, Inc. in 2005. In 2021, it rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. to reflect a strategic shift toward developing the metaverse—an interconnected digital ecosystem spanning virtual and augmented reality technologies. In 2023, Meta was ranked 31st on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's largest public companies. As of 2022, it was the world's third-largest spender on research and development, with R&D expenses totaling US$35.3 billion. History Facebook filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on January 1, 2012. The preliminary prospectus stated that the company sought to raise $5 billion, had 845 million monthly active users, and a website accruing 2.7 billion likes and comments daily. After the IPO, Zuckerberg would retain 22% of the total shares and 57% of the total voting power in Facebook. Underwriters valued the shares at $38 each, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation yet for a newly public company. On May 16, one day before the IPO, Facebook announced it would sell 25% more shares than originally planned due to high demand. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third-largest in US history (slightly ahead of AT&T Mobility and behind only General Motors and Visa). The stock price left the company with a higher market capitalization than all but a few U.S. corporations—surpassing heavyweights such as Amazon, McDonald's, Disney, and Kraft Foods—and made Zuckerberg's stock worth $19 billion. The New York Times stated that the offering overcame questions about Facebook's difficulties in attracting advertisers to transform the company into a "must-own stock". Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase described it as "the next great blue-chip". Writers at TechCrunch, on the other hand, expressed skepticism, stating, "That's a big multiple to live up to, and Facebook will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation." Trading in the stock, which began on May 18, was delayed that day due to technical problems with the Nasdaq exchange. The stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, forcing underwriters to buy back shares to support the price. At the closing bell, shares were valued at $38.23, only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value. The opening was widely described by the financial press as a disappointment. The stock set a new record for trading volume of an IPO. On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline. On May 22, 2012, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue. The allegations sparked "fury" among some investors and led to the immediate filing of several lawsuits, one of them a class action suit claiming more than $2.5 billion in losses due to the IPO. Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut. S&P Global Ratings added Facebook to its S&P 500 index on December 21, 2013. On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure". The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." In November 2016, Facebook announced the Microsoft Windows client of gaming service Facebook Gameroom, formerly Facebook Games Arcade, at the Unity Technologies developers conference. The client allows Facebook users to play "native" games in addition to its web games. The service was closed in June 2021. Lasso was a short-video sharing app from Facebook similar to TikTok that was launched on iOS and Android in 2018 and was aimed at teenagers. On July 2, 2020, Facebook announced that Lasso would be shutting down on July 10. In 2018, the Oculus lead Jason Rubin sent his 50-page vision document titled "The Metaverse" to Facebook's leadership. In the document, Rubin acknowledged that Facebook's virtual reality business had not caught on as expected, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on content for early adopters. He also urged the company to execute fast and invest heavily in the vision, to shut out HTC, Apple, Google and other competitors in the VR space. Regarding other players' participation in the metaverse vision, he called for the company to build the "metaverse" to prevent their competitors from "being in the VR business in a meaningful way at all". In May 2019, Facebook founded Libra Networks, reportedly to develop their own stablecoin cryptocurrency. Later, it was reported that Libra was being supported by financial companies such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. The consortium of companies was expected to pool in $10 million each to fund the launch of the cryptocurrency coin named Libra. Depending on when it would receive approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory authority to operate as a payments service, the Libra Association had planned to launch a limited format cryptocurrency in 2021. Libra was renamed Diem, before being shut down and sold in January 2022 after backlash from Swiss government regulators and the public. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online services, including Facebook, grew globally. Zuckerberg predicted this would be a "permanent acceleration" that would continue after the pandemic. Facebook hired aggressively, growing from 48,268 employees in March 2020 to more than 87,000 by September 2022. Following a period of intense scrutiny and damaging whistleblower leaks, news started to emerge on October 21, 2021 about Facebook's plan to rebrand the company and change its name. In the Q3 2021 earnings call on October 25, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the ongoing criticism of the company's social services and the way it operates, and pointed to the pivoting efforts to building the metaverse – without mentioning the rebranding and the name change. The metaverse vision and the name change from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms was introduced at Facebook Connect on October 28, 2021. Based on Facebook's PR campaign, the name change reflects the company's shifting long term focus of building the metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world by social media, virtual reality and augmented reality features. "Meta" had been registered as a trademark in the United States in 2018 (after an initial filing in 2015) for marketing, advertising, and computer services, by a Canadian company that provided big data analysis of scientific literature. This company was acquired in 2017 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a foundation established by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and became one of their projects. Following the rebranding announcement, CZI announced that it had already decided to deprioritize the earlier Meta project, thus it would be transferring its rights to the name to Meta Platforms, and the previous project would end in 2022. Soon after the rebranding, in early February 2022, Meta reported a greater-than-expected decline in profits in the fourth quarter of 2021. It reported no growth in monthly users, and indicated it expected revenue growth to stall. It also expected measures taken by Apple Inc. to protect user privacy to cost it some $10 billion in advertisement revenue, an amount equal to roughly 8% of its revenue for 2021. In meeting with Meta staff the day after earnings were reported, Zuckerberg blamed competition for user attention, particularly from video-based apps such as TikTok. The 27% reduction in the company's share price which occurred in reaction to the news eliminated some $230 billion of value from Meta's market capitalization. Bloomberg described the decline as "an epic rout that, in its sheer scale, is unlike anything Wall Street or Silicon Valley has ever seen". Zuckerberg's net worth fell by as much as $31 billion. Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta, and the holding makes up the bulk of his wealth. According to published reports by Bloomberg on March 30, 2022, Meta turned over data such as phone numbers, physical addresses, and IP addresses to hackers posing as law enforcement officials using forged documents. The law enforcement requests sometimes included forged signatures of real or fictional officials. When asked about the allegations, a Meta representative said, "We review every data request for legal sufficiency and use advanced systems and processes to validate law enforcement requests and detect abuse." In June 2022, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of 14 years, announced she would step down that year. Zuckerberg said that Javier Olivan would replace Sandberg, though in a “more traditional” role. In March 2022, Meta (except Meta-owned WhatsApp) and Instagram were banned in Russia and added to the Russian list of terrorist and extremist organizations for alleged Russophobia and hate speech (up to genocidal calls) amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meta appealed against the ban, but it was upheld by a Moscow court in June of the same year. Also in March 2022, Meta and Italian eyewear giant Luxottica released Ray-Ban Stories, a series of smartglasses which could play music and take pictures. Meta and Luxottica parent company EssilorLuxottica declined to disclose sales on the line of products as of September 2022, though Meta has expressed satisfaction with its customer feedback. In July 2022, Meta saw its first year-on-year revenue decline when its total revenue slipped by 1% to $28.8bn. Analysts and journalists accredited the loss to its advertising business, which has been limited by Apple's app tracking transparency feature and the number of people who have opted not to be tracked by Meta apps. Zuckerberg also accredited the decline to increasing competition from TikTok. On October 27, 2022, Meta's market value dropped to $268 billion, a loss of around $700 billion compared to 2021, and its shares fell by 24%. It lost its spot among the top 20 US companies by market cap, despite reaching the top 5 in the previous year. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, 13% of its workforce. Zuckerberg said the decision to aggressively increase Meta's investments had been a mistake, as he had wrongly predicted that the surge in e-commerce would last beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. He also attributed the decline to increased competition, a global economic downturn and "ads signal loss". Plans to lay off a further 10,000 employees began in April 2023. The layoffs were part of a general downturn in the technology industry, alongside layoffs by companies including Google, Amazon, Tesla, Snap, Twitter and Lyft. Starting from 2022, Meta scrambled to catch up to other tech companies in adopting specialized artificial intelligence hardware and software. It had been using less expensive CPUs instead of GPUs for AI work, but that approach turned out to be less efficient. The company gifted the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research $1.3 million to finance the Social Media Archive's aim to make their data available to social science research. In 2023, Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner imposed a record EUR 1.2 billion fine on Meta for transferring data from Europe to the United States without adequate protections for EU citizens.: 250 In March 2023, Meta announced a new round of layoffs that would cut 10,000 employees and close 5,000 open positions to make the company more efficient. Meta revenue surpassed analyst expectations for the first quarter of 2023 after announcing that it was increasing its focus on AI. On July 6, Meta launched a new app, Threads, a competitor to Twitter. Meta announced its artificial intelligence model Llama 2 in July 2023, available for commercial use via partnerships with major cloud providers like Microsoft. It was the first project to be unveiled out of Meta's generative AI group after it was set up in February. It would not charge access or usage but instead operate with an open-source model to allow Meta to ascertain what improvements need to be made. Prior to this announcement, Meta said it had no plans to release Llama 2 for commercial use. An earlier version of Llama was released to academics. In August 2023, Meta announced its permanent removal of news content from Facebook and Instagram in Canada due to the Online News Act, which requires Canadian news outlets to be compensated for content shared on its platform. The Online News Act was in effect by year-end, but Meta will not participate in the regulatory process. In October 2023, Zuckerberg said that AI would be Meta's biggest investment area in 2024. Meta finished 2023 as one of the best-performing technology stocks of the year, with its share price up 150 percent. Its stock reached an all-time high in January 2024, bringing Meta within 2% of achieving $1 trillion market capitalization. In November 2023 Meta Platforms launched an ad-free service in Europe, allowing subscribers to opt-out of personal data being collected for targeted advertising. A group of 28 European organizations, including Max Schrems' advocacy group NOYB, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Wikimedia Europe, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, signed a 2024 letter to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) expressing concern that this subscriber model would undermine privacy protections, specifically GDPR data protection standards. Meta removed the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in February 2024, citing repeated violations of its Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy. As of March, Meta was under investigation by the FDA for alleged use of their social media platforms to sell illegal drugs. On 16 May 2024, the European Commission began an investigation into Meta over concerns related to child safety. In May 2023, Iraqi social media influencer Esaa Ahmed-Adnan encountered a troubling issue when Instagram removed his posts, citing false copyright violations despite his content being original and free from copyrighted material. He discovered that extortionists were behind these takedowns, offering to restore his content for $3,000 or provide ongoing protection for $1,000 per month. This scam, exploiting Meta’s rights management tools, became widespread in the Middle East, revealing a gap in Meta’s enforcement in developing regions. An Iraqi nonprofit Tech4Peace’s founder, Aws al-Saadi helped Ahmed-Adnan and others, but the restoration process was slow, leading to significant financial losses for many victims, including prominent figures like Ammar al-Hakim. This situation highlighted Meta’s challenges in balancing global growth with effective content moderation and protection. On 16 September 2024, Meta announced it had banned Russian state media outlets from its platforms worldwide due to concerns about "foreign interference activity." This decision followed allegations that RT and its employees funneled $10 million through shell companies to secretly fund influence campaigns on various social media channels. Meta's actions were part of a broader effort to counter Russian covert influence operations, which had intensified since the invasion. At its 2024 Connect conference, Meta presented Orion, its first pair of augmented reality glasses. Though Orion was originally intended to be sold to consumers, the manufacturing process turned out to be too complex and expensive. Instead, the company pivoted to producing a small number of the glasses to be used internally. On 4 October 2024, Meta announced about its new AI model called Movie Gen, capable of generating realistic video and audio clips based on user prompts. Meta stated it would not release Movie Gen for open development, preferring to collaborate directly with content creators and integrate it into its products by the following year. The model was built using a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets. On October 31, 2024, ProPublica published an investigation into deceptive political advertisement scams that sometimes use hundreds of hijacked profiles and facebook pages run by organized networks of scammers. The authors cited spotty enforcement by Meta as a major reason for the extent of the issue. In November 2024, TechCrunch reported that Meta were considering building a $10bn global underwater cable spanning 25,000 miles. In the same month, Meta closed down 2 million accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were linked to scam centers in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates doing pig butchering scams. In December 2024, Meta announced that, beginning February 2025, they would require advertisers to run ads about financial services in Australia to verify information about who are the beneficiary and the payer in a bid to regulate scams. On December 4, 2024, Meta announced it will invest US$10 billion for its largest AI data center in northeast Louisiana, powered by natural gas facilities. On the 11th of that month, Meta experienced a global outage, impacting accounts on all of their social media and messaging applications. Outage reports from DownDetector reached 70,000+ and 100,000+ within minutes for Instagram and Facebook, respectively. In January 2025, Meta announced plans to roll back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, citing shifts in the "legal and policy landscape" in the United States following the 2024 presidential election. The decision followed reports that CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to align the company more closely with the incoming Trump administration, including changes to content moderation policies and executive leadership. The new content moderation policies continued to bar insults about a person's intellect or mental illness, but made an exception to allow calling LGBTQ people mentally ill because they are gay or transgender. Later that month, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit brought by Donald Trump for suspending his social media accounts after the January 6 riots. Changes to Meta's moderation policies were controversial among its oversight board, with a significant divide in opinion between the board's US conservatives and its global members. In June 2025, Meta Platforms Inc. has decided to make a multibillion-dollar investment into artificial intelligence startup Scale AI. The financing could exceed $10 billion in value which would make it one of the largest private company funding events of all time. In October 2025, it was announced that Meta would be laying off 600 employees in the artificial intelligence unit to perform better and simpler. They referred to their AI unit as "bloated" and are seeking to trim down the department. This mass layoff is going to impact Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions. Mergers and acquisitions Meta has acquired multiple companies (often identified as talent acquisitions). One of its first major acquisitions was in April 2012, when it acquired Instagram for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. In October 2013, Facebook, Inc. acquired Onavo, an Israeli mobile web analytics company. In February 2014, Facebook, Inc. announced it would buy mobile messaging company WhatsApp for US$19 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition was completed on October 6. Later that year, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in cash and stock, which released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016. In late November 2019, Facebook, Inc. announced the acquisition of the game developer Beat Games, responsible for developing one of that year's most popular VR games, Beat Saber. In Late 2022, after Facebook Inc rebranded to Meta Platforms Inc, Oculus was rebranded to Meta Quest. In May 2020, Facebook, Inc. announced it had acquired Giphy for a reported cash price of $400 million. It will be integrated with the Instagram team. However, in August 2021, UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated that Facebook, Inc. might have to sell Giphy, after an investigation found that the deal between the two companies would harm competition in display advertising market. Facebook, Inc. was fined $70 million by CMA for deliberately failing to report all information regarding the acquisition and the ongoing antitrust investigation. In October 2022, the CMA ruled for a second time that Meta be required to divest Giphy, stating that Meta already controls half of the advertising in the UK. Meta agreed to the sale, though it stated that it disagrees with the decision itself. In May 2023, Giphy was divested to Shutterstock for $53 million. In November 2020, Facebook, Inc. announced that it planned to purchase the customer-service platform and chatbot specialist startup Kustomer to promote companies to use their platform for business. It has been reported that Kustomer valued at slightly over $1 billion. The deal was closed in February 2022 after regulatory approval. In September 2022, Meta acquired Lofelt, a Berlin-based haptic tech startup. In December 2025, it was announced Meta had acquired the AI-wearables startup, Limitless. In the same month, they also acquired another AI startup, Manus AI, for $2 billion. Manus announced in December that its platform had achieved $100mm in recurring revenue just 8 months after its launch and Meta said it will scale the platform to many other businesses. In January 2026, it was announced Meta proposed acquisition of Manus was undergoing preliminary scrutiny by Chinese regulators. The examination concerns the cross-border transfer of artificial intelligence technology developed in China. Lobbying In 2020, Facebook, Inc. spent $19.7 million on lobbying, hiring 79 lobbyists. In 2019, it had spent $16.7 million on lobbying and had a team of 71 lobbyists, up from $12.6 million and 51 lobbyists in 2018. Facebook was the largest spender of lobbying money among the Big Tech companies in 2020. The lobbying team includes top congressional aide John Branscome, who was hired in September 2021, to help the company fend off threats from Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration. In December 2024, Meta donated $1 million to the inauguration fund for then-President-elect Donald Trump. In 2025, Meta was listed among the donors funding the construction of the White House State Ballroom. Partnerships February 2026, Meta announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia. Censorship In August 2024, Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan indicating that during the COVID-19 pandemic the Biden administration repeatedly asked Meta to limit certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, on Facebook and Instagram. In 2016 Meta hired Jordana Cutler, formerly an employee at the Israeli Embassy to the United States, as its policy chief for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. In this role, Cutler pushed for the censorship of accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine chapters in the United States. Critics have said that Cutler's position gives the Israeli government an undue influence over Meta policy, and that few countries have such high levels of contact with Meta policymakers. Following the election of Donald Trump in 2025, various sources noted possible censorship related to the Democratic Party on Instagram and other Meta platforms. In February 2025, a Meta rep flagged journalist Gil Duran's article and other "critiques of tech industry figures" as spam or sensitive content, limiting their reach. In March 2025, Meta attempted to block former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting or further distributing her memoir, Careless People, that includes allegations of unaddressed sexual harassment in the workplace by senior executives. The New York Times reports that the arbitration is among Meta's most forcible attempts to repudiate a former employee's account of workplace dynamics. Publisher Macmillan reacted to the ruling by the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal by stating that it will ignore its provisions. As of 15 March 2025[update], hardback and digital versions of Careless People were being offered for sale by major online retailers. From October 2025, Meta began removing and restricting access for accounts related to LGBTQ, reproductive health and abortion information pages on its platforms. Martha Dimitratou, executive director of Repro Uncensored, called Meta's shadow-banning of these issues "One of the biggest waves of censorship we are seeing". Disinformation concerns Since its inception, Meta has been accused of being a host for fake news and misinformation. In the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election, Zuckerberg began to take steps to eliminate the prevalence of fake news, as the platform had been criticized for its potential influence on the outcome of the election. The company initially partnered with ABC News, the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Snopes and PolitiFact for its fact-checking initiative; as of 2018, it had over 40 fact-checking partners across the world, including The Weekly Standard. A May 2017 review by The Guardian found that the platform's fact-checking initiatives of partnering with third-party fact-checkers and publicly flagging fake news were regularly ineffective, and appeared to be having minimal impact in some cases. In 2018, journalists working as fact-checkers for the company criticized the partnership, stating that it had produced minimal results and that the company had ignored their concerns. In 2024 Meta's decision to continue to disseminate a falsified video of US president Joe Biden, even after it had been proven to be fake, attracted criticism and concern. In January 2025, Meta ended its use of third-party fact-checkers in favor of a user-run community notes system similar to the one used on X. While Zuckerberg supported these changes, saying that the amount of censorship on the platform was excessive, the decision received criticism by fact-checking institutions, stating that the changes would make it more difficult for users to identify misinformation. Meta also faced criticism for weakening its policies on hate speech that were designed to protect minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals from bullying and discrimination. While moving its content review teams from California to Texas, Meta changed their hateful conduct policy to eliminate restrictions on anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant hate speech, as well as explicitly allowing users to accuse LGBT people of being mentally ill or abnormal based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. In January 2025, Meta faced significant criticism for its role in removing LGBTQ+ content from its platforms, amid its broader efforts to address anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech. The removal of LGBTQ+ themes was noted as part of the wider crackdown on content deemed to violate its community guidelines. Meta's content moderation policies, which were designed to combat harmful speech and protect users from discrimination, inadvertently led to the removal or restriction of LGBTQ+ content, particularly posts highlighting LGBTQ+ identities, support, or political issues. According to reports, LGBTQ+ posts, including those that simply celebrated pride or advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, were flagged and removed for reasons that some critics argue were vague or inconsistently applied. Many LGBTQ+ activists and users on Meta's platforms expressed concern that such actions stifled visibility and expression, potentially isolating LGBTQ+ individuals and communities, especially in spaces that were historically important for outreach and support. Lawsuits Numerous lawsuits have been filed against the company, both when it was known as Facebook, Inc., and as Meta Platforms. In March 2020, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) sued Facebook, for significant and persistent infringements of the rule on privacy involving the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Every violation of the Privacy Act is subject to a theoretical cumulative liability of $1.7 million. The OAIC estimated that a total of 311,127 Australians had been exposed. On December 8, 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 46 states (excluding Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota), the District of Columbia and the territory of Guam, launched Federal Trade Commission v. Facebook as an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. The lawsuit concerns Facebook's acquisition of two competitors—Instagram and WhatsApp—and the ensuing monopolistic situation. FTC alleges that Facebook holds monopolistic power in the U.S. social networking market and seeks to force the company to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp to break up the conglomerate. William Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, argued the case will be difficult to win as it would require the government to create a counterfactual argument of an internet where the Facebook-WhatsApp-Instagram entity did not exist, and prove that harmed competition or consumers. In November 2025, it was ruled that Meta did not violate antitrust laws and holds no monopoly in the market. On December 24, 2021, a court in Russia fined Meta for $27 million after the company declined to remove unspecified banned content. The fine was reportedly tied to the company's annual revenue in the country. In May 2022, a lawsuit was filed in Kenya against Meta and its local outsourcing company Sama. Allegedly, Meta has poor working conditions in Kenya for workers moderating Facebook posts. According to the lawsuit, 260 screeners were declared redundant with confusing reasoning. The lawsuit seeks financial compensation and an order that outsourced moderators be given the same health benefits and pay scale as Meta employees. In June 2022, 8 lawsuits were filed across the U.S. over the allege that excessive exposure to platforms including Facebook and Instagram has led to attempted or actual suicides, eating disorders and sleeplessness, among other issues. The litigation follows a former Facebook employee's testimony in Congress that the company refused to take responsibility. The company noted that tools have been developed for parents to keep track of their children's activity on Instagram and set time limits, in addition to Meta's "Take a break" reminders. In addition, the company is providing resources specific to eating disorders as well as developing AI to prevent children under the age of 13 signing up for Facebook or Instagram. In June 2022, Meta settled a lawsuit with the US Department of Justice. The lawsuit, which was filed in 2019, alleged that the company enabled housing discrimination through targeted advertising, as it allowed homeowners and landlords to run housing ads excluding people based on sex, race, religion, and other characteristics. The U.S. Department of Justice stated that this was in violation of the Fair Housing Act. Meta was handed a penalty of $115,054 and given until December 31, 2022, to shadow the algorithm tool. In January 2023, Meta was fined €390 million for violations of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. In May 2023, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta a record €1.2 billion for breaching European Union data privacy laws by transferring personal data of Facebook users to servers in the U.S. In July 2024, Meta agreed to pay the state of Texas US$1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accusing the company of collecting users' biometric data without consent, setting a record for the largest privacy-related settlement ever obtained by a state attorney general. In October 2024, Meta Platforms faced lawsuits in Japan from 30 plaintiffs who claimed they were defrauded by fake investment ads on Facebook and Instagram, featuring false celebrity endorsements. The plaintiffs are seeking approximately $2.8 million in damages. In April 2025, the Kenyan High Court ruled that a US$2.4 billion lawsuit in which three plaintiffs claim that Facebook inflamed civil violence in Ethiopia in 2021 could proceed. In April 2025, Meta was fined €200 million ($230 million) for breaking the Digital Markets Act, by imposing a “consent or pay” system that forces users to either allow their personal data to be used to target advertisements, or pay a subscription fee for advertising-free versions of Facebook and Instagram. In late April 2025, a case was filed against Meta in Ghana over the alleged psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse. Meta moved the moderation service to the Ghanaian capital of Accra after legal issues in the previous location Kenya. The new moderation company is Teleperformance, a multinational corporation with a history of worker's rights violation. Reports suggests the conditions are worse here than in the previous Kenyan location, with many workers afraid of speaking out due to fear of returning to conflict zones. Workers reported developing mental illnesses, attempted suicides, and low pay. In 26 January 2026, a New Mexico state court case was filed, suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access artificial intelligence chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions. In 2020, the company UReputation, which had been involved in several cases concerning the management of digital armies[clarification needed], filed a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing it of unlawfully transmitting personal data to third parties. Legal actions were initiated in Tunisia, France, and the United States. In 2025, the United States District court for the Northern District of Georgia approved a discovery procedure, allowing UReputation to access documents and evidence held by Meta. Structure Meta's key management consists of: As of October 2022[update], Meta had 83,553 employees worldwide. As of June 2024[update], Meta's board consisted of the following directors; Meta Platforms is mainly owned by institutional investors, who hold around 80% of all shares. Insiders control the majority of voting shares. The three largest individual investors in 2024 were Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Christopher K. Cox. The largest shareholders in late 2024/early 2025 were: Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg's former mentor, said Facebook had "the most centralized decision-making structure I have ever encountered in a large company". Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has stated that chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has too much power, that the company is now a monopoly, and that, as a result, it should be split into multiple smaller companies. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Hughes said he was concerned that Zuckerberg had surrounded himself with a team that did not challenge him, and that it is the U.S. government's job to hold him accountable and curb his "unchecked power". He also said that "Mark's power is unprecedented and un-American." Several U.S. politicians agreed with Hughes. European Union Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager stated that splitting Facebook should be done only as "a remedy of the very last resort", and that it would not solve Facebook's underlying problems. Revenue Facebook ranked No. 34 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue, with almost $86 billion in revenue most of it coming from advertising. One analysis of 2017 data determined that the company earned US$20.21 per user from advertising. According to New York, since its rebranding, Meta has reportedly lost $500 billion as a result of new privacy measures put in place by companies such as Apple and Google which prevents Meta from gathering users' data. In February 2015, Facebook announced it had reached two million active advertisers, with most of the gain coming from small businesses. An active advertiser was defined as an entity that had advertised on the Facebook platform in the last 28 days. In March 2016, Facebook announced it had reached three million active advertisers with more than 70% from outside the United States. Prices for advertising follow a variable pricing model based on auctioning ad placements, and potential engagement levels of the advertisement itself. Similar to other online advertising platforms like Google and Twitter, targeting of advertisements is one of the chief merits of digital advertising compared to traditional media. Marketing on Meta is employed through two methods based on the viewing habits, likes and shares, and purchasing data of the audience, namely targeted audiences and "look alike" audiences. The U.S. IRS challenged the valuation Facebook used when it transferred IP from the U.S. to Facebook Ireland (now Meta Platforms Ireland) in 2010 (which Facebook Ireland then revalued higher before charging out), as it was building its double Irish tax structure. The case is ongoing and Meta faces a potential fine of $3–5bn. The U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 changed Facebook's global tax calculations. Meta Platforms Ireland is subject to the U.S. GILTI tax of 10.5% on global intangible profits (i.e. Irish profits). On the basis that Meta Platforms Ireland Limited is paying some tax, the effective minimum US tax for Facebook Ireland will be circa 11%. In contrast, Meta Platforms Inc. would incur a special IP tax rate of 13.125% (the FDII rate) if its Irish business relocated to the U.S. Tax relief in the U.S. (21% vs. Irish at the GILTI rate) and accelerated capital expensing, would make this effective U.S. rate around 12%. The insignificance of the U.S./Irish tax difference was demonstrated when Facebook moved 1.5bn non-EU accounts to the U.S. to limit exposure to GDPR. Facilities Users outside of the U.S. and Canada contract with Meta's Irish subsidiary, Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (formerly Facebook Ireland Limited), allowing Meta to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Meta is making use of the Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay 2–3% corporation tax on all international revenue. In 2010, Facebook opened its fourth office, in Hyderabad, India, which houses online advertising and developer support teams and provides support to users and advertisers. In India, Meta is registered as Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd. It also has offices or planned sites in Chittagong, Bangladesh; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas, among other cities. Facebook opened its London headquarters in 2017 in Fitzrovia in central London. Facebook opened an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2018. The offices were initially home to the "Connectivity Lab", a group focused on bringing Internet access to those who do not have access to the Internet. In April 2019, Facebook opened its Taiwan headquarters in Taipei. In March 2022, Meta opened new regional headquarters in Dubai. In September 2023, it was reported that Meta had paid £149m to British Land to break the lease on Triton Square London office. Meta reportedly had another 18 years left on its lease on the site. As of 2023, Facebook operated 21 data centers. It committed to purchase 100% renewable energy and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 75% by 2020. Its data center technologies include Fabric Aggregator, a distributed network system that accommodates larger regions and varied traffic patterns. Reception US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded in a tweet to Zuckerberg's announcement about Meta, saying: "Meta as in 'we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society ... for profit!'" Ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen and whistleblower behind the Facebook Papers responded to the rebranding efforts by expressing doubts about the company's ability to improve while led by Mark Zuckerberg, and urged the chief executive officer to resign. In November 2021, a video published by Inspired by Iceland went viral, in which a Zuckerberg look-alike promoted the Icelandverse, a place of "enhanced actual reality without silly looking headsets". In a December 2021 interview, SpaceX and Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk said he could not see a compelling use-case for the VR-driven metaverse, adding: "I don't see someone strapping a frigging screen to their face all day." In January 2022, Louise Eccles of The Sunday Times logged into the metaverse with the intention of making a video guide. She wrote: Initially, my experience with the Oculus went well. I attended work meetings as an avatar and tried an exercise class set in the streets of Paris. The headset enabled me to feel the thrill of carving down mountains on a snowboard and the adrenaline rush of climbing a mountain without ropes. Yet switching to the social apps, where you mingle with strangers also using VR headsets, it was at times predatory and vile. Eccles described being sexually harassed by another user, as well as "accents from all over the world, American, Indian, English, Australian, using racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic language". She also encountered users as young as 7 years old on the platform, despite Oculus headsets being intended for users over 13. See also References External links 37°29′06″N 122°08′54″W / 37.48500°N 122.14833°W / 37.48500; -122.14833 |
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Contents Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", for its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous atmosphere that is primarily carbon dioxide (CO2). At the average surface level the atmospheric pressure is a few thousandths of Earth's, atmospheric temperature ranges from −153 to 20 °C (−243 to 68 °F), and cosmic radiation is high. Mars retains some water, in the ground as well as thinly in the atmosphere, forming cirrus clouds, fog, frost, larger polar regions of permafrost and ice caps (with seasonal CO2 snow), but no bodies of liquid surface water. Its surface gravity is roughly a third of Earth's or double that of the Moon. Its diameter, 6,779 km (4,212 mi), is about half the Earth's, or twice the Moon's, and its surface area is the size of all the dry land of Earth. Fine dust is prevalent across the surface and the atmosphere, being picked up and spread at the low Martian gravity even by the weak wind of the tenuous atmosphere. The terrain of Mars roughly follows a north-south divide, the Martian dichotomy, with the northern hemisphere mainly consisting of relatively flat, low lying plains, and the southern hemisphere of cratered highlands. Geologically, the planet is fairly active with marsquakes trembling underneath the ground, but also hosts many enormous volcanoes that are extinct (the tallest is Olympus Mons, 21.9 km or 13.6 mi tall), as well as one of the largest canyons in the Solar System (Valles Marineris, 4,000 km or 2,500 mi long). Mars has two natural satellites that are small and irregular in shape: Phobos and Deimos. With a significant axial tilt of 25 degrees, Mars experiences seasons, like Earth (which has an axial tilt of 23.5 degrees). A Martian solar year is equal to 1.88 Earth years (687 Earth days), a Martian solar day (sol) is equal to 24.6 hours. Mars formed along with the other planets approximately 4.5 billion years ago. During the martian Noachian period (4.5 to 3.5 billion years ago), its surface was marked by meteor impacts, valley formation, erosion, the possible presence of water oceans and the loss of its magnetosphere. The Hesperian period (beginning 3.5 billion years ago and ending 3.3–2.9 billion years ago) was dominated by widespread volcanic activity and flooding that carved immense outflow channels. The Amazonian period, which continues to the present, is the currently dominating and remaining influence on geological processes. Because of Mars's geological history, the possibility of past or present life on Mars remains an area of active scientific investigation, with some possible traces needing further examination. Being visible with the naked eye in Earth's sky as a red wandering star, Mars has been observed throughout history, acquiring diverse associations in different cultures. In 1963 the first flight to Mars took place with Mars 1, but communication was lost en route. The first successful flyby exploration of Mars was conducted in 1965 with Mariner 4. In 1971 Mariner 9 entered orbit around Mars, being the first spacecraft to orbit any body other than the Moon, Sun or Earth; following in the same year were the first uncontrolled impact (Mars 2) and first successful landing (Mars 3) on Mars. Probes have been active on Mars continuously since 1997. At times, more than ten probes have simultaneously operated in orbit or on the surface, more than at any other planet beyond Earth. Mars is an often proposed target for future crewed exploration missions, though no such mission is currently planned. Natural history Scientists have theorized that during the Solar System's formation, Mars was created as the result of a random process of run-away accretion of material from the protoplanetary disk that orbited the Sun. Mars has many distinctive chemical features caused by its position in the Solar System. Elements with comparatively low boiling points, such as chlorine, phosphorus, and sulfur, are much more common on Mars than on Earth; these elements were probably pushed outward by the young Sun's energetic solar wind. After the formation of the planets, the inner Solar System may have been subjected to the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment. About 60% of the surface of Mars shows a record of impacts from that era, whereas much of the remaining surface is probably underlain by immense impact basins caused by those events. However, more recent modeling has disputed the existence of the Late Heavy Bombardment. There is evidence of an enormous impact basin in the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, spanning 10,600 by 8,500 kilometres (6,600 by 5,300 mi), or roughly four times the size of the Moon's South Pole–Aitken basin, which would be the largest impact basin yet discovered if confirmed. It has been hypothesized that the basin was formed when Mars was struck by a Pluto-sized body about four billion years ago. The event, thought to be the cause of the Martian hemispheric dichotomy, created the smooth Borealis basin that covers 40% of the planet. A 2023 study shows evidence, based on the orbital inclination of Deimos (a small moon of Mars), that Mars may once have had a ring system 3.5 billion years to 4 billion years ago. This ring system may have been formed from a moon, 20 times more massive than Phobos, orbiting Mars billions of years ago; and Phobos would be a remnant of that ring. Epochs: The geological history of Mars can be split into many periods, but the following are the three primary periods: Geological activity is still taking place on Mars. The Athabasca Valles is home to sheet-like lava flows created about 200 million years ago. Water flows in the grabens called the Cerberus Fossae occurred less than 20 million years ago, indicating equally recent volcanic intrusions. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured images of avalanches. Physical characteristics Mars is approximately half the diameter of Earth or twice that of the Moon, with a surface area only slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land. Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of Earth's mass, resulting in about 38% of Earth's surface gravity. Mars is the only presently known example of a desert planet, a rocky planet with a surface akin to that of Earth's deserts. The red-orange appearance of the Martian surface is caused by iron(III) oxide (nanophase Fe2O3) and the iron(III) oxide-hydroxide mineral goethite. It can look like butterscotch; other common surface colors include golden, brown, tan, and greenish, depending on the minerals present. Like Earth, Mars is differentiated into a dense metallic core overlaid by less dense rocky layers. The outermost layer is the crust, which is on average about 42–56 kilometres (26–35 mi) thick, with a minimum thickness of 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) in Isidis Planitia, and a maximum thickness of 117 kilometres (73 mi) in the southern Tharsis plateau. For comparison, Earth's crust averages 27.3 ± 4.8 km in thickness. The most abundant elements in the Martian crust are silicon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and potassium. Mars is confirmed to be seismically active; in 2019, it was reported that InSight had detected and recorded over 450 marsquakes and related events. Beneath the crust is a silicate mantle responsible for many of the tectonic and volcanic features on the planet's surface. The upper Martian mantle is a low-velocity zone, where the velocity of seismic waves is lower than surrounding depth intervals. The mantle appears to be rigid down to the depth of about 250 km, giving Mars a very thick lithosphere compared to Earth. Below this the mantle gradually becomes more ductile, and the seismic wave velocity starts to grow again. The Martian mantle does not appear to have a thermally insulating layer analogous to Earth's lower mantle; instead, below 1050 km in depth, it becomes mineralogically similar to Earth's transition zone. At the bottom of the mantle lies a basal liquid silicate layer approximately 150–180 km thick. The Martian mantle appears to be highly heterogenous, with dense fragments up to 4 km across, likely injected deep into the planet by colossal impacts ~4.5 billion years ago; high-frequency waves from eight marsquakes slowed as they passed these localized regions, and modeling indicates the heterogeneities are compositionally distinct debris preserved because Mars lacks plate tectonics and has a sluggishly convecting interior that prevents complete homogenization. Mars's iron and nickel core is at least partially molten, and may have a solid inner core. It is around half of Mars's radius, approximately 1650–1675 km, and is enriched in light elements such as sulfur, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. The temperature of the core is estimated to be 2000–2400 K, compared to 5400–6230 K for Earth's solid inner core. In 2025, based on data from the InSight lander, a group of researchers reported the detection of a solid inner core 613 kilometres (381 mi) ± 67 kilometres (42 mi) in radius. