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On 10 February 1258, Baghdad was captured by the Mongols led by Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan ("Chingiz Khan"), during the siege of Baghdad. Many quarters were ruined by fire, siege, or looting. The Mongols massacred most of the city's inhabitants, including the caliph Al-Musta'sim, and destroyed large sections of the city. The canals and dykes forming the city's irrigation system were also destroyed. During this time, in Baghdad, Christians and Shia were tolerated, while Sunnis were treated as enemies. The sack of Baghdad put an end to the Abbasid Caliphate. It has been argued that this marked an end to the Islamic Golden Age and served a blow from which Islamic civilization never fully recovered.
At this point, Baghdad was ruled by the Ilkhanate, a breakaway state of the Mongol Empire, ruling from Iran. In August 1393, Baghdad was occupied by the Central Asian Turkic conqueror Timur ("Tamerlane"), by marching there in only eight days from Shiraz. Sultan Ahmad Jalayir fled to Syria, where the Mamluk Sultan Barquq protected him and killed Timur's envoys. Timur left the Sarbadar prince Khwaja Mas'ud to govern Baghdad, but he was driven out when Ahmad Jalayir returned.
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In 1401, Baghdad was again sacked, by Timur, a Central Asian Turko-Mongol figure. When his forces took Baghdad, he spared almost no one, and ordered that each of his soldiers bring back two severed human heads. Baghdad became a provincial capital controlled by the Mongol Jalayirid (1400–1411), Turkic Kara Koyunlu (1411–1469), Turkic Ak Koyunlu (1469–1508), and the Iranian Safavid (1508–1534) dynasties.
Ottoman and Mamluks (16th–19th centuries).
The Safavids took control of the city in 1509 under the leadership of Shah Ismail I. It remained under Safavid rule until the Ottomans seized it in 1535, but the Safavids regained control in 1624. A massacre occurred when the Shah's army entered the city. It remained under Safavid rule until 1639 when Sultan Murad IV recaptured it in 1638.
In 1534, Baghdad was captured by the Ottoman Empire. Under the Ottomans, Baghdad continued into a period of decline, partially as a result of the enmity between its rulers and Iranian Safavids, which did not accept the Sunni control of the city. Between 1623 and 1638, it returned to Iranian rule before falling back into Ottoman hands. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague and cholera, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out. The city became part of an eyalet and then a vilayet.
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For a time, Baghdad had been the largest city in the Middle East. The city saw relative revival in the latter part of the 18th century, under Mamluk government. Direct Ottoman rule was reimposed by Ali Rıza Pasha in 1831. From 1851 to 1852 and from 1861 to 1867, Baghdad was governed, under the Ottoman Empire by Mehmed Namık Pasha. The Nuttall Encyclopedia reports the 1907 population of Baghdad as 185,000.
The city's municipality was established in 1868, and Ibrahim al-Daftari was appointed its first mayor. The year 1869 is of great importance in the history of Baghdad in the Ottoman era, as it was the beginning of what can be considered a distinct era of the Ottoman eras, the foundations of which were laid by Governor Midhat Pasha, who implemented a number of reform systems and laws that the state legislated during the era of reforms and reconstruction, which was called the Tanzimat era. The overall importance of Baghdad to the Ottomans was that they made the headquarters of the Sixth Corps of the Ottoman Army in the city.
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By the 19th century, Baghdad emerged as a leading center for Jewish learning. The city had Jewish population of over 6,000 and had numerous yeshivas. The Jewish population has grown so rapidly that by 1884, there were 30,000 Jews in Baghdad and by 1900, around 50,000, comprising over a quarter of the city's total population. Large-scale Jewish immigration from Kurdistan to Baghdad continued throughout this period. By the mid-19th century, the religious infrastructure of Baghdad grew to include a large yeshiva which trained up to sixty rabbis at time. Religious scholarship flourished in Baghdad, which produced great rabbis, such as Joseph Hayyim ben Eliahu Mazal-Tov, known as the Ben Ish Chai (1834–1909) or Rabbi Abdallah Somekh (1813–1889). During this time, Baghdadi Jews established a successful trade diaspora in China, India and Singapore.
Modern era (1917–2000).
Baghdad and southern Iraq remained under Ottoman rule until 1917, when they were captured by the British during World War I. A revolt errupted against the British rule in Iraq. It was retaliated by air bombing campaigns by the British forces in 1920, where thousands of residents were killed. In 1920, Baghdad became the capital of the Mandatory Iraq under the Mandate of Mesopotamia, with several architectural and planning projects commissioned to reinforce this administration. After receiving independence in 1932, the city became capital of the new Kingdom of Iraq. During this period, the substantial Jewish community (probably exceeding 100,000 people) comprised between a quarter and a third of the city's population, who were pioneer in trade and commerce.
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On 1 April 1941, members of the "Golden Square" and Rashid Ali al-Gaylani staged a coup in Baghdad and installed a pro-German and pro-Italian government to replace the pro-British government of Regent Abd al-Ilah. On 31 May, after the resulting Anglo-Iraqi War and after al-Gaylani and his government had fled and the Mayor of Baghdad surrendered to the British and Commonwealth forces. On 1–2 June, during the ensuing power vacuum, Jewish residents were attacked following rumors they had aided the British. In what became known as the Farhud, over 180 Jews were killed, 1,000 injured and hundreds of Jewish properties were ransacked. Between 300 and 400 non-Jewish rioters were killed in the attempt to quell the violence. Between 1950 and 1951, Jews were targeted in series of bombings. According to Avi Shlaim, Israel was behind bombings, which is also believed by the majority of the Iraqis.
The city's population grew from an estimated 145,000 in 1900 to 580,000 in 1950. A development plan came during the reign of King Faisal II. However, the project was ceased, when new the government came to power. On 14 July 1958, members of the Iraqi Army, under Abdul-Karim Qasim, staged a coup to topple the Kingdom of Iraq. King Faisal, former Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, former Regent Prince Abd al-Ilah, members of the royal family, and others were brutally killed during the coup. Many of the victim's bodies were then dragged through the streets of Baghdad. Qasim adopted new principles to develop the city. New projects such as Al–Thawra and New Baghdad ("Baghdad al-Jadeeda") came under his rule. In 1960, Baghdad hosted an international conference with dignitaries from Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, that founded Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
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During the 1970s, Baghdad experienced a period of prosperity and growth because of a sharp increase in the price of petroleum, which is Iraq's main export. Saddam Hussein had vision of modernizing Baghdad and reviving its Abbasid era legacy, when the city was a global hub of trade and knowledge. New infrastructure including modern sewerage, water, highway facilities, and airport were built during this period. The master plans of the city in 1967 and 1973 were delivered by the Polish planning office Miastoprojekt-Kraków, mediated by Polservice. Saddam sponsored numerous architectural and artwork events, which attracted some of the world’s popular architects. Museums, government offices, palaces, convention centers and luxurious hotels such as Sheraton Ishtar and Oberoi Babylon were built. The city had a vibrant modern culture and lifestyle. Baghdad was called as "the Nuremberg of 1930s" and "Las Vegas of the 1980s".
However, the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s was a difficult time for the city, as money was diverted by Saddam Hussein to the army and thousands of residents were killed. Iran launched a number of missile attacks against Baghdad in retaliation for the Iraqi Army's continuous bombardments of Tehran's residential districts. Power plants and oil refineries in Baghdad were destroyed by the Iranian forces. In 1981, a nuclear reactor near Baghdad was destroyed in an airstrike by Israel. The city was attacked numerous times between 1986 and 1988 by the Iranian forces. Iran also fired numerous rockets towards the city, landing dangerously close to Al-Rashid Street and the Jewish Quarter. In 1983, a Non-Alignment Movement summit was proposed to be held in Baghdad. However, due to security concerns and war situations, the summit was hosted New Delhi.
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During the Gulf War, the multinational forces preceded with aerial bombings and airstrikes in Baghdad, which was described as "fireworks". Air defenses, bridges, communications systems, chemical weapons facilities, tanks and artillery were damaged. Oil refinery and airport were targeted. On 13 February 1991, an aerial bombing attack in Amiriya killed at least 408 civilians. Shortly after the war ended in 1991, ethnic Kurds and Shi'ite Muslims in Iraq led uprisings against the government. Baghdad was sight of clashes between the Shi'ite rebels and Republican Guard led by Qusay Hussein. Another uprising ocurred in 1999, when Shi'a jurist Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr was assassinated in Najaf. The Shi'a community accused the government for the assassination. Unrest began as large scale protests took place in Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad, specially Saddam City. The Republican Guard deployed in the district suppressed the demonstration, leaving between 27 and 100 dead. Later, the city was targeted more by the United States and the United Kingdom in 1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001.
21st century (2001–present).
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The Gulf War and subsequent sanctions on Iraq led decline of Baghdad. By the end of the 1990s, the government made improvements in Iraq's economy and infrastructure. In 2000, a broad initiative came to restore Baghdad's cultural heritage. Older mosques, churches, "mandis" and synagogues were restored and other historical structures were rebuilt. Saddam Hussein continued his architectural vision, which boosted further after the war. A large number of presidential palaces, and government symbolic structures were built. These structures further beautified Baghdad. As a part of Saddam's Faith Campaign, numerous mosques such as Umm al-Qura Mosque were built. However, these efforts were interrupted by the war which began in 2003.