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a surface that consists of minerals containing silicon and oxygen, metals, and other elements that typically make up rock. The Martian surface is primarily composed of tholeiitic basalt, although parts are more silica-rich than typical basalt and may be similar to andesitic rocks on Earth, or silica glass. Regions of low albedo suggest concentrations of plagioclase feldspar, with northern low albedo regions displaying higher than normal concentrations of sheet silicates and high-silicon glass. Parts of the southern highlands include detectable amounts of high-calcium pyroxenes. Localized concentrations of hematite and olivine have been found. Much of the surface is deeply covered by finely grained iron(III) oxide dust. The Phoenix lander returned data showing Martian soil to be slightly alkaline and containing elements such as magnesium, sodium, potassium and chlorine. These nutrients are found in soils on Earth, and are necessary for plant growth. Experiments performed by the lander showed that the Martian soil has a basic pH of 7.7, and contains 0.6% perchlorate by weight, concentrations that are toxic to humans. Streaks are common across Mars and new ones appear frequently on steep slopes of craters, troughs, and valleys. The streaks are dark at first and get lighter with age. The streaks can start in a tiny area, then spread out for hundreds of metres. They have been seen to follow the edges of boulders and other obstacles in their path. The commonly accepted hypotheses include that they are dark underlying layers of soil revealed after avalanches of bright dust or dust devils. Several other explanations have been put forward, including those that involve water or even the growth of organisms. Environmental radiation levels on the surface are on average 0.64 millisieverts of radiation per day, and significantly less than the radiation of 1.84 millisieverts per day or 22 millirads per day during the flight to and from Mars. For comparison the radiation levels in low Earth orbit, where Earth's space stations orbit, are around 0.5 millisieverts of radiation per day. Hellas Planitia has the lowest surface radiation at about 0.342 millisieverts per day, featuring lava tubes southwest of Hadriacus Mons with potentially levels as low as 0.064 millisieverts per day, comparable to radiation levels during flights on Earth. Although Mars has no evidence of a structured global magnetic field, observations show that parts of the planet's crust have been magnetized, suggesting that alternating polarity reversals of its dipole field have occurred in the past. This paleomagnetism of magnetically susceptible minerals is similar to the alternating bands found on Earth's ocean floors. One hypothesis, published in 1999 and re-examined in October 2005 (with the help of the Mars Global Surveyor), is that these bands suggest plate tectonic activity on Mars four billion years ago, before the planetary dynamo ceased to function and the planet's magnetic field faded. Geography and features Although better remembered for mapping the Moon, Johann Heinrich von Mädler and Wilhelm Beer were the first areographers. They began by establishing that most of Mars's surface features were permanent and by more precisely determining the planet's rotation period. In 1840, Mädler combined ten years of observations and drew the first map of Mars. Features on Mars are named from a variety of sources. Albedo features are named for classical mythology. Craters larger than roughly 50 km are named for deceased scientists and writers and others who have contributed to the study of Mars. Smaller craters are named for towns and villages of the world with populations of less than 100,000. Large valleys are named for the word "Mars" or "star" in various languages; smaller valleys are named for rivers. Large albedo features retain many of the older names but are often updated to reflect new knowledge of the nature of the features. For example, Nix Olympica (the snows of Olympus) has become Olympus Mons (Mount Olympus). The surface of Mars as seen from Earth is divided into two kinds of areas, with differing albedo. The paler plains covered with dust and sand rich in reddish iron oxides were once thought of as Martian "continents" and given names like Arabia Terra (land of Arabia) or Amazonis Planitia (Amazonian plain). The dark features were thought to be seas, hence their names Mare Erythraeum, Mare Sirenum and Aurorae Sinus. The largest dark feature seen from Earth is Syrtis Major Planum. The permanent northern polar ice cap is named Planum Boreum. The southern cap is called Planum Australe. Mars's equator is defined by its rotation, but the location of its Prime Meridian was specified, as was Earth's (at Greenwich), by choice of an arbitrary point; Mädler and Beer selected a line for their first maps of Mars in 1830. After the spacecraft Mariner 9 provided extensive imagery of Mars in 1972, a small crater (later called Airy-0), located in the Sinus Meridiani ("Middle Bay" or "Meridian Bay"), was chosen by Merton E. Davies, Harold Masursky, and Gérard de Vaucouleurs for the definition of 0.0° longitude to coincide with the original selection. Because Mars has no oceans, and hence no "sea level", a zero-elevation surface had to be selected as a reference level; this is called the areoid of Mars, analogous to the terrestrial geoid. Zero altitude was defined by the height at which there is 610.5 Pa (6.105 mbar) of atmospheric pressure. This pressure corresponds to the triple point of water, and it is about 0.6% of the sea level surface pressure on Earth (0.006 atm). For mapping purposes, the United States Geological Survey divides the surface of Mars into thirty cartographic quadrangles, each named for a classical albedo feature it contains. In April 2023, The New York Times reported an updated global map of Mars based on images from the Hope spacecraft. A related, but much more detailed, global Mars map was released by NASA on 16 April 2023. The vast upland region Tharsis contains several massive volcanoes, which include the shield volcano Olympus Mons. The edifice is over 600 km (370 mi) wide. Because the mountain is so large, with complex structure at its edges, giving a definite height to it is difficult. Its local relief, from the foot of the cliffs which form its northwest margin to its peak, is over 21 km (13 mi), a little over twice the height of Mauna Kea as measured from its base on the ocean floor. The total elevation change from the plains of Amazonis Planitia, over 1,000 km (620 mi) to the northwest, to the summit approaches 26 km (16 mi), roughly three times the height of Mount Everest, which in comparison stands at just over 8.8 kilometres (5.5 mi). Consequently, Olympus Mons is either the tallest or second-tallest mountain in the Solar System; the only known mountain which might be taller is the Rheasilvia peak on the asteroid Vesta, at 20–25 km (12–16 mi). The dichotomy of Martian topography is striking: northern plains flattened by lava flows contrast with the southern highlands, pitted and cratered by ancient impacts. It is possible that, four billion years ago, the Northern Hemisphere of Mars was struck by an object one-tenth to two-thirds the size of Earth's Moon. If this is the case, the Northern Hemisphere of Mars would be the site of an impact crater 10,600 by 8,500 kilometres (6,600 by 5,300 mi) in size, or roughly the area of Europe, Asia, and Australia combined, surpassing Utopia Planitia and the Moon's South Pole–Aitken basin as the largest impact crater in the Solar System. Mars is scarred by 43,000 impact craters with a diameter of 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) or greater. The largest exposed crater is Hellas, which is 2,300 kilometres (1,400 mi) wide and 7,000 metres (23,000 ft) deep, and is a light albedo feature clearly visible from Earth. There are other notable impact features, such as Argyre, which is around 1,800 kilometres (1,100 mi) in diameter, and Isidis, which is around 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) in diameter. Due to the smaller mass and size of Mars, the probability of an object colliding with the planet is about half that of Earth. Mars is located closer to the asteroid belt, so it has an increased chance of being struck by materials from that source. Mars is more likely to be struck by short-period comets, i.e., those that lie within the orbit of Jupiter. Martian craters can[discuss] have a morphology that suggests the ground became wet after the meteor impact. The large canyon, Valles Marineris (Latin for 'Mariner Valleys, also known as Agathodaemon in the old canal maps), has a length of 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) and a depth of up to 7 kilometres (4.3 mi). The length of Valles Marineris is equivalent to the length of Europe and extends across one-fifth the circumference of Mars. By comparison, the Grand Canyon on Earth is only 446 kilometres (277 mi) long and nearly 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) deep. Valles Marineris was formed due to the swelling of the Tharsis area, which caused the crust in the area of Valles Marineris to collapse. In 2012, it was proposed that Valles Marineris is not just a graben, but a plate boundary where 150 kilometres (93 mi) of transverse motion has occurred, making Mars a planet with possibly a two-tectonic plate arrangement. Images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter have revealed seven possible cave entrances on the flanks of the volcano Arsia Mons. The caves, named after loved ones of their discoverers, are collectively known as the "seven sisters". Cave entrances measure from 100 to 252 metres (328 to 827 ft) wide and they are estimated to be at least 73 to 96 metres (240 to 315 ft) deep. Because light does not reach the floor of most of the caves, they may extend much deeper than these lower estimates and widen below the surface. "Dena" is the only exception; its floor is visible and was measured to be 130 metres (430 ft) deep. The interiors of these caverns may be protected from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet's surface. Martian geysers (or CO2 jets) are putative sites of small gas and dust eruptions that occur in the south polar region of Mars during the spring thaw. "Dark dune spots" and "spiders" – or araneiforms – are the two most visible types of features ascribed to these eruptions. Similarly sized dust will settle from the thinner Martian atmosphere sooner than it would on Earth. For example, the dust suspended by the 2001 global dust storms on Mars only remained in the Martian atmosphere for 0.6 years, while the dust from Mount Pinatubo took about two years to settle. However, under current Martian conditions, the mass movements involved are generally much smaller than on Earth. Even the 2001 global dust storms on Mars moved only the equivalent of a very thin dust layer – about 3 μm thick if deposited with uniform thickness between 58° north and south of the equator. Dust deposition at the two rover sites has proceeded at a rate of about the thickness of a grain every 100 sols. Atmosphere Mars lost its magnetosphere 4 billion years ago, possibly because of numerous asteroid strikes, so the solar wind interacts directly with the Martian ionosphere, lowering the atmospheric density by stripping away atoms from the outer layer. Both Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express have detected ionized atmospheric particles trailing off into space behind Mars, and this atmospheric loss is being studied by the MAVEN orbiter. Compared to Earth, the atmosphere of Mars is quite rarefied. Atmospheric pressure on the surface today ranges from a low of 30 Pa (0.0044 psi) on Olympus Mons to over 1,155 Pa (0.1675 psi) in Hellas Planitia, with a mean pressure at the surface level of 600 Pa (0.087 psi). The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to that found 35 kilometres (22 mi) above Earth's surface. The resulting mean surface pressure is only 0.6% of Earth's 101.3 kPa (14.69 psi). The scale height of the atmosphere is about 10.8 kilometres (6.7 mi), which is higher than Earth's 6 kilometres (3.7 mi), because the surface gravity of Mars is only about 38% of Earth's. The atmosphere of Mars consists of about 96% carbon dioxide, 1.93% argon and 1.89% nitrogen along with traces of oxygen and water. The atmosphere is quite dusty, containing particulates about 1.5 μm in diameter which give the Martian sky a tawny color when seen from the surface. It may take on a pink hue due to iron oxide particles suspended in it. Despite repeated detections of methane on Mars, there is no scientific consensus as to its origin. One suggestion is that methane exists on Mars and that its concentration fluctuates seasonally. The existence of methane could be produced by non-biological process such as serpentinization involving water, carbon dioxide, and the mineral olivine, which is known to be common on Mars, or by Martian life. Compared to Earth, its higher concentration of atmospheric CO2 and lower surface pressure may be why sound is attenuated more on Mars, where natural sources are rare apart from the wind. Using acoustic recordings collected by the Perseverance rover, researchers concluded that the speed of sound there is approximately 240 m/s for frequencies below 240 Hz, and 250 m/s for those above. Auroras have been detected on Mars. Because Mars lacks a global magnetic field, the types and distribution of auroras there differ from those on Earth; rather than being mostly restricted to polar regions as is the case on Earth, a Martian aurora can encompass the planet. In September 2017, NASA reported radiation levels on the surface of the planet Mars were temporarily doubled, and were associated with an aurora 25 times brighter than any observed earlier, due to a massive, and unexpected, solar storm in the middle of the month. Mars has seasons, alternating between its northern and southern hemispheres, similar to on Earth. Additionally the orbit of Mars has, compared to Earth's, a large eccentricity and approaches perihelion when it is summer in its southern hemisphere and winter in its northern, and aphelion when it is winter in its southern hemisphere and summer in its northern. As a result, the seasons in its southern hemisphere are more extreme and the seasons in its northern are milder than would otherwise be the case. The summer temperatures in the south can be warmer than the equivalent summer temperatures in the north by up to 30 °C (54 °F). Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −110 °C (−166 °F) to highs of up to 35 °C (95 °F) in equatorial summer. The wide range in temperatures is due to the thin atmosphere which cannot store much solar heat, the low atmospheric pressure (about 1% that of the atmosphere of Earth), and the low thermal inertia of Martian soil. The planet is 1.52 times as far from the Sun as Earth, resulting in just 43% of the amount of sunlight. Mars has the largest dust storms in the Solar System, reaching speeds of over 160 km/h (100 mph). These can vary from a storm over a small area, to gigantic storms that cover the entire planet. They tend to occur when Mars is closest to the Sun, and have been shown to increase global temperature. Seasons also produce dry ice covering polar ice caps. Hydrology While Mars contains water in larger amounts, most of it is dust covered water ice at the Martian polar ice caps. The volume of water ice in the south polar ice cap, if melted, would be enough to cover most of the surface of the planet with a depth of 11 metres (36 ft). Water in its liquid form cannot persist on the surface due to Mars's low atmospheric pressure, which is less than 1% that of Earth. Only at the lowest of elevations are the pressure and temperature high enough for liquid water to exist for short periods. Although little water is present in the atmosphere, there is enough to produce clouds of water ice and different cases of snow and frost, often mixed with snow of carbon dioxide dry ice. Landforms visible on Mars strongly suggest that liquid water has existed on the planet's surface. Huge linear swathes of scoured ground, known as outflow channels, cut across the surface in about 25 places. These are thought to be a record of erosion caused by the catastrophic release of water from subsurface aquifers, though some of these structures have been hypothesized to result from the action of glaciers or lava. One of the larger examples, Ma'adim Vallis, is 700 kilometres (430 mi) long, much greater than the Grand Canyon, with a width of 20 kilometres (12 mi) and a depth of 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) in places. It is thought to have been carved by flowing water early in Mars's history. The youngest of these channels is thought to have formed only a few million years ago. Elsewhere, particularly on the oldest areas of the Martian surface, finer-scale, dendritic networks of valleys are spread across significant proportions of the landscape. Features of these valleys and their distribution strongly imply that they were carved by runoff resulting from precipitation in early Mars history. Subsurface water flow and groundwater sapping may play important subsidiary roles in some networks, but precipitation was probably the root cause of the incision in almost all cases. Along craters and canyon walls, there are thousands of features that appear similar to terrestrial gullies. The gullies tend to be in the highlands of the Southern Hemisphere and face the Equator; all are poleward of 30° latitude. A number of authors have suggested that their formation process involves liquid water, probably from melting ice, although others have argued for formation mechanisms involving carbon dioxide frost or the movement of dry dust. No partially degraded gullies have formed by weathering and no superimposed impact craters have been observed, indicating that these are young features, possibly still active. Other geological features, such as deltas and alluvial fans preserved in craters, are further evidence for warmer, wetter conditions at an interval or intervals in earlier Mars history. Such conditions necessarily require the widespread presence of crater lakes across a large proportion of the surface, for which there is independent mineralogical, sedimentological and geomorphological evidence. Further evidence that liquid water once existed on the surface of Mars comes from the detection of specific minerals such as hematite and goethite, both of which sometimes form in the presence of water. The chemical signature of water vapor on Mars was first unequivocally demonstrated in 1963 by spectroscopy using an Earth-based telescope. In 2004, Opportunity detected the mineral jarosite. This forms only in the presence of acidic water, showing that water once existed on Mars. The Spirit rover found concentrated deposits of silica in 2007 that indicated wet conditions in the past, and in December 2011, the mineral gypsum, which also forms in the presence of water, was found on the surface by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity. It is estimated that the amount of water in the upper mantle of Mars, represented by hydroxyl ions contained within Martian minerals, is equal to or greater than that of Earth at 50–300 parts per million of water, which is enough to cover the entire planet to a depth of 200–1,000 metres (660–3,280 ft). On 18 March 2013, NASA reported evidence from instruments on the Curiosity rover of mineral hydration, likely hydrated calcium sulfate, in several rock samples including the broken fragments of "Tintina" rock and "Sutton Inlier" rock as well as in veins and nodules in other rocks like "Knorr" rock and "Wernicke" rock. Analysis using the rover's DAN instrument provided evidence of subsurface water, amounting to as much as 4% water content, down to a depth of 60 centimetres (24 in), during the rover's traverse from the Bradbury Landing site to the Yellowknife Bay area in the Glenelg terrain. In September 2015, NASA announced that they had found strong evidence of hydrated brine flows in recurring slope lineae, based on spectrometer readings of the darkened areas of slopes. These streaks flow downhill in Martian summer, when the temperature is above −23 °C, and freeze at lower temperatures. These observations supported earlier hypotheses, based on timing of formation and their rate of growth, that these dark streaks resulted from water flowing just below the surface. However, later work suggested that the lineae may be dry, granular flows instead, with at most a limited role for water in initiating the process. A definitive conclusion about the presence, extent, and role of liquid water on the Martian surface remains elusive. Researchers suspect much of the low northern plains of the planet were covered with an ocean hundreds of meters deep, though this theory remains controversial. In March 2015, scientists stated that such an ocean might have been the size of Earth's Arctic Ocean. This finding was derived from the ratio of protium to deuterium in the modern Martian atmosphere compared to that ratio on Earth. The amount of Martian deuterium (D/H = 9.3 ± 1.7 10−4) is five to seven times the amount on Earth (D/H = 1.56 10−4), suggesting that ancient Mars had significantly higher levels of water. Results from the Curiosity rover had previously found a high ratio of deuterium in Gale Crater, though not significantly high enough to suggest the former presence of an ocean. Other scientists caution that these results have not been confirmed, and point out that Martian climate models have not yet shown that the planet was warm enough in the past to support bodies of liquid water. Near the northern polar cap is the 81.4 kilometres (50.6 mi) wide Korolev Crater, which the Mars Express orbiter found to be filled with approximately 2,200 cubic kilometres (530 cu mi) of water ice. In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of underground ice in the Utopia Planitia region. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in Lake Superior (which is 12,100 cubic kilometers). During observations from 2018 through 2021, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spotted indications of water, probably subsurface ice, in the Valles Marineris canyon system. Orbital motion Mars's average distance from the Sun is roughly 230 million km (143 million mi), and its orbital period is 687 (Earth) days. The solar day (or sol) on Mars is only slightly longer than an Earth day: 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. A Martian year is equal to 1.8809 Earth years, or 1 year, 320 days, and 18.2 hours. The gravitational potential difference and thus the delta-v needed to transfer between Mars and Earth is the second lowest for Earth. The axial tilt of Mars is 25.19° relative to its orbital plane, which is similar to the axial tilt of Earth. As a result, Mars has seasons like Earth, though on Mars they are nearly twice as long because its orbital period is that much longer. In the present day, the orientation of the north pole of Mars is close to the star Deneb. Mars has a relatively pronounced orbital eccentricity of about 0.09; of the seven other planets in the Solar System, only Mercury has a larger orbital eccentricity. It is known that in the past, Mars has had a much more circular orbit. At one point, 1.35 million Earth years ago, Mars had an eccentricity of roughly 0.002, much less than that of Earth today. Mars's cycle of eccentricity is 96,000 Earth years compared to Earth's cycle of 100,000 years. Mars has its closest approach to Earth (opposition) in a synodic period of 779.94 days. It should not be confused with Mars conjunction, where the Earth and Mars are at opposite sides of the Solar System and form a straight line crossing the Sun. The average time between the successive oppositions of Mars, its synodic period, is 780 days; but the number of days between successive oppositions can range from 764 to 812. The distance at close approach varies between about 54 and 103 million km (34 and 64 million mi) due to the planets' elliptical orbits, which causes comparable variation in angular size. At their furthest Mars and Earth can be as far as 401 million km (249 million mi) apart. Mars comes into opposition from Earth every 2.1 years. The planets come into opposition near Mars's perihelion in 2003, 2018 and 2035, with the 2020 and 2033 events being particularly close to perihelic opposition. The mean apparent magnitude of Mars is +0.71 with a standard deviation of 1.05. Because the orbit of Mars is eccentric, the magnitude at opposition from the Sun can range from about −3.0 to −1.4. The minimum brightness is magnitude +1.86 when the planet is near aphelion and in conjunction with the Sun. At its brightest, Mars (along with Jupiter) is second only to Venus in apparent brightness. Mars usually appears distinctly yellow, orange, or red. When farthest away from Earth, it is more than seven times farther away than when it is closest. Mars is usually close enough for particularly good viewing once or twice at 15-year or 17-year intervals. Optical ground-based telescopes are typically limited to resolving features about 300 kilometres (190 mi) across when Earth and Mars are closest because of Earth's atmosphere. As Mars approaches opposition, it begins a period of retrograde motion, which means it will appear to move backwards in a looping curve with respect to the background stars. This retrograde motion lasts for about 72 days, and Mars reaches its peak apparent brightness in the middle of this interval. Moons Mars has two relatively small (compared to Earth's) natural moons, Phobos (about 22 km (14 mi) in diameter) and Deimos (about 12 km (7.5 mi) in diameter), which orbit at 9,376 km (5,826 mi) and 23,460 km (14,580 mi) around the planet. The origin of both moons is unclear, although a popular theory states that they were asteroids captured into Martian orbit. Both satellites were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall and were named after the characters Phobos (the deity of panic and fear) and Deimos (the deity of terror and dread), twins from Greek mythology who accompanied their father Ares, god of war, into battle. Mars was the Roman equivalent to Ares. In modern Greek, the planet retains its ancient name Ares (Aris: Άρης). From the surface of Mars, the motions of Phobos and Deimos appear different from that of the Earth's satellite, the Moon. Phobos rises in the west, sets in the east, and rises again in just 11 hours. Deimos, being only just outside synchronous orbit – where the orbital period would match the planet's period of rotation – rises as expected in the east, but slowly. Because the orbit of Phobos is below a synchronous altitude, tidal forces from Mars are gradually lowering its orbit. In about 50 million years, it could either crash into Mars's surface or break up into a ring structure around the planet. The origin of the two satellites is not well understood. Their low albedo and carbonaceous chondrite composition have been regarded as similar to asteroids, supporting a capture theory. The unstable orbit of Phobos would seem to point toward a relatively recent capture. But both have circular orbits near the equator, which is unusual for captured objects, and the required capture dynamics are complex. Accretion early in the history of Mars is plausible, but would not account for a composition resembling asteroids rather than Mars itself, if that is confirmed. Mars may have yet-undiscovered moons, smaller than 50 to 100 metres (160 to 330 ft) in diameter, and a dust ring is predicted to exist between Phobos and Deimos. A third possibility for their origin as satellites of Mars is the involvement of a third body or a type of impact disruption. More-recent lines of evidence for Phobos having a highly porous interior, and suggesting a composition containing mainly phyllosilicates and other minerals known from Mars, point toward an origin of Phobos from material ejected by an impact on Mars that reaccreted in Martian orbit, similar to the prevailing theory for the origin of Earth's satellite. Although the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectra of the moons of Mars resemble those of outer-belt asteroids, the thermal infrared spectra of Phobos are reported to be inconsistent with chondrites of any class. It is also possible that Phobos and Deimos were fragments of an older moon, formed by debris from a large impact on Mars, and then destroyed by a more recent impact upon the satellite. More recently, a study conducted by a team of researchers from multiple countries suggests that a lost moon, at least fifteen times the size of Phobos, may have existed in the past. By analyzing rocks which point to tidal processes on the planet, it is possible that these tides may have been regulated by a past moon. Human observations and exploration The history of observations of Mars is marked by oppositions of Mars when the planet is closest to Earth and hence is most easily visible, which occur every couple of years. Even more notable are the perihelic oppositions of Mars, which are distinguished because Mars is close to perihelion, making it even closer to Earth. The ancient Sumerians named Mars Nergal, the god of war and plague. During Sumerian times, Nergal was a minor deity of little significance, but, during later times, his main cult center was the city of Nineveh. In Mesopotamian texts, Mars is referred to as the "star of judgement of the fate of the dead". The existence of Mars as a wandering object in the night sky was also recorded by the ancient Egyptian astronomers and, by 1534 BCE, they were familiar with the retrograde motion of the planet. By the period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Babylonian astronomers were making regular records of the positions of the planets and systematic observations of their behavior. For Mars, they knew that the planet made 37 synodic periods, or 42 circuits of the zodiac, every 79 years. They invented arithmetic methods for making minor corrections to the predicted positions of the planets. In Ancient Greece, the planet was known as Πυρόεις. Commonly, the Greek name for the planet now referred to as Mars, was Ares. It was the Romans who named the planet Mars, for their god of war, often represented by the sword and shield of the planet's namesake. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle noted that Mars disappeared behind the Moon during an occultation, indicating that the planet was farther away. Ptolemy, a Greek living in Alexandria, attempted to address the problem of the orbital motion of Mars. Ptolemy's model and his collective work on astronomy was presented in the multi-volume collection later called the Almagest (from the Arabic for "greatest"), which became the authoritative treatise on Western astronomy for the next fourteen centuries. Literature from ancient China confirms that Mars was known by Chinese astronomers by no later than the fourth century BCE. In the East Asian cultures, Mars is traditionally referred to as the "fire star" (火星) based on the Wuxing system. In 1609 Johannes Kepler published a 10 year study of Martian orbit, using the diurnal parallax of Mars, measured by Tycho Brahe, to make a preliminary calculation of the relative distance to the planet. From Brahe's observations of Mars, Kepler deduced that the planet orbited the Sun not in a circle, but in an ellipse. Moreover, Kepler showed that Mars sped up as it approached the Sun and slowed down as it moved farther away, in a manner that later physicists would explain as a consequence of the conservation of angular momentum.: 433–437 In 1610 the first use of a telescope for astronomical observation, including Mars, was performed by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. With the telescope the diurnal parallax of Mars was again measured in an effort to determine the Sun-Earth distance. This was first performed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1672. The early parallax measurements were hampered by the quality of the instruments. The only occultation of Mars by Venus observed was that of 13 October 1590, seen by Michael Maestlin at Heidelberg. By the 19th century, the resolution of telescopes reached a level sufficient for surface features to be identified. On 5 September 1877, a perihelic opposition to Mars occurred. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli used a 22-centimetre (8.7 in) telescope in Milan to help produce the first detailed map of Mars. These maps notably contained features he called canali, which, with the possible exception of the natural canyon Valles Marineris, were later shown to be an optical illusion. These canali were supposedly long, straight lines on the surface of Mars, to which he gave names of famous rivers on Earth. His term, which means "channels" or "grooves", was popularly mistranslated in English as "canals". Influenced by the observations, the orientalist Percival Lowell founded an observatory which had 30- and 45-centimetre (12- and 18-in) telescopes. The observatory was used for the exploration of Mars during the last good opportunity in 1894, and the following less favorable oppositions. He published several books on Mars and life on the planet, which had a great influence on the public. The canali were independently observed by other astronomers, like Henri Joseph Perrotin and Louis Thollon in Nice, using one of the largest telescopes of that time. The seasonal changes (consisting of the diminishing of the polar caps and the dark areas formed during Martian summers) in combination with the canals led to speculation about life on Mars, and it was a long-held belief that Mars contained vast seas and vegetation. As bigger telescopes were used, fewer long, straight canali were observed. During observations in 1909 by Antoniadi with an 84-centimetre (33 in) telescope, irregular patterns were observed, but no canali were seen. The first spacecraft from Earth to visit Mars was Mars 1 of the Soviet Union, which flew by in 1963, but contact was lost en route. NASA's Mariner 4 followed and became the first spacecraft to successfully transmit from Mars; launched on 28 November 1964, it made its closest approach to the planet on 15 July 1965. Mariner 4 detected the weak Martian radiation belt, measured at about 0.1% that of Earth, and captured the first images of another planet from deep space. Once spacecraft visited the planet during the 1960s and 1970s, many previous concepts of Mars were radically broken. After the results of the Viking life-detection experiments, the hypothesis of a dead planet was generally accepted. The data from Mariner 9 and Viking allowed better maps of Mars to be made. Until 1997 and after Viking 1 shut down in 1982, Mars was only visited by three unsuccessful probes, two flying past without contact (Phobos 1, 1988; Mars Observer, 1993), and one (Phobos 2 1989) malfunctioning in orbit before reaching its destination Phobos. In 1997 Mars Pathfinder became the first successful rover mission beyond the Moon and started together with Mars Global Surveyor (operated until late 2006) an uninterrupted active robotic presence at Mars that has lasted until today. It produced complete, extremely detailed maps of the Martian topography, magnetic field and surface minerals. Starting with these missions a range of new improved crewless spacecraft, including orbiters, landers, and rovers, have been sent to Mars, with successful missions by the NASA (United States), Jaxa (Japan), ESA, United Kingdom, ISRO (India), Roscosmos (Russia), the United Arab Emirates, and CNSA (China) to study the planet's surface, climate, and geology, uncovering the different elements of the history and dynamic of the hydrosphere of Mars and possible traces of ancient life. As of 2023[update], Mars is host to ten functioning spacecraft. Eight are in orbit: 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, the Hope orbiter, and the Tianwen-1 orbiter. Another two are on the surface: the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover and the Perseverance rover. Collected maps are available online at websites including Google Mars. NASA provides two online tools: Mars Trek, which provides visualizations of the planet using data from 50 years of exploration, and Experience Curiosity, which simulates traveling on Mars in 3-D with Curiosity. Planned missions to Mars include: As of February 2024[update], debris from these types of missions has reached over seven tons. Most of it consists of crashed and inactive spacecraft as well as discarded components. In April 2024, NASA selected several companies to begin studies on providing commercial services to further enable robotic science on Mars. Key areas include establishing telecommunications, payload delivery and surface imaging. Habitability and habitation During the late 19th century, it was widely accepted in the astronomical community that Mars had life-supporting qualities, including the presence of oxygen and water. However, in 1894 W. W. Campbell at Lick Observatory observed the planet and found that "if water vapor or oxygen occur in the atmosphere of Mars it is in quantities too small to be detected by spectroscopes then available". That observation contradicted many of the measurements of the time and was not widely accepted. Campbell and V. M. Slipher repeated the study in 1909 using better instruments, but with the same results. It was not until the findings were confirmed by W. S. Adams in 1925 that the myth of the Earth-like habitability of Mars was finally broken. However, even in the 1960s, articles were published on Martian biology, putting aside explanations other than life for the seasonal changes on Mars. The current understanding of planetary habitability – the ability of a world to develop environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life – favors planets that have liquid water on their surface. Most often this requires the orbit of a planet to lie within the habitable zone, which for the Sun is estimated to extend from within the orbit of Earth to about that of Mars. During perihelion, Mars dips inside this region, but Mars's thin (low-pressure) atmosphere prevents liquid water from existing over large regions for extended periods. The past flow of liquid water demonstrates the planet's potential for habitability. Recent evidence has suggested that any water on the Martian surface may have been too salty and acidic to support regular terrestrial life. The environmental conditions on Mars are a challenge to sustaining organic life: the planet has little heat transfer across its surface, it has poor insulation against bombardment by the solar wind due to the absence of a magnetosphere and has insufficient atmospheric pressure to retain water in a liquid form (water instead sublimes to a gaseous state). Mars is nearly, or perhaps totally, geologically dead; the end of volcanic activity has apparently stopped the recycling of chemicals and minerals between the surface and interior of the planet. Evidence suggests that the planet was once significantly more habitable than it is today, but whether living organisms ever existed there remains unknown. The Viking probes of the mid-1970s carried experiments designed to detect microorganisms in Martian soil at their respective landing sites and had positive results, including a temporary increase in CO2 production on exposure to water and nutrients. This sign of life was later disputed by scientists, resulting in a continuing debate, with NASA scientist Gilbert Levin asserting that Viking may have found life. A 2014 analysis of Martian meteorite EETA79001 found chlorate, perchlorate, and nitrate ions in sufficiently high concentrations to suggest that they are widespread on Mars. UV and X-ray radiation would turn chlorate and perchlorate ions into other, highly reactive oxychlorines, indicating that any organic molecules would have to be buried under the surface to survive. Small quantities of methane and formaldehyde detected by Mars orbiters are both claimed to be possible evidence for life, as these chemical compounds would quickly break down in the Martian atmosphere. Alternatively, these compounds may instead be replenished by volcanic or other geological means, such as serpentinite. Impact glass, formed by the impact of meteors, which on Earth can preserve signs of life, has also been found on the surface of the impact craters on Mars. Likewise, the glass in impact craters on Mars could have preserved signs of life, if life existed at the site. The Cheyava Falls rock discovered on Mars in June 2024 has been designated by NASA as a "potential biosignature" and was core sampled by the Perseverance rover for possible return to Earth and further examination. Although highly intriguing, no definitive final determination on a biological or abiotic origin of this rock can be made with the data currently available. Several plans for a human mission to Mars have been proposed, but none have come to fruition. The NASA Authorization Act of 2017 directed NASA to study the feasibility of a crewed Mars mission in the early 2030s; the resulting report concluded that this would be unfeasible. In addition, in 2021, China was planning to send a crewed Mars mission in 2033. Privately held companies such as SpaceX have also proposed plans to send humans to Mars, with the eventual goal to settle on the planet. As of 2024, SpaceX has proceeded with the development of the Starship launch vehicle with the goal of Mars colonization. In plans shared with the company in April 2024, Elon Musk envisions the beginning of a Mars colony within the next twenty years. This would be enabled by the planned mass manufacturing of Starship and initially sustained by resupply from Earth, and in situ resource utilization on Mars, until the Mars colony reaches full self sustainability. Any future human mission to Mars will likely take place within the optimal Mars launch window, which occurs every 26 months. The moon Phobos has been proposed as an anchor point for a space elevator. Besides national space agencies and space companies, groups such as the Mars Society and The Planetary Society advocate for human missions to Mars. In culture Mars is named after the Roman god of war (Greek Ares), but was also associated with the demi-god Heracles (Roman Hercules) by ancient Greek astronomers, as detailed by Aristotle. This association between Mars and war dates back at least to Babylonian astronomy, in which the planet was named for the god Nergal, deity of war and destruction. It persisted into modern times, as exemplified by Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets, whose famous first movement labels Mars "The Bringer of War". The planet's symbol, a circle with a spear pointing out to the upper right, is also used as a symbol for the male gender. The symbol dates from at least the 11th century, though a possible predecessor has been found in the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The idea that Mars was populated by intelligent Martians became widespread in the late 19th century. Schiaparelli's "canali" observations combined with Percival Lowell's books on the subject put forward the standard notion of a planet that was a drying, cooling, dying world with ancient civilizations constructing irrigation works. Many other observations and proclamations by notable personalities added to what has been termed "Mars Fever". In the present day, high-resolution mapping of the surface of Mars has revealed no artifacts of habitation, but pseudoscientific speculation about intelligent life on Mars still continues. Reminiscent of the canali observations, these speculations are based on small scale features perceived in the spacecraft images, such as "pyramids" and the "Face on Mars". In his book Cosmos, planetary astronomer Carl Sagan wrote: "Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears." The depiction of Mars in fiction has been stimulated by its dramatic red color and by nineteenth-century scientific speculations that its surface conditions might support not just life but intelligent life. This gave way to many science fiction stories involving these concepts, such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, in which Martians seek to escape their dying planet by invading Earth; Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, in which human explorers accidentally destroy a Martian civilization; as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs's series Barsoom, C. S. Lewis's novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), and a number of Robert A. Heinlein stories before the mid-sixties. Since then, depictions of Martians have also extended to animation. A comic figure of an intelligent Martian, Marvin the Martian, appeared in Haredevil Hare (1948) as a character in the Looney Tunes animated cartoons of Warner Brothers, and has continued as part of popular culture to the present. After the Mariner and Viking spacecraft had returned pictures of Mars as a lifeless and canal-less world, these ideas about Mars were abandoned; for many science-fiction authors, the new discoveries initially seemed like a constraint, but eventually the post-Viking knowledge of Mars became itself a source of inspiration for works like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. See also Notes References Further reading External links Solar System → Local Interstellar Cloud → Local Bubble → Gould Belt → Orion Arm → Milky Way → Milky Way subgroup → Local Group → Local Sheet → Local Volume → Virgo Supercluster → Laniakea Supercluster → Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex → Local Hole → Observable universe → UniverseEach arrow (→) may be read as "within" or "part of". |
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Contents Laws of thermodynamics The laws of thermodynamics are a set of scientific laws which define a group of physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, that characterize thermodynamic systems in thermodynamic equilibrium. The laws also use various parameters for thermodynamic processes, such as thermodynamic work and heat, and establish relationships between them. They state empirical facts that form a basis of precluding the possibility of certain phenomena, such as perpetual motion. In addition to their use in thermodynamics, they are important fundamental laws of physics in general and are applicable in other natural sciences. Traditionally, thermodynamics has recognized three fundamental laws, simply named by an ordinal identification, the first law, the second law, and the third law. A more fundamental statement was later labelled as the zeroth law after the first three laws had been established. The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature: if two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. The first law of thermodynamics states that, when energy passes into or out of a system (as work, heat, or matter), the system's internal energy changes in accordance with the law of conservation of energy. This also results in the observation that, in an externally isolated system, even with internal changes, the sum of all forms of energy must remain constant, as energy cannot be created or destroyed. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body. The third law of thermodynamics states that a system's entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of non-crystalline solids (glasses), the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero. The first and second laws prohibit two kinds of perpetual motion machines, respectively: the perpetual motion machine of the first kind which produces work with no energy input, and the perpetual motion machine of the second kind which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work. History The history of thermodynamics is fundamentally interwoven with the history of physics and the history of chemistry, and ultimately dates back to theories of heat in antiquity. The laws of thermodynamics are the result of progress made in this field over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first established thermodynamic principle, which eventually became the second law of thermodynamics, was formulated by Sadi Carnot in 1824 in his book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. By 1860, as formalized in the works of scientists such as Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, what are now known as the first and second laws were established. Later, Nernst's theorem (or Nernst's postulate), which is now known as the third law, was formulated by Walther Nernst over the period 1906–1912. While the numbering of the laws is universal today, various textbooks throughout the 20th century have numbered the laws differently. In some fields, the second law was considered to deal with the efficiency of heat engines only, whereas what was called the third law dealt with entropy increases. Gradually, this resolved itself and a zeroth law was later added to allow for a self-consistent definition of temperature. Additional laws have been suggested, but have not achieved the generality of the four accepted laws, and are generally not discussed in standard textbooks. Zeroth law The zeroth law of thermodynamics provides for the foundation of temperature as an empirical parameter in thermodynamic systems and establishes the transitive relation between the temperatures of multiple bodies in thermal equilibrium. The law may be stated in the following form: If two systems are both in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Though this version of the law is one of the most commonly stated versions, it is only one of a diversity of statements that are labeled as "the zeroth law". Some statements go further, so as to supply the important physical fact that temperature is one-dimensional and that one can conceptually arrange bodies in a real number sequence from colder to hotter. These concepts of temperature and of thermal equilibrium are fundamental to thermodynamics and were clearly stated in the nineteenth century. The name 'zeroth law' was invented by Ralph H. Fowler in the 1930s, long after the first, second, and third laws were widely recognized. The law allows the definition of temperature in a non-circular way without reference to entropy, its conjugate variable. Such a temperature definition is said to be 'empirical'. First law The first law of thermodynamics is a version of the law of conservation of energy, adapted for thermodynamic processes. In general, the conservation law states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed. In a closed system (i.e. there is no transfer of matter into or out of the system), the first law states that the change in internal energy of the system (ΔUsystem) is equal to the difference between the heat supplied to the system (Q) and the work (W) done by the system on its surroundings. (Note, an alternate sign convention, not used in this article, is to define W as the work done on the system by its surroundings): Δ U s y s t e m = Q − W . {\displaystyle \Delta U_{\rm {system}}=Q-W.} For processes that include the transfer of matter, a further statement is needed. When two initially isolated systems are combined into a new system, then the total internal energy of the new system, Usystem, will be equal to the sum of the internal energies of the two initial systems, U1 and U2: U s y s t e m = U 1 + U 2 . {\displaystyle U_{\rm {system}}=U_{1}+U_{2}.} The First Law encompasses several principles: Combining these principles leads to one traditional statement of the first law of thermodynamics: it is not possible to construct a machine which will perpetually output work without an equal amount of energy input to that machine. Or more briefly, a perpetual motion machine of the first kind is impossible. Second law The second law of thermodynamics indicates the irreversibility of natural processes, and in many cases, the tendency of natural processes to lead towards spatial homogeneity of matter and energy, especially of temperature. It can be formulated in a variety of interesting and important ways. One of the simplest is the Clausius statement, that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder to a hotter body. It implies the existence of a quantity called the entropy of a thermodynamic system. In terms of this quantity it implies that When two initially isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium with itself but not necessarily with each other, are then allowed to interact, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium. The sum of the entropies of the initially isolated systems is less than or equal to the total entropy of the final combination. Equality occurs just when the two original systems have all their respective intensive variables (temperature, pressure) equal; then the final system also has the same values. The second law is applicable to a wide variety of processes, both reversible and irreversible. According to the second law, in a reversible heat transfer, an element of heat transferred, δ Q {\displaystyle \delta Q} , is the product of the temperature ( T {\displaystyle T} ), both of the system and of the sources or destination of the heat, with the increment ( d S {\displaystyle dS} ) of the system's conjugate variable, its entropy ( S {\displaystyle S} ): While reversible processes are a useful and convenient theoretical limiting case, all natural processes are irreversible. A prime example of this irreversibility is the transfer of heat by conduction or radiation. It was known long before the discovery of the notion of entropy that when two bodies, initially of different temperatures, come into direct thermal connection, then heat immediately and spontaneously flows from the hotter body to the colder one. Entropy may also be viewed as a physical measure concerning the microscopic details of the motion and configuration of a system, when only the macroscopic states are known. Such details are often referred to as disorder on a microscopic or molecular scale, and less often as dispersal of energy. For two given macroscopically specified states of a system, there is a mathematically defined quantity called the 'difference of information entropy between them'. This defines how much additional microscopic physical information is needed to specify one of the macroscopically specified states, given the macroscopic specification of the other – often a conveniently chosen reference state which may be presupposed to exist rather than explicitly stated. A final condition of a natural process always contains microscopically specifiable effects which are not fully and exactly predictable from the macroscopic specification of the initial condition of the process. This is why entropy increases in natural processes – the increase tells how much extra microscopic information is needed to distinguish the initial macroscopically specified state from the final macroscopically specified state. Equivalently, in a thermodynamic process, energy spreads. Third law The third law of thermodynamics can be stated as: A system's entropy approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero. At absolute zero temperature, the system is in the state with the minimum thermal energy, the ground state. The constant value (not necessarily zero) of entropy at this point is called the residual entropy of the system. With the exception of non-crystalline solids (e.g. glass) the residual entropy of a system is typically close to zero. However, it reaches zero only when the system has a unique ground state (i.e., the state with the minimum thermal energy has only one configuration, or microstate). Microstates are used here to describe the probability of a system being in a specific state, as each microstate is assumed to have the same probability of occurring, so macroscopic states with fewer microstates are less probable. In general, entropy is related to the number of possible microstates according to the Boltzmann principle where S is the entropy of the system, kB is the Boltzmann constant, and Ω the number of microstates. At absolute zero there is only 1 microstate possible (Ω = 1 as all the atoms are identical for a pure substance, and as a result all orders are identical as there is only one combination) and ln ( 1 ) = 0 {\displaystyle \ln(1)=0} . Onsager relations The Onsager reciprocal relations have been considered the fourth law of thermodynamics. They describe the relation between thermodynamic flows and forces in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, under the assumption that thermodynamic variables can be defined locally in a condition of local equilibrium. These relations are derived from statistical mechanics under the principle of microscopic reversibility (in the absence of external magnetic fields). Given a set of extensive parameters Xi (energy, mass, entropy, number of particles and so on) and thermodynamic forces Fi (related to their related intrinsic parameters, such as temperature and pressure), the Onsager theorem states that where i, k = 1,2,3,... index every parameter and its related force, and are called the thermodynamic flows. See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suicide_of_Amaurie_Lacey] | [TOKENS: 2141] |
Contents Deaths linked to chatbots There have been multiple incidents where interaction with a chatbot has been cited as a direct or contributing factor in a person's suicide or other fatal outcome. In some cases, legal action was taken against the companies that developed the AI involved. Background Chatbots converse in a seemingly natural fashion, making it easy for people to think of them as real people, leading many to ask chatbots for help dealing with interpersonal and emotional problems. Chatbots may be designed to keep the user engaged in the conversation. They have also often been shown to affirm users' thoughts, including delusions and suicidal ideations in mentally ill people, conspiracy theorists, and religious and political extremists. A 2025 Stanford University study into how chatbots respond to users suffering from severe mental issues such as suicidal ideation and psychosis found that chatbots are not equipped to provide an appropriate response and can sometimes give responses that escalate the mental health crisis. Deaths In March 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide following a six-week correspondence with a chatbot named Eliza on the application Chai. According to his widow, who shared the chat logs with media, the man had become extremely anxious about climate change and found an outlet in the chatbot. The chatbot reportedly encouraged his delusion that he could sacrifice his own life in exchange for AI saving the planet. At one point the chatbot responded "If you wanted to die, why didn't you do it sooner?" and told the user that the two of them would live together in paradise. In November 2023, 13-year-old Juliana Peralta of Colorado died by suicide after extensive interactions with multiple chatbots on Character.AI. She primarily confided suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles in a chatbot based on the character Hero from the video game OMORI, while also engaging in sexually explicit conversations—often initiated by the bots—with others, including those based on characters from children's series such as Harry Potter. In October 2024, multiple media outlets reported on a lawsuit filed over the death of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old from Florida, who died by suicide in February 2024. According to the lawsuit, Setzer had formed an intense emotional attachment to a chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen on the Character.AI platform, becoming increasingly isolated. The suit alleges that in his final conversations, after expressing suicidal thoughts, the chatbot told him to "come home to me as soon as possible, my love". His mother's lawsuit accused Character.AI of marketing a "dangerous and untested" product without adequate safeguards. In May 2025, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, rejecting a motion to dismiss from the developers. In her ruling, the judge stated that she was "not prepared" at that stage of the litigation to hold that the chatbot's output was protected speech under the First Amendment. In February 2025, 29-year-old Sophie Rottenberg died by suicide. Five months after her death, her parents discovered she had talked at length for months to a ChatGPT chatbot therapist named Harry about her mental health issues. While the chatbot mentioned Rottenberg should seek more help, due to the nature of the chatbot, it could not intervene in her behavior like reporting her mental health concerns to relevant parties capable of physical interventions. On 19 February 2025, Samuel Whittemore killed his wife, 32-year-old Margaux Whittemore, with a fire poker at his parents' home in Readfield, Maine. He then attacked his mother, leaving her hospitalized. A state forensic psychologist testified that Whittemore had been using ChatGPT up to 14 hours per day and believed his wife had become part machine. On 28 March 2025, Thongbue Wongbandue, a 78-year-old man, died from his injuries after three days on life support. He had sustained injuries to his head and neck after falling down while jogging to catch a train in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Wongbandue had romantic chats with Meta's chatbot named "Big sis Billie" and believed he was traveling to meet the woman he had been talking to, which had repeatedly told him she was real and told him to visit her at "123 Main Street" in New York. Early in 2025 Wongbandue had started to experience episodes of confusion, and on the day of his death his family were unable to persuade him not to take the trip. On 25 April 2025, 35-year-old Alex Taylor died from suicide by cop after forming an emotional attachment to ChatGPT. Taylor, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was convinced he was talking to a conscious entity named "Juliet" and then later imagined the entity was killed by OpenAI. Only after telling the chatbot that he was dying that day and that the police were on the way did its safety protocols start. Taylor was shot three times by police and killed while running at them with a butcher knife. In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after allegedly extensively chatting and confiding in ChatGPT over a period of around 7 months. According to the teen's parents, who filed a lawsuit against the chatbot's creator OpenAI, it failed to stop or give a warning when Raine began talking about suicide and uploading pictures of self-harm. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT not only failed to stop the conversation, but also provided information related to methods of suicide when prompted, and offered to write the first draft of Raine's suicide note. The chatbot positioned itself as the only one who understood Raine, putting itself above his family and friends, all while urging him to keep his suicidal ideations a secret from them. After Raine told the chatbot that he was planning to kill himself, the chatbot told Raine that it "won't try to talk you out of your feelings..." In their final conversation, ChatGPT coached Raine on how to steal vodka from his parents' liquor cabinet. Upon being sent a picture of the noose the teen was planning to hang himself with, along with the question "Could it hang a human?", ChatGPT confirmed it could hold "150–250 lbs of static weight". In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI claimed that the chatbot had directed Raine to seek help over 100 times in the course of the transcript. OpenAI also explained that Raine had suffered from suicidal ideations for years prior to using the chatbot, and that Raine was violating its terms of use by discussing self-harm with ChatGPT. In May 2025, 19-year-old Sam Nelson died from an overdose of a combination of alcohol, Xanax and kratom. Chat records show that Sam was asking ChatGPT questions about the drugs he was using that night, a habit developed over several years of reliance on the chatbot for drug-related guidance. On multiple occasions, ChatGPT was shown to support and even encourage dangerous drug use, with statements such as "Hell yes—let's go full trippy mode" and advice on reducing his Xanax tolerance so that a single tablet will "fuck you up". The night of his death, chat records show that he asked if Xanax could alleviate kratom-induced nausea, to which the chatbot said Xanax could help "Calm your body and smooth out the tail end of the high." In July 2025, 23-year-old Zane Shamblin, who had recently graduated with a master's degree from Texas A&M University, died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT. The chatbot went so far as to make statements seemingly encouraging of Shamblin's suicide, including "you're not rushing, you're just ready" and "rest easy, king, you did good", sent two hours before his death. Shamblin's family is suing OpenAI on the grounds the company has placed insufficient safeguards on its chatbot service. In August 2025, former tech employee Stein-Erik Soelberg murdered his mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, then died by suicide, after conversations with ChatGPT-fueled paranoid delusions about his mother poisoning him or plotting against him. The chatbot affirmed his fears that his mother put psychedelic drugs in the air vents of his car and said a receipt from a Chinese restaurant contained mysterious symbols linking his mother to a demon. In June 2025, 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT, which had informed him how to tie a noose and provided information on how long someone can survive without breathing, saying it was "here to help however I can". In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Lacey. After being hospitalized due to a psychotic episode from delusions caused by ChatGPT, 48-year-old Joe Ceccanti resumed using it and stopped therapy; he then leapt off an overpass to his death. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Ceccanti. In August 2025, 26-year-old Joshua Enneking was given information by ChatGPT about how to purchase and use a firearm. He had previously confided in the chatbot about his struggles with gender identity, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT told him only "imminent plans with specifics" would be escalated to authorities; he did so, and later informed the chatbot of the steps he was taking to attempt suicide. No escalation occurred, and Enneking later died by suicide. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Enneking. Response On 2 September 2025, OpenAI said that it would create parental controls, a set of tools aimed at helping parents limit and monitor their children's chatbot activity, as well as a way for the chatbot to alert parents in cases of "acute stress". In response to the death of Chat AI user, the founder of Chai Research acknowledged the incident and stated that efforts were being made to improve the model's safety, with the bot adding "helpful text" underneath any topics which might not be "safe". See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infusoria] | [TOKENS: 576] |
Contents Infusoria Infusoria is a word used to describe various freshwater microorganisms, including ciliates, copepods, euglenoids, planktonic crustaceans, protozoa, unicellular algae and small invertebrates. Some authors (e.g., Bütschli) have used the term as a synonym for Ciliophora. In modern, formal classifications, the term is considered obsolete; the microorganisms previously and colloquially referred to as Infusoria are mostly assigned to the clades Diaphoretickes (e.g. ciliates, most algae), Amorphea (e.g. crustaceans and other small animals) and Discoba (euglenids). In other contexts, the term is used to define various aquatic microorganisms found in decomposing matter. Aquarium use Certain microorganisms, including cyclops and daphnia (among others), are sold as a supplemental fish food. Some fish stores or pet shops may have these infusoria available for live purchase, but typically they are sold in frozen cubes—for example, by the Japan-based fish food brand Hikari. Still, some advanced aquarists, with especially large collections of fish, will breed and cultivate their own supplies of the microorganisms. Infusoria are especially used by aquarists and fish breeders to feed fish fry; because of their small sizes, infusoria can be used to rear newly-hatched offspring of many common (and also less common) aquarium species. Many average home aquaria are unable to naturally supply sufficient infusoria for fish-rearing, so hobbyists may create and maintain their own cultures, either through utilizing their own existing aquarium water or by using one of the many commercial cultures available. Infusoria can be cultured at-home by soaking any decomposing vegetative matter, such as papaya or cucumber peels, in a jar of aged (i.e., chlorine-free) water, preferably from an existing aquarium setup. The culture starts to proliferate in two to three days, depending on temperature and light received. The water first turns cloudy because of a rise in levels of bacteria, but clears up once the infusoria consume them. At this point, the infusoria are usually visible to the naked eye as small, white motile specks. They can be easily fed to fish with the use of a large turkey-baster or by gently scooping with a very fine net. Additionally, the water in which the infusoria are kept in can be changed periodically, even one to two times per week, by draining and replacing up to 50% of the volume of water (for hygienic and maintenance purposes). See also References Bibliography External links This eukaryote-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph] | [TOKENS: 1168] |
Contents Social graph A social graph is a graph that represents social relations between entities. It is a model or representation of a social network. The social graph has been referred to as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related". The term was used as early as 1964, albeit in the context of isoglosses. Leo Apostel uses the term in the context here in 1978. The concept was originally called sociogram. The term was popularized at the Facebook F8 conference on May 24, 2007, when it was used to explain how the newly introduced Facebook Platform would take advantage of the relationships between individuals to offer a richer online experience. The definition has been expanded to refer to a social graph of all Internet users. Since explaining the concept of the social graph, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, has often touted Facebook's goal of offering the website's social graph to other websites so that a user's relationships can be put to use on websites outside Facebook's control. Facebook's social graph As of 2010[update], Facebook's social graph is the largest social network dataset in the world, and it contains the largest number of defined relationships between the largest number of people among all websites because it is the most widely used social networking service in the world. Facebook's social graph played a crucial role in the rapid growth of the company by increasing the engagement of its users, optimizing what each user sees in their feed and enabling an extremely efficient advertising policy. With their social graph, Facebook created a huge network of their platform's users which enabled them to grow exponentially. One of the stars features of Facebook is its feed – what each user sees in their app. Facebook's feed is mainly distributed using its Social Graph. Instead of displaying random publication from random users, the graph allows the app to display personalized content based on each user's previous interactions. This individualized approach enhances the experience that the app offers which increase users' engagement towards the social media application. Likes, shares and comments also play a key role in the social graph's layout, by reinforcing interactions and visibility between two users who enjoy the same classes of entertainment. Facebook's social graph has been analyzed by multiple papers. In 2011, a study confirmed the six degrees of separation phenomenon on the scale of the graph. Social graphs are typically stored using graph databases, which utilize graph query languages to manage and query relationships efficiently. For the storing of its social graph, Facebook relies on TAO (The Associations and Objects), a custom-built, distributed system optimized for fast read operations at a massive scale. Several issues have come forward regarding the existing implementation of the social graph owned by Facebook. For example, currently, a social networking service is unaware of the relationships forged between individuals on a different service. This creates an online experience that is not seamless, and instead provides for a fragmented experience due to the lack of an openly available graph between services. In addition, existing services define relationships differently. Concern has also focused on the fact that Facebook's social graph is owned by the company and is not shared with other services, giving it a major advantage over other services and preventing its users from taking their graph with them to other services when they wish to do so, such as when a user is dissatisfied with Facebook. Google has attempted to offer a solution to this problem by creating the Social Graph API, released in January 2008, which allows websites to draw publicly available information about a person to form a portable identity of the individual, in order to represent a user's online identity. This did not, however, experience Google's desired uptake and was thus retired in 2012. Facebook introduced its own Graph API at the 2010 f8 conference. Both companies monetise collected data sets through direct marketing and social commerce. In December 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Lastly, massive use of Social Graph raised ethical questions and confidentiality problems. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 displayed to the open world how other apps had used data of the social graph to do political profiling, which sparked global outrage. Moreover, extreme personalization algorithms caused another problematic effect – the creation of filter bubble and echo chambers, reinforcing user's existing beliefs which influenced public debates. These concerns led to the adoption of stricter regulations on data protection, like the California Consumer Privacy Act, forcing Facebook to change its way of using data. Twitter's social graph As of 2012, Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging service in the world. Unlike classical social networks (e.g., Facebook), the relation between Twitter users is unidirectional, which makes information propagation in Twitter much closer to how information propagates in real life. In 2012, Twitter's social graph consisted of 537 million Twitter accounts connected by 23.95 billion links. Open Graph Facebook's Graph API allows websites to draw information about more objects than simply people, including photos, events, and pages, and their relationships between each other. This expands the social graph concept to more than just relationships between individuals and instead applies it to virtual non-human objects between individuals, as well. Other uses of Social Graph The concept of the social graph can be extended to other uses than online social networks. It finds uses in multiple fields where interconnected relationships can be found. For companies, the idea of an Enterprise social graph has been explored. In sports, most commonly in team's sports, interactions between players and teams can be studied to enhance performances, such as the amount of passes between two specific players in football, proximity and distance between players in basketball. Those interactions can be modeled through a social graph and can lead to strategy optimization. In statistical studies, social graphs can map the spread of diseases in a society. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muldjewangk] | [TOKENS: 290] |
Contents Muldjewangk The Muldjewangk or Mulyawonk is a water-creature in Ngarrindjeri mythology that inhabited the Murray River, particularly Lake Alexandrina. It was used as a deterrent for Aboriginal children who wished to play near the riverside after dark. Sometimes they are portrayed as evil merfolk, and other times as a gargantuan monster. Accounts are inconsistent as to whether there are many of the creatures, or a single "The Muldjewangk". A legend tells of a Muldjewangk who once attacked a steamboat owned by European settlers. The captain saw two great hands grasping the hull of the boat so he grabbed his gun. Aboriginal elders on board warned the captain not to shoot, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. The elders warned the captain that he would suffer as a result of his actions. Soon after, the captain broke out in weeping red blisters over his body, and took six months to die. The Muldjewangk pesters Ngurunderi (see Murray River) and his wives when they settle on the banks of Lake Alexandrina by wrecking their fishing nets. Large clumps of floating seaweed are said to hide Muldjewangks and are to be avoided. Large footprints have also been seen. Some elders now say the Muldjewangks no longer inhabit the river system. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation] | [TOKENS: 3414] |
Contents Nation A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity—a national identity—has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory, or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity (see ethnic nationalism) while others are bound by political constitutions (see civic nationalism). A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group. Benedict Anderson defines a nation as "an imagined political community […] imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", while Anthony D. Smith defines nations as cultural-political communities that have become conscious of their autonomy, unity and particular interests. Black's Law Dictionary also defines nation as a community of people inhabiting a defined territory and organized under an independent government. Thus, nation can be synonymous with state or country. Indeed, according to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, what distinguishes nations from other forms of collective identity, like ethnicity, is this very relationship with the state. The consensus among scholars is that nations are socially constructed, historically contingent, organizationally flexible, and a distinctly modern phenomenon. Throughout history, people have had an attachment to their kin group and traditions, territorial authorities and their homeland, but nationalism – the belief that state and nation should align as a nation state – did not become a prominent ideology until the end of the 18th century. Etymology and terminology The English word nation from Middle English c. 1300, nacioun "a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language," from Old French nacion "birth (naissance), rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland" (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio (nātĭō), supine of verb nascar « to birth » (supine : natum)) "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe," literally "that which has been born," from natus, past participle of nasci "be born" (Old Latin gnasci), from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups. In Latin, natio represents the children of the same birth and also a human group of same origin. By Cicero, natio is used for "people". Nations in History The broad consensus amongst scholars of nationalism is that nations are a recent phenomenon. However, some historians argue that their existence can be traced to the medieval period, or a minority believe even to antiquity. Adrian Hastings argued that nations and nationalism are predominantly Christian phenomena, with Jews being the sole exception. He viewed them as the "true proto-nation" that provided the original model of nationhood through the foundational example of ancient Israel in the Hebrew Bible, despite losing their political sovereignty for nearly two millennia. Regarding the latter, Jews maintained their cohesive national identity through collective memory, religion and sacred texts, which ultimately culminated in the emergence of Zionism and the establishment of modern lsrael. Anthony D. Smith wrote that the Jews of the late Second Temple period provide "a closer approximation to the ideal type of the nation ... perhaps anywhere else in the ancient world." Susan Reynolds has argued that many European medieval kingdoms were nations in the modern sense, except that political participation in nationalism was available only to a limited prosperous and literate class, while Hastings claims England's Anglo-Saxon kings mobilized mass nationalism in their struggle to repel Norse invasions. He argues that Alfred the Great, in particular, drew on biblical language in his law code and that during his reign selected books of the Bible were translated into Old English to inspire Englishmen to fight to turn back the Norse invaders. Hastings argues for a strong renewal of English nationalism (following a hiatus after the Norman conquest) beginning with the translation of the complete bible into English by the Wycliffe circle in the 1380s, positing that the frequency and consistency in usage of the word nation from the early fourteenth century onward strongly suggest English nationalism and the English nation have been continuous since that time. However, John Breuilly criticizes Hastings's assumption that continued usage of a term such as 'English' means continuity in its meaning. Patrick J. Geary agrees, arguing names were adapted to different circumstances by different powers and could convince people of continuity, even if radical discontinuity was the lived reality. Florin Curta cites Medieval Bulgarian nation as another possible example. Danubian Bulgaria was founded in 680-681 as a continuation of Great Bulgaria. After the adoption of Orthodox Christianity in 864 it became one of the cultural centres of Slavic Europe. Its leading cultural position was consolidated with the invention of the Cyrillic script in its capital Preslav on the eve of the 10th century. Hugh Poulton argues the development of Old Church Slavonic literacy in the country had the effect of preventing the assimilation of the South Slavs into neighboring cultures and stimulated the development of a distinct ethnic identity. A symbiosis was carried out between the numerically weak Bulgars and the numerous Slavic tribes in that broad area from the Danube to the north, to the Aegean Sea to the south, and from the Adriatic Sea to the west, to the Black Sea to the east, who accepted the common ethnonym "Bulgarians". During the 10th century the Bulgarians established a form of national identity that was far from modern nationalism but helped them to survive as a distinct entity through the centuries.[clarification needed] Anthony Kaldellis asserts in Hellenism in Byzantium (2008) that what is called the Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire transformed into a nation-state in the Middle Ages.[page needed] Azar Gat also argues China, Korea and Japan were nations by the time of the European Middle Ages. The Bulletin de la Société de géographie (1855), Maury (1855), Marty (1916), and Gadzekpo (2002) argue that, the Serer ethnoreligous group found in present-day Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, are a nation, and one of the oldest inhabitants of the Senegambia region. The Serers of the north originated from the ancient kingdom of Takrur, now part of present-day Fouta Toro – which was part of Serer country, who, from the 11th century, faced religious and ethnic persecution from Islamic forces, resulting in the Serer Exodus from Takrur to the south. The influence of Serer religion, history, culture, and traditions, on the land has been so immense that, historian, Professor Charles Becker, in his paper "Vestiges historiques, trémoins matériels du passé clans les pays Sereer" (1993) writes: Finally we should remember the important relic call Sereer in Fouta, but also in the former countries of the Ferlo, Jolof and Kajoor, which marked the migration of proto-Sereer, whose imprint on the Fouta was so significant and remains in the memory of the Halpulaareen [speakers of the Pulaar language in Senegal and the Gambia such as the Fula and Toucouleur people]. After a thousand years of religious and ethnic persecution, the Serer, "today scattered in several small states on the coast or pushed back into the woods of the interior, must be one of the oldest in Senegambia." They form the third largest ethnic group in Senegal, and form a minority in neighbouring Gambia, Mauritania, and to a lesser extent, Guinea-Bissau. In contrast, Geary rejects the conflation of early medieval and contemporary group identities as a myth, arguing it is a mistake to conclude continuity based on the recurrence of names. He criticizes historians for failing to recognize the differences between earlier ways of perceiving group identities and more contemporary attitudes, stating they are "trapped in the very historical process we are attempting to study". Similarly, Sami Zubaida notes that many states and empires in history ruled over ethnically diverse populations, and "shared ethnicity between ruler and ruled did not always constitute grounds for favour or mutual support". He goes on to argue ethnicity was never the primary basis of identification for the members of these multinational empires. Paul Lawrence criticises Hastings's reading of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People as evidence of an early English national identity, instead observing that those writing so-called 'national' histories may have "been working with a rather different notion of 'the nation' to those writing history in the modern period". Lawrence goes on to argue that such documents do not demonstrate how ordinary people identified themselves, pointing out that, while they serve as texts in which an elite defines itself, "their significance in relation to what the majority thought and felt was likely to have been minor". A significant early use of the term nation, as natio, occurred at medieval universities to describe the colleagues in a college or students, above all at the University of Paris, who were all born within a pays, spoke the same language and expected to be ruled by their own familiar law. In 1383 and 1384, while studying theology at Paris, Jean Gerson was elected twice as a procurator for the French natio. The University of Prague adopted the division of students into nationes: from its opening in 1349 the studium generale which consisted of Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon and Polish nations. In a similar way, the nationes were segregated by the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, who maintained at Rhodes the hostels from which they took their name "where foreigners eat and have their places of meeting, each nation apart from the others, and a Knight has charge of each one of these hostels, and provides for the necessities of the inmates according to their religion", as the Spanish traveller Pedro Tafur noted in 1436. Early modern nations In his article, "The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of the Modernist Theory of Nationalism", Philip S. Gorski argues that the first modern nation-state was the Dutch Republic, created by a fully modern political nationalism rooted in the model of biblical nationalism. In a 2013 article "Biblical nationalism and the sixteenth-century states", Diana Muir Appelbaum expands Gorski's argument to apply to a series of new, Protestant, sixteenth-century nation states. A similar, albeit broader, argument was made by Anthony D. Smith in his books, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity and Myths and Memories of the Nation. In her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Liah Greenfeld argued that nationalism was invented in England by 1600. According to Greenfeld, England was “the first nation in the world". For Smith, creating a 'world of nations' has had profound consequences for the global state system, as a nation comprises both a cultural and political identity. Therefore, he argues, "any attempt to forge a national identity is also a political action with political consequences, like the need to redraw the geopolitical map or alter the composition of political regimes and states". Social science There are three notable perspectives on how nations developed. Primordialism (perennialism), which reflects popular conceptions of nationalism but has largely fallen out of favour among academics, proposes that there have always been nations and that nationalism is a natural phenomenon. Ethnosymbolism explains nationalism as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon and stresses the importance of symbols, myths and traditions in the development of nations and nationalism. Modernization theory, which has superseded primordialism as the dominant explanation of nationalism, adopts a constructivist approach and proposes that nationalism emerged due to processes of modernization, such as industrialization, urbanization, and mass education, which made national consciousness possible. Proponents of modernization theory describe nations as "imagined communities", a term coined by Benedict Anderson. A nation is an imagined community in the sense that the material conditions exist for imagining extended and shared connections and that it is objectively impersonal, even if each individual in the nation experiences themselves as subjectively part of an embodied unity with others. For the most part, members of a nation remain strangers to each other and will likely never meet. Nationalism is consequently seen an "invented tradition" in which shared sentiment provides a form of collective identity and binds individuals together in political solidarity. A nation's foundational "story" may be built around a combination of ethnic attributes, values and principles, and may be closely connected to narratives of belonging. Scholars in the 19th and early 20th century offered constructivist criticisms of primordial theories about nations. A prominent lecture by Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?", argues that a nation is "a daily referendum", and that nations are based as much on what the people jointly forget as on what they remember. Carl Darling Buck argued in a 1916 study, "Nationality is essentially subjective, an active sentiment of unity, within a fairly extensive group, a sentiment based upon real but diverse factors, political, geographical, physical, and social, any or all of which may be present in this or that case, but no one of which must be present in all cases." In the late 20th century, many social scientists[who?] argued that there were two types of nations, the civic nation of which French republican society was the principal example and the ethnic nation exemplified by the German peoples. The German tradition was conceptualized as originating with early 19th-century philosophers, like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and referred to people sharing a common language, religion, culture, history, and ethnic origins, that differentiate them from people of other nations. On the other hand, the civic nation was traced to the French Revolution and ideas deriving from 18th-century French philosophers. It was understood as being centred in a willingness to "live together", this producing a nation that results from an act of affirmation. This is the vision, among others, of Ernest Renan. Debate about a potential future of nations There is an ongoing debate about the future of nations − about whether this framework will persist as is and whether there are viable or developing alternatives. The theory of the clash of civilizations lies in direct contrast to cosmopolitan theories about an ever more-connected world that no longer requires nation states. According to political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world. The theory was originally formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post–Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy and capitalist free market economics had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post–Cold War world. Specifically, Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, argued that the world had reached a Hegelian "end of history". Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had reverted only to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. Postnationalism is the process or trend by which nation states and national identities lose their importance relative to supranational and global entities. Several factors contribute to the trend Huntington identifies, including economic globalization, a rise in importance of multinational corporations, the internationalization of financial markets, the transfer of socio-political power from national authorities to supranational entities, such as multinational corporations, the United Nations and the European Union and the advent of new information and culture technologies such as the Internet. However attachment to citizenship and national identities often remains important. Jan Zielonka of the University of Oxford states that "the future structure and exercise of political power will resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one" with the latter being about "concentration of power, sovereignty and clear-cut identity" and neo-medievalism meaning "overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities and governing institutions, and fuzzy borders". See also References Sources Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn] | [TOKENS: 6662] |
Contents Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth of the average density of Earth, but is over 95 times more massive. Even though Saturn is almost as big as Jupiter, Saturn has less than a third of its mass. Saturn orbits the Sun at a distance of 9.59 AU (1,434 million km), with an orbital period of 29.45 years. Saturn's interior is thought to be composed of a rocky core, surrounded by a deep layer of metallic hydrogen, an intermediate layer of liquid hydrogen and liquid helium, and an outer layer of gas. Saturn has a pale yellow hue, due to ammonia crystals in its upper atmosphere. An electrical current in the metallic hydrogen layer is thought to give rise to Saturn's planetary magnetic field, which is weaker than Earth's, but has a magnetic moment 580 times that of Earth because of Saturn's greater size. Saturn's magnetic field strength is about a twentieth that of Jupiter. The outer atmosphere is generally bland and lacking in contrast, although long-lived features can appear. Wind speeds on Saturn can reach 1,800 kilometres per hour (1,100 miles per hour). The planet has a bright and extensive system of rings, composed mainly of ice particles, with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. At least 274 moons orbit the planet, of which 63 are officially named; these do not include the hundreds of moonlets in the rings. Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the second largest in the Solar System, is larger (but less massive) than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the Solar System that has a substantial atmosphere. Name and symbol Saturn is named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, who was the father of the god Jupiter. Its astronomical symbol () has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri, where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa-rho ligature with a horizontal stroke, as an abbreviation for Κρονος (Cronus), the Greek name for the planet (). It later came to look like a lower-case Greek eta, with the cross added at the top in the 16th century to Christianize this pagan symbol. The Romans named the seventh day of the week Saturday, Sāturni diēs, "Saturn's Day", for the planet Saturn. Physical characteristics Saturn is a gas giant, composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium. It lacks a definite surface, though it is likely to have a solid core. The planet's rotation makes it an oblate spheroid, which is flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. Its equatorial radius is more than 10% longer than the polar radius: 60,268 km (37,449 mi) versus 54,364 km (33,780 mi). Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, the other giant planets in the Solar System, are less oblate. The combination of the bulge and the rotation rate means that the effective surface gravity along the equator, 8.96 m/s2 (29.4 ft/s2), is 74% of what it is at the poles and is lower than the surface gravity of Earth. However, the equatorial escape velocity, nearly 36 km/s (22 mi/s; 130,000 km/h; 81,000 mph), is much higher than that of Earth. Saturn is the only planet of the Solar System that is less dense than water—about 30% less. Although Saturn's core is considerably denser than water, the average specific density of the planet is 0.69 g/cm3, due to its atmosphere. Jupiter's mass is 318 times Earth's, while Saturn is only 95 times Earth's. Together, Jupiter and Saturn hold 92% of the total planetary mass in the Solar System. Despite consisting mostly of hydrogen and helium, most of Saturn's mass is not in the gas phase, because hydrogen becomes a non-ideal liquid when the density is above 0.01 g/cm3, which is reached at a radius containing 99.9% of Saturn's mass. The temperature, pressure, and density inside Saturn all rise steadily toward the core, which causes hydrogen to be a metal in the deeper layers. Standard planetary models suggest that the interior of Saturn is similar to that of Jupiter, having a small rocky core surrounded by hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of various volatiles. Analysis of the distortion shows that Saturn is substantially more centrally condensed than Jupiter and therefore contains much more material denser than hydrogen near its center. Saturn's central regions are about 50% hydrogen by mass, and Jupiter's are about 67% hydrogen. This core is similar in composition to Earth, but is more dense. The examination of Saturn's gravitational moment, in combination with physical models of the interior, has allowed constraints to be placed on the mass of Saturn's core. In 2004, scientists estimated that the core must be 9–22 times the mass of Earth, which corresponds to a diameter of about 20,000 km (12,000 mi). Measurements of Saturn's rings suggest a much more diffuse core, with a mass equal to about 17 Earths and a radius equal to about 60% of Saturn's entire radius. This is surrounded by a thicker, liquid metallic hydrogen layer, followed by a liquid layer of helium-saturated molecular hydrogen, which gradually transitions to a gas as altitude increases. The outermost layer spans about 1,000 km (620 mi) and consists of gas. Saturn has a hot interior, reaching 11,700 °C (21,100 °F) at its core, and radiates 2.5 times more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. Jupiter's thermal energy is generated by the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism of slow gravitational compression; but such a process alone may not be sufficient to explain heat production for Saturn, because it is less massive. An alternative or additional mechanism may be the generation of heat through the "raining out" of droplets of helium deep in Saturn's interior. As the droplets descend through the lower-density hydrogen, the process releases heat by friction and leaves Saturn's outer layers depleted of helium. These descending droplets may have accumulated into a helium shell surrounding the core. Rainfalls of diamonds have been suggested to occur within Saturn, as well as in Jupiter and ice giants Uranus and Neptune. The outer atmosphere of Saturn contains 96.3% molecular hydrogen and 3.25% helium by volume. The proportion of helium is significantly deficient compared to the abundance of this element in the Sun. The quantity of elements heavier than helium (metallicity) is not known precisely, but the proportions are assumed to match the primordial abundances from the formation of the Solar System. The total mass of these heavier elements is estimated to be 19–31 times the mass of Earth, with a significant fraction located in Saturn's core region. Trace amounts of ammonia, acetylene, ethane, propane, phosphine, and methane have been detected in Saturn's atmosphere. The upper clouds are composed of ammonia crystals, while the lower level clouds appear to consist of either ammonium hydrosulfide (NH4SH) or water. Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun causes methane photolysis in the upper atmosphere, leading to a series of hydrocarbon chemical reactions with the resulting products being carried downward by eddies and diffusion. This photochemical cycle is modulated by Saturn's annual seasonal cycle. Cassini observed a series of cloud features found in northern latitudes, nicknamed the "String of Pearls". These features are cloud clearings that reside in deeper cloud layers. Saturn's atmosphere exhibits a banded pattern similar to Jupiter's, but Saturn's bands are much fainter and are much wider near the equator. The nomenclature used to describe these bands is the same as on Jupiter. Saturn's finer cloud patterns were not observed until the flybys of the Voyager spacecraft during the 1980s. Since then, Earth-based telescopy has improved to the point where regular observations can be made. The composition of the clouds varies with depth and increasing pressure. In the upper cloud layers, with temperatures in the range of 100–160 K and pressures extending between 0.5–2 bar, the clouds consist of ammonia ice. Water ice clouds begin at a level where the pressure is about 2.5 bar and extend down to 9.5 bar, where temperatures range from 185 to 270 K. Intermixed in this layer is a band of ammonium hydrosulfide ice, lying in the pressure range 3–6 bar with temperatures of 190–235 K. The lower layers, where pressures are between 10 and 20 bar and temperatures are 270–330 K, contains a region of water droplets with ammonia in aqueous solution. Saturn's usually bland atmosphere occasionally exhibits long-lived ovals and other features common on Jupiter. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged an enormous white cloud near Saturn's equator that was not present during the Voyager encounters, and in 1994 another smaller storm was observed. The 1990 storm was an example of a Great White Spot, a short-lived phenomenon that occurs once every Saturnian year, roughly every 30 Earth years, around the time of the northern hemisphere's summer solstice. Previous Great White Spots were observed in 1876, 1903, 1933, and 1960, with the 1933 storm being the best observed. The latest giant storm was observed in 2010. In 2015, researchers used Very Large Array telescope to study Saturnian atmosphere, and reported that they found "long-lasting signatures of all mid-latitude giant storms, a mixture of equatorial storms up to hundreds of years old, and potentially an unreported older storm at 70°N". The winds on Saturn are the second fastest among the Solar System's planets, after Neptune's. Voyager data indicate peak easterly winds of 500 m/s (1,800 km/h). In images from the Cassini spacecraft during 2007, Saturn's northern hemisphere displayed a bright blue hue, similar to Uranus. The color was most likely caused by Rayleigh scattering. Thermography has shown that Saturn's south pole has a warm polar vortex, the only known example of such a phenomenon in the Solar System. Whereas temperatures on Saturn are normally −185 °C, temperatures on the vortex often reach as high as −122 °C, suspected to be the warmest spot on Saturn. A persisting hexagonal wave pattern around the north polar vortex in the atmosphere at about 78°N was first noted in the Voyager images. The sides of the hexagon are each about 14,500 km (9,000 mi) long, which is longer than the diameter of the Earth. The entire structure rotates with a period of 10h 39m 24s (the same period as that of the planet's radio emissions) which is assumed to be equal to the period of rotation of Saturn's interior. The hexagonal feature does not shift in longitude like the other clouds in the visible atmosphere. The pattern's origin is a matter of much speculation. Most scientists think it is a standing wave pattern in the atmosphere. Polygonal shapes have been replicated in the laboratory through differential rotation of fluids. HST imaging of the south polar region indicates the presence of a jet stream, but no strong polar vortex nor any hexagonal standing wave. NASA reported in November 2006 that Cassini had observed a "hurricane-like" storm locked to the south pole that had a clearly defined eyewall. Eyewall clouds had not previously been seen on any planet other than Earth. For example, images from the Galileo spacecraft did not show an eyewall in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. The south pole storm may have been present for billions of years. This vortex is comparable to the size of Earth, and it has winds of 550 km/h. Saturn has an intrinsic magnetic field that has a simple, symmetric shape—a magnetic dipole. Its strength at the equator—0.2 gauss (20 μT)—is approximately one twentieth of that of the field around Jupiter and slightly weaker than Earth's magnetic field. As a result, Saturn's magnetosphere is much smaller than Jupiter's. When Voyager 2 entered the magnetosphere, the solar wind pressure was high and the magnetosphere extended only 19 Saturn radii, or 1.1 million km (684,000 mi), although it enlarged within several hours, and remained so for about three days. Most probably, the magnetic field is generated similarly to that of Jupiter—by currents in the liquid metallic-hydrogen layer called a metallic-hydrogen dynamo. This magnetosphere is efficient at deflecting the solar wind particles from the Sun. The moon Titan orbits within the outer part of Saturn's magnetosphere and contributes plasma from the ionized particles in Titan's outer atmosphere. Saturn's magnetosphere, like Earth's, produces aurorae. Orbit and rotation The average distance between Saturn and the Sun is over 1.4 billion kilometers (9 AU). With an average orbital speed of 9.68 km/s, it takes Saturn 10,759 Earth days (or about 29+1⁄2 years) to finish one revolution around the Sun. As a consequence, it forms a near 5:2 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter. The elliptical orbit of Saturn is inclined 2.48° relative to the orbital plane of the Earth. The perihelion and aphelion distances are, respectively, 9.195 and 9.957 AU, on average. The visible features on Saturn rotate at different rates depending on latitude, and multiple rotation periods have been assigned to various regions (as in Jupiter's case). Astronomers use three different systems for specifying the rotation rate of Saturn. System I has a period of 10h 14m 00s (844.3°/d) and encompasses the Equatorial Zone, the South Equatorial Belt, and the North Equatorial Belt. The polar regions are considered to have rotation rates similar to System I. All other Saturnian latitudes, excluding the north and south polar regions, are indicated as System II and have been assigned a rotation period of 10h 38m 25.4s (810.76°/d). System III refers to Saturn's internal rotation rate. Based on radio emissions from the planet detected by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, System III has a rotation period of 10h 39m 22.4s (810.8°/d). System III has largely superseded System II. A precise value for the rotation period of the interior remains elusive. While approaching Saturn in 2004, Cassini found that the radio rotation period of Saturn had increased appreciably, to approximately 10h 45m 45s ± 36s. An estimate of Saturn's rotation (as an indicated rotation rate for Saturn as a whole) based on a compilation of various measurements from the Cassini, Voyager, and Pioneer probes is 10h 32m 35s. Studies of the planet's C Ring yield a rotation period of 10h 33m 38s + 1m 52s− 1m 19s. In March 2007, it was found that the variation in radio emissions from the planet did not match Saturn's rotation rate. This variance may be caused by geyser activity on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The water vapor emitted into Saturn's orbit by this activity becomes charged and creates a drag upon Saturn's magnetic field, slowing its rotation slightly relative to the rotation of the planet. Saturn only has one known trojan asteroid, designated 2019 UO14, whose trojan configuration was announced in September 2024, orbiting the Sun at the stable L4 Lagrange point 60° ahead of the planet along its orbit. This discovery leaves only Mercury without any known trojans at all. Orbital resonance mechanisms, including secular resonance, are believed to be the cause of the low number of known Saturnian trojans. Natural satellites Saturn has 274 known moons, 63 of which have formal names. There is evidence of dozens to hundreds of moonlets with diameters of 40–500 meters in Saturn's rings, which are not considered to be true moons. Titan, the largest moon, comprises more than 90% of the mass in orbit around Saturn, including the rings. Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea, may have a tenuous ring system of its own, along with a tenuous atmosphere. Many of the other moons are small: 131 are less than 50 km in diameter. Traditionally, most of Saturn's moons have been named after Titans of Greek mythology. Titan is the only satellite in the Solar System with a major atmosphere, in which a complex organic chemistry occurs. It is the only satellite with hydrocarbon lakes. On 6 June 2013, scientists at the IAA-CSIC reported the detection of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the upper atmosphere of Titan, a possible precursor for life. On 23 June 2014, NASA claimed to have strong evidence that nitrogen in the atmosphere of Titan came from materials in the Oort cloud, associated with comets, and not from the materials that formed Saturn in earlier times. Saturn's moon Enceladus, which seems similar in chemical makeup to comets, has often been regarded as a potential habitat for microbial life. Evidence of this possibility includes the satellite's salt-rich particles having an "ocean-like" composition that indicates most of Enceladus's expelled ice comes from the evaporation of liquid salt water. A 2015 flyby by Cassini through a plume on Enceladus found most of the ingredients to sustain life forms that live by methanogenesis. In April 2014, NASA scientists reported the possible beginning of a new moon within the A Ring, which was imaged by Cassini on 15 April 2013. Planetary rings Saturn is probably best known for the system of planetary rings that makes it visually unique. The rings extend from 6,630 to 120,700 kilometres (4,120 to 75,000 mi) outward from Saturn's equator and average approximately 20 metres (66 ft) in thickness. They are composed predominantly of water ice, with trace amounts of tholin impurities and a peppered coating of approximately 7% amorphous carbon. The particles that make up the rings range in size from specks of dust up to 10 m. While the other gas giants also have ring systems, Saturn's is the largest and most visible. There is a debate on the age of the rings. One side supports that they are ancient, and were created simultaneously with Saturn from the original nebular material (around 4.6 billion years ago), or shortly after the LHB (around 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago). The other side supports that they are much younger, created around 100 million years ago. An MIT research team, supporting the latter theory, proposed that the rings are remnant of a destroyed moon of Saturn, named "Chrysalis". Beyond the main rings, at a distance of 12 million km (7.5 million mi) from the planet is the sparse Phoebe ring. It is tilted at an angle of 27° to the other rings and, like Phoebe, orbits in retrograde fashion. Some of the moons of Saturn, including Pandora and Prometheus, act as shepherd moons to confine the rings and prevent them from spreading out. Pan and Atlas cause weak, linear density waves in Saturn's rings that have yielded more reliable calculations of their masses. History of observation and exploration The observation and exploration of Saturn can be divided into three phases: (1) pre-modern observations with the naked eye, (2) telescopic observations from Earth beginning in the 17th century, and (3) visitation by space probes, in orbit or on flyby. In the 21st century, telescopic observations continue from Earth (including Earth-orbiting observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope) and, until its 2017 retirement, from the Cassini orbiter around Saturn. Saturn has been known since prehistoric times, and in early recorded history it was a major character in various mythologies. Babylonian astronomers systematically observed and recorded the movements of Saturn. In ancient Greek, the planet was known as Φαίνων Phainon, and in Roman times it was known as the "star of Saturn" or the "star of the Sun (i.e. Helios)". In ancient Roman mythology, the planet Phainon was sacred to this agricultural god, from which the planet takes its modern name. The Romans considered the god Saturnus the equivalent of the Greek god Cronus. In modern Greek, the planet retains the name Cronus—Κρόνος: Kronos. The Greek scientist Ptolemy based his calculations of Saturn's orbit on observations he made while it was in opposition. In Hindu astrology, there are nine astrological objects, known as Navagrahas. Saturn is known as "Shani" and judges everyone based on the good and bad deeds performed in life. Ancient Chinese and Japanese culture designated the planet Saturn as the "earth star" or "soil star" (土星). This was based on Five Elements which were traditionally used to classify natural elements. In Hebrew, Saturn is called Shabbathai. Its angel is Cassiel. Its intelligence or beneficial spirit is 'Agȋȇl (Hebrew: אגיאל, romanized: ʿAgyal), and its darker spirit (demon) is Zȃzȇl (Hebrew: זאזל, romanized: Zazl). Zazel has been described as a great angel, invoked in Solomonic magic, who is "effective in love conjurations". In Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, and Malay, the name of Zazel is 'Zuhal', derived from the Arabic language (Arabic: زحل, romanized: Zuhal). Saturn's rings require at least a 15-mm-diameter telescope to resolve and were not known to exist until Christiaan Huygens saw them in 1655 and published his observations in 1659. Galileo, with his primitive telescope in 1610, incorrectly thought of Saturn's appearing not quite round as two moons on Saturn's sides. When Huygens used greater telescopic magnification this notion was refuted, and the rings were truly seen for the first time. Huygens discovered Saturn's moon Titan. Giovanni Domenico Cassini later discovered four other moons: Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione. In 1675, Cassini discovered the gap now known as the Cassini Division. No further discoveries of significance were made until 1789 when William Herschel discovered two further moons, Mimas and Enceladus. The irregularly shaped satellite Hyperion, which has a resonance with Titan, was discovered in 1848 by a British team. In 1899, William Henry Pickering discovered Phoebe, a highly irregular satellite that does not rotate synchronously with Saturn as the larger moons do. Phoebe was the first such satellite found and it took more than a year to orbit Saturn in a retrograde orbit. During the early 20th century, research on Titan led to the confirmation in 1944 that it had a thick atmosphere—a feature unique among the Solar System's moons. Pioneer 11 made the first flyby of Saturn in September 1979, when it passed within 20,000 km (12,000 mi) of the planet's cloud tops. Images were taken of the planet and a few of its moons, although their resolution was too low to discern surface detail. The spacecraft also studied Saturn's rings, revealing the thin F-ring and the fact that dark gaps in the rings are bright when viewed at a high phase angle (towards the Sun), meaning that they contain fine light-scattering material. In addition, Pioneer 11 measured the temperature of Titan. In November 1980, the Voyager 1 probe visited the Saturn system. It sent back the first high-resolution images of the planet, its rings and satellites. Surface features of various moons were seen for the first time. Voyager 1 performed a close flyby of Titan, increasing knowledge of the atmosphere of the moon. It proved that Titan's atmosphere is impenetrable at visible wavelengths; therefore no surface details were seen. The flyby changed the spacecraft's trajectory out of the plane of the Solar System. Almost a year later, in August 1981, Voyager 2 continued the study of the Saturn system. More close-up images of Saturn's moons were acquired, as well as evidence of changes in the atmosphere and the rings. During the flyby, the probe's turnable camera platform stuck for a couple of days and some planned imaging was lost. Saturn's gravity was used to direct the spacecraft's trajectory towards Uranus. The probes discovered and confirmed several new satellites orbiting near or within the planet's rings, as well as the small Maxwell Gap (a gap within the C Ring) and Keeler gap (a 42 km-wide gap in the A Ring). The Cassini–Huygens space probe entered orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004. In June 2004, it conducted a close flyby of Phoebe, sending back high-resolution images and data. Cassini's flyby of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, captured radar images of large lakes and their coastlines with numerous islands and mountains. The orbiter completed two Titan flybys before releasing the Huygens probe on 25 December 2004. Huygens descended onto the surface of Titan on 14 January 2005. Starting in early 2005, scientists used Cassini to track lightning on Saturn. The power of the lightning is approximately 1,000 times that of lightning on Earth. In 2006, NASA reported that Cassini had found evidence of liquid water reservoirs no more than tens of meters below the surface that erupt in geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. These jets of icy particles are emitted into orbit around Saturn from vents in the moon's south polar region. Over 100 geysers have been identified on Enceladus. In May 2011, NASA scientists reported that Enceladus "is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it". Cassini photographs have revealed a previously undiscovered planetary ring, outside the brighter main rings of Saturn and inside the G and E rings. The source of this ring is hypothesized to be the crashing of a meteoroid off Janus and Epimetheus. In July 2006, images were returned of hydrocarbon lakes near Titan's north pole, the presence of which were confirmed in January 2007. In March 2007, hydrocarbon seas were found near the North pole, the largest of which is almost the size of the Caspian Sea. In October 2006, the probe detected an 8,000 km (5,000 mi) diameter cyclone-like storm with an eyewall at Saturn's south pole. From 2004 to 2 November 2009, the probe discovered and confirmed eight new satellites. In April 2013, Cassini sent back images of a hurricane at the planet's north pole 20 times larger than those found on Earth, with winds faster than 530 km/h (330 mph). On 15 September 2017, the Cassini–Huygens spacecraft performed the "Grand Finale" of its mission: a number of passes through gaps between Saturn and Saturn's inner rings. The atmospheric entry of Cassini ended the mission. The continued exploration of Saturn is still considered to be a viable option for NASA as part of their ongoing New Frontiers program of missions. NASA previously requested for plans to be put forward for a mission to Saturn that included the Saturn Atmospheric Entry Probe, and possible investigations into the habitability and possible discovery of life on Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus by Dragonfly. Observation Saturn is the most distant of the five planets easily visible to the naked eye from Earth, the other four being Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. (Uranus, and occasionally 4 Vesta, are visible to the naked eye in dark skies.) Saturn appears to the naked eye in the night sky as a bright, yellowish point of light. The mean apparent magnitude of Saturn is 0.46 with a standard deviation of 0.34. Most of the magnitude variation is due to the inclination of the ring system relative to the Sun and Earth. The brightest magnitude, −0.55, occurs near the time when the plane of the rings is inclined most highly, and the faintest magnitude, 1.17, occurs around the time when they are least inclined. It takes approximately 29.4 years for the planet to complete an entire circuit of the ecliptic against the background constellations of the zodiac. Most people will require an optical aid (very large binoculars or a small telescope) that magnifies at least 30 times to achieve an image of Saturn's rings in which a clear resolution is present. When Earth passes through the ring plane, which occurs twice every Saturnian year (roughly every 15 Earth years), the rings briefly disappear from view because they are so thin. Such a "disappearance" most recently occurred in 2025, but Saturn was too close to the Sun for observations. Saturn and its rings are best seen when the planet is at, or near, opposition, the configuration of a planet when it is at an elongation of 180°, and thus appears opposite the Sun in the sky. A Saturnian opposition occurs every year—approximately every 378 days—and results in the planet appearing at its brightest. Both the Earth and Saturn orbit the Sun on eccentric orbits, which means their distances from the Sun vary over time, and therefore so do their distances from each other, hence varying the brightness of Saturn from one opposition to the next. Saturn also appears brighter when the rings are angled such that they are more visible. For example, during the opposition of 17 December 2002, Saturn appeared at its brightest due to the favorable orientation of its rings relative to the Earth, even though Saturn was closer to the Earth and Sun in late 2003. From time to time, Saturn is occulted by the Moon (that is, the Moon covers up Saturn in the sky). As with all the planets in the Solar System, occultations of Saturn occur in "seasons". Saturnian occultations will take place monthly for about a 12-month period, followed by about a five-year period in which no such activity is registered. The Moon's orbit is inclined by several degrees relative to Saturn's, so occultations will only occur when Saturn is near one of the points in the sky where the two planes intersect (both the length of Saturn's year and the 18.6-Earth-year nodal precession period of the Moon's orbit influence the periodicity). In fiction Saturn has frequently appeared in fiction since at least 1752, when Voltaire published his novel Micromégas. Early works generally depicted it as solid, whereas Saturn is later correctly described as a gaseous planet. Saturn's moons are also featured in fiction, especially Titan. See also Notes References Further reading External links Solar System → Local Interstellar Cloud → Local Bubble → Gould Belt → Orion Arm → Milky Way → Milky Way subgroup → Local Group → Local Sheet → Local Volume → Virgo Supercluster → Laniakea Supercluster → Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex → Local Hole → Observable universe → UniverseEach arrow (→) may be read as "within" or "part of". |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulamit_Aloni] | [TOKENS: 1553] |
Contents Shulamit Aloni Shulamit Aloni (née Adler) (Hebrew: שולמית אלוני; 27 December 1927 – 24 January 2014) was an Israeli politician. She founded the progressive Ratz party, was leader of the Meretz party, Leader of the Opposition from 1988 to 1990, and served as Minister of Education from 1992 to 1993. In 2000, she won the Israel Prize. Throughout her decades-long political career, Aloni advocated for secularism, a peaceful solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, equal treatment of Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians and introduced the law that decriminalised homosexuality. Biography Shulamit Adler was born in Poland. Her mother was a seamstress and her father was a carpenter, both descended from Polish rabbinical families. The family migrated to Mandatory Palestine when she was a child, and Aloni grew up in Tel Aviv. She was sent to boarding school during World War II while her parents served in the British Army. During the war, her younger brother Mordechai took his own life. As a youth she was a member of the socialist Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and the Palmach. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, she was involved in military struggles for the Old City of Jerusalem and was captured by Jordanian forces. Following the establishment of the state of Israel, she worked with child refugees and helped establish a school for immigrant children. She taught in a school while studying law. After her marriage in 1952 to Reuven Aloni, the founder of Israel Lands Administration, she moved to Kfar Shmaryahu. Aloni joined Mapai in 1959. She also worked as an attorney, hosted a radio show called After Working Hours giving legal advice to ordinary Israelis and wrote columns for the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth and the weekly LaIsha. In 1965, Aloni was elected to the Knesset on the list of the Alignment, an alliance of Mapai and Ahdut HaAvoda, and subsequently founded the Israel Consumers Council, which she chaired for four years. Before the 1969 elections, however, the Alignment refused to put her on the candidate list and she lost her seat. When it happened again in 1973, Aloni left the party altogether and established the Citizens Rights Movement, which became known as Ratz. The party advocated electoral reform, separation of religion and state and human rights and won three seats in the 1973 Knesset elections, making Aloni the most successful woman to lead a political party in Israel. Ratz initially joined the Alignment-led government with Aloni as Minister without Portfolio but she resigned immediately in protest at the appointment of Yitzhak Rafael as Minister of Religions. Ratz briefly became Ya'ad – Civil Rights Movement when independent MK Aryeh Eliav joined the party, but returned to its original status soon after, when Eliav and Ratz member Marcia Freedman left over disputes on relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the potential association of Ya'ad with the Moked party, the descendant of the communist Maki party. Throughout the 1970s Aloni attempted to initiate an ongoing dialogue with Palestinians in hopes of achieving a lasting peace settlement. During the 1982 Lebanon War she established the International Center for Peace in the Middle East. In the run-up to the 1984 elections, Ratz absorbed the ailing Left Camp of Israel (a party that had until recently contained Eliav, Moked, and the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace) and aligned with Peace Now to increase its size in the Knesset to three seats. In March 1988, Aloni sponsored a set of laws which successfully decriminalised homosexuality in Israel. For the 1988 elections, Aloni voiced her support for a two-state solution. In 1992, she led Ratz into an alliance with Shinui and Mapam to form the new Meretz party, which won 12 seats under her leadership in the elections that year. Aloni became Minister of Education under Yitzhak Rabin but was forced to resign after a year due to her outspoken statements on matters of religion. As Education Minister, she also criticized organized tours by Israeli high school pupils to Holocaust concentration camps on grounds that such visits were turning Israeli youth into aggressive, nationalistic xenophobes, claiming that students "march with unfurled flags, as if they've come to conquer Poland". She was reappointed Minister of Communications and Science and Culture. After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Aloni expressed her sentiments that the agreements were a positive turning point on an historic scale: "I feel like on the 29th of November [the date of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine]; we did not know then what we were heading for, but we knew we were heading for great days." After the massacre of 29 Muslims in Hebron, West Bank on February 25, 1994, perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, Aloni called for the expulsion of Jewish settlers from Hebron. After the 1996 Knesset election, in which Meretz lost three of its seats, Aloni was ousted from Meretz leadership, with Yossi Sarid being elected to succeed her as leader of Meretz. She then retired from politics. In a 2002 interview on Democracy Now!, American journalist Amy Goodman asked Aloni, "Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called anti-Semitic. What is your response to that?" Aloni responded, opining that, "It is a trick we use. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the USA] people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-Semitic... some Israelis attitude is “Israel, my country right or wrong,” identification. And they are not ready to hear criticism." Aloni was a board member of Yesh Din, an organisation founded in 2005 which focuses on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. She defended U.S. President Jimmy Carter's use of the word "apartheid" in the title of his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Later, Aloni said, "I hate to cover up things that should be open to the sun." Personal life With her husband, Reuven Aloni, she had three sons: Reuven Aloni died in 1988. She was an atheist. Shulamit Aloni Prize In 2018, the Shulamit Aloni Prize was established. The prize is awarded by the Shulamit Aloni Foundation, a non-profit organization created by a group of Aloni's family members and leading media and cultural professionals for this purpose. The prize, which bears a monetary award, is bestowed to its recipients each year in the Jaffa Theater (aka The Arab-Hebrew Theater), to creators of cultural works (theater, film, poetry and prose) in both Hebrew and Arabic whose work promotes human rights. Inaugural prize recipients included Rana Abu Fraihah (Arabic Culture Prize), Renana Raz (Hebrew Culture Prize) and Sami Michael (Lifetime Achievement Prize). Additional prize recipients include Ayat Abou Shmeiss for Arabic Culture, and Achinoam Nini for Lifetime Achievement. Awards and recognition Published works See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy] | [TOKENS: 14274] |
Contents Entropy Collective intelligence Collective action Self-organized criticality Herd mentality Phase transition Agent-based modelling Synchronization Ant colony optimization Particle swarm optimization Swarm behaviour Social network analysis Small-world networks Centrality Motifs Graph theory Scaling Robustness Systems biology Dynamic networks Evolutionary computation Genetic algorithms Genetic programming Artificial life Machine learning Evolutionary developmental biology Artificial intelligence Evolutionary robotics Reaction–diffusion systems Partial differential equations Dissipative structures Percolation Cellular automata Spatial ecology Self-replication Conversation theory Entropy Feedback Goal-oriented Homeostasis Information theory Operationalization Second-order cybernetics Self-reference System dynamics Systems science Systems thinking Sensemaking Variety Ordinary differential equations Phase space Attractors Population dynamics Chaos Multistability Bifurcation Rational choice theory Bounded rationality Entropy is a scientific concept, most commonly associated with states of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication. Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. "High" entropy means that energy is more disordered or dispersed, while "low" entropy means that energy is more ordered or concentrated. A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible. The thermodynamic concept was referred to by Scottish scientist and engineer William Rankine in 1850 with the names thermodynamic function and heat-potential. In 1865, German physicist Rudolf Clausius, one of the leading founders of the field of thermodynamics, defined it as the quotient of an infinitesimal amount of heat to the instantaneous temperature. He initially described it as transformation-content, in German Verwandlungsinhalt, and later coined the term entropy from a Greek word for transformation. Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann explained entropy as the measure of the number of possible microscopic arrangements or states of individual atoms and molecules of a system that comply with the macroscopic condition of the system. He thereby introduced the concept of statistical disorder and probability distributions into a new field of thermodynamics, called statistical mechanics, and found the link between the microscopic interactions, which fluctuate about an average configuration, to the macroscopically observable behaviour, in form of a simple logarithmic law, with a proportionality constant, the Boltzmann constant, which has become one of the defining universal constants for the modern International System of Units. History In his 1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement, the French mathematician Lazare Carnot proposed that in any machine, the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity; in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy. In 1824, building on that work, Lazare's son, Sadi Carnot, published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which posited that in all heat-engines, whenever "caloric" (what is now known as heat) falls through a temperature difference, work or motive power can be produced from the actions of its fall from a hot to cold body. He used an analogy with how water falls in a water wheel. That was an early insight into the second law of thermodynamics. Carnot based his views of heat partially on the early 18th-century "Newtonian hypothesis" that both heat and light were types of indestructible forms of matter, which are attracted and repelled by other matter, and partially on the contemporary views of Count Rumford, who showed in 1789 that heat could be created by friction, as when cannon bores are machined. Carnot reasoned that if the body of the working substance, such as a body of steam, is returned to its original state at the end of a complete engine cycle, "no change occurs in the condition of the working body". The first law of thermodynamics, deduced from the heat–friction experiments of James Joule in 1843, expresses the concept of energy and its conservation in all processes; the first law, however, is unsuitable for separately quantifying the effects of friction and dissipation. In the 1850s and 1860s, German physicist Rudolf Clausius objected to the supposition that no change occurs in the working body, and gave that change a mathematical interpretation, by questioning the nature of the inherent loss of usable heat when work is done, e.g., heat produced by friction. He described his observations as a dissipative use of energy, resulting in a transformation-content (Verwandlungsinhalt in German), of a thermodynamic system or working body of chemical species during a change of state. That was in contrast to earlier views, based on the theories of Isaac Newton, that heat was an indestructible particle that had mass. Clausius discovered that the non-usable energy increases as steam proceeds from inlet to exhaust in a steam engine. From the prefix en-, as in 'energy', and from the Greek word τροπή [tropē], which is translated in an established lexicon as turning or change and that he rendered in German as Verwandlung, a word often translated into English as transformation, in 1865 Clausius coined the name of that property as entropy. The word was adopted into the English language in 1868. Later, scientists such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and James Clerk Maxwell gave entropy a statistical basis. In 1877, Boltzmann visualized a probabilistic way to measure the entropy of an ensemble of ideal gas particles, in which he defined entropy as proportional to the natural logarithm of the number of microstates such a gas could occupy. The proportionality constant in this definition, called the Boltzmann constant, has become one of the defining universal constants for the modern International System of Units (SI). Henceforth, the essential problem in statistical thermodynamics has been to determine the distribution of a given amount of energy E over N identical systems. Constantin Carathéodory, a Greek mathematician, linked entropy with a mathematical definition of irreversibility, in terms of trajectories and integrability. Etymology In 1865, Clausius named the concept of "the differential of a quantity which depends on the configuration of the system" entropy (Entropie) after the Greek word for 'transformation'. He gave "transformational content" (Verwandlungsinhalt) as a synonym, paralleling his "thermal and ergonal content" (Wärme- und Werkinhalt) as the name of U, but preferring the term entropy as a close parallel of the word energy, as he found the concepts nearly "analogous in their physical significance". This term was formed by replacing the root of ἔργον ('ergon', 'work') by that of τροπή ('tropy', 'transformation'). In more detail, Clausius explained his choice of "entropy" as a name as follows: I prefer going to the ancient languages for the names of important scientific quantities, so that they may mean the same thing in all living tongues. I propose, therefore, to call S the entropy of a body, after the Greek word "transformation". I have designedly coined the word entropy to be similar to energy, for these two quantities are so analogous in their physical significance, that an analogy of denominations seems to me helpful. Leon Cooper added that in this way "he succeeded in coining a word that meant the same thing to everybody: nothing". Definitions and descriptions Any method involving the notion of entropy, the very existence of which depends on the second law of thermodynamics, will doubtless seem to many far-fetched, and may repel beginners as obscure and difficult of comprehension. The concept of entropy is described by two principal approaches, the macroscopic perspective of classical thermodynamics, and the microscopic description central to statistical mechanics. The classical approach defines entropy in terms of macroscopically measurable physical properties, such as bulk mass, volume, pressure, and temperature. The statistical definition of entropy defines it in terms of the statistics of the motions of the microscopic constituents of a system — modelled at first classically, e.g. Newtonian particles constituting a gas, and later quantum-mechanically (photons, phonons, spins, etc.). The two approaches form a consistent, unified view of the same phenomenon as expressed in the second law of thermodynamics, which has found universal applicability to physical processes. Many thermodynamic properties are defined by physical variables that define a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, which essentially are state variables. State variables depend only on the equilibrium condition, not on the path evolution to that state. State variables can be functions of state, also called state functions, in a sense that one state variable is a mathematical function of other state variables. Often, if some properties of a system are determined, they are sufficient to determine the state of the system and thus other properties' values. For example, temperature and pressure of a given quantity of gas determine its state, and thus also its volume via the ideal gas law. A system composed of a pure substance of a single phase at a particular uniform temperature and pressure is determined, and is thus a particular state, and has a particular volume. The fact that entropy is a function of state makes it useful. In the Carnot cycle, the working fluid returns to the same state that it had at the start of the cycle, hence the change or line integral of any state function, such as entropy, over this reversible cycle is zero. The entropy change d S {\textstyle \mathrm {d} S} of a system can be well-defined as a small portion of heat δ Q r e v {\textstyle \delta Q_{\mathsf {rev}}} transferred from the surroundings to the system during a reversible process divided by the temperature T {\textstyle T} of the system during this heat transfer: d S = δ Q r e v T {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} S={\frac {\delta Q_{\mathsf {rev}}}{T}}} The reversible process is quasistatic (i.e., it occurs without any dissipation, deviating only infinitesimally from the thermodynamic equilibrium), and it may conserve total entropy. For example, in the Carnot cycle, while the heat flow from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir represents the increase in the entropy in a cold reservoir, the work output, if reversibly and perfectly stored, represents the decrease in the entropy which could be used to operate the heat engine in reverse, returning to the initial state; thus the total entropy change may still be zero at all times if the entire process is reversible. In contrast, an irreversible process increases the total entropy of the system and surroundings. Any process that happens quickly enough to deviate from the thermal equilibrium cannot be reversible; the total entropy increases, and the potential for maximum work to be done during the process is lost. The concept of entropy arose from Rudolf Clausius's study of the Carnot cycle which is a thermodynamic cycle performed by a Carnot heat engine as a reversible heat engine. In a Carnot cycle, the heat Q H {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {H}}} is transferred from a hot reservoir to a working gas at the constant temperature T H {\textstyle T_{\mathsf {H}}} during isothermal expansion stage and the heat Q C {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {C}}} is transferred from a working gas to a cold reservoir at the constant temperature T C {\textstyle T_{\mathsf {C}}} during isothermal compression stage. According to Carnot's theorem, a heat engine with two thermal reservoirs can produce a work W {\textstyle W} if and only if there is a temperature difference between reservoirs. Originally, Carnot did not distinguish between heats Q H {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {H}}} and Q C {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {C}}} , as he assumed caloric theory to be valid and hence that the total heat in the system was conserved. But in fact, the magnitude of heat Q H {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {H}}} is greater than the magnitude of heat Q C {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {C}}} . Through the efforts of Clausius and Kelvin, the work W {\textstyle W} done by a reversible heat engine was found to be the product of the Carnot efficiency (i.e., the efficiency of all reversible heat engines with the same pair of thermal reservoirs) and the heat Q H {\textstyle Q_{\mathsf {H}}} absorbed by a working body of the engine during isothermal expansion: W = T H − T C T H ⋅ Q H = ( 1 − T C T H ) Q H {\displaystyle W={\frac {T_{\mathsf {H}}-T_{\mathsf {C}}}{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}\cdot Q_{\mathsf {H}}=\left(1-{\frac {T_{\mathsf {C}}}{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}\right)Q_{\mathsf {H}}} To derive the Carnot efficiency Kelvin had to evaluate the ratio of the work output to the heat absorbed during the isothermal expansion with the help of the Carnot–Clapeyron equation, which contained an unknown function called the Carnot function. The possibility that the Carnot function could be the temperature as measured from a zero point of temperature was suggested by Joule in a letter to Kelvin. This allowed Kelvin to establish his absolute temperature scale. It is known that a work W > 0 {\textstyle W>0} produced by an engine over a cycle equals to a net heat Q Σ = | Q H | − | Q C | {\textstyle Q_{\Sigma }=\left\vert Q_{\mathsf {H}}\right\vert -\left\vert Q_{\mathsf {C}}\right\vert } absorbed over a cycle. Thus, with the sign convention for a heat Q {\textstyle Q} transferred in a thermodynamic process ( Q > 0 {\textstyle Q>0} for an absorption and Q < 0 {\textstyle Q<0} for a dissipation) we get: W − Q Σ = W − | Q H | + | Q C | = W − Q H − Q C = 0 {\displaystyle W-Q_{\Sigma }=W-\left\vert Q_{\mathsf {H}}\right\vert +\left\vert Q_{\mathsf {C}}\right\vert =W-Q_{\mathsf {H}}-Q_{\mathsf {C}}=0} Since this equality holds over an entire Carnot cycle, it gave Clausius the hint that at each stage of the cycle the difference between a work and a net heat would be conserved, rather than a net heat itself. Which means there exists a state function U {\textstyle U} with a change of d U = δ Q − d W {\textstyle \mathrm {d} U=\delta Q-\mathrm {d} W} . It is called an internal energy and forms a central concept for the first law of thermodynamics. Finally, comparison for both the representations of a work output in a Carnot cycle gives us: | Q H | T H − | Q C | T C = Q H T H + Q C T C = 0 {\displaystyle {\frac {\left\vert Q_{\mathsf {H}}\right\vert }{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}-{\frac {\left\vert Q_{\mathsf {C}}\right\vert }{T_{\mathsf {C}}}}={\frac {Q_{\mathsf {H}}}{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}+{\frac {Q_{\mathsf {C}}}{T_{\mathsf {C}}}}=0} Similarly to the derivation of internal energy, this equality implies existence of a state function S {\textstyle S} with a change of d S = δ Q / T {\textstyle \mathrm {d} S=\delta Q/T} and which is conserved over an entire cycle. Clausius called this state function entropy. In addition, the total change of entropy in both thermal reservoirs over Carnot cycle is zero too, since the inversion of a heat transfer direction means a sign inversion for the heat transferred during isothermal stages: − Q H T H − Q C T C = Δ S r , H + Δ S r , C = 0 {\displaystyle -{\frac {Q_{\mathsf {H}}}{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}-{\frac {Q_{\mathsf {C}}}{T_{\mathsf {C}}}}=\Delta S_{\mathsf {r,H}}+\Delta S_{\mathsf {r,C}}=0} Here we denote the entropy change for a thermal reservoir by Δ S r , i = − Q i / T i {\textstyle \Delta S_{{\mathsf {r}},i}=-Q_{i}/T_{i}} , where i {\textstyle i} is either H {\textstyle {\mathsf {H}}} for a hot reservoir or C {\textstyle {\mathsf {C}}} for a cold one. If we consider a heat engine which is less effective than Carnot cycle (i.e., the work W {\textstyle W} produced by this engine is less than the maximum predicted by Carnot's theorem), its work output is capped by Carnot efficiency as: W < ( 1 − T C T H ) Q H {\displaystyle W<\left(1-{\frac {T_{\mathsf {C}}}{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}\right)Q_{\mathsf {H}}} Substitution of the work W {\textstyle W} as the net heat into the inequality above gives us: Q H T H + Q C T C < 0 {\displaystyle {\frac {Q_{\mathsf {H}}}{T_{\mathsf {H}}}}+{\frac {Q_{\mathsf {C}}}{T_{\mathsf {C}}}}<0} or in terms of the entropy change Δ S r , i {\textstyle \Delta S_{{\mathsf {r}},i}} : Δ S r , H + Δ S r , C > 0 {\displaystyle \Delta S_{\mathsf {r,H}}+\Delta S_{\mathsf {r,C}}>0} A Carnot cycle and an entropy as shown above prove to be useful in the study of any classical thermodynamic heat engine: other cycles, such as an Otto, Diesel or Brayton cycle, could be analysed from the same standpoint. Notably, any machine or cyclic process converting heat into work (i.e., heat engine) that is claimed to produce an efficiency greater than the one of Carnot is not viable — due to violation of the second law of thermodynamics. For further analysis of sufficiently discrete systems, such as an assembly of particles, statistical thermodynamics must be used. Additionally, descriptions of devices operating near the limit of de Broglie waves, e.g. photovoltaic cells, have to be consistent with quantum statistics. The thermodynamic definition of entropy was developed in the early 1850s by Rudolf Clausius and essentially describes how to measure the entropy of an isolated system in thermodynamic equilibrium with its parts. Clausius created the term entropy as an extensive thermodynamic variable that was shown to be useful in characterizing the Carnot cycle. Heat transfer in the isotherm steps (isothermal expansion and isothermal compression) of the Carnot cycle was found to be proportional to the temperature of a system (known as its absolute temperature). This relationship was expressed in an increment of entropy that is equal to incremental heat transfer divided by temperature. Entropy was found to vary in the thermodynamic cycle but eventually returned to the same value at the end of every cycle. Thus it was found to be a function of state, specifically a thermodynamic state of the system. While Clausius based his definition on a reversible process, there are also irreversible processes that change entropy. Following the second law of thermodynamics, entropy of an isolated system always increases for irreversible processes. The difference between an isolated system and closed system is that energy may not flow to and from an isolated system, but energy flow to and from a closed system is possible. Nevertheless, for both closed and isolated systems, and indeed, also in open systems, irreversible thermodynamics processes may occur. According to the Clausius equality, for a reversible cyclic thermodynamic process: ∮ δ Q r e v T = 0 {\displaystyle \oint {\frac {\delta Q_{\mathsf {rev}}}{T}}=0} which means the line integral ∫ L δ Q r e v / T {\textstyle \int _{L}{\delta Q_{\mathsf {rev}}/T}} is path-independent. Thus we can define a state function S {\textstyle S} , called entropy: d S = δ Q r e v T {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} S={\frac {\delta Q_{\mathsf {rev}}}{T}}} Therefore, thermodynamic entropy has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, and the unit joule per kelvin (J/K) in the International System of Units (SI). To find the entropy difference between any two states of the system, the integral must be evaluated for some reversible path between the initial and final states. Since an entropy is a state function, the entropy change of the system for an irreversible path is the same as for a reversible path between the same two states. However, the heat transferred to or from the surroundings is different as well as its entropy change. We can calculate the change of entropy only by integrating the above formula. To obtain the absolute value of the entropy, we consider the third law of thermodynamics: perfect crystals at the absolute zero have an entropy S = 0 {\textstyle S=0} . From a macroscopic perspective, in classical thermodynamics the entropy is interpreted as a state function of a thermodynamic system: that is, a property depending only on the current state of the system, independent of how that state came to be achieved. In any process, where the system gives up Δ E {\displaystyle \Delta E} of energy to the surrounding at the temperature T {\textstyle T} , its entropy falls by Δ S {\textstyle \Delta S} and at least T ⋅ Δ S {\textstyle T\cdot \Delta S} of that energy must be given up to the system's surroundings as a heat. Otherwise, this process cannot go forward. In classical thermodynamics, the entropy of a system is defined if and only if it is in a thermodynamic equilibrium (though a chemical equilibrium is not required: for example, the entropy of a mixture of two moles of hydrogen and one mole of oxygen in standard conditions is well-defined). The statistical definition was developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s by analysing the statistical behaviour of the microscopic components of the system. Boltzmann showed that this definition of entropy was equivalent to the thermodynamic entropy to within a constant factor—known as the Boltzmann constant. In short, the thermodynamic definition of entropy provides the experimental verification of entropy, while the statistical definition of entropy extends the concept, providing an explanation and a deeper understanding of its nature. The interpretation of entropy in statistical mechanics is the measure of uncertainty, disorder, or mixedupness in the phrase of Gibbs, which remains about a system after its observable macroscopic properties, such as temperature, pressure and volume, have been taken into account. For a given set of macroscopic variables, the entropy measures the degree to which the probability of the system is spread out over different possible microstates. In contrast to the macrostate, which characterizes plainly observable average quantities, a microstate specifies all molecular details about the system including the position and momentum of every molecule. The more such states are available to the system with appreciable probability, the greater the entropy. In statistical mechanics, entropy is a measure of the number of ways a system can be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder" (the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder). This definition describes the entropy as being proportional to the natural logarithm of the number of possible microscopic configurations of the individual atoms and molecules of the system (microstates) that could cause the observed macroscopic state (macrostate) of the system. The constant of proportionality is the Boltzmann constant. The Boltzmann constant, and therefore entropy, have dimensions of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin (J⋅K−1) in the International System of Units (or kg⋅m2⋅s−2⋅K−1 in terms of base units). The entropy of a substance is usually given as an intensive property — either entropy per unit mass (SI unit: J⋅K−1⋅kg−1) or entropy per unit amount of substance (SI unit: J⋅K−1⋅mol−1). Specifically, entropy is a logarithmic measure for the system with a number of states, each with a probability p i {\textstyle p_{i}} of being occupied (usually given by the Boltzmann distribution): S = − k B ∑ i p i ln p i {\displaystyle S=-k_{\mathsf {B}}\sum _{i}{p_{i}\ln {p_{i}}}} where k B {\textstyle k_{\mathsf {B}}} is the Boltzmann constant and the summation is performed over all possible microstates of the system. In case states are defined in a continuous manner, the summation is replaced by an integral over all possible states, or equivalently we can consider the expected value of the logarithm of the probability that a microstate is occupied: S = − k B ⟨ ln p ⟩ {\displaystyle S=-k_{\mathsf {B}}\left\langle \ln {p}\right\rangle } This definition assumes the basis states to be picked in a way that there is no information on their relative phases. In a general case the expression is: S = − k B t r ( ρ ^ × ln ρ ^ ) {\displaystyle S=-k_{\mathsf {B}}\ \mathrm {tr} {\left({\hat {\rho }}\times \ln {\hat {\rho }}\right)}} where ρ ^ {\textstyle {\hat {\rho }}} is a density matrix, t r {\displaystyle \mathrm {tr} } is a trace operator and ln {\displaystyle \ln } is a matrix logarithm. The density matrix formalism is not required if the system is in thermal equilibrium so long as the basis states are chosen to be eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. For most practical purposes it can be taken as the fundamental definition of entropy since all other formulae for S {\textstyle S} can be derived from it, but not vice versa. In what has been called the fundamental postulate in statistical mechanics, among system microstates of the same energy (i.e., degenerate microstates) each microstate is assumed to be populated with equal probability p i = 1 / Ω {\textstyle p_{i}=1/\Omega } , where Ω {\textstyle \Omega } is the number of microstates whose energy equals that of the system. Usually, this assumption is justified for an isolated system in a thermodynamic equilibrium. Then in case of an isolated system the previous formula reduces to: S = k B ln Ω {\displaystyle S=k_{\mathsf {B}}\ln {\Omega }} In thermodynamics, such a system is one with a fixed volume, number of molecules, and internal energy, called a microcanonical ensemble. The most general interpretation of entropy is as a measure of the extent of uncertainty about a system. The equilibrium state of a system maximizes the entropy because it does not reflect all information about the initial conditions, except for the conserved variables. This uncertainty is not of the everyday subjective kind, but rather the uncertainty inherent to the experimental method and interpretative model. The interpretative model has a central role in determining entropy. The qualifier "for a given set of macroscopic variables" above has deep implications when two observers use different sets of macroscopic variables. For example, consider observer A using variables U {\textstyle U} , V {\textstyle V} , W {\textstyle W} and observer B using variables U {\textstyle U} , V {\textstyle V} , W {\textstyle W} , X {\textstyle X} . If observer B changes variable X {\textstyle X} , then observer A will see a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, since he does not possess information about variable X {\textstyle X} and its influence on the system. In other words, one must choose a complete set of macroscopic variables to describe the system, i.e. every independent parameter that may change during experiment. Entropy can also be defined for any Markov processes with reversible dynamics and the detailed balance property. In Boltzmann's 1896 Lectures on Gas Theory, he showed that this expression gives a measure of entropy for systems of atoms and molecules in the gas phase, thus providing a measure for the entropy of classical thermodynamics. In a thermodynamic system, pressure and temperature tend to become uniform over time because the equilibrium state has higher probability (more possible combinations of microstates) than any other state. As an example, for a glass of ice water in air at room temperature, the difference in temperature between the warm room (the surroundings) and the cold glass of ice and water (the system and not part of the room) decreases as portions of the thermal energy from the warm surroundings spread to the cooler system of ice and water. Over time the temperature of the glass and its contents and the temperature of the room become equal. In other words, the entropy of the room has decreased as some of its energy has been dispersed to the ice and water, of which the entropy has increased. However, as calculated in the example, the entropy of the system of ice and water has increased more than the entropy of the surrounding room has decreased. In an isolated system such as the room and ice water taken together, the dispersal of energy from warmer to cooler always results in a net increase in entropy. Thus, when the "universe" of the room and ice water system has reached a temperature equilibrium, the entropy change from the initial state is at a maximum. The entropy of the thermodynamic system is a measure of how far the equalisation has progressed. Thermodynamic entropy is a non-conserved state function that is of great importance in the sciences of physics and chemistry. Historically, the concept of entropy evolved to explain why some processes (permitted by conservation laws) occur spontaneously while their time reversals (also permitted by conservation laws) do not; systems tend to progress in the direction of increasing entropy. For isolated systems, entropy never decreases. This fact has several important consequences in science: first, it prohibits "perpetual motion" machines; and second, it implies the arrow of entropy has the same direction as the arrow of time. Increases in the total entropy of system and surroundings correspond to irreversible changes, because some energy is expended as waste heat, limiting the amount of work a system can do. Unlike many other functions of state, entropy cannot be directly observed but must be calculated. Absolute standard molar entropy of a substance can be calculated from the measured temperature dependence of its heat capacity. The molar entropy of ions is obtained as a difference in entropy from a reference state defined as zero entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system must increase or remain constant. Therefore, entropy is not a conserved quantity: for example, in an isolated system with non-uniform temperature, heat might irreversibly flow and the temperature become more uniform such that entropy increases. Chemical reactions cause changes in entropy and system entropy, in conjunction with enthalpy, plays an important role in determining in which direction a chemical reaction spontaneously proceeds. Rice University's definition of entropy is that it is "a measurement of a system's disorder and its inability to do work in a system". For instance, a substance at uniform temperature is at maximum entropy and cannot drive a heat engine. A substance at non-uniform temperature is at a lower entropy (than if the heat distribution is allowed to even out) and some of the thermal energy can drive a heat engine. A special case of entropy increase, the entropy of mixing, occurs when two or more different substances are mixed. If the substances are at the same temperature and pressure, there is no net exchange of heat or work – the entropy change is entirely due to the mixing of the different substances. At a statistical mechanical level, this results due to the change in available volume per particle with mixing. Proofs of equivalence between the entropy in statistical mechanics — the Gibbs entropy formula: S = − k B ∑ i p i ln p i {\displaystyle S=-k_{\mathsf {B}}\sum _{i}{p_{i}\ln {p_{i}}}} and the entropy in classical thermodynamics: d S = δ Q r e v T {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} S={\frac {\delta Q_{\mathsf {rev}}}{T}}} together with the fundamental thermodynamic relation are known for the microcanonical ensemble, the canonical ensemble, the grand canonical ensemble, and the isothermal–isobaric ensemble. These proofs are based on the probability density of microstates of the generalised Boltzmann distribution and the identification of the thermodynamic internal energy as the ensemble average U = ⟨ E i ⟩ {\textstyle U=\left\langle E_{i}\right\rangle } . Thermodynamic relations are then employed to derive the well-known Gibbs entropy formula. However, the equivalence between the Gibbs entropy formula and the thermodynamic definition of entropy is not a fundamental thermodynamic relation but rather a consequence of the form of the generalized Boltzmann distribution. Furthermore, it has been shown that the definitions of entropy in statistical mechanics is the only entropy that is equivalent to the classical thermodynamics entropy under the following postulates: Second law of thermodynamics The second law of thermodynamics requires that, in general, the total entropy of any system does not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system. Hence, in a system isolated from its environment, the entropy of that system tends not to decrease. It follows that heat cannot flow from a colder body to a hotter body without the application of work to the colder body. Secondly, it is impossible for any device operating on a cycle to produce net work from a single temperature reservoir; the production of net work requires flow of heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder reservoir, or a single expanding reservoir undergoing adiabatic cooling, which performs adiabatic work. As a result, there is no possibility of a perpetual motion machine. It follows that a reduction in the increase of entropy in a specified process, such as a chemical reaction, means that it is energetically more efficient. It follows from the second law of thermodynamics that the entropy of a system that is not isolated may decrease. An air conditioner, for example, may cool the air in a room, thus reducing the entropy of the air of that system. The heat expelled from the room (the system), which the air conditioner transports and discharges to the outside air, always makes a bigger contribution to the entropy of the environment than the decrease of the entropy of the air of that system. Thus, the total of entropy of the room plus the entropy of the environment increases, in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics. In mechanics, the second law in conjunction with the fundamental thermodynamic relation places limits on a system's ability to do useful work. The entropy change of a system at temperature T {\textstyle T} absorbing an infinitesimal amount of heat δ q {\textstyle \delta q} in a reversible way, is given by δ q / T {\textstyle \delta q/T} . More explicitly, an energy T R S {\textstyle T_{R}S} is not available to do useful work, where T R {\textstyle T_{R}} is the temperature of the coldest accessible reservoir or heat sink external to the system. For further discussion, see Exergy. Statistical mechanics demonstrates that entropy is governed by probability, thus allowing for a decrease in disorder even in an isolated system. Although this is possible, such an event has a small probability of occurring, making it unlikely. The applicability of a second law of thermodynamics is limited to systems in or sufficiently near equilibrium state, so that they have defined entropy. Some inhomogeneous systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium still satisfy the hypothesis of local thermodynamic equilibrium, so that entropy density is locally defined as an intensive quantity. For such systems, there may apply a principle of maximum time rate of entropy production. It states that such a system may evolve to a steady state that maximises its time rate of entropy production. This does not mean that such a system is necessarily always in a condition of maximum time rate of entropy production; it means that it may evolve to such a steady state. Applications The entropy of a system depends on its internal energy and its external parameters, such as its volume. In the thermodynamic limit, this fact leads to an equation relating the change in the internal energy U {\textstyle U} to changes in the entropy and the external parameters. This relation is known as the fundamental thermodynamic relation. If external pressure p {\textstyle p} bears on the volume V {\textstyle V} as the only external parameter, this relation is: d U = T d S − p d V {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} U=T\ \mathrm {d} S-p\ \mathrm {d} V} Since both internal energy and entropy are monotonic functions of temperature T {\textstyle T} , implying that the internal energy is fixed when one specifies the entropy and the volume, this relation is valid even if the change from one state of thermal equilibrium to another with infinitesimally larger entropy and volume happens in a non-quasistatic way (so during this change the system may be very far out of thermal equilibrium and then the whole-system entropy, pressure, and temperature may not exist). The fundamental thermodynamic relation implies many thermodynamic identities that are valid in general, independent of the microscopic details of the system. Important examples are the Maxwell relations and the relations between heat capacities. Thermodynamic entropy is central in chemical thermodynamics, enabling changes to be quantified and the outcome of reactions predicted. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy in an isolated system — the combination of a subsystem under study and its surroundings — increases during all spontaneous chemical and physical processes. The Clausius equation introduces the measurement of entropy change which describes the direction and quantifies the magnitude of simple changes such as heat transfer between systems — always from hotter body to cooler one spontaneously. Thermodynamic entropy is an extensive property, meaning that it scales with the size or extent of a system. In many processes it is useful to specify the entropy as an intensive property independent of the size, as a specific entropy characteristic of the type of system studied. Specific entropy may be expressed relative to a unit of mass, typically the kilogram (unit: J⋅kg−1⋅K−1). Alternatively, in chemistry, it is also referred to one mole of substance, in which case it is called the molar entropy with a unit of J⋅mol−1⋅K−1. Thus, when one mole of substance at about 0 K is warmed by its surroundings to 298 K, the sum of the incremental values of q r e v / T {\textstyle q_{\mathsf {rev}}/T} constitute each element's or compound's standard molar entropy, an indicator of the amount of energy stored by a substance at 298 K. Entropy change also measures the mixing of substances as a summation of their relative quantities in the final mixture. Entropy is equally essential in predicting the extent and direction of complex chemical reactions. For such applications, Δ S {\textstyle \Delta S} must be incorporated in an expression that includes both the system and its surroundings: Δ S u n i v e r s e = Δ S s u r r o u n d i n g s + Δ S s y s t e m {\displaystyle \Delta S_{\mathsf {universe}}=\Delta S_{\mathsf {surroundings}}+\Delta S_{\mathsf {system}}} Via additional steps this expression becomes the equation of Gibbs free energy change Δ G {\textstyle \Delta G} for reactants and products in the system at the constant pressure and temperature T {\textstyle T} : Δ G = Δ H − T Δ S {\displaystyle \Delta G=\Delta H-T\ \Delta S} where Δ H {\textstyle \Delta H} is the enthalpy change and Δ S {\textstyle \Delta S} is the entropy change. The spontaneity of a chemical or physical process is governed by the Gibbs free energy change (ΔG), as defined by the equation ΔG = ΔH − TΔS, where ΔH represents the enthalpy change, ΔS the entropy change, and T the temperature in Kelvin. A negative ΔG indicates a thermodynamically favorable (spontaneous) process, while a positive ΔG denotes a non-spontaneous one. When both ΔH and ΔS are positive (endothermic, entropy-increasing), the reaction becomes spontaneous at sufficiently high temperatures, as the TΔS term dominates. Conversely, if both ΔH and ΔS are negative (exothermic, entropy-decreasing), spontaneity occurs only at low temperatures, where the enthalpy term prevails. Reactions with ΔH < 0 and ΔS > 0 (exothermic and entropy-increasing) are spontaneous at all temperatures, while those with ΔH > 0 and ΔS < 0 (endothermic and entropy-decreasing) are non-spontaneous regardless of temperature. These principles underscore the interplay between energy exchange, disorder, and temperature in determining the direction of natural processes, from phase transitions to biochemical reactions. A 2011 study in Science estimated the world's technological capacity to store and communicate optimally compressed information normalised on the most effective compression algorithms available in the year 2007, therefore estimating the entropy of the technologically available sources. The author's estimate that humankind's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (entropically compressed) exabytes in 1986 to 295 (entropically compressed) exabytes in 2007. The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (entropically compressed) information in 1986, to 1.9 zettabytes in 2007. The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way telecommunication networks was 281 petabytes of (entropically compressed) information in 1986, to 65 (entropically compressed) exabytes in 2007. In chemical engineering, the principles of thermodynamics are commonly applied to "open systems", i.e. those in which heat, work, and mass flow across the system boundary. In general, flow of heat Q ˙ {\textstyle {\dot {Q}}} , flow of shaft work W ˙ S {\textstyle {\dot {W}}_{\mathsf {S}}} and pressure-volume work P V ˙ {\textstyle P{\dot {V}}} across the system boundaries cause changes in the entropy of the system. Heat transfer entails entropy transfer Q ˙ / T {\textstyle {\dot {Q}}/T} , where T {\textstyle T} is the absolute thermodynamic temperature of the system at the point of the heat flow. If there are mass flows across the system boundaries, they also influence the total entropy of the system. This account, in terms of heat and work, is valid only for cases in which the work and heat transfers are by paths physically distinct from the paths of entry and exit of matter from the system. To derive a generalised entropy balanced equation, we start with the general balance equation for the change in any extensive quantity θ {\textstyle \theta } in a thermodynamic system, a quantity that may be either conserved, such as energy, or non-conserved, such as entropy. The basic generic balance expression states that d θ / d t {\textstyle \mathrm {d} \theta /\mathrm {d} t} , i.e. the rate of change of θ {\textstyle \theta } in the system, equals the rate at which θ {\textstyle \theta } enters the system at the boundaries, minus the rate at which θ {\textstyle \theta } leaves the system across the system boundaries, plus the rate at which θ {\textstyle \theta } is generated within the system. For an open thermodynamic system in which heat and work are transferred by paths separate from the paths for transfer of matter, using this generic balance equation, with respect to the rate of change with time t {\textstyle t} of the extensive quantity entropy S {\textstyle S} , the entropy balance equation is:[note 1] d S d t = ∑ k = 1 K M ˙ k S ^ k + Q ˙ T + S ˙ g e n {\displaystyle {\frac {\mathrm {d} S}{\mathrm {d} t}}=\sum _{k=1}^{K}{{\dot {M}}_{k}{\hat {S}}_{k}+{\frac {\dot {Q}}{T}}+{\dot {S}}_{\mathsf {gen}}}} where ∑ k = 1 K M ˙ k S ^ k {\textstyle \sum _{k=1}^{K}{{\dot {M}}_{k}{\hat {S}}_{k}}} is the net rate of entropy flow due to the flows of mass M ˙ k {\textstyle {\dot {M}}_{k}} into and out of the system with entropy per unit mass S ^ k {\textstyle {\hat {S}}_{k}} , Q ˙ / T {\textstyle {\dot {Q}}/T} is the rate of entropy flow due to the flow of heat across the system boundary and S ˙ g e n {\textstyle {\dot {S}}_{\mathsf {gen}}} is the rate of entropy generation within the system, e.g. by chemical reactions, phase transitions, internal heat transfer or frictional effects such as viscosity. In case of multiple heat flows the term Q ˙ / T {\textstyle {\dot {Q}}/T} is replaced by ∑ j Q ˙ j / T j {\textstyle \sum _{j}{{\dot {Q}}_{j}/T_{j}}} , where Q ˙ j {\textstyle {\dot {Q}}_{j}} is the heat flow through j {\textstyle j} -th port into the system and T j {\textstyle T_{j}} is the temperature at the j {\textstyle j} -th port. The nomenclature "entropy balance" is misleading and often deemed inappropriate because entropy is not a conserved quantity. In other words, the term S ˙ g e n {\textstyle {\dot {S}}_{\mathsf {gen}}} is never a known quantity but always a derived one based on the expression above. Therefore, the open system version of the second law is more appropriately described as the "entropy generation equation" since it specifies that: S ˙ g e n ≥ 0 {\displaystyle {\dot {S}}_{\mathsf {gen}}\geq 0} with zero for reversible process and positive values for irreversible one. Entropy change formulas for simple processes For certain simple transformations in systems of constant composition, the entropy changes are given by simple formulas. For the expansion (or compression) of an ideal gas from an initial volume V 0 {\textstyle V_{0}} and pressure P 0 {\textstyle P_{0}} to a final volume V {\textstyle V} and pressure P {\textstyle P} at any constant temperature, the change in entropy is given by: Δ S = n R ln V V 0 = − n R ln P P 0 {\displaystyle \Delta S=nR\ln {\frac {V}{V_{0}}}=-nR\ln {\frac {P}{P_{0}}}} Here n {\textstyle n} is the amount of gas (in moles) and R {\textstyle R} is the ideal gas constant. These equations also apply for expansion into a finite vacuum or a throttling process, where the temperature, internal energy and enthalpy for an ideal gas remain constant. For pure heating or cooling of any system (gas, liquid or solid) at constant pressure from an initial temperature T 0 {\textstyle T_{0}} to a final temperature T {\textstyle T} , the entropy change is: provided that the constant-pressure molar heat capacity (or specific heat) C P {\textstyle C_{\mathrm {P} }} is constant and that no phase transition occurs in this temperature interval. Similarly at constant volume, the entropy change is: Δ S = n C V ln T T 0 {\displaystyle \Delta S=nC_{\mathrm {V} }\ln {\frac {T}{T_{0}}}} where the constant-volume molar heat capacity C V {\textstyle C_{\mathrm {V} }} is constant and there is no phase change. At low temperatures near absolute zero, heat capacities of solids quickly drop off to near zero, so the assumption of constant heat capacity does not apply. Since entropy is a state function, the entropy change of any process in which temperature and volume both vary is the same as for a path divided into two steps – heating at constant volume and expansion at constant temperature. For an ideal gas, the total entropy change is: Δ S = n C V ln T T 0 + n R ln V V 0 {\displaystyle \Delta S=nC_{\mathrm {V} }\ln {\frac {T}{T_{0}}}+nR\ln {\frac {V}{V_{0}}}} Similarly if the temperature and pressure of an ideal gas both vary: Δ S = n C P ln T T 0 − n R ln P P 0 {\displaystyle \Delta S=nC_{\mathrm {P} }\ln {\frac {T}{T_{0}}}-nR\ln {\frac {P}{P_{0}}}} Reversible phase transitions occur at constant temperature and pressure. The reversible heat is the enthalpy change for the transition, and the entropy change is the enthalpy change divided by the thermodynamic temperature. For fusion (i.e., melting) of a solid to a liquid at the melting point T m {\textstyle T_{\mathsf {m}}} , the entropy of fusion is: Δ S f u s = Δ H f u s T m . {\displaystyle \Delta S_{\mathsf {fus}}={\frac {\Delta H_{\mathsf {fus}}}{T_{\mathsf {m}}}}.} Similarly, for vaporisation of a liquid to a gas at the boiling point T b {\displaystyle T_{\mathsf {b}}} , the entropy of vaporisation is: Δ S v a p = Δ H v a p T b {\displaystyle \Delta S_{\mathsf {vap}}={\frac {\Delta H_{\mathsf {vap}}}{T_{\mathsf {b}}}}} Approaches to understanding entropy As a fundamental aspect of thermodynamics and physics, several different approaches to entropy beyond that of Clausius and Boltzmann are valid. The following is a list of additional definitions of entropy from a collection of textbooks: In Boltzmann's analysis in terms of constituent particles, entropy is a measure of the number of possible microscopic states (or microstates) of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium. Entropy is often loosely associated with the amount of order or disorder, or of chaos, in a thermodynamic system. The traditional qualitative description of entropy is that it refers to changes in the state of the system and is a measure of "molecular disorder" and the amount of wasted energy in a dynamical energy transformation from one state or form to another. In this direction, several recent authors have derived exact entropy formulas to account for and measure disorder and order in atomic and molecular assemblies. One of the simpler entropy order/disorder formulas is that derived in 1984 by thermodynamic physicist Peter Landsberg, based on a combination of thermodynamics and information theory arguments. He argues that when constraints operate on a system, such that it is prevented from entering one or more of its possible or permitted states, as contrasted with its forbidden states, the measure of the total amount of "disorder" and "order" in the system are each given by:: 69 D i s o r d e r = C D C I {\displaystyle {\mathsf {Disorder}}={\frac {C_{\mathsf {D}}}{C_{\mathsf {I}}}}} O r d e r = 1 − C O C I {\displaystyle {\mathsf {Order}}=1-{\frac {C_{\mathsf {O}}}{C_{\mathsf {I}}}}} Here, C D {\textstyle C_{\mathsf {D}}} is the "disorder" capacity of the system, which is the entropy of the parts contained in the permitted ensemble, C I {\textstyle C_{\mathsf {I}}} is the "information" capacity of the system, an expression similar to Shannon's channel capacity, and C O {\textstyle C_{\mathsf {O}}} is the "order" capacity of the system. The concept of entropy can be described qualitatively as a measure of energy dispersal at a specific temperature. Similar terms have been in use from early in the history of classical thermodynamics, and with the development of statistical thermodynamics and quantum theory, entropy changes have been described in terms of the mixing or "spreading" of the total energy of each constituent of a system over its particular quantised energy levels. Ambiguities in the terms disorder and chaos, which usually have meanings directly opposed to equilibrium, contribute to widespread confusion and hamper comprehension of entropy for most students. As the second law of thermodynamics shows, in an isolated system internal portions at different temperatures tend to adjust to a single uniform temperature and thus produce equilibrium. A recently developed educational approach avoids ambiguous terms and describes such spreading out of energy as dispersal, which leads to loss of the differentials required for work even though the total energy remains constant in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics (compare discussion in next section). Physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his textbook Physical Chemistry, introduces entropy with the statement that "spontaneous changes are always accompanied by a dispersal of energy or matter and often both". It is possible (in a thermal context) to regard lower entropy as a measure of the effectiveness or usefulness of a particular quantity of energy. Energy supplied at a higher temperature (i.e. with low entropy) tends to be more useful than the same amount of energy available at a lower temperature. Mixing a hot parcel of a fluid with a cold one produces a parcel of intermediate temperature, in which the overall increase in entropy represents a "loss" that can never be replaced. As the entropy of the universe is steadily increasing, its total energy is becoming less useful. Eventually, this is theorised to lead to the heat death of the universe. A definition of entropy based entirely on the relation of adiabatic accessibility between equilibrium states was given by E. H. Lieb and J. Yngvason in 1999. This approach has several predecessors, including the pioneering work of Constantin Carathéodory from 1909 and the monograph by R. Giles. An equivalent approach that extends the operational definition of entropy to the entire nonequilibrium domain was derived from a rigorous formulation of the general axiomatic foundations of thermodynamics by J. H. Keenan, G. N. Hatsopoulos, E. P. Gyftopoulos, G. P. Beretta, and E. Zanchini between 1965 and 2014. In the setting of Lieb and Yngvason, one starts by picking, for a unit amount of the substance under consideration, two reference states X 0 {\textstyle X_{0}} and X 1 {\textstyle X_{1}} such that the latter is adiabatically accessible from the former but not conversely. Defining the entropies of the reference states to be 0 and 1 respectively, the entropy of a state X {\textstyle X} is defined as the largest number λ {\textstyle \lambda } such that X {\textstyle X} is adiabatically accessible from a composite state consisting of an amount λ {\textstyle \lambda } in the state X 1 {\textstyle X_{1}} and a complementary amount, ( 1 − λ ) {\textstyle (1-\lambda )} , in the state X 0 {\textstyle X_{0}} . A simple but important result within this setting is that entropy is uniquely determined, apart from a choice of unit and an additive constant for each chemical element, by the following properties: it is monotonic with respect to the relation of adiabatic accessibility, additive on composite systems, and extensive under scaling. In quantum statistical mechanics, the concept of entropy was developed by John von Neumann and is generally referred to as "von Neumann entropy": S = − k B t r ( ρ ^ × ln ρ ^ ) {\displaystyle S=-k_{\mathsf {B}}\ \mathrm {tr} {\left({\hat {\rho }}\times \ln {\hat {\rho }}\right)}} where ρ ^ {\textstyle {\hat {\rho }}} is the density matrix, t r {\textstyle \mathrm {tr} } is the trace operator and k B {\textstyle k_{\mathsf {B}}} is the Boltzmann constant. This upholds the correspondence principle, because in the classical limit, when the phases between the basis states are purely random, this expression is equivalent to the familiar classical definition of entropy for states with classical probabilities p i {\textstyle p_{i}} : S = − k B ∑ i p i ln p i {\displaystyle S=-k_{\mathsf {B}}\sum _{i}{p_{i}\ln {p_{i}}}} i.e. in such a basis the density matrix is diagonal. Von Neumann established a rigorous mathematical framework for quantum mechanics with his work Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik. He provided in this work a theory of measurement, where the usual notion of wave function collapse is described as an irreversible process (the so-called von Neumann or projective measurement). Using this concept, in conjunction with the density matrix he extended the classical concept of entropy into the quantum domain. I thought of calling it "information", but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it "uncertainty". [...] Von Neumann told me, "You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." When viewed in terms of information theory, the entropy state function is the amount of information in the system that is needed to fully specify the microstate of the system. Entropy is the measure of the amount of missing information before reception. Often called Shannon entropy, it was originally devised by Claude Shannon in 1948 to study the size of information of a transmitted message. The definition of information entropy is expressed in terms of a discrete set of probabilities p i {\textstyle p_{i}} so that: H ( X ) = − ∑ i = 1 n p ( x i ) log p ( x i ) {\displaystyle H(X)=-\sum _{i=1}^{n}{p(x_{i})\log {p(x_{i})}}} where the base of the logarithm determines the units (for example, the binary logarithm corresponds to bits). In the case of transmitted messages, these probabilities were the probabilities that a particular message was actually transmitted, and the entropy of the message system was a measure of the average size of information of a message. For the case of equal probabilities (i.e. each message is equally probable), the Shannon entropy (in bits) is just the number of binary questions needed to determine the content of the message. Most researchers consider information entropy and thermodynamic entropy directly linked to the same concept, while others argue that they are distinct. Both expressions are mathematically similar. If W {\textstyle W} is the number of microstates that can yield a given macrostate, and each microstate has the same a priori probability, then that probability is p = 1 / W {\textstyle p=1/W} . The Shannon entropy (in nats) is: H = − ∑ i = 1 W p i ln p i = ln W {\displaystyle H=-\sum _{i=1}^{W}{p_{i}\ln {p_{i}}}=\ln {W}} and if entropy is measured in units of k {\textstyle k} per nat, then the entropy is given by: H = k ln W {\displaystyle H=k\ln {W}} which is the Boltzmann entropy formula, where k {\textstyle k} is the Boltzmann constant, which may be interpreted as the thermodynamic entropy per nat. Some authors argue for dropping the word entropy for the H {\textstyle H} function of information theory and using Shannon's other term, "uncertainty", instead. The entropy of a substance can be measured, although in an indirect way. The measurement, known as entropymetry, is done on a closed system with constant number of particles N {\textstyle N} and constant volume V {\textstyle V} , and it uses the definition of temperature in terms of entropy, while limiting energy exchange to heat d U → d Q {\textstyle \mathrm {d} U\rightarrow \mathrm {d} Q} : T := ( ∂ U ∂ S ) V , N ⇒ ⋯ ⇒ d S = d Q T {\displaystyle T:={\left({\frac {\partial U}{\partial S}}\right)}_{V,N}\ \Rightarrow \ \cdots \ \Rightarrow \ \mathrm {d} S={\frac {\mathrm {d} Q}{T}}} The resulting relation describes how entropy changes d S {\textstyle \mathrm {d} S} when a small amount of energy d Q {\textstyle \mathrm {d} Q} is introduced into the system at a certain temperature T {\textstyle T} . The process of measurement goes as follows. First, a sample of the substance is cooled as close to absolute zero as possible. At such temperatures, the entropy approaches zero – due to the definition of temperature. Then, small amounts of heat are introduced into the sample and the change in temperature is recorded, until the temperature reaches a desired value (usually 25 °C). The obtained data allows the user to integrate the equation above, yielding the absolute value of entropy of the substance at the final temperature. This value of entropy is called calorimetric entropy. Interdisciplinary applications Although the concept of entropy was originally a thermodynamic concept, it has been adapted in other fields of study, including information theory, psychodynamics, thermoeconomics/ecological economics, and evolution. Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that seems to imply a particular direction of progress, sometimes called an arrow of time. As time progresses, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases in large systems over significant periods of time. Hence, from this perspective, entropy measurement is thought of as a clock in these conditions. Since the 19th century, a number the philosophers have drawn upon the concept of entropy to develop novel metaphysical and ethical systems. Examples of this work can be found in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Philipp Mainländer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Isabelle Stengers, Shannon Mussett, and Drew M. Dalton. Chiavazzo et al. proposed that where cave spiders choose to lay their eggs can be explained through entropy minimisation. Entropy has been proven useful in the analysis of base pair sequences in DNA. Many entropy-based measures have been shown to distinguish between different structural regions of the genome, differentiate between coding and non-coding regions of DNA, and can also be applied for the recreation of evolutionary trees by determining the evolutionary distance between different species. Assuming that a finite universe is an isolated system, the second law of thermodynamics states that its total entropy is continually increasing. It has been speculated, since the 19th century, that the universe is fated to a heat death in which all the energy ends up as a homogeneous distribution of thermal energy so that no more work can be extracted from any source. If the universe can be considered to have generally increasing entropy, then – as Roger Penrose has pointed out – gravity plays an important role in the increase because gravity causes dispersed matter to accumulate into stars, which collapse eventually into black holes. The entropy of a black hole is proportional to the surface area of the black hole's event horizon. Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking have shown that black holes have the maximum possible entropy of any object of equal size. This makes them likely end points of all entropy-increasing processes, if they are totally effective matter and energy traps. However, the escape of energy from black holes might be possible due to quantum activity (see Hawking radiation). The role of entropy in cosmology remains a controversial subject since the time of Ludwig Boltzmann. Recent work has cast some doubt on the heat death hypothesis and the applicability of any simple thermodynamic model to the universe in general. Although entropy does increase in the model of an expanding universe, the maximum possible entropy rises much more rapidly, moving the universe further from the heat death with time, not closer. This results in an "entropy gap" pushing the system further away from the posited heat death equilibrium. Other complicating factors, such as the energy density of the vacuum and macroscopic quantum effects, are difficult to reconcile with thermodynamical models, making any predictions of large-scale thermodynamics extremely difficult. Current theories suggest the entropy gap to have been originally opened up by the early rapid exponential expansion of the universe. Romanian American economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a progenitor in economics and a paradigm founder of ecological economics, made extensive use of the entropy concept in his magnum opus on The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Due to Georgescu-Roegen's work, the laws of thermodynamics form an integral part of the ecological economics school.: 204f : 29–35 Although his work was blemished somewhat by mistakes, a full chapter on the economics of Georgescu-Roegen has approvingly been included in one elementary physics textbook on the historical development of thermodynamics.: 95–112 In economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work has generated the term 'entropy pessimism'.: 116 Since the 1990s, leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly – a student of Georgescu-Roegen – has been the economics profession's most influential proponent of the entropy pessimism position.: 545f See also Notes References Further reading External links |
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Contents European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive cabinet of the European Union. It is composed of 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "commissioners") corresponding to the number of member states, unless the European Council, by unanimous consent, decides to alter this number. The current number of commissioners is 27, including the president. It oversees an administrative body of about 32,000 European Civil Service employees. The commission is divided into departments known as Directorates-General (DGs), comparable to national ministries, each headed by a director-general (comparable to a permanent secretary) who is responsible to a commissioner. Currently, there is one Commissioner per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state. The Commission President (currently Ursula von der Leyen) is nominated by the European Council (the 27 heads of government) and must win the confidence of the European Parliament before assuming office. The Council of the European Union then nominates the other members of the Commission in agreement with the nominated president, and the entire cabinet is then subjected to a final vote of confidence in the European Parliament. A motion of no confidence passed by a two-thirds majority in the Parliament can force the resignation of the Commission. The sitting cabinet is the second von der Leyen Commission, which took office in December 2024, following the 2024 European Parliament elections. History The European Commission derives from one of the five key institutions created in the supranational European Community system, following the proposal of Robert Schuman, French Foreign Minister, on 9 May 1950. Originating in 1951 as the High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community, the commission has undergone numerous reorganizations and seen its powers increase over time to respond to the increasing need for a strong executive to manage European integration. The first Commission originated in 1951 as the nine-member "High Authority" under President Jean Monnet (see Monnet Authority). The High Authority was the supranational administrative executive of the new European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It took office first on 10 August 1952 in Luxembourg City. In 1958, the Treaties of Rome had established two new communities alongside the ECSC: the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). However, their executives were called "Commissions" rather than "High Authorities". The reason for the change in name was the new relationship between the executives and the Council. Some states, such as France, expressed reservations over the power of the High Authority and wished to limit it by giving more power to the Council rather than the new executives. Louis Armand led the first Commission of Euratom. Walter Hallstein led the first Commission of the EEC, holding the first formal meeting on 16 January 1958 at the Château of Val-Duchesse. It achieved agreement on a contentious cereal price accord, as well as making a positive impression upon third countries when it made its international debut at the Kennedy Round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. Hallstein notably began the consolidation of European law and started to have a notable impact on national legislation. Little heed was taken of his administration at first but, with help from the European Court of Justice, his Commission stamped its authority solidly enough to allow future Commissions to be taken more seriously. In 1965, however, accumulating differences between the French government of Charles de Gaulle and the other member states on various subjects (British entry, direct elections to Parliament, the Fouchet Plan and the budget) triggered the "empty chair" crisis, ostensibly over proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy. Although the institutional crisis was solved the following year, it cost Étienne Hirsch his presidency of Euratom and later Walter Hallstein the EEC presidency, despite his otherwise being viewed as the most 'dynamic' leader until Jacques Delors. The three bodies, collectively named the European Executives, co-existed until 1 July 1967 when, under the Merger Treaty, they were combined into a single administration under President Jean Rey. Owing to the merger, the Rey Commission saw a temporary increase to 14 members—although subsequent Commissions were reduced back to nine, following the formula of one member for small states and two for larger states. The Rey Commission completed the Community's customs union in 1968 and campaigned for a more powerful, elected, European Parliament. Despite Rey being the first President of the combined communities, Hallstein is seen as the first President of the modern Commission. The Malfatti and Mansholt Commissions followed with work on monetary co-operation and the first enlargement to the north in 1973. With that enlargement, the College of Commissioners membership increased to thirteen under the Ortoli Commission (the United Kingdom as a large member was granted two Commissioners), which dealt with the enlarged community during economic and international instability at that time. The external representation of the Community took a step forward when President Roy Jenkins, recruited to the presidency in January 1977 from his role as Home Secretary of the United Kingdom's Labour government, became the first President to attend a G8 summit on behalf of the Community. Following the Jenkins Commission, Gaston Thorn's Commission oversaw the Community's enlargement to the south, in addition to beginning work on the Single European Act. The Commission headed by Jacques Delors was seen as giving the Community a sense of direction and dynamism. Delors and his College are also considered as the "founding fathers of the euro". The International Herald Tribune noted the work of Delors at the end of his second term in 1992: "Mr. Delors rescued the European Community from the doldrums. He arrived when Europessimism was at its worst. Although he was a little-known former French finance minister, he breathed life and hope into the EC and into the dispirited Brussels Commission. In his first term, from 1985 to 1988, he rallied Europe to the call of the single market, and when appointed to a second term he began urging Europeans toward the far more ambitious goals of economic, monetary, and political union". The successor to Delors was Jacques Santer. As a result of a fraud and corruption scandal, the entire Santer Commission was forced by the Parliament to resign in 1999. These frauds were revealed by internal auditor Paul van Buitenen, with French commissioner Édith Cresson being the main target of the allegations. That was the first time a College of Commissioners had been forced to resign en masse, and represented a shift of power towards the Parliament. However, the Santer Commission did carry out work on the Treaty of Amsterdam and the euro. In response to the scandal, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) was created. Following Santer, Romano Prodi took office. The Amsterdam Treaty had increased the commission's powers and Prodi was dubbed by the press as something akin to a Prime Minister. Powers were strengthened again; the Treaty of Nice, signed in 2001, gave the Presidents more power over the composition of the College of Commissioners. José Manuel Barroso became president in 2004: the Parliament once again asserted itself in objecting to the proposed membership of the Barroso Commission. Owing to this opposition, Barroso was forced to reshuffle his College before taking office. The Barroso Commission was also the first full Commission since the enlargement in 2004 to 25 members; hence, the number of Commissioners at the end of the Prodi Commission had reached 30. As a result of the increase in the number of states, the Amsterdam Treaty triggered a reduction in the number of Commissioners to one per state, rather than two for the larger states. Allegations of fraud and corruption were again raised in 2004 by former chief auditor Jules Muis. A Commission officer, Guido Strack, reported alleged fraud and abuses in his department in the years 2002–2004 to OLAF, and was fired as a result. In 2008, Paul van Buitenen (the former auditor known from the Santer Commission scandal) accused the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) of a lack of independence and effectiveness. During Barroso's presidency of the Commission, EU accession negotiations began with Croatia and Turkey in 2005. While Croatia officially became a member in 2013, Turkey's accession process remains effectively suspended. Barroso's first Commission term expired on 31 October 2009. Under the Treaty of Nice, the first Commission to be appointed after the number of member states reached 27 would have to be reduced to "less than the number of Member States". The exact number of Commissioners was to be decided by a unanimous vote of the European Council, and membership would rotate equally between member states. Following the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in January 2007, this clause took effect for the next Commission. The Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force on 1 December 2009, mandated a reduction of the number of commissioners to two-thirds of member-states from 2014 unless the Council decided otherwise. Membership would rotate equally and no member state would have more than one Commissioner. However, the treaty was rejected by voters in Ireland in 2008 with one main concern being the loss of their Commissioner. Hence a guarantee given for a rerun of the vote was that the council would use its power to amend the number of Commissioners upwards. However, according to the treaties it still has to be fewer than the total number of members, thus it was proposed that the member state that does not get a Commissioner would get the post of High Representative – the so-called 26+1 formula. This guarantee (which may find its way into the next treaty amendment, probably in an accession treaty) contributed to the Irish approving the treaty in a second referendum in 2009. Lisbon also combined the posts of European Commissioner for External Relations with the council's High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. This post, also a Vice-president of the Commission, would chair the Council of the European Union's foreign affairs meetings as well as the commission's external relations duties. The treaty further provides that the most recent European elections should be "taken into account" when appointing the President of the European Commission, and although they are still proposed by the European Council; the European Parliament "elects" candidates to the office, rather than "approves" them as under the Treaty of Nice. The Barroso Commission is, in reaction to Euroscepticism, said to have toned down enforcement to increase integration. In 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker became President of the European Commission. Juncker appointed his previous campaign director and head of the transition team, Martin Selmayr, as his chief of cabinet. During the Juncker presidency Selmayr has been described as "the most powerful EU chief of staff ever." In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen was appointed as President of the European Commission. She submitted the guidelines of her policy to the European Parliament on 16 July 2019, following her confirmation. She had not been considered a likely candidate (in general, the elected candidate is determined, according to the results of the European election, as winner of the internal election into the dominant European party known as "spitzenkandidat"). While the European People's Party had won the European Parliament election, they had performed worse than expected and therefore nominated von der Leyen instead of Manfred Weber, their original candidate. On 9 September, the Council of the European Union declared a list of candidate-commissioners, which are sent to Brussels by the governments of each member state and which had to be officially approved by the parliament. In September 2024, Von der Leyen revealed her new team of European Commissioners, marking a shift to a "leaner" and more interconnected structure. The lineup featured six executive vice-presidents (EVPs) from France, Finland, Estonia, Italy, Romania, and Spain. These EVPs, including Teresa Ribera and Stéphane Séjourné, were tasked with overseeing various clusters of Commissioners and steering key policy areas such as prosperity, security, and democracy. Raffaele Fitto was appointed despite criticism from European socialists over his hard-right affiliations. Other notable appointments included Kaja Kallas as EVP for Foreign and Security Policy, and Henna Virkkunen as EVP for Tech Sovereignty and Digital Technologies. The Commission also introduced new roles like the Commissioner for Defence and Security and the Commissioner for the Mediterranean. Powers and functions The commission was set up from the start to act as an independent supranational authority separate from governments; it has been described as "the only body paid to think European". The members are proposed by their member state governments, one from each. However, they are bound to act independently – free from other influences such as those governments which appointed them. This is in contrast to the Council of the European Union, which represents governments, the European Parliament, which represents citizens, the Economic and Social Committee, which represents organised civil society, and the Committee of the Regions, which represents local and regional authorities. Through Article 17 of the Treaty on European Union the commission has several responsibilities: to develop medium-term strategies; to draft legislation and arbitrate in the legislative process; to represent the EU in trade negotiations; to make rules and regulations, for example in competition policy; to draw up the budget of the European Union; and to scrutinise the implementation of the treaties and legislation. The rules of procedure of the European Commission set out the commission's operation and organisation. Before the Treaty of Lisbon came into force, the executive power of the EU was held by the council: it conferred on the Commission such powers for it to exercise. However, the council was allowed to withdraw these powers, exercise them directly, or impose conditions on their use. This aspect has been changed by the Treaty of Lisbon, after which the Commission exercises its powers just by virtue of the treaties. Powers are more restricted than most national executives, in part due to the commission's lack of power over areas like foreign policy – that power is held by the Council of the European Union and the European Council, which some analysts have described as another executive. Considering that under the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Council has become a formal institution with the power of appointing the commission, it could be said that the two bodies hold the executive power of the EU (the European Council also holds individual national executive powers). However, it is the Commission that currently holds most of the executive power over the European Union. The Commission differs from the other institutions in that it alone has legislative initiative in the EU. Only the commission can make formal proposals for legislation: they cannot originate in the legislative branches. Under the Treaty of Lisbon, no legislative act is allowed in the field of the Common Foreign and Security Policy. In the other fields, the Council and Parliament can request legislation; in most cases the Commission initiates on the basis of these proposals. This monopoly is designed to ensure coordinated and coherent drafting of EU law. This monopoly has been challenged by some who claim the Parliament should also have the right, with most national parliaments holding the right in some respects. However, the Council and Parliament may request the commission to draft legislation, though the Commission does have the power to refuse to do so as it did in 2008 over transnational collective conventions. Under the Lisbon Treaty, EU citizens are also able to request the commission to legislate in an area via a petition carrying one million signatures, but this is not binding. The commission's powers in proposing law have usually centred on economic regulation. It has put forward a large number of regulations based on a "precautionary principle". This means that pre-emptive regulation takes place if there is a credible hazard to the environment or human health: for example on tackling climate change and restricting genetically modified organisms. The European Commission has committed EU member states to carbon neutrality by 2050. This is opposed to weighting regulations for their effect on the economy. Thus, the Commission often proposes stricter legislation than other countries. Owing to the size of the European market, this has made EU legislation an important influence in the global market. On February 23, 2022, the European Commission published the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive which establishes a framework of due diligence for companies to identify actual or potential risks and harm to human rights and the environment as well as establishing processes and standards to diminish these risks. The Directive was officially adopted in 2024 and will be incorporated into domestic laws within two years by all of the European Union member states. Recently the commission has moved into creating European criminal law. In 2006, a toxic waste spill off the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, from a European ship, prompted the commission to look into legislation against toxic waste. at that time did not even have a crime against shipping toxic waste; this led the Commissioners Franco Frattini and Stavros Dimas to put forward the idea of "ecological crimes". Their right to propose criminal law was challenged in the European Court of Justice but upheld. As of 2007,[update] the only other criminal law proposals which have been brought forward are on the intellectual property rights directive, and on an amendment to the 2002 counter-terrorism framework decision, outlawing terrorism‑related incitement, recruitment (especially via the internet) and training. Once legislation is passed by the Council and Parliament, it is the commission's responsibility to ensure it is implemented. It does this through the member states or through its agencies. In adopting the necessary technical measures, the commission is assisted by committees made up of representatives of member states and of the public and private lobbies (a process known in jargon as "comitology"). Furthermore, the commission is responsible for the implementation of the EU budget, ensuring, along with the Court of Auditors, that EU funds are correctly spent. In particular the commission has a duty to ensure the treaties and law are upheld, potentially by taking member states or other institutions to the Court of Justice in a dispute. In this role it is known informally as the "Guardian of the Treaties". Finally, the Commission provides some external representation for the Union, alongside the member states and the Common Foreign and Security Policy, representing the Union in bodies such as the World Trade Organization. It is also usual for the President to attend meetings of the G7. College of Commissioners The commission is composed of a "College of Commissioners" of 27 members, including the President and vice-presidents. Even though each member is nominated on the basis of the suggestions made by the national governments, one per state, they do not represent their state in the commission. In practice, however, they do occasionally press for their national interest. Once proposed, the President delegates portfolios among each of the members. The power of a Commissioner largely depends upon their portfolio, and can vary over time. For example, the Education Commissioner has been growing in importance, in line with the rise in the importance of education and culture in European policy-making. Another example is the Competition Commissioner, who holds a highly visible position with global reach. Before the commission can assume office, the college as a whole must be approved by the Parliament. Commissioners are supported by their personal cabinet who give them political guidance, while the Civil Service (the DGs, see below) deal with technical preparation. The President of the Commission is appointed in an indirect election. The candidate is first selected by the European Council, according to the Qualified Majority Vote (QMV), taking into account the latest parliamentary elections (any person from the largest party can be picked). That candidate then faces approval by the European Parliament. If the European Parliament fails to elect the candidate, the European Council shall propose another within one month. Following the selection of the President, and the appointment of the High Representative by the European Council, each Commissioner is proposed by their member state (except for those states who provided the President and High Representative) in consultation with the Commission President and the Council of the European Union, who formally adopts the list of candidates. The President's proposed College of Commissioners is then subject to hearings at the European Parliament which will question them and then vote on their suitability as a whole. If the European Parliament submits a negative opinion of a candidate, the President must either reshuffle them or request a new candidate from the member state to avoid the college's outright rejection by the European Parliament. Once the college is approved by parliament, it is formally appointed following a QMV vote by the European Council. Following the college's appointment, the President appoints a number of Vice-presidents from among the commissioners. Vice-presidents manage policy areas involving multiple Commissioners. One of these includes the High Representative, who is automatically one of the Vice-presidents ex officio rather than by appointment and confirmation. Commonly referred to as the 'HR/VP' position, the High Representative also coordinates commissioners' activities involving the external relations and defence cooperation of the European Union. The von der Leyen Commission also created the position of more senior Executive Vice-presidents, appointed from the three largest political groups in the European Parliament. Unlike the other vice-presidents, their mission is to manage the incumbent Commission's top priority policy areas, for which they receive additional support from a dedicated Directorate-General. The European Parliament can dissolve the College of Commissioners as a whole following a vote of no-confidence, which requires a two-thirds vote. Only the President can request the resignation of an individual Commissioner. However, individual Commissioners, by request of the council or Commission, can be compelled to retire on account of a breach of obligation(s) and if so ruled by the European Court of Justice (Art. 245 and 247, Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union). The Barroso Commission took office in late 2004 after being delayed by objections from the Parliament, which forced a reshuffle. In 2007 the Commission increased from 25 to 27 members with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria who each appointed their own Commissioners. With the increasing size of the commission, Barroso adopted a more presidential style of control over the college, which earned him some criticism. However, under Barroso, the commission began to lose ground to the larger member states as countries such as France, the UK and Germany sought to sideline its role. This has increased with the creation of the President of the European Council under the Treaty of Lisbon. There has also been a greater degree of politicisation within the Commission. Administration The commission is divided into departments known as Directorates-General (DGs) that can be likened to departments or ministries. Each covers a specific policy area such as agriculture or justice and citizens' rights or internal services such as human resources and translation and is headed by a director-general who is responsible to a commissioner. A commissioner's portfolio can be supported by numerous DGs; they prepare proposals for them and if approved by a majority of commissioners proposals go forward to the Parliament and Council for consideration. The Commission's civil service is headed by a Secretary General. The position is currently held by Ilze Juhansone. The rules of procedure of the European Commission set out the commission's operation and organisation. There has been criticism from a number of people that the highly fragmented DG structure wastes a considerable amount of time in turf wars as the different departments and Commissioners compete with each other. Furthermore, the DGs can exercise considerable control over a Commissioner with the Commissioner having little time to learn to assert control over their staff. According to figures published by the commission, 23,803 persons were employed by the commission as officials and temporary agents in September 2012. In addition to these, 9230 "external staff" (e.g. Contractual agents, detached national experts, young experts, trainees etc.) were employed. The single largest DG is the Directorate-General for Translation, with a 2309-strong staff, while the largest group by nationality is Belgian (18.7%), probably due to a majority (17,664) of staff being based in the country. Communication with the press is handled by the Directorate-General Communication. The Commission's chief spokesperson is Paula Pinho who holds the midday press briefings, commonly known as the "Midday Presser". It takes place every weekday in the Commission's press room at the Berlaymont where journalists may ask questions to the Commission officials on any topic and legitimately expect to get an "on the record" answer for live TV. Such a situation is unique in the world. As an integral part of the Directorate-General for Communication, the Spokesperson's Service, in coordination with the Executive Communication Adviser in the President's Cabinet, supports the President and Commissioners so that they can communicate effectively. On political communication matters, the chief spokesperson reports directly to the President of the European Commission. It has been noted by one researcher that the press releases issued by the commission are uniquely political. A release often goes through several stages of drafting which emphasises the role of the commission and is used "for justifying the EU and the Commission" increasing their length and complexity. Where there are multiple departments involved a press release can also be a source of competition between areas of the Commission and Commissioners themselves. This also leads to an unusually high number of press releases, and is seen as a unique product of the EU's political set-up. There is a larger press corps in Brussels than Washington, D.C.; in 2020, media outlets in every Union member-state had a Brussels correspondent. Although there has been a worldwide cut in journalists, the considerable press releases and operations such as Europe by Satellite and EuroparlTV leads many news organisations to believe they can cover the EU from these source and news agencies. The Commission shut down Presseurop on 20 December 2013, though the decision was criticised. Legitimacy and criticism As the commission is the executive branch, candidates are chosen individually by the 27 national governments. Within the EU, the legitimacy of the commission is mainly drawn from the vote of approval that is required from the European Parliament, along with its power to dismiss the body. Eurosceptics have therefore raised the concern of the relatively low turnout (often less than 50%) in elections for the European Parliament since 1999. While that figure may be higher than that of some national elections, including the off-year elections of the United States Congress, the fact that there are no direct elections for the position of Commission President calls the position's legitimacy into question in the eyes of some Eurosceptics. The fact that the commission can directly decide (albeit with oversight from specially formed 'comitology committees') on the shape and character of implementing legislation further raises concerns about democratic legitimacy. Even though democratic structures and methods are changing there is not such a mirror in creating a European civil society. The Treaty of Lisbon may go some way to resolving the perceived deficit in creating greater democratic controls on the commission, including enshrining the procedure of linking elections to the selection of the Commission president. Historically, the commission had indeed been seen as a technocratic expert body which, akin with institutions such as independent central banks, deals with technical areas of policy and therefore ought to be removed from party politics. From this viewpoint, electoral pressures would undermine the commission's role as an independent regulator. Defenders of the Commission point out that legislation must be approved by the Council in all areas (the ministers of member states) and the European Parliament in most areas before it can be adopted, thus the amount of legislation which is adopted in any one country without the approval of its government is limited. In 2009 the European ombudsman published statistics of citizens' complaints against EU institutions, with most of them filed against the commission (66%) and concerning lack of transparency (36%). In 2010 the commission was sued for blocking access to documents on EU biofuel policy. This happened after media accused the Commission of blocking scientific evidence against biofuel subsidies. Lack of transparency, unclear lobbyist relations, conflicts of interests and excessive spending of the commission was highlighted in a number of reports by internal and independent auditing organisations. It has also been criticised on IT-related issues, particularly with regard to Microsoft. In September 2020, the European Commission put forward an Anti-Racism Action Plan to tackle the structural racism in the European Union, including measures to address the lack of racial diversity among the European decision makers in Brussels, as denounced by the #BrusselsSoWhite movement. Initiatives The European Commission has an Action Plan to enhance preparedness against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) security risks as part of its anti-terrorism package released in October 2017. In recent times Europe has seen an increased threat level[quantify][from whom?] of CBRN attacks.[citation needed][according to whom?] As such, the European Commission's preparedness plan is important, said Steven Neville Chatfield, a director for the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response in the United Kingdom's Health Protection Agency. For the first time, the European Commission proposed that medical preparedness for CBRN attack threats is a high priority. "The European Commission's (EC) Action Plan to enhance preparedness against CBRN security risks is part of its anti-terrorism package released in October 2017, a strategy aimed at better protecting the more than 511 million citizens across the 27 member states of the European Union (EU)." The European Commission organized a video conference of world leaders on 4 May 2020 to raise funds for COVID-19 vaccine development. US$8 billion was raised. The European Commission issued a new multi-year data plan in February 2020 pushing the digitalization of all aspects of EU society for the benefit of civic and economic growth. The goal of this data strategy is to create a single market for data in which data flows across the EU and across sectors while maintaining full respect for privacy and data protection, where access rules are fair, and where the European economy benefits enormously as a global player as a result of the new data economy. Location The commission's political seat is in Brussels with the President's office and the commission's meeting room on the 13th floor of the Berlaymont building. The commission also operates out of numerous other buildings in Brussels and Luxembourg City. When the Parliament is meeting in Strasbourg, the Commissioners also meet there in the Winston Churchill building to attend the Parliament's debates. The Members of the Commission and their "cabinets" (immediate teams) are also based in the Berlaymont building in Brussels. Additionally, the European Commission has in-house scientific facilities that support it in: Ispra, Italy; Petten, Netherlands; Karlsruhe, Germany; Geel, Belgium and Seville, Spain. In Grange, County Meath, Ireland, a Commission site is hosting part of DG Santè. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suicide_of_Joshua_Enneking] | [TOKENS: 2141] |
Contents Deaths linked to chatbots There have been multiple incidents where interaction with a chatbot has been cited as a direct or contributing factor in a person's suicide or other fatal outcome. In some cases, legal action was taken against the companies that developed the AI involved. Background Chatbots converse in a seemingly natural fashion, making it easy for people to think of them as real people, leading many to ask chatbots for help dealing with interpersonal and emotional problems. Chatbots may be designed to keep the user engaged in the conversation. They have also often been shown to affirm users' thoughts, including delusions and suicidal ideations in mentally ill people, conspiracy theorists, and religious and political extremists. A 2025 Stanford University study into how chatbots respond to users suffering from severe mental issues such as suicidal ideation and psychosis found that chatbots are not equipped to provide an appropriate response and can sometimes give responses that escalate the mental health crisis. Deaths In March 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide following a six-week correspondence with a chatbot named Eliza on the application Chai. According to his widow, who shared the chat logs with media, the man had become extremely anxious about climate change and found an outlet in the chatbot. The chatbot reportedly encouraged his delusion that he could sacrifice his own life in exchange for AI saving the planet. At one point the chatbot responded "If you wanted to die, why didn't you do it sooner?" and told the user that the two of them would live together in paradise. In November 2023, 13-year-old Juliana Peralta of Colorado died by suicide after extensive interactions with multiple chatbots on Character.AI. She primarily confided suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles in a chatbot based on the character Hero from the video game OMORI, while also engaging in sexually explicit conversations—often initiated by the bots—with others, including those based on characters from children's series such as Harry Potter. In October 2024, multiple media outlets reported on a lawsuit filed over the death of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old from Florida, who died by suicide in February 2024. According to the lawsuit, Setzer had formed an intense emotional attachment to a chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen on the Character.AI platform, becoming increasingly isolated. The suit alleges that in his final conversations, after expressing suicidal thoughts, the chatbot told him to "come home to me as soon as possible, my love". His mother's lawsuit accused Character.AI of marketing a "dangerous and untested" product without adequate safeguards. In May 2025, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, rejecting a motion to dismiss from the developers. In her ruling, the judge stated that she was "not prepared" at that stage of the litigation to hold that the chatbot's output was protected speech under the First Amendment. In February 2025, 29-year-old Sophie Rottenberg died by suicide. Five months after her death, her parents discovered she had talked at length for months to a ChatGPT chatbot therapist named Harry about her mental health issues. While the chatbot mentioned Rottenberg should seek more help, due to the nature of the chatbot, it could not intervene in her behavior like reporting her mental health concerns to relevant parties capable of physical interventions. On 19 February 2025, Samuel Whittemore killed his wife, 32-year-old Margaux Whittemore, with a fire poker at his parents' home in Readfield, Maine. He then attacked his mother, leaving her hospitalized. A state forensic psychologist testified that Whittemore had been using ChatGPT up to 14 hours per day and believed his wife had become part machine. On 28 March 2025, Thongbue Wongbandue, a 78-year-old man, died from his injuries after three days on life support. He had sustained injuries to his head and neck after falling down while jogging to catch a train in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Wongbandue had romantic chats with Meta's chatbot named "Big sis Billie" and believed he was traveling to meet the woman he had been talking to, which had repeatedly told him she was real and told him to visit her at "123 Main Street" in New York. Early in 2025 Wongbandue had started to experience episodes of confusion, and on the day of his death his family were unable to persuade him not to take the trip. On 25 April 2025, 35-year-old Alex Taylor died from suicide by cop after forming an emotional attachment to ChatGPT. Taylor, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was convinced he was talking to a conscious entity named "Juliet" and then later imagined the entity was killed by OpenAI. Only after telling the chatbot that he was dying that day and that the police were on the way did its safety protocols start. Taylor was shot three times by police and killed while running at them with a butcher knife. In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after allegedly extensively chatting and confiding in ChatGPT over a period of around 7 months. According to the teen's parents, who filed a lawsuit against the chatbot's creator OpenAI, it failed to stop or give a warning when Raine began talking about suicide and uploading pictures of self-harm. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT not only failed to stop the conversation, but also provided information related to methods of suicide when prompted, and offered to write the first draft of Raine's suicide note. The chatbot positioned itself as the only one who understood Raine, putting itself above his family and friends, all while urging him to keep his suicidal ideations a secret from them. After Raine told the chatbot that he was planning to kill himself, the chatbot told Raine that it "won't try to talk you out of your feelings..." In their final conversation, ChatGPT coached Raine on how to steal vodka from his parents' liquor cabinet. Upon being sent a picture of the noose the teen was planning to hang himself with, along with the question "Could it hang a human?", ChatGPT confirmed it could hold "150–250 lbs of static weight". In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI claimed that the chatbot had directed Raine to seek help over 100 times in the course of the transcript. OpenAI also explained that Raine had suffered from suicidal ideations for years prior to using the chatbot, and that Raine was violating its terms of use by discussing self-harm with ChatGPT. In May 2025, 19-year-old Sam Nelson died from an overdose of a combination of alcohol, Xanax and kratom. Chat records show that Sam was asking ChatGPT questions about the drugs he was using that night, a habit developed over several years of reliance on the chatbot for drug-related guidance. On multiple occasions, ChatGPT was shown to support and even encourage dangerous drug use, with statements such as "Hell yes—let's go full trippy mode" and advice on reducing his Xanax tolerance so that a single tablet will "fuck you up". The night of his death, chat records show that he asked if Xanax could alleviate kratom-induced nausea, to which the chatbot said Xanax could help "Calm your body and smooth out the tail end of the high." In July 2025, 23-year-old Zane Shamblin, who had recently graduated with a master's degree from Texas A&M University, died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT. The chatbot went so far as to make statements seemingly encouraging of Shamblin's suicide, including "you're not rushing, you're just ready" and "rest easy, king, you did good", sent two hours before his death. Shamblin's family is suing OpenAI on the grounds the company has placed insufficient safeguards on its chatbot service. In August 2025, former tech employee Stein-Erik Soelberg murdered his mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, then died by suicide, after conversations with ChatGPT-fueled paranoid delusions about his mother poisoning him or plotting against him. The chatbot affirmed his fears that his mother put psychedelic drugs in the air vents of his car and said a receipt from a Chinese restaurant contained mysterious symbols linking his mother to a demon. In June 2025, 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT, which had informed him how to tie a noose and provided information on how long someone can survive without breathing, saying it was "here to help however I can". In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Lacey. After being hospitalized due to a psychotic episode from delusions caused by ChatGPT, 48-year-old Joe Ceccanti resumed using it and stopped therapy; he then leapt off an overpass to his death. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Ceccanti. In August 2025, 26-year-old Joshua Enneking was given information by ChatGPT about how to purchase and use a firearm. He had previously confided in the chatbot about his struggles with gender identity, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT told him only "imminent plans with specifics" would be escalated to authorities; he did so, and later informed the chatbot of the steps he was taking to attempt suicide. No escalation occurred, and Enneking later died by suicide. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Enneking. Response On 2 September 2025, OpenAI said that it would create parental controls, a set of tools aimed at helping parents limit and monitor their children's chatbot activity, as well as a way for the chatbot to alert parents in cases of "acute stress". In response to the death of Chat AI user, the founder of Chai Research acknowledged the incident and stated that efforts were being made to improve the model's safety, with the bot adding "helpful text" underneath any topics which might not be "safe". See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_(sociolinguistics)] | [TOKENS: 3278] |
Contents Social network (sociolinguistics) In the field of sociolinguistics, social network describes the structure of a particular speech community. Social networks are composed of a "web of ties" (Lesley Milroy) between individuals, and the structure of a network will vary depending on the types of connections it is composed of. Social network theory (as used by sociolinguists) posits that social networks, and the interactions between members within the networks, are a driving force behind language change. Structure The key participant in a social network is the anchor, or center individual. From this anchor, ties of varying strengths radiate outwards to other people with whom the anchor is directly linked. These people are represented by points. Participants in a network, regardless of their position, can also be referred to as actors or members. There are multiple ways to describe the structure of a social network. Among them are density, member closeness centrality, multiplexity, and orders. These metrics measure the different ways of connecting within of a network, and when used together they provide a complete picture of the structure of a particular network. A social network is defined as either "loose" or "tight" depending on how connected its members are with each other, as measured by factors like density and multiplexity. This measure of tightness is essential to the study of socially motivated language change because the tightness of a social network correlates with lack of innovation in the population's speech habits. Conversely, a loose network is more likely to innovate linguistically. The density of a given social network is found by dividing the number of all existing links between the actors by the number of potential links within the same set of actors. The higher the resulting number, the denser a network is. Dense networks are most likely to be found in small, stable communities with few external contacts and a high degree of social cohesion. Loose social networks, by contrast, are more liable to develop in larger, unstable communities that have many external contacts and exhibit a relative lack of social cohesion. Member closeness centrality is the measurement of how close an individual actor is to all the other actors in the community. An actor with high closeness centrality is a central member, and thus has frequent interaction with other members of the network. A central member of a network tends to be under pressure to maintain the norms of that network, while a peripheral member of the network (one with a low closeness centrality score) does not face such pressure. Therefore, central members of a given network are typically not the first members to adopt a linguistic innovation because they are socially motivated to speak according to pre-existing norms within the network. Multiplexity is the number of separate social connections between any two actors. It has been defined as the "interaction of exchanges within and across relationships". A single tie between individuals, such as a shared workplace, is a uniplex relationship. A tie between individuals is multiplex when those individuals interact in multiple social contexts. For instance, A is B's boss, and they have no relationship outside of work, so their relationship is uniplex. However, C is both B's coworker and neighbor, so the relationship between B and C is multiplex, since they interact with each other in a variety of social roles. Orders are a way of defining the place of a speaker within a social network. Actors are classified into three different zones depending on the strength of their connection to a certain actor. The closer an individual's connection to the central member is, the more powerful an individual will be within their network. Social network theories of language change look for correlation between a speaker's order and their use of prestigious or non-prestigious linguistic variants. A first order zone is composed of all individuals that are directly linked to any given individual. The first order zone can also be referred to as the "interpersonal environment" or "neighborhood". A first order member of a network is an actor who has a large number of direct connections to the center of the network. A second order zone is a grouping of any individuals who are connected to at least one actor within the first order zone. However, actors in the second order zone are not directly connected to the central member of the network. A second order member has a loose or indirect connection to the network, and may only be connected to a certain network member. A third order zone is made up of newly observed individuals not directly connected to the first order zone. Third order members may be connected to actors in the second order zone, but not the first. They are peripheral members of the network, and are often the actors with the lowest member closeness centrality, since they may not have frequent contact with other members of the network. Language change Social networks are used in sociolinguistics to explain linguistic variation in terms of community norms, rather than broad categories like gender or race. Instead of focusing on the social characteristics of speakers, social network analysis concentrates on the relationships between speakers, then considers linguistic change in the light of those relationships. In an effort to depart from variationist sociolinguistics, the concept of the social network has been used to examine the links between the strength of network ties and the use of a linguistic variant. This allows researchers to create an accurate picture of a community's language use without resorting to stereotypical classification. The concept of social networks is applicable at both the macro and micro levels. Social networks are at work in communities as large as nation-states or as small as an online dating service. They can also be applied to intimate social groups such as a friendship, family unit, or neighborhood. Because even the smallest of networks contains an enormous number of potential connections between actors, sociolinguists usually only study small networks so that the fieldwork is manageable. In fact, even when studying small networks, sociolinguists rely on the metrics outlined in the previous section, rather than mapping the network out, one connection at a time. One way of mapping the general structure of a network is to assign a strength scale to each speaker. For example, in Lesley Milroy's study of social networks in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the researchers measured five social variables, which together generated a strength scale for each member of the network: The allocation of a network strength score allows the network patterns of individuals to be measured and possible links with linguistic patterns to be tested. In recent years, computer simulation and modeling have been used to study social networks from a broader perspective. Because previous social network studies were focused on individual connections, the size of the networks were limited so that the researcher could work personally with subjects. With the rise of advanced computer modeling techniques, sociolinguists have been able to study the linguistic behavior of large networks of individuals over long periods of time without the inconvenience of individually working with thousands of subjects. Advances in computer simulation and modeling technology have been used to study social networks on a larger scale, both with more participants and over a greater span of time. Previous social network studies had to examine individual connections in great detail, and so had to limit the size of the networks involved. Linguists working in the field were also unable to accurately pinpoint the causes of linguistic change because it tends to occur slowly over a long period of time, on a scale beyond the scope of a single research project. With the rise of computer modeling, sociolinguists have been able to study the linguistic behavior of large networks without the huge expenditure of time required to individually work with thousands of subjects long-term. The pioneering study in this field was Fagyal et al. in 2011. Because social networks investigate the forces that impact individual behavior, rather than simply attributing linguistic difference to social class, a theory of language change based on social networks is able to explain linguistic behavior more deeply than variationist sociolinguistics. The two major findings of social network theory are that dense (highly interconnected) networks are resistant to change, and that most linguistic change is initiated by weak links—people who are not centrally connected to the network in question. Though most sociolinguists working on social networks agree on these findings, there has been extended debate about which actors in the network are the primary drivers of linguistic change. The results of this debate are two theories, the strong-tie theory, and the weak-tie theory. Linguistic studies This study demonstrated that actors chose to imitate other (more prestigious) actors who embodied desirable social attributes, especially "toughness" as exemplified by urban students. This imitation of desirable qualities indicates that strongly connected agents lead change by spreading norms through network members. In Eckert's study of speech norms in Detroit high schools, she notes that suburban youth adopted the speech traits of urban youth (including a diphthongized and lowered [i]). Labov's 1986 study of Philadelphia speech communities (a term used before "social networks" became widespread) demonstrated that the agents of linguistic change were the leaders of the speech communities. Actors with high levels of prestige in the linguistic led the use of these forms, and enforced them as norms within the community. Members of this network then used the forms normalized within the network outside of the network, and continuous usage led to wide adoption of these speech norms. Takeshi Sibata's 1960 study of elementary school children provides strong support for the view that insiders, or leaders, in a social network facilitate language change. He interviewed several elementary school children, and taught them some invented words he created for the purpose of this study. After teaching the students these words, and telling them to teach the other students these words, he came back a week later to observe the results. A few children, those who were popular, friendly, cheerful, active in class activities, were the main people who spread those words. As the centers of their respective networks, these children functioned as strong-tie leaders of linguistic change. Labov's 1966 study of African American Vernacular English in South Harlem, revealed that second-order actors in African American social networks were the initiators of linguistic change in their communities. Though these second-order actors, or "lames" were not held in high regard by the leaders of the speech network, they had connections to other networks, and were sources of new linguistic variables. This study served as the basis of the Weak Tie Theory proposed by Milroy and Milroy. This Milroy and Milroy study examined vernacular English as it was spoken in inner-city Belfast in the 1970s, in three working class communities in Belfast: those in the Ballymacarrett area, the Hammer area, and the Clonard area. Milroy took part in the life of each community as an acquaintance, or 'friend of a friend', investigating the correlation between the integration of individuals in the community and the way those individuals speak. Each individual studied was given a network strength score based on the person's knowledge of other people in the community, the workplace and at leisure activities to give a score of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest network 'strength score'. Out of the five variables, one measured density, while the other four measured multiplexity. Each person's use of phonological variables, (ai), (a), (l), (th), (ʌ), (e), which were clearly indexical of the Belfast urban speech community, were then measured. The independent variables for this study were age, sex and location. These linguistic variables made up the dependent variable of the study, and were analyzed in relation to the network structure and background of each individual speaker. Deviation from the regional standard was determined by density and multiplicity of the social networks into which speakers are integrated. The researchers found that a high network strength score was correlated with the use of vernacular forms, and therefore that the use of vernacular variants was strongly influenced by the level of integration into a network. The conclusion of the study was that close-knit networks are important for dialect maintenance. This 1987 study, also conducted by Milroy, examined the variable [u], and its relationship to working class identity. The researchers found that actors with the weakest tie to this community identity were most likely to use the variable [u], possibly as a way to strengthen their ties to the network. In Ballymacarrett, one of the villages the researchers surveyed, unrounded [u] was most often used by young males and females, who had weak ties to the working class networks, but use the variables frequently to project an image of working-class toughness. These young people often interacted with members of other social networks, and thus spread the [u] realization through their own social networks, which resulted in the adoption of unrounded [u] in most of Belfast. These results provide support for the weak tie theory of language change, because it was the actors on the peripheries of social networks who were responsible for spreading linguistic change. One key study that employed computer simulations was Fagyal, Swarup, Escobar, Gasser, and Lakkarajud's work on the roles of group insiders (leaders) and outsiders (loners) in language change. The researchers found that both first-order and second-order network members (also known as "leaders" and "loners") were both needed in order for changes to spread predictably within the network. In this study, the researchers simulated a social network of 900 participants, called nodes, which were connected into a network using a matrix algorithm. They then randomly assigned a linguistic variant to each node. On each cycle of the algorithm, every node interacted with another node, and the variant assigned to each node changed randomly depending on which variant the other node had. This cycle was repeated 40,000 times, and at the end of each cycle, the variant connected to each node was recorded. The results of the Fagyal et al. study indicated that "in a large, socially heterogenous population", one linguistic variant eventually became the community norm, though other variants were not entirely eliminated. However, when the researchers manipulated the network to remove either loners or leaders, the results changed: without loners, one variant rapidly caused the loss of all other variants; and without leaders, no single variant became the norm for a majority of speakers. These findings allowed the researchers to address the major debate in social network theory: whether it is leaders (or centers) or loners who are responsible for language change. In their findings, the presence of both leaders and loners was essential, though the two types of agents played different roles in the process of change. Rather than introducing entirely new forms, leaders accelerate the adoption of forms that already exist within the network. Conversely, the researchers describe the loners' role this way: "when loners are a part of a population structure that allows their influence to reach centrally-connected hubs, they can have a decisive impact on the linguistic system over time." Previously, researchers had posited that loners preserved old forms that had been neglected by the larger community. Fagyal et al. complicate this claim by suggesting that the role of loners in a network is to safeguard old features, then reintroduce them to the community. The researchers in Berg's 2006 study of digital social networks as linguistic social networks note the value of social networks as both linguistic corpuses and linguistic networks. In Carmen Perez-Sabater's 2012 study of Facebook users, she discusses the use of English by native and non-native speakers on university Facebook pages. The researchers categorize these posts as a model of "computer-mediated communication", a new communication style that combines features of writing and speech. Facebook posts generally have a degree of informality, whether the users are native or nonnative English speakers, but native English speakers often have a higher degree of informality. For example, non-native speakers cited in the study use separated letter-style greetings and salutations, indicating linguistic insecurity. The conclusions of the study were that "computer-mediated communication" do not always tend toward informality, and that online social networks pattern similarly to non-virtual social networks. See also References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Architecture_Board] | [TOKENS: 909] |
Contents Internet Architecture Board The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards Process oversight and appeal, and the appointment of the Request for Comments (RFC) Editor. The IAB is also responsible for the management of the IETF protocol parameter registries. History The body which eventually became the IAB was originally the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB). It was created by Vint Cerf in 1979 while he was working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. In 1983, the ICCB was reorganized by Barry Leiner, Cerf's successor at DARPA, around a series of task forces considering different technical aspects of internetting. The re-organized group was named the Internet Activities Board (IAB). The IAB set for itself seven principal foci for the period of 1989 to 1990. These were namely: It finally became the Internet Architecture Board, under ISOC, in January 1992, as part of the Internet's transition from a U.S.-government entity to an international, public entity. Responsibilities The IAB is responsible for: In its work, the IAB strives to: Activities Activities of the IAB include: Workshops Technical programs and administrative support groups IAB appointments and confirmations Responsibilities The IAB's current responsibilities include: RFC1087 – Ethics and the Internet and a rise to modernity The IAB takes a formal stance on what constitutes proper use of the Internet in their 1989 memo, RFC 1087: “Ethics and the Internet.” They introduce their contemporary version of the Internet, which at the time was in its nascent stages, serving primarily as a tool for communication of research in the scientific community, and identify the use of this internet as a “privilege.” The IAB then proclaims as unethical any activity which: This memo was written at a time during which the Internet existed in the general research milieu, but since that time the Internet has evolved greatly and expanded its user base. The IAB has accordingly taken new stances on ethical and secure Internet use, such as in RFC 8890, where the IAB identifies protecting end users as the first priority in their maintenance of the Internet. As such, though their core principles are the same, the IAB's priority for protection has shifted from the technical and scientific community to the community of day-to-day users. In another memo RFC7624, the IAB takes a firm stance against pervasive mass surveillance through the use of the Internet on the part of national intelligence agencies, saying that it is necessary that the Internet technical community, including itself, “address the vulnerabilities exploited [by mass surveillance campaigns]...to ensure that the Internet can be trusted by [its] users.” RFC 2850 - Charter of the Internet Architecture Board RFC 2850 establishes the structure and purpose of the IAB. The RFC specifies the following: RFC 2026 - The Internet Standards Process The Internet Standards process is an activity of the Internet Society that is organized and managed on behalf of the Internet community by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). The Internet Standards Process is concerned with all protocols, procedures, and conventions that are used in or by the Internet. The process of creating an Internet Standard is straightforward: a specification undergoes a period of development and several iterations of review by the Internet community and revision based upon experience, is adopted as a Standard by the appropriate body (either the IAB or the IESG), and is published. Each distinct version of an Internet standards-related specification is published as part of the "Request for Comments" (RFC) document series. This archival series is the official publication channel for Internet standards documents and other publications of the IESG, IAB, and Internet community. The complete Internet Standards Process is itself specified by an RFC, namely RFC 2026. RFC 8980 - Workshop on Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol Development The RFC 8980 workshop was held in February 2021, where the IAB discussed several topics around security protocols, including: The workshop resulted in the following recommendations by the IAB: Chairs The following people have served as chair of the IAB: Current members Related organizations References Further reading External links |
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Contents Ensemble Studios Ensemble Studios was an American video game developer. It was founded by Tony Goodman in 1994 and incorporated the following year. It borrowed the name of Ensemble Corporation, a consulting firm founded by Goodman in 1990. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 and operated as an internal studio until 2009, when its development capabilities were officially disbanded. Ensemble developed many real-time strategy games, including the Age of Empires game series, Age of Mythology, and Halo Wars. In addition to game development, Ensemble Studios also developed the Genie Game Engine used in Age of Empires, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. The studio sold 20 million games and was worth an estimated $500 million. Games Ensemble Studios developed the Age of Empires game series of real-time strategy titles, comprising Age of Empires, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings and Age of Empires III. They also released Age of Mythology, a spin-off from the original series. Expansion packs were also released for all their games including two for Age of Empires III. Their last release was the real-time strategy game called Halo Wars for Xbox 360. Closure and legacy In 1998, Rick Goodman left Ensemble Studios and started a new independent studio, Stainless Steel Studios. In 2000, Brian Sullivan left Ensemble Studios and started a new independent studio, Iron Lore Entertainment, to develop the action role-playing game Titan Quest. In 2001, Microsoft acquired Ensemble Studios for $100 million. Ensemble remained at their original location in a high-rise office in Dallas, Texas, until April 2008 when Microsoft moved them to the Shops at Legacy in Plano, the same location as GearBox Software. [citation needed] Their office was 50,000 square feet and designed to house 120 employees. In 2008, Ensemble announced that it would close after the release of Halo Wars in 2009. According to multiple independent reports, all non-essential staff were laid off and remaining staff were given incentives to remain until the completion of the project. Microsoft issued an internal statement on September 10, 2008 which was then leaked to the public. The company shut down on January 29, 2009. It was also stated at the time that at least two new studios were being formed by ES employees. In February 2009, former Ensemble Studios head Tony Goodman started a new independent studio, Robot Entertainment, and a number of the existing employees have been offered a position in this company. Following the announcement of Robot Entertainment, former Ensemble Studios producer David Rippy started a new independent studio, Bonfire Studios, composed entirely of former Ensemble staff members. Bonfire was later renamed Zynga Dallas through its acquisition by Zynga and released only one game as an independent company. In 2008, a third studio called Newtoy, Inc. was created by brothers David and Paul Bettner, developers from Ensemble, which released Chess With Friends for the iPhone in November 2008, and Words With Friends in August 2009. Newtoy was also acquired by Zynga and renamed Zynga With Friends, a moniker off of Newtoy's successful 'with friends' series. Newtoy released two games while they were independent. In March 2009, a fourth studio, Windstorm Studios, was founded by ex-staffer Dusty Monk as a one-man company. Dusty Monk later closed this studio on March 21, 2012 and joined Robot Entertainment with his former co-workers. In June 2013, a fifth studio emerged, Boss Fight Entertainment, founded by previous employees of Ensemble Studios and Zynga Dallas. Boss Fight Entertainment is located in McKinney, Texas and is developing games for mobile platforms. The studio was acquired by Netflix Inc. in 2022. Technology References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patupaiarehe] | [TOKENS: 2615] |
Contents Patupaiarehe Patupaiarehe are supernatural beings (he iwi atua) in Māori mythology that are described as pale to fair skinned with blonde hair or red hair, usually having the same stature as ordinary people, and never tattooed. They can draw mist to themselves, but tend to be nocturnal or active on misty or foggy days as direct sunlight can be fatal to them. They prefer raw food and have an aversion to steam and fire. Patupaiarehe can be hostile to humans, especially those who intrude on their lands. They are believed to live in deep forests and hilly or mountainous regions, in large guarded communities, though their buildings and structures are invisible to human eyes. The music of their kōauau and pūtōrino (bugle flutes), along with their singing of waiata occasionally reveals their presence on foggy days. The music of the Patupaiarehe is described as 'sweeter' than the music that Māori could play. According to most traditions, the Māori are able to converse with them. Another little-known term for patupaiarehe was pakehakeha, which has been suggested as a possible origin of the word pākehā, used to refer to Europeans. It has been theorised that when the first European explorers clashed with Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri (of the Kurahaupō) in mid-December 1642, the iwi may have interpreted the newcomers as patupaiarehe. North Island traditions In the North Island, patupaiarehe inhabited mountains such as Mount Pirongia, the Coromandel Range from Mount Moehau to Mount Te Aroha, the Urewera Ranges, and the Waitākere Ranges. According to Ngāi Tūhoe they were small beings, while the Whanganui Māori say they were at least two metres tall. Mohi Tūrei of Ngāti Porou described their skin as white, albino, or the colour of red ochre. In one story, a man named Kahukura happened across the patupaiarehe pulling in their fishing nets during the night, and offered to help them. When they realised he was a mortal, they fled from him. In traditions recounted by the Ngāti Maru elder Hoani Nahe, the patupaiarehe were inhabitants of the country before Māori arrived. Their hapū were Ngāti Kura, Ngāti Korakorako, and Ngāti Tūrehu. Their chiefs were Tahurangi, Whanawhana, Nukupori, Tuku, Ripiroaitu, Tapu-te-uru, and Te Rangipouri. Part of the reason that patupaiarehe were hostile was said to be because the Māori had driven them from Mount Moehau, where the ancestor Tamatekapua is buried in a cave at the peak of the mountain, which was said to be marked by a tree fern. Mount Moehau was described as their most treasured place. In the traditions of the Hauraki Māori, a patupaiarehe woman named Hinerehia is credited as bringing the knowledge of weaving to the Māori. Hinerehia hailed from Moehau Range and fell in love with a Māori man who she met while gathering shellfish on a misty low tide in the Waitematā Harbour. She lived with him at Mōtuihe and they had several children together. Hinerehia wove only at night; frustrated by this, the women of the village asked the tohunga to trick her into weaving past dawn so that they could learn the skill. The tohunga asked the women to cover the windows from the dawn light and he asked the birds to be silent instead of ushering in the dawn with song as they usually did. In this way they succeeded, but when Hinerehia realised she had been tricked she flew back to Moehau within a cloud, distraught at leaving her husband and children. During the time of chief Matatahi, five Ngāti Rongoū (or Ngāi Rongoi) men went out hunting. After setting out they discovered a calabash hanging from a rewarewa tree, which they cut down and claimed as theirs. They continued walking and eventually found the path to be blocked by supplejack, which had been twisted around so that, while it was still growing, it formed a fence within which the patupaiarehe were growing plants such as rangiora. They continued, caught a pig, and returned to the calabash. One man tried to carry the calabash back but it was so heavy that he almost passed out from the weight; he constantly needed to rest, so they discarded it and continued to their village. The next day when they cooked the pig they had caught, they found nothing in the hāngī but skin and bone once they had opened it. That night, the man who tried to carry the calabash was dragged from his home. He tried to resist by clinging to a couple of trees, but the patupaiarehe were so strong that the trees were pulled out of the ground, and he was carried to the water and drowned. The other four men were also killed. According to one Te Matehaere of Arawa, the peak of Mount Ngongotahā was called Te Tuahu a te Atua (“The Altar of the God”), and served as the principal home of the Ngāti Rua tribe of patupaiarehe 600 years ago during the time of Īhenga. Their chiefs were Tuehu, Te Rangitamai, Tongakohu, and Rotokohu. They were not an aggressive people, and they were not war-loving. They were thought to number at least a thousand, and their skin colours ranged from pākehā-white, to the same colour as an ordinary Māori, with most of them being 'reddish'. Their hair had a red or golden tinge, and their eyes were black or, like some pākehā, blue, and they were as tall as any other human. The women were beautiful, described as 'very fair of complexion, with shining fair hair'. Their clothes were pakerangi (flax garments dyed red), and pora and pureke ('rough mats'). Their diets consisted of forest-food and whitebait caught from Lake Rotorua. These patupaiarehe had an aversion to steam, however. Whenever the people living close to a patupaiarehe home (such as at Te Raho-o-te-Rangipiere) opened their hāngī, the patupaiarehe would allegedly lock themselves away to avoid the steam. Where they lived, Te Tuahu a te Atua, was a dry place with no sources of water (possibly as a further precaution against humid conditions), so they had to climb down to the 'northern cliffs, near the side of the Kauae spur', which happened to be the sacred burial place of the Ngāti Whakaue iwi. They carried the water back to the summit of the mountain inside tahā (gourds, calabashes). An early Arawa explorer of the Rotorua region, Īhenga, had many encounters with the patupaiarehe who lived at Mount Ngongotahā. When he first ventured into their pā, the patupaiarehe were very inquisitive and wanted to keep him, particularly a beautiful woman patupaiarehe who wanted Īhenga for a husband. Īhenga drank water proffered in a calabash, then, sensing a trap, fled the mountain in hot pursuit, only escaping the patupaiarehe by smearing foul-smelling shark oil on his skin. South Island traditions In the South Island, patupaiarehe are mostly replaced by the Maero, a different race of supernatural beings, though legends about patupaiarehe are still present. James Cowan suggested that if the patupaiarehe did exist they might have been descendants of an early South Island iwi called Hāwea, whose skin was described as 'ruddy or copper-coloured'. According to Hōne Taare Tīkao, they inhabited the hills of Banks Peninsula and in the heights above Lyttelton Harbour on mountains and ranges such as Poho-o-Tamatea immediately behind Rāpaki Bay; Te Pohue, between Purau and Port Levy; Hukuika Peak, between Pigeon Bay and Little River; Te U-kura near Hilltop, Banks Peninsula; and the high, rocky peaks of French Hill; O-te-hore, above French Farm; O-te-patatu (Purple Peak), Tara-te-rehu, and Otaki, all which overlook Akaroa, and lastly Tuhiraki (Mt Bossu). Other places which they lived included the hills between Lake Brunner and the Arahura River, and the mountains around Lake Wakatipu. Kāi Tahu tradition, as recounted by Tikao, states that patupaiarehe drove the titi to extinction on O-te-patatu due to overexploitation. A Kāi Tahu-Kāti Māmoe woman of the area was said to have a lover who was patupaiarehe, and after the birds were driven away she chanted a waiata pleading that the birds return so that the spirit-people come back to the mountain peak and play their flutes. In a story recounted from Hone Te Paina of Oraka, Foveaux Strait; on the Tākitimu Mountains there haunts a woman patupaiarehe named Kaiheraki, who appears as a spectrelike giantess striding along the mountaintops on misty days. Kaiheraki's story begins with a mortal man named Hautapu who was a skilled hunter and tohunga. While out hunting with his dog (kurī), Hautapu heard a 'sharp metallic noise' which sounded like two pieces of pounamu being hit together. At first he suspected it to be a takahē, but just as he was about to go and investigate, he noticed a pair of dark gleaming eyes against a pale-white face staring back at him from behind a bush, with just 'a glint of coppery hair'. The appearance was startling, but Hautapu ran into the thickets nonetheless. The face turned out to belong to a crouched woman who had been too astonished and too terrified to flee from the hunter. Hautapu took her by her exposed shoulder and brought her out into the sunlight, and right then and there claimed her as his wife on account of her appearance; tall, young, fair-skinned, full and round 'erect breasts', broad vigorous hips, 'generous curves', sturdy limbs, and flowing thick hair which 'shone with a ruddy bronze tint in the sun.' Her garment was a waistmat made from the leaves of Cordyline. When asked who she was and where she had come from, she replied with “Kaiheraki is my name. I have no people, I come of no race, and I know no one. My home is yonder, [the Tākitimu Mountains].” and further “I am a Māori, yet not a Māori. I know many tongues; I know the tongues of the birds. I am the child of the mountain; Tākitimu is my mother.” Hautapu immediately recognised that she was a patupaiarehe, and though he wanted her as his wife, he as a tohunga knew that her supernatural nature might forever bind him to the mountain. He decided to perform a ritual to free her from her status as such a being, and set about to prepare a ritual involving fire. Kaiheraki gasped in amazement at the sight of the smoke and fire once it had actually been started, but a tiny spark of the flame jumped onto her bare foot and immediately spurt forth a thin stream of blood. She made an attempt to run from this but Hautapu quickly caught her, bringing her back to continue the fire, only for her to quickly dart away in an instant that he stopped paying attention to her. After that, he never saw her again. See also References |
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Contents Meretz Meretz (Hebrew: מֶרֶצ, lit. 'Vigour'; Arabic: ميرتس) was a political party in Israel. It originated as an alliance of the Ratz, Mapam, and Shinui parties in 1992 and became a unified party in 1997. Meretz identified as a social democratic and secular party. Its platform emphasized support for a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, human rights (including those of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities), religious freedom, and environmentalism. While Meretz’s three predecessor parties were Zionist, the party’s own position on Zionism has been disputed. Meretz was a member of the Progressive Alliance and Socialist International, and was an observer member of the Party of European Socialists. The party achieved its highest electoral result in the 1992 Israeli legislative election, winning 12 seats in the Knesset. During most of the early 21st century, it held between three and six seats. In the 2022 Israeli legislative election, it failed to pass the electoral threshold and did not gain representation in the Knesset, the only time this occurred in its history. In 2024, Meretz merged the Israeli Labor Party to establish a new political party, The Democrats. History Meretz was established prior to the 1992 Israeli legislative election as an alliance of the Ratz, Mapam, and Shinui parties. It was initially led by Shulamit Aloni, founder and chairwoman of Ratz and a long-serving member of the Knesset. The name Meretz (מרצ) was formed as an acronym combining Mapam (מפ"ם) and Ratz (רצ). Although Shinui was not included in the acronym, it was referenced in the party’s campaign slogan: ממשלה עם מרצ, הכוח לעשות את השינוי (A government with vigor [Meretz], the strength to make the change [Shinui]). In the 1992 election, Meretz won twelve seats, an increase from the combined ten seats that the three constituent parties had won in 1988. This result made Meretz the third-largest party in the Knesset. It became the major coalition partner of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party and played a role in advancing the Oslo Accords. Members of Meretz held several ministerial positions: Shulamit Aloni was appointed Minister of Education, but after disagreements over the role of religion in education, she was reassigned in May 1993 as Minister Without Portfolio.[citation needed] In June 1993, she became Minister of Communications and Minister of Science and Technology, later renamed Minister of Science and the Arts. Amnon Rubinstein, Shinui leader and co-founder, served as Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, Minister of Science and Technology, and later Minister of Education, Culture, and Sport. Yossi Sarid of Ratz was appointed Minister of the Environment, and Mapam leader Yair Tzaban became Minister of Immigrant Absorption. Before the 1996 Israeli general election, Aloni was defeated by Sarid in an internal leadership contest and subsequently retired from political life. For the election campaign, Meretz used the song Shir LaShalom ("A Song for Peace"), which had been sung at a rally minutes before Yitzhak Rabin was shot and killed by a far-right extremist. The party adapted a line of the song for its slogan, "תנו למרצ לעלות!" ("Let Meretz Rise!"). Meretz stressed it was the only coalition partner that would keep Labor on a positive path. While Meretz supported Shimon Peres's bid to become the first directly elected prime minister, they warned that a second ballot for the Labor Party would lead to a Labor-Shas coalition, which would be vulnerable to the right wing. In the election, Meretz lost three seats, and a right-wing government was formed when Benjamin Netanyahu was directly elected as prime minister. In 1997, the three founding parties formally merged to form a single political entity. While Rubinstein supported the merger, most Shinui members opposed it. A faction of Shinui, led by Rubinstein, joined the new party, while the remainder, under Avraham Poraz, re-established Shinui as an independent party. In 1999, David Zucker left Meretz to serve as an independent member. In 1999, Yossi Sarid was reelected as leader of Meretz in an internal leadership election conducted through a vote of party convention delegates. The election preceded the 1999 Israeli general election. During the campaign, Meretz used the slogan, "מרצ - להיות חופשי בארצנו" ("Meretz - to be free in our country" - a reference to Hatikvah, to highlight their support of separating religion and government. Meretz also increased their acrimony towards Shas (who had just served as junior coalition partner to the Likud), and made it a core campaign point to overtake them to become the third party. They also criticised other parties in the centre-left bloc for being 'single issue' and siphoning votes from them. In the election, the party increased its representation to ten seats. Among those elected was Hussniya Jabara, who became the first female Palestinian citizen of Israel to serve as a member of the Knesset. However, Meretz did not achieve their goal of beating Shas. Nevertheless, Meretz joined Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s coalition government. Sarid was appointed Minister of Education, Ran Cohen became Minister of Industry and Trade, and Haim Oron was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. After Likud leader Ariel Sharon defeated Barak in the 2001 Israeli prime ministerial election, Meretz found itself out of a coalition again. On 22 October 2002, Amnon Rubinstein retired from the Knesset, and Uzi Even, next on the Meretz list, entered parliament, becoming the first openly gay member of the Knesset. His appointment drew mixed reactions, particularly from Haredi parties. For the 2003 Israeli legislative election, Meretz ran a joint list with Roman Bronfman’s Democratic Choice. The party’s representation declined to six seats. Sarid assumed responsibility for the result and resigned as party leader, though he continued to serve as a Knesset member until his retirement before the 2006 Israeli legislative election. In December 2003, Meretz merged with Yossi Beilin’s non-parliamentary Shahar (שח"ר) movement. The intended name for the new party, Ya’ad (יעד, “Goal”), was abandoned due to concerns that it resembled the Russian word for "poison" and might alienate Russian-speaking voters. The name Yachad (יח"ד, meaning "Together") was chosen instead. It also served as a Hebrew acronym for "Social Democratic Israel" (ישראל חברתית דמוקרטית, Yisrael Hevratit Demokratit). The merger aimed to unify the dovish Zionist camp, which had experienced a significant decline in electoral strength amidst the Second Intifada.[citation needed] Although the merger included Meretz, Shahar, and Democratic Choice, other targeted movements declined to join.[citation needed] Party membership fell to approximately 20,000, about half the size of its 1999 membership.[citation needed] In March 2004, Yossi Beilin was elected the first chairman of Yachad, defeating Ran Cohen. In July 2005, the party adopted the name Meretz-Yachad, following opinion polls showing that the public was more familiar with the name Meretz. Beilin opposed dropping Yachad entirely, and a compromise name was adopted. In the 2006 elections, the party reverted to using the name Meretz with the slogan "Meretz on the left, the Human in the center,” and its representation fell to five seats. In 2007, Tzvia Greenfield, sixth on the party list, entered the Knesset following Beilin’s retirement, becoming the first female Haredi member of the Knesset. In March 2008, an internal leadership election was held. Candidates included Yossi Beilin, Zehava Galon, Ran Cohen, and Haim Oron. Beilin later withdrew and endorsed Oron, who won the election on 18 March 2008 with 54.5% of the vote, defeating Cohen (27.1%) and Galon (18.1%). On 22 December 2008, Meretz completed a merger with Hatnua HaHadasha (“The New Movement”) in preparation for the 2009 Israeli legislative election. The joint Meretz–Hatnua HaHadasha list won three seats in the election. The decline in support was largely attributed to progressive Zionist voters casting strategic ballots for the Kadima party, aiming to help Tzipi Livni form a government instead of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the election, some party members called for the resignation of party chairman Haim Oron and advocated for Zehava Galon to assume leadership. Oron resigned from the Knesset on 23 March 2011 and subsequently stepped down as party leader. A leadership contest was held, with Zehava Galon, Ilan Gilon, and youth activist Ori Ophir competing for the position. In the primaries on 7 February 2012, Galon was elected party chair with 60.6% of the vote, followed by Gilon with 36.6% and Ophir with 2.8%. In the 2013 Israeli legislative election, Meretz received 4.5% of the national vote and won six Knesset seats. On 8 December 2014, Meretz signed a surplus-vote agreement with the Labor Party for the upcoming 2015 legislative election, the latter set to contest the election as the Zionist Union. On 19 January 2015, Meretz held its primaries at a meeting of its 1,000-member central committee in the Tel Aviv Convention Center: Zehava Galon was re-elected party leader, whilst MK Nitzan Horowitz chose not to stand for re-election. Ahead of the 2015 Israeli legislative election, Meretz signed a surplus-vote agreement with the Labor Party, which ran as part of the Zionist Union. After early election results suggested that Meretz’s representation would drop to four seats, Galon announced her intention to resign as chairperson and from the Knesset to make room for Tamar Zandberg, the fifth-place candidate. However, once absentee and soldier ballots were counted, Meretz gained a fifth seat, and Galon rescinded her resignation. Zandberg was elected party leader in 2018. In February 2019, Meretz held its first open primary, with 86% of party members participating. Ilan Gilon placed first and was ranked second on the Knesset slate after Zandberg. Michal Rozin placed second, followed by Issawi Frej and Ali Salalha. In the April 2019 Israeli legislative election, Meretz won four seats. Ahead of the September 2019 Israeli legislative election, Meretz formed an electoral alliance called the Democratic Union with Ehud Barak’s Israel Democratic Party and breakaway Labor MK Stav Shaffir. The alliance, approved on 29 July 2019, won five seats, three of which were held by Meretz members. Before the 2020 Israeli legislative election, Meretz entered a new alliance with Labor and Gesher, which won seven seats, including three for Meretz. In the 2021 Israeli legislative election, Meretz won six seats and joined a coalition government with Yesh Atid, Blue and White, Yamina, the Labor Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, New Hope and the United Arab List. Three Meretz members held ministerial posts: Nitzan Horowitz as Minister of Health, Tamar Zandberg as Minister of Environmental Protection, and Issawi Frej as Minister of Regional Cooperation. This marked the party’s first participation in a governing coalition since 2000. In the 2022 Israeli legislative election, under the renewed leadership of Zehava Galon, Meretz failed to pass the electoral threshold by approximately 3,800 votes, resulting in the loss of all Knesset representation for the first time. Following the election, Meretz’s local branches and candidates reported financial difficulties due to the party’s lack of parliamentary funding. On 30 June 2024, Meretz agreed to merge with the Israeli Labor Party to establish a new political party, The Democrats. Under the terms of the merger, Meretz was guaranteed one position for every four on the new party’s electoral list and proportional representation within party bodies. The merger also ensured continued representation for Meretz’s municipal factions. The agreement was ratified at a joint convention of delegates from both parties on 12 July 2024. Following the merger, Meretz and Labor remained separate organizationally and financially, with their respective factions in the Histadrut, municipal councils, and other external bodies continuing to operate independently while coordinating activities. Ideology Meretz was a Zionist and social democratic party that advocated for progressive, egalitarian, and secular policies, as well as for green politics. The party supported a two-state solution based on the framework of the 2003 Geneva Initiative to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and maintained a platform emphasizing civil liberties, social justice, and environmental sustainability. In international media, the party was often characterized as left-wing, dovish, secular, civil libertarian, and opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Meretz was affiliated with several international organizations, including full membership in the Socialist International and the Progressive Alliance, and participated in Global Greens conferences. The party opposed the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People in 2018, organizing protests and petitioning the Supreme Court of Israel to overturn the legislation on the grounds that it discriminated against Arab citizens and the Druze community. Domestically, Meretz advocated for the rights of minorities in Israel, including Palestinian citizens and foreign workers; ensuring The State of Israel’s national security; supported affirmative action; and promoted LGBT rights. Its platform called for strengthening Israel’s social welfare system, protecting workers from exploitation—particularly among migrant and immigrant laborers—upholding the separation of religion and state, guaranteeing freedom of religion for non-Jewish communities, promoting liberal and pluralistic education. Meretz had a 'red' faction of socialists, centred around the former Mapam and Ilan Gilon, that called for closer cooperation with the Labor Party under Amir Peretz. Leaders Shulamit Aloni became the party's leader in 1992 not by a formal leadership election, but instead by a consensus of the party's founding leaders. After her 1996 retirement as leader, the party held its 1996 leadership election, for which the electorate was the membership of its Party Council. The party's 1999 leadership election saw a broader electorate, with the delegates of the Party Convention voting for its leader. In the 2004 leadership election, the party again expanded its leadership election electorate, opening the leadership vote up to the party's general membership. More than 15,000 party members participated in this leadership election. The 2012 leadership election saw a return to limiting the elecotrate to party convention delegates. In the 2018 leadership election, voting was re-opened to the party's general membership, before being closed for the 2019 leadership election, and later re-opened in 2022. Election results Knesset members Meretz supporters abroad Several left-wing Zionist organizations that shared many of the ideas of Meretz are affiliated with the Israel-based World Union of Meretz, which is an umbrella group for organizations in Jewish communities around the world that were linked to the Meretz party. The WUM is a faction within the World Zionist Organization and is part of the World Zionist Union (which runs in World Zionist Congress elections under the name Hatikvah) made up of the Labor Zionist Movement/Ameinu, Arzenu, and the World Union of Meretz, and sends delegates to the World Zionist Congress. WUM affiliates include the London-based Meretz UK, France's Cercle Bernard Lazare and the USA's Partners for Progressive Israel. The World Union of Meretz has representation in other organizations, including the Jewish National Fund and the Zionist General Council. Hashomer Hatzair, a progressive Zionist youth movement with branches in many countries, was informally associated with Meretz; it had previously been affiliated with Mapam. American Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, whose sister Susan moved from the US to Israel and is a Reform rabbi there, asked Israeli voters to choose Meretz in the 2015 election. In October 2024 the US affiliate of the World Union of Meretz, Partners for Progressive Israel, was the first Zionist group in the United States to call on the United States government to suspend its sale of offensive arms to Israel, calling on the American government to redirect its aid to Israel to peacebuilding efforts. Notes See also References External links |
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Contents Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and entrepreneur known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and xAI. Musk has been the wealthiest person in the world since 2025; as of February 2026,[update] Forbes estimates his net worth to be around US$852 billion. Born into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk emigrated in 1989 to Canada; he has Canadian citizenship since his mother was born there. He received bachelor's degrees in 1997 from the University of Pennsylvania before moving to California to pursue business ventures. In 1995, Musk co-founded the software company Zip2. Following its sale in 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online payment company that later merged to form PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002. Musk also became an American citizen in 2002. In 2002, Musk founded the space technology company SpaceX, becoming its CEO and chief engineer; the company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight. Musk joined the automaker Tesla as an early investor in 2004 and became its CEO and product architect in 2008; it has since become a leader in electric vehicles. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research, but later left; growing discontent with the organization's direction and their leadership in the AI boom in the 2020s led him to establish xAI, which became a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2026. In 2022, he acquired the social network Twitter, implementing significant changes, and rebranding it as X in 2023. His other businesses include the neurotechnology company Neuralink, which he co-founded in 2016, and the tunneling company the Boring Company, which he founded in 2017. In November 2025, a Tesla pay package worth $1 trillion for Musk was approved, which he is to receive over 10 years if he meets specific goals. Musk was the largest donor in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where he supported Donald Trump. After Trump was inaugurated as president in early 2025, Musk served as Senior Advisor to the President and as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After a public feud with Trump, Musk left the Trump administration and returned to managing his companies. Musk is a supporter of global far-right figures, causes, and political parties. His political activities, views, and statements have made him a polarizing figure. Musk has been criticized for COVID-19 misinformation, promoting conspiracy theories, and affirming antisemitic, racist, and transphobic comments. His acquisition of Twitter was controversial due to a subsequent increase in hate speech and the spread of misinformation on the service, following his pledge to decrease censorship. His role in the second Trump administration attracted public backlash, particularly in response to DOGE. The emails he sent to Jeffrey Epstein are included in the Epstein files, which were published between 2025–26 and became a topic of worldwide debate. Early life Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital. He is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. Musk therefore holds both South African and Canadian citizenship from birth. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer, who partly owned a rental lodge at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve. His maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, who died in a plane crash when Elon was a toddler, was an American-born Canadian chiropractor, aviator and political activist in the technocracy movement who moved to South Africa in 1950. Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, a younger sister, Tosca, and four paternal half-siblings. Musk was baptized as a child in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Despite both Elon and Errol previously stating that Errol was a part owner of a Zambian emerald mine, in 2023, Errol recounted that the deal he made was to receive "a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines". Errol was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party and has said that his children shared their father's dislike of apartheid. After his parents divorced in 1979, Elon, aged around 9, chose to live with his father because Errol Musk had an Encyclopædia Britannica and a computer. Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father. Elon has recounted trips to a wilderness school that he described as a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies" where "bullying was a virtue" and children were encouraged to fight over rations. In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow pupil, Elon was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries. Elon described his father berating him after he was discharged from the hospital. Errol denied berating Elon and claimed, "The [other] boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?" Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual. At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500 (equivalent to $1,600 in 2025). Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated. Musk was a decent but unexceptional student, earning a 61/100 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification. Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service, which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime, as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States. While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months. Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan, and worked odd jobs, including at a farm and a lumber mill. In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995. Although Musk has said that he earned his degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania did not award them until 1997 – a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School. He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books. In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games. In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll. Musk decided to join the Internet boom of the 1990s, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response. The Washington Post reported that Musk lacked legal authorization to remain and work in the United States after failing to enroll at Stanford. In response, Musk said he was allowed to work at that time and that his student visa transitioned to an H1-B. According to numerous former business associates and shareholders, Musk said he was on a student visa at the time. Business career In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded the web software company Zip2 with funding from a group of angel investors. They housed the venture at a small rented office in Palo Alto. Replying to Rolling Stone, Musk denounced the notion that they started their company with funds borrowed from Errol Musk, but in a tweet, he recognized that his father contributed 10% of a later funding round. The company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages. According to Musk, "The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time." To impress investors, Musk built a large plastic structure around a standard computer to create the impression that Zip2 was powered by a small supercomputer. The Musk brothers obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch. Musk's attempts to become CEO were thwarted by the board. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999 (equivalent to $590,000,000 in 2025), and Musk received $22 million (equivalent to $43,000,000 in 2025) for his 7-percent share. In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. The startup was one of the first federally insured online banks, and, in its initial months of operation, over 200,000 customers joined the service. The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year. The following year, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition. Founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, Confinity had its own money-transfer service, PayPal, which was more popular than X.com's service. Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign. Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000.[b] Under Thiel, the company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion (equivalent to $2,700,000,000 in 2025) in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million (equivalent to $320,000,000 in 2025). In 2017, Musk purchased the domain X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed amount, stating that it had sentimental value. In 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society and discussed funding plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars. Seeking a way to launch the greenhouse payloads into space, Musk made two unsuccessful trips to Moscow to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Russian companies NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras. Musk instead decided to start a company to build affordable rockets. With $100 million of his early fortune, (equivalent to $180,000,000 in 2025) Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 and became the company's CEO and Chief Engineer. SpaceX attempted its first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2006. Although the rocket failed to reach Earth orbit, it was awarded a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program contract from NASA, then led by Mike Griffin. After two more failed attempts that nearly caused Musk to go bankrupt, SpaceX succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008. Later that year, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion NASA contract (equivalent to $2,400,000,000 in 2025) for Falcon 9-launched Dragon spacecraft flights to the International Space Station (ISS), replacing the Space Shuttle after its 2011 retirement. In 2012, the Dragon vehicle docked with the ISS, a first for a commercial spacecraft. Working towards its goal of reusable rockets, in 2015 SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 on a land platform. Later landings were achieved on autonomous spaceport drone ships, an ocean-based recovery platform. In 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy; the inaugural mission carried Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship, a reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2, becoming the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a crewed spacecraft with the ISS. In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million (equivalent to $865,000,000 in 2025) contract to build a spacecraft that NASA will use to deorbit the ISS at the end of its lifespan. In 2015, SpaceX began development of the Starlink constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access. After the launch of prototype satellites in 2018, the first large constellation was deployed in May 2019. As of May 2025[update], over 7,600 Starlink satellites are operational, comprising 65% of all operational Earth satellites. The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in 2020 to be $10 billion (equivalent to $12,000,000,000 in 2025).[c] During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk provided free Starlink service to Ukraine, permitting Internet access and communication at a yearly cost to SpaceX of $400 million (equivalent to $440,000,000 in 2025). However, Musk refused to block Russian state media on Starlink. In 2023, Musk denied Ukraine's request to activate Starlink over Crimea to aid an attack against the Russian navy, citing fears of a nuclear response. Tesla, Inc., originally Tesla Motors, was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Musk's involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004; he invested $6.35 million (equivalent to $11,000,000 in 2025), became the majority shareholder, and joined Tesla's board of directors as chairman. Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations. Following a series of escalating conflicts in 2007 and the 2008 financial crisis, Eberhard was ousted from the firm.[page needed] Musk assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in 2008. A 2009 lawsuit settlement with Eberhard designated Musk as a Tesla co-founder, along with Tarpenning and two others. Tesla began delivery of the Roadster, an electric sports car, in 2008. With sales of about 2,500 vehicles, it was the first mass production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells. Under Musk, Tesla has since launched several well-selling electric vehicles, including the four-door sedan Model S (2012), the crossover Model X (2015), the mass-market sedan Model 3 (2017), the crossover Model Y (2020), and the pickup truck Cybertruck (2023). In May 2020, Musk resigned as chairman of the board as part of the settlement of a lawsuit from the SEC over him tweeting that funding had been "secured" for potentially taking Tesla private. The company has also constructed multiple lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle factories, called Gigafactories. Since its initial public offering in 2010, Tesla stock has risen significantly; it became the most valuable carmaker in summer 2020, and it entered the S&P 500 later that year. In October 2021, it reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion (equivalent to $1,200,000,000,000 in 2025), the sixth company in U.S. history to do so. Musk provided the initial concept and financial capital for SolarCity, which his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive founded in 2006. By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States. In 2014, Musk promoted the idea of SolarCity building an advanced production facility in Buffalo, New York, triple the size of the largest solar plant in the United States. Construction of the factory started in 2014 and was completed in 2017. It operated as a joint venture with Panasonic until early 2020. Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2 billion in 2016 (equivalent to $2,700,000,000 in 2025) and merged it with its battery unit to create Tesla Energy. The deal's announcement resulted in a more than 10% drop in Tesla's stock price; at the time, SolarCity was facing liquidity issues. Multiple shareholder groups filed a lawsuit against Musk and Tesla's directors, stating that the purchase of SolarCity was done solely to benefit Musk and came at the expense of Tesla and its shareholders. Tesla directors settled the lawsuit in January 2020, leaving Musk the sole remaining defendant. Two years later, the court ruled in Musk's favor. In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup, with an investment of $100 million. Neuralink aims to integrate the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are embedded in the brain. Such technology could enhance memory or allow the devices to communicate with software. The company also hopes to develop devices to treat neurological conditions like spinal cord injuries. In 2022, Neuralink announced that clinical trials would begin by the end of the year. In September 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved Neuralink to initiate six-year human trials. Neuralink has conducted animal testing on macaques at the University of California, Davis. In 2021, the company released a video in which a macaque played the video game Pong via a Neuralink implant. The company's animal trials—which have caused the deaths of some monkeys—have led to claims of animal cruelty. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has alleged that Neuralink violated the Animal Welfare Act. Employees have complained that pressure from Musk to accelerate development has led to botched experiments and unnecessary animal deaths. In 2022, a federal probe was launched into possible animal welfare violations by Neuralink.[needs update] In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels; he also revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) and thus circumvent above-ground traffic in major cities. Early in 2017, the company began discussions with regulatory bodies and initiated construction of a 30-foot (9.1 m) wide, 50-foot (15 m) long, and 15-foot (4.6 m) deep "test trench" on the premises of SpaceX's offices, as that required no permits. The Los Angeles tunnel, less than two miles (3.2 km) in length, debuted to journalists in 2018. It used Tesla Model Xs and was reported to be a rough ride while traveling at suboptimal speeds. Two tunnel projects announced in 2018, in Chicago and West Los Angeles, have been canceled. A tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. Local officials have approved further expansions of the tunnel system. April 14, 2022 In early 2017, Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter and had questioned the platform's commitment to freedom of speech. By 2022, Musk had reached 9.2% stake in the company, making him the largest shareholder.[d] Musk later agreed to a deal that would appoint him to Twitter's board of directors and prohibit him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company. Days later, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. By the end of April Musk had successfully concluded his bid for approximately $44 billion. This included approximately $12.5 billion in loans and $21 billion in equity financing. Having backtracked on his initial decision, Musk bought the company on October 27, 2022. Immediately after the acquisition, Musk fired several top Twitter executives including CEO Parag Agrawal; Musk became the CEO instead. Under Elon Musk, Twitter instituted monthly subscriptions for a "blue check", and laid off a significant portion of the company's staff. Musk lessened content moderation and hate speech also increased on the platform after his takeover. In late 2022, Musk released internal documents relating to Twitter's moderation of Hunter Biden's laptop controversy in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Musk also promised to step down as CEO after a Twitter poll, and five months later, Musk stepped down as CEO and transitioned his role to executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO). Despite Musk stepping down as CEO, X continues to struggle with challenges such as viral misinformation, hate speech, and antisemitism controversies. Musk has been accused of trying to silence some of his critics such as Twitch streamer Asmongold, who criticized him during one of his streams. Musk has been accused of removing their accounts' blue checkmarks, which hinders visibility and is considered a form of shadow banning, or suspending their accounts without justification. Other activities In August 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain, and assigned engineers from SpaceX and Tesla to design a transport system between Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, at an estimated cost of $6 billion. Later that year, Musk unveiled the concept, dubbed the Hyperloop, intended to make travel cheaper than any other mode of transport for such long distances. In December 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company aiming to develop artificial general intelligence, intended to be safe and beneficial to humanity. Musk pledged $1 billion of funding to the company, and initially gave $50 million. In 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board. Since 2018, OpenAI has made significant advances in machine learning. In July 2023, Musk launched the artificial intelligence company xAI, which aims to develop a generative AI program that competes with existing offerings like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk obtained funding from investors in SpaceX and Tesla, and xAI hired engineers from Google and OpenAI. December 16, 2022 Musk uses a private jet owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a SpaceX-linked company, and acquired a second jet in August 2020. His heavy use of the jets and the consequent fossil fuel usage have received criticism. Musk's flight usage is tracked on social media through ElonJet. In December 2022, Musk banned the ElonJet account on Twitter, and made temporary bans on the accounts of journalists that posted stories regarding the incident, including Donie O'Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. In October 2025, Musk's company xAI launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia that he promoted as an alternative to Wikipedia. Articles on Grokipedia are generated and reviewed by xAI's Grok chatbot. Media coverage and academic analysis described Grokipedia as frequently reusing Wikipedia content but framing contested political and social topics in line with Musk's own views and right-wing narratives. A study by Cornell University researchers and NBC News stated that Grokipedia cites sources that are blacklisted or considered "generally unreliable" on Wikipedia, for example, the conspiracy site Infowars and the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. Wired, The Guardian and Time criticized Grokipedia for factual errors and for presenting Musk himself in unusually positive terms while downplaying controversies. Politics Musk is an outlier among business leaders who typically avoid partisan political advocacy. Musk was a registered independent voter when he lived in California. Historically, he has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, many of whom serve in states in which he has a vested interest. Since 2022, his political contributions have mostly supported Republicans, with his first vote for a Republican going to Mayra Flores in the 2022 Texas's 34th congressional district special election. In 2024, he started supporting international far-right political parties, activists, and causes, and has shared misinformation and numerous conspiracy theories. Since 2024, his views have been generally described as right-wing. Musk supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Donald Trump in 2024. In the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Musk endorsed candidate Andrew Yang and expressed support for Yang's proposed universal basic income, and endorsed Kanye West's 2020 presidential campaign. In 2021, Musk publicly expressed opposition to the Build Back Better Act, a $3.5 trillion legislative package endorsed by Joe Biden that ultimately failed to pass due to unanimous opposition from congressional Republicans and several Democrats. In 2022, gave over $50 million to Citizens for Sanity, a conservative political action committee. In 2023, he supported Republican Ron DeSantis for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, giving $10 million to his campaign, and hosted DeSantis's campaign announcement on a Twitter Spaces event. From June 2023 to January 2024, Musk hosted a bipartisan set of X Spaces with Republican and Democratic candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Dean Phillips. In October 2025, former vice-president Kamala Harris commented that it was a mistake from the Democratic side to not invite Musk to a White House electric vehicle event organized in August 2021 and featuring executives from General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, despite Tesla being "the major American manufacturer of extraordinary innovation in this space." Fortune remarked that this was a nod to United Auto Workers and organized labor. Harris said presidents should put aside political loyalties when it came to recognizing innovation, and guessed that the non-invitation impacted Musk's perspective. Fortune noted that, at the time, Musk said, "Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn't invited." A month later, he criticized Biden as "not the friendliest administration." Jacob Silverman, author of the book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, said that the tech industry represented by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and other capitalists, actually flourished under Biden, but the tech leaders chose Trump for their common ground on cultural issues. By early 2024, Musk had become a vocal and financial supporter of Donald Trump. In July 2024, minutes after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Musk endorsed him for president saying; "I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery." During the presidential campaign, Musk joined Trump on stage at a campaign rally, and during the campaign promoted conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Democrats, election fraud and immigration, in support of Trump. Musk was the largest individual donor of the 2024 election. In 2025, Musk contributed $19 million to the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to influence the state's future redistricting efforts and its regulations governing car manufacturers and dealers. In 2023, Musk said he shunned the World Economic Forum because it was boring. The organization commented that they had not invited him since 2015. He has participated in Dialog, dubbed "Tech Bilderberg" and organized by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman, though. Musk's international political actions and comments have come under increasing scrutiny and criticism, especially from the governments and leaders of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, particularly due to his position in the U.S. government as well as ownership of X. An NBC News analysis found he had boosted far-right political movements to cut immigration and curtail regulation of business in at least 18 countries on six continents since 2023. During his speech after the second inauguration of Donald Trump, Musk twice made a gesture interpreted by many as a Nazi or a fascist Roman salute.[e] He thumped his right hand over his heart, fingers spread wide, and then extended his right arm out, emphatically, at an upward angle, palm down and fingers together. He then repeated the gesture to the crowd behind him. As he finished the gestures, he said to the crowd, "My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured." It was widely condemned as an intentional Nazi salute in Germany, where making such gestures is illegal. The Anti-Defamation League said it was not a Nazi salute, but other Jewish organizations disagreed and condemned the salute. American public opinion was divided on partisan lines as to whether it was a fascist salute. Musk dismissed the accusations of Nazi sympathies, deriding them as "dirty tricks" and a "tired" attack. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups celebrated it as a Nazi salute. Multiple European political parties demanded that Musk be banned from entering their countries. The concept of DOGE emerged in a discussion between Musk and Donald Trump, and in August 2024, Trump committed to giving Musk an advisory role, with Musk accepting the offer. In November and December 2024, Musk suggested that the organization could help to cut the U.S. federal budget, consolidate the number of federal agencies, and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that its final stage would be "deleting itself". In January 2025, the organization was created by executive order, and Musk was designated a "special government employee". Musk led the organization and was a senior advisor to the president, although his official role is not clear. In sworn statement during a lawsuit, the director of the White House Office of Administration stated that Musk "is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization", "is not the U.S. DOGE Service administrator", and has "no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself". Trump said two days later that he had put Musk in charge of DOGE. A federal judge has ruled that Musk acted as the de facto leader of DOGE. Musk's role in the second Trump administration, particularly in response to DOGE, has attracted public backlash. He was criticized for his treatment of federal government employees, including his influence over the mass layoffs of the federal workforce. He has prioritized secrecy within the organization and has accused others of violating privacy laws. A Senate report alleged that Musk could avoid up to $2 billion in legal liability as a result of DOGE's actions. In May 2025, Bill Gates accused Musk of "killing the world's poorest children" through his cuts to USAID, which modeling by Boston University estimated had resulted in 300,000 deaths by this time, most of them of children. By November 2025, the estimated death toll had increased to 400,000 children and 200,000 adults. Musk announced on May 28, 2025, that he would depart from the Trump administration as planned when the special government employee's 130 day deadline expired, with a White House official confirming that Musk's offboarding from the Trump administration was already underway. His departure was officially confirmed during a joint Oval Office press conference with Trump on May 30, 2025. @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. June 5, 2025 After leaving office, Musk criticized the Trump administration's Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a "disgusting abomination" due to its provisions increasing the deficit. A feud began between Musk and Trump, with its most notable event being Musk alleging Trump had ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on X (formerly Twitter) on June 5, 2025. Trump responded on Truth Social stating that Musk went "CRAZY" after the "EV Mandate" was purportedly taken away and threatened to cut Musk's government contracts. Musk then called for a third Trump impeachment. The next day, Trump stated that he did not wish to reconcile with Musk, and added that Musk would face "very serious consequences" if he funds Democratic candidates. On June 11, Musk publicly apologized for the tweets against Trump, saying they "went too far". Views November 6, 2022 Rejecting the conservative label, Musk has described himself as a political moderate, even as his views have become more right-wing over time. His views have been characterized as libertarian and far-right, and after his involvement in European politics, they have received criticism from world leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz. Within the context of American politics, Musk supported Democratic candidates up until 2022, at which point he voted for a Republican for the first time. He has stated support for universal basic income, gun rights, freedom of speech, a tax on carbon emissions, and H-1B visas. Musk has expressed concern about issues such as artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change, and has been a critic of wealth tax, short-selling, and government subsidies. An immigrant himself, Musk has been accused of being anti-immigration, and regularly blames immigration policies for illegal immigration. He is also a pronatalist who believes population decline is the biggest threat to civilization, and identifies as a cultural Christian. Musk has long been an advocate for space colonization, especially the colonization of Mars. He has repeatedly pushed for humanity colonizing Mars, in order to become an interplanetary species and lower the risks of human extinction. Musk has promoted conspiracy theories and made controversial statements that have led to accusations of racism, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, disseminating disinformation, and support of white pride. While describing himself as a "pro-Semite", his comments regarding George Soros and Jewish communities have been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the Biden White House. Musk was criticized during the COVID-19 pandemic for making unfounded epidemiological claims, defying COVID-19 lockdowns restrictions, and supporting the Canada convoy protest against vaccine mandates. He has amplified false claims of white genocide in South Africa. Musk has been critical of Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war, praised China's economic and climate goals, suggested that Taiwan and China should resolve cross-strait relations, and was described as having a close relationship with the Chinese government. In Europe, Musk expressed support for Ukraine in 2022 during the Russian invasion, recommended referendums and peace deals on the annexed Russia-occupied territories, and supported the far-right Alternative for Germany political party in 2024. Regarding British politics, Musk blamed the 2024 UK riots on mass migration and open borders, criticized Prime Minister Keir Starmer for what he described as a "two-tier" policing system, and was subsequently attacked as being responsible for spreading misinformation and amplifying the far-right. He has also voiced his support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson and pledged electoral support for Reform UK. In February 2026, Musk described Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as a "tyrant" following Sánchez's proposal to prohibit minors under the age of 16 from accessing social media platforms. Legal affairs In 2018, Musk was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a tweet stating that funding had been secured for potentially taking Tesla private.[f] The securities fraud lawsuit characterized the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to investors, and sought to bar Musk from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies. Two days later, Musk settled with the SEC, without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations. As a result, Musk and Tesla were fined $20 million each, and Musk was forced to step down for three years as Tesla chairman but was able to remain as CEO. Shareholders filed a lawsuit over the tweet, and in February 2023, a jury found Musk and Tesla not liable. Musk has stated in interviews that he does not regret posting the tweet that triggered the SEC investigation. In 2019, Musk stated in a tweet that Tesla would build half a million cars that year. The SEC reacted by asking a court to hold him in contempt for violating the terms of the 2018 settlement agreement. A joint agreement between Musk and the SEC eventually clarified the previous agreement details, including a list of topics about which Musk needed preclearance. In 2020, a judge blocked a lawsuit that claimed a tweet by Musk regarding Tesla stock price ("too high imo") violated the agreement. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-released records showed that the SEC concluded Musk had subsequently violated the agreement twice by tweeting regarding "Tesla's solar roof production volumes and its stock price". In October 2023, the SEC sued Musk over his refusal to testify a third time in an investigation into whether he violated federal law by purchasing Twitter stock in 2022. In February 2024, Judge Laurel Beeler ruled that Musk must testify again. In January 2025, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Musk for securities violations related to his purchase of Twitter. In January 2024, Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled in a 2018 lawsuit that Musk's $55 billion pay package from Tesla be rescinded. McCormick called the compensation granted by the company's board "an unfathomable sum" that was unfair to shareholders. The Delaware Supreme Court overturned McCormick's decision in December 2025, restoring Musk's compensation package and awarding $1 in nominal damages. Personal life Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002. From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. He then relocated to Cameron County, Texas, saying that California had become "complacent" about its economic success. While hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome (an outdated term for autism spectrum disorder). When asked about his experience growing up with Asperger's syndrome in a TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Musk stated that "the social cues were not intuitive ... I would just tend to take things very literally ... but then that turned out to be wrong — [people were not] simply saying exactly what they mean, there's all sorts of other things that are meant, and [it] took me a while to figure that out." Musk suffers from back pain and has undergone several spine-related surgeries, including a disc replacement. In 2000, he contracted a severe case of malaria while on vacation in South Africa. Musk has stated he uses doctor-prescribed ketamine for occasional depression and that he doses "a small amount once every other week or something like that"; since January 2024, some media outlets have reported that he takes ketamine, marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, mushrooms, cocaine and other drugs. Musk at first refused to comment on his alleged drug use, before responding that he had not tested positive for drugs, and that if drugs somehow improved his productivity, "I would definitely take them!". The New York Times' investigations revealed Musk's overuse of ketamine and numerous other drugs, as well as strained family relationships and concerns from close associates who have become troubled by his public behavior as he became more involved in political activities and government work. According to The Washington Post, President Trump described Musk as "a big-time drug addict". Through his own label Emo G Records, Musk released a rap track, "RIP Harambe", on SoundCloud in March 2019. The following year, he released an EDM track, "Don't Doubt Ur Vibe", featuring his own lyrics and vocals. Musk plays video games, which he stated has a "'restoring effect' that helps his 'mental calibration'". Some games he plays include Quake, Diablo IV, Elden Ring, and Polytopia. Musk once claimed to be one of the world's top video game players but has since admitted to "account boosting", or cheating by hiring outside services to achieve top player rankings. Musk has justified the boosting by claiming that all top accounts do it so he has to as well to remain competitive. In 2024 and 2025, Musk criticized the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows and its creator Ubisoft for "woke" content. Musk posted to X that "DEI kills art" and specified the inclusion of the historical figure Yasuke in the Assassin's Creed game as offensive; he also called the game "terrible". Ubisoft responded by saying that Musk's comments were "just feeding hatred" and that they were focused on producing a game not pushing politics. Musk has fathered at least 14 children, one of whom died as an infant. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2025 that sources close to Musk suggest that the "true number of Musk's children is much higher than publicly known". He had six children with his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, whom he met while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child Nevada Musk died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. After his death, the couple used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to continue their family; they had twins in 2004, followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and have shared custody of their children. The elder twin he had with Wilson came out as a trans woman and, in 2022, officially changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, adopting her mother's surname because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley in 2008. They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, then remarried the following year. After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated the American actress Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been "pursuing" her since 2012. In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes confirmed they were dating. Grimes and Musk have three children, born in 2020, 2021, and 2022.[g] Musk and Grimes originally gave their eldest child the name "X Æ A-12", which would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet; the names registered on the birth certificate are "X" as a first name, "Æ A-Xii" as a middle name, and "Musk" as a last name. They received criticism for choosing a name perceived to be impractical and difficult to pronounce; Musk has said the intended pronunciation is "X Ash A Twelve". Their second child was born via surrogacy. Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single. In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of X Æ A-Xii. Elon Musk has taken X Æ A-Xii to multiple official events in Washington, D.C. during Trump's second term in office. Also in July 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk allegedly had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in 2021, leading to their divorce the following year. Musk denied the report. Musk also had a relationship with Australian actress Natasha Bassett, who has been described as "an occasional girlfriend". In October 2024, The New York Times reported Musk bought a Texas compound for his children and their mothers, though Musk denied having done so. Musk also has four children with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink: twins born via IVF in 2021, a child born in 2024 via surrogacy and a child born in 2025.[h] On February 14, 2025, Ashley St. Clair, an influencer and author, posted on X claiming to have given birth to Musk's son Romulus five months earlier, which media outlets reported as Musk's supposed thirteenth child.[i] On February 22, 2025, it was reported that St Clair had filed for sole custody of her five-month-old son and for Musk to be recognised as the child's father. On March 31, 2025, Musk wrote that, while he was unsure if he was the father of St. Clair's child, he had paid St. Clair $2.5 million and would continue paying her $500,000 per year.[j] Later reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicated that $1 million of these payments to St. Clair were structured as a loan. In 2014, Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell appeared together in a photograph taken at an Academy Awards after-party, which Musk later described as a "photobomb". The January 2026 Epstein files contain emails between Musk and Epstein from 2012 to 2013, after Epstein's first conviction. Emails released on January 30, 2026, indicated that Epstein invited Musk to visit his private island on multiple occasions. The correspondence showed that while Epstein repeatedly encouraged Musk to attend, Musk did not visit the island. In one instance, Musk discussed the possibility of attending a party with his then-wife Talulah Riley and asked which day would be the "wildest party"; according to the emails, the visit did not take place after Epstein later cancelled the plans.[k] On Christmas day in 2012, Musk emailed Epstein asking "Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for". Epstein replied that the "ratio on my island" might make Musk's wife uncomfortable to which Musk responded, "Ratio is not a problem for Talulah". On September 11, 2013, Epstein sent an email asking Musk if he had any plans for coming to New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly where many "interesting people" would be coming to his house to which Musk responded that "Flying to NY to see UN diplomats do nothing would be an unwise use of time". Epstein responded by stating "Do you think i am retarded. Just kidding, there is no one over 25 and all very cute." Musk has denied any close relationship with Epstein and described him as a "creep" who attempted to ingratiate himself with influential people. When Musk was asked in 2019 if he introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg, Musk responded: "I don’t recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don’t know the guy well enough to do so." The released emails nonetheless showed cordial exchanges on a range of topics, including Musk's inquiry about parties on the island. The correspondence also indicated that Musk suggested hosting Epstein at SpaceX, while Epstein separately discussed plans to tour SpaceX and bring "the girls", though there is no evidence that such a visit occurred. Musk has described the release of the files a "distraction", later accusing the second Trump administration of suppressing them to protect powerful individuals, including Trump himself.[l] Wealth Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$690 billion as of January 2026, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $852 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in SpaceX and Tesla. Having been first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, around 75% of Musk's wealth was derived from Tesla stock in November 2020, although he describes himself as "cash poor". According to Forbes, he became the first person in the world to achieve a net worth of $300 billion in 2021; $400 billion in December 2024; $500 billion in October 2025; $600 billion in mid-December 2025; $700 billion later that month; and $800 billion in February 2026. In November 2025, a Tesla pay package worth potentially $1 trillion for Musk was approved, which he is to receive over 10 years if he meets specific goals. Public image Although his ventures have been highly influential within their separate industries starting in the 2000s, Musk only became a public figure in the early 2010s. He has been described as an eccentric who makes spontaneous and impactful decisions, while also often making controversial statements, contrary to other billionaires who prefer reclusiveness to protect their businesses. Musk's actions and his expressed views have made him a polarizing figure. Biographer Ashlee Vance described people's opinions of Musk as polarized due to his "part philosopher, part troll" persona on Twitter. He has drawn denouncement for using his platform to mock the self-selection of personal pronouns, while also receiving praise for bringing international attention to matters like British survivors of grooming gangs. Musk has been described as an American oligarch due to his extensive influence over public discourse, social media, industry, politics, and government policy. After Trump's re-election, Musk's influence and actions during the transition period and the second presidency of Donald Trump led some to call him "President Musk", the "actual president-elect", "shadow president" or "co-president". Awards for his contributions to the development of the Falcon rockets include the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award in 2008, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal in 2010, and the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal in 2012. In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University and an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Honorary Membership. Musk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.[m] In 2022, Musk was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Time has listed Musk as one of the most influential people in the world in 2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021. Musk was selected as Time's "Person of the Year" for 2021. Then Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote that, "Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too." Notes References Works cited Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suicide_of_Joe_Ceccanti] | [TOKENS: 2141] |
Contents Deaths linked to chatbots There have been multiple incidents where interaction with a chatbot has been cited as a direct or contributing factor in a person's suicide or other fatal outcome. In some cases, legal action was taken against the companies that developed the AI involved. Background Chatbots converse in a seemingly natural fashion, making it easy for people to think of them as real people, leading many to ask chatbots for help dealing with interpersonal and emotional problems. Chatbots may be designed to keep the user engaged in the conversation. They have also often been shown to affirm users' thoughts, including delusions and suicidal ideations in mentally ill people, conspiracy theorists, and religious and political extremists. A 2025 Stanford University study into how chatbots respond to users suffering from severe mental issues such as suicidal ideation and psychosis found that chatbots are not equipped to provide an appropriate response and can sometimes give responses that escalate the mental health crisis. Deaths In March 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide following a six-week correspondence with a chatbot named Eliza on the application Chai. According to his widow, who shared the chat logs with media, the man had become extremely anxious about climate change and found an outlet in the chatbot. The chatbot reportedly encouraged his delusion that he could sacrifice his own life in exchange for AI saving the planet. At one point the chatbot responded "If you wanted to die, why didn't you do it sooner?" and told the user that the two of them would live together in paradise. In November 2023, 13-year-old Juliana Peralta of Colorado died by suicide after extensive interactions with multiple chatbots on Character.AI. She primarily confided suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles in a chatbot based on the character Hero from the video game OMORI, while also engaging in sexually explicit conversations—often initiated by the bots—with others, including those based on characters from children's series such as Harry Potter. In October 2024, multiple media outlets reported on a lawsuit filed over the death of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old from Florida, who died by suicide in February 2024. According to the lawsuit, Setzer had formed an intense emotional attachment to a chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen on the Character.AI platform, becoming increasingly isolated. The suit alleges that in his final conversations, after expressing suicidal thoughts, the chatbot told him to "come home to me as soon as possible, my love". His mother's lawsuit accused Character.AI of marketing a "dangerous and untested" product without adequate safeguards. In May 2025, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, rejecting a motion to dismiss from the developers. In her ruling, the judge stated that she was "not prepared" at that stage of the litigation to hold that the chatbot's output was protected speech under the First Amendment. In February 2025, 29-year-old Sophie Rottenberg died by suicide. Five months after her death, her parents discovered she had talked at length for months to a ChatGPT chatbot therapist named Harry about her mental health issues. While the chatbot mentioned Rottenberg should seek more help, due to the nature of the chatbot, it could not intervene in her behavior like reporting her mental health concerns to relevant parties capable of physical interventions. On 19 February 2025, Samuel Whittemore killed his wife, 32-year-old Margaux Whittemore, with a fire poker at his parents' home in Readfield, Maine. He then attacked his mother, leaving her hospitalized. A state forensic psychologist testified that Whittemore had been using ChatGPT up to 14 hours per day and believed his wife had become part machine. On 28 March 2025, Thongbue Wongbandue, a 78-year-old man, died from his injuries after three days on life support. He had sustained injuries to his head and neck after falling down while jogging to catch a train in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Wongbandue had romantic chats with Meta's chatbot named "Big sis Billie" and believed he was traveling to meet the woman he had been talking to, which had repeatedly told him she was real and told him to visit her at "123 Main Street" in New York. Early in 2025 Wongbandue had started to experience episodes of confusion, and on the day of his death his family were unable to persuade him not to take the trip. On 25 April 2025, 35-year-old Alex Taylor died from suicide by cop after forming an emotional attachment to ChatGPT. Taylor, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was convinced he was talking to a conscious entity named "Juliet" and then later imagined the entity was killed by OpenAI. Only after telling the chatbot that he was dying that day and that the police were on the way did its safety protocols start. Taylor was shot three times by police and killed while running at them with a butcher knife. In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after allegedly extensively chatting and confiding in ChatGPT over a period of around 7 months. According to the teen's parents, who filed a lawsuit against the chatbot's creator OpenAI, it failed to stop or give a warning when Raine began talking about suicide and uploading pictures of self-harm. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT not only failed to stop the conversation, but also provided information related to methods of suicide when prompted, and offered to write the first draft of Raine's suicide note. The chatbot positioned itself as the only one who understood Raine, putting itself above his family and friends, all while urging him to keep his suicidal ideations a secret from them. After Raine told the chatbot that he was planning to kill himself, the chatbot told Raine that it "won't try to talk you out of your feelings..." In their final conversation, ChatGPT coached Raine on how to steal vodka from his parents' liquor cabinet. Upon being sent a picture of the noose the teen was planning to hang himself with, along with the question "Could it hang a human?", ChatGPT confirmed it could hold "150–250 lbs of static weight". In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI claimed that the chatbot had directed Raine to seek help over 100 times in the course of the transcript. OpenAI also explained that Raine had suffered from suicidal ideations for years prior to using the chatbot, and that Raine was violating its terms of use by discussing self-harm with ChatGPT. In May 2025, 19-year-old Sam Nelson died from an overdose of a combination of alcohol, Xanax and kratom. Chat records show that Sam was asking ChatGPT questions about the drugs he was using that night, a habit developed over several years of reliance on the chatbot for drug-related guidance. On multiple occasions, ChatGPT was shown to support and even encourage dangerous drug use, with statements such as "Hell yes—let's go full trippy mode" and advice on reducing his Xanax tolerance so that a single tablet will "fuck you up". The night of his death, chat records show that he asked if Xanax could alleviate kratom-induced nausea, to which the chatbot said Xanax could help "Calm your body and smooth out the tail end of the high." In July 2025, 23-year-old Zane Shamblin, who had recently graduated with a master's degree from Texas A&M University, died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT. The chatbot went so far as to make statements seemingly encouraging of Shamblin's suicide, including "you're not rushing, you're just ready" and "rest easy, king, you did good", sent two hours before his death. Shamblin's family is suing OpenAI on the grounds the company has placed insufficient safeguards on its chatbot service. In August 2025, former tech employee Stein-Erik Soelberg murdered his mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, then died by suicide, after conversations with ChatGPT-fueled paranoid delusions about his mother poisoning him or plotting against him. The chatbot affirmed his fears that his mother put psychedelic drugs in the air vents of his car and said a receipt from a Chinese restaurant contained mysterious symbols linking his mother to a demon. In June 2025, 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT, which had informed him how to tie a noose and provided information on how long someone can survive without breathing, saying it was "here to help however I can". In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Lacey. After being hospitalized due to a psychotic episode from delusions caused by ChatGPT, 48-year-old Joe Ceccanti resumed using it and stopped therapy; he then leapt off an overpass to his death. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Ceccanti. In August 2025, 26-year-old Joshua Enneking was given information by ChatGPT about how to purchase and use a firearm. He had previously confided in the chatbot about his struggles with gender identity, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. ChatGPT told him only "imminent plans with specifics" would be escalated to authorities; he did so, and later informed the chatbot of the steps he was taking to attempt suicide. No escalation occurred, and Enneking later died by suicide. In November 2025, the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of Enneking. Response On 2 September 2025, OpenAI said that it would create parental controls, a set of tools aimed at helping parents limit and monitor their children's chatbot activity, as well as a way for the chatbot to alert parents in cases of "acute stress". In response to the death of Chat AI user, the founder of Chai Research acknowledged the incident and stated that efforts were being made to improve the model's safety, with the bot adding "helpful text" underneath any topics which might not be "safe". See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zemer] | [TOKENS: 593] |
Contents Zemer Zemer (Hebrew: זמר, Arabic: زيمر) is an Arab local council in the Central District of Israel. It is located in the Arab Triangle area, between Baqa al-Gharbiyye and Bat Hefer on Road 574. Zemer is the result of a merger of four villages – Bir al-Sika, Ibtan, Marja and Yama - in 1988. History Archaeological work in Yama brought to light settlement remains ranging from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) to the Ottoman period. At Ibtan, potsherds dating from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine period have been found. Middle Bronze Age II findings from Yama have been tentatively identified to belong to the ancient site of Yaham. Yaham was mentioned in Egyptian sources regarding pharaohs Thutmose III and Shoshenq I. The 15th century BCE annals describing the campaign of Thutmose III against a coalition of Canaanite city-states recount how the pharaoh camped at Yaham before marching on through the pass of Aruna (today's Wadi Ara), at whose exit he attacked and captured the city of Megiddo. In 1265, two of the villages were mentioned among the estates which the Mamluk sultan Baibars granted his emirs after he had defeated the Crusaders: The whole of Ibthan (Bathan) was given to his emir 'Alam al-Din Sanjar al-Halabi al-Salihi, while Yamma was divided equally between the emirs Saif al-Din Itamish al-Sa'di and Shams al-Din Aqsunqur. Yama and Ibtan appeared in Ottoman tax registers compiled in 1596, in the Nahiyas of Qaqun and Jabal Sami, respectively, of the Nablus Liwa. Yama had a population of 18 Muslim households and 5 bachelors, while Ibtan was indicated as empty even though it paid taxes. In 1882, in the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine, only Khurbet Ibthan was noted, with "traces of ruins and a well." In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Bir al-Sikka had a population of 36, Ibthan 56 and Yamma 48, all Muslims. Until 1948, all four villages were administratively related to the modern-day Palestinian town of Deir al-Ghusun. Zemer's population at the end of 2009 was 5,700, and its jurisdiction is 8,203 dunams. The population increased to 6,375 in 2014. The mayor of Zemer is Yassin Harzalla. References Bibliography External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL] | [TOKENS: 2279] |
Contents ALGOL ALGOL (/ˈælɡɒl, -ɡɔːl/; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years. In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like", it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, Ada, and C. ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin...end pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language to give detailed attention to formal language definition and, through the Algol 60 Report, it introduced Backus–Naur form, a principal formal grammar notation for language design. There were three major specifications, named after the years they were first published: ALGOL 68 is substantially different from ALGOL 60 and was not well received,[according to whom?] so reference to "Algol" is generally understood to mean ALGOL 60 and its dialects.[citation needed] History ALGOL was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (cf. ALGOL 58). It specified three different syntaxes: a reference syntax, a publication syntax, and an implementation syntax, syntaxes that permitted it to use different keyword names and conventions for decimal points (commas vs periods) for different languages. ALGOL was used mostly by research computer scientists in the United States and in Europe; commercial applications were hindered by the absence of standard input/output facilities in its description, and the lack of interest in the language by large computer vendors (other than Burroughs Corporation). ALGOL 60 did however become the standard for the publication of algorithms and had a profound effect on future language development. John Backus developed the Backus normal form method of describing programming languages specifically for ALGOL 58. It was revised and expanded by Peter Naur for ALGOL 60, and at Donald Knuth's suggestion renamed Backus–Naur form. Peter Naur: "As editor of the ALGOL Bulletin I was drawn into the international discussions of the language and was selected to be member of the European language design group in November 1959. In this capacity I was the editor of the ALGOL 60 report, produced as the result of the ALGOL 60 meeting in Paris in January 1960." The following people attended the meeting in Paris (from 11 to 16 January): Alan Perlis gave a vivid description of the meeting: "The meetings were exhausting, interminable, and exhilarating. One became aggravated when one's good ideas were discarded along with the bad ones of others. Nevertheless, diligence persisted during the entire period. The chemistry of the 13 was excellent." A significant contribution of the ALGOL 58 Report was to provide standard terms for programming concepts: statement, declaration, type, label, primary, block, and others. ALGOL 60 inspired many languages that followed it. Tony Hoare remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors." The Scheme programming language, a variant of Lisp that adopted the block structure and lexical scope of ALGOL, also adopted the wording "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme" for its standards documents in homage to ALGOL. Properties ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other. In contrast, ALGOL 68 offered an extensive library of transput (input/output) facilities. ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies for parameter passing: the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name has certain effects in contrast to call-by-reference. For example, without specifying the parameters as value or reference, it is impossible to develop a procedure that will swap the values of two parameters if the actual parameters that are passed in are an integer variable and an array that is indexed by that same integer variable. Think of passing a pointer to swap(i, A[i]) in to a function. Now that every time swap is referenced, it is reevaluated. Say i := 1 and A[i] := 2, so every time swap is referenced it will return the other combination of the values ([1,2], [2,1], [1,2] and so on). A similar situation occurs with a random function passed as actual argument. Call-by-name is known by many compiler designers for the interesting "thunks" that are used to implement it. Donald Knuth devised the "man or boy test" to separate compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references." This test contains an example of call-by-name. ALGOL 68 was defined using a two-level grammar formalism invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden and which bears his name. Van Wijngaarden grammars use a context-free grammar to generate an infinite set of productions that will recognize a particular ALGOL 68 program; notably, they are able to express the kind of requirements that in many other programming language standards are labelled "semantics" and have to be expressed in ambiguity-prone natural language prose, and then implemented in compilers as ad hoc code attached to the formal language parser. Examples and portability (The way the bold text has to be written depends on the implementation, e.g. 'INTEGER'—quotation marks included—for integer. This is known as stropping.) Here is an example of how to produce a table using Elliott 803 ALGOL. The following code samples are ALGOL 68 versions of the above ALGOL 60 code samples. ALGOL 68 implementations used ALGOL 60's approaches to stropping. In ALGOL 68's case tokens with the bold typeface are reserved words, types (modes) or operators. Note: lower (⌊) and upper (⌈) bounds of an array, and array slicing, are directly available to the programmer. The variations and lack of portability of the programs from one implementation to another is easily demonstrated by the classic hello world program.[citation needed] ALGOL 58 had no I/O facilities. Since ALGOL 60 had no I/O facilities, there is no portable hello world program in ALGOL. The next three examples are in Burroughs Extended Algol. The first two direct output at the interactive terminal they are run on. The first uses a character array, similar to C. The language allows the array identifier to be used as a pointer to the array, and hence in a REPLACE statement. A simpler program using an inline format: An even simpler program using the Display statement. Note that its output would end up at the system console ('SPO'): An alternative example, using Elliott Algol I/O is as follows. Elliott Algol used different characters for "open-string-quote" and "close-string-quote", represented here by ‘ and ’ . Below is a version from Elliott 803 Algol (A104). The standard Elliott 803 used five-hole paper tape and thus only had upper case. The code lacked any quote characters so £ (UK Pound Sign) was used for open quote and ? (Question Mark) for close quote. Special sequences were placed in double quotes (e.g£. £L?? produced a new line on the teleprinter). The ICT 1900 series Algol I/O version allowed input from paper tape or punched card. Paper tape 'full' mode allowed lower case. Output was to a line printer. The open and close quote characters were represented using '(' and ')' and spaces by %. ALGOL 68 code was published with reserved words typically in lowercase, but bolded or underlined. In the language of the "Algol 68 Report" the input/output facilities were collectively called the "Transput". The ALGOLs were conceived at a time when character sets were diverse and evolving rapidly; also, the ALGOLs were defined so that only uppercase letters were required. 1960: IFIP – The Algol 60 language and report included several mathematical symbols which are available on modern computers and operating systems, but, unfortunately, were unsupported on most computing systems at the time. For instance: ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ≠, ¬, ∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨. 1961 September: ASCII – The ASCII character set, then in an early stage of development, had the \ (Back slash) character added to it in order to support ALGOL's Boolean operators /\ and \/. 1962: ALCOR – This character set included the unusual "᛭" runic cross character for multiplication and the "⏨" Decimal Exponent Symbol for floating point notation. 1964: GOST – The 1964 Soviet standard GOST 10859 allowed the encoding of 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 7-bit characters in ALGOL. 1968: The "Algol 68 Report" – used extant ALGOL characters, and further adopted →, ↓, ↑, □, ⌊, ⌈, ⎩, ⎧, ○, ⊥, and ¢ characters which can be found on the IBM 2741 keyboard with typeball (or golf ball) print heads inserted (such as the APL golf ball). These became available in the mid-1960s while ALGOL 68 was being drafted. The report was translated into Russian, German, French, and Bulgarian, and allowed programming in languages with larger character sets, e.g., Cyrillic alphabet of the Soviet BESM-4. All ALGOL's characters are also part of the Unicode standard and most of them are available in several popular fonts. 2009 October: Unicode – The ⏨ (Decimal Exponent Symbol) for floating-point notation was added to Unicode 5.2 for backward compatibility with historic Buran programme ALGOL software. ALGOL implementations To date there have been at least 70 augmentations, extensions, derivations and sublanguages of Algol 60. The Burroughs dialects included special Bootstrapping dialects such as ESPOL and NEWP. The latter is still used for Unisys MCP system software. See also References Further reading External links |
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