In March 2003, the United States-led coalition invaded Iraq. The coalition forces launched massive aerial assaults. Following the fall of Baghdad on 09 April, the government lost its power. A statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdous Square, symbolizing the end of his rule. Many of the former government officials were either killed or captured by the forces or locals, while others managed to escape and flee. After the overthrow the government, the Coalition Provisional Authority was formed. It designed new municipal systems and ordered the expulsion of former Ba'ath Party members, that caused a power vacuum. Also two minor riots took place in 2003, on 21 July and 2 October, causing some disturbance in the population. Shortly after the invasion and toppling of the government, an anti-coalition insurgancy began, consisting of former government officers and Islamist groups.
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Two major bombings took place at Jordanian Embassy and Canal Hotel. Religious and ethnic minorities,— Christians, Mandaeans, and Jews, began leaving the city out of fear of being targeted in attacks, as they were subjected to kidnappings, death threats, and violence. Priceless collection of artifacts in the National Museum of Iraq was looted by people and thousands of ancient manuscripts in the National Library were destroyed. Iraqi Film Archive building was bombed. The Haifa Street helicopter incident on 12 September gained controversial attraction. On the eve of Ashura on 2 March 2004, one of the deadliest bombing took place in Baghdad, that killed at least 80–100 were killed and injured 200 Shi'a Muslims. In 2005, over 965 people were killed in Al-Aimmah Bridge near Al-Kadhimiya Mosque. Attempts were made to rescue people, specially from the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, which is today seen as a symbol of unity.
Coinciding the execution of Saddam Hussein in 2006, violence increased during the civil war between Shi'ite militias and Sunni insurgents. Shi'ite militias were Muqtada as-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) and the Iranian-backed Special Groups and among Sunni insurgents, the largest was Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Sunni insurgents established their bases Mansour, Adhamiyah and Doura. Mansour district borders the Shi'ite populated Kadhimiyah and East Rasheed. Before 2003, it was home to wealthy Sunnis and Ba’athist officials. Hence, when the regime fell, it quickly became a stronghold for the Sunni insurgency. While Shia militias were based in Sadr City, Kadhimiyah, and West Rasheed, with Bab Al-Sharqi becoming stronghold for the Mahdi Army. Later, they also expanded into the surrounding districts of eastern Baghdad. 9 Nissan, Karadah, and Rusafa were dominated by Shias.
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Under Operation Imposing Law ("Operation Fardh al-Qanoon"), the coalition forces and post-2003 Iraqi Army successfully defeated Al-Qaeda and targeted Shia militias. By 2009, the level of violence decreased. However, violence continued. The period surrounding Provincial Elections was remarkably peaceful. But Baghdad witnessed an uptick in attacks in early April 2009, when a series of suicide bomb and vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attacks were perpetrated across the capital. The war and subsequent occupation ended in 2011, that caused huge damage to Baghdad's transportation, power, and sanitary infrastructure. It resulted massive civilian causalities, whose number is disputed.
Though the war ended, but an Islamist insurgency lasted until 2013. Baghdad experienced anti-government protests by Sunnis during the Arab Spring. It was followed by another war from 2013 to 2017 and a low-level insurgency from 2017, which included suicide bombings in January 2018 and January 2021. It has been site of clashes between the citizens and the government. The city attracted global media attention on 3 January 2020, when Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad Airport. In December 2015, Baghdad was selected by UNESCO as the first Arab city of the center of literary creativity.
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Geography.
The city is located on a vast plain bisected by the Tigris river. The Tigris splits Baghdad in half, with the eastern half being called "Risafa" and the Western half known as "Karkh". The land on which the city is built is almost entirely flat and low-lying, being of quaternary alluvial origin due to periodic large flooding of the Tigris river. The Diyala river is a tributary of the Tigris, flowing southeast of the city and bordering its eastern suburbs.
Baghdad is northwest of Basra, south of Mosul, south of Erbil and northeast of Karbala. Located to the south is Mahmoudiyah, which serves as the gateway to Baghdad.
Climate.
Baghdad has a hot desert climate (Köppen "BWh"), featuring extremely hot, prolonged, dry summers and mild to cool, slightly wet, short winters. In the summer, from June through August, the average maximum temperature is as high as and accompanied by sunshine. Rainfall has been recorded on fewer than half a dozen occasions at this time of year and has never exceeded . Even at night, temperatures in summer are seldom below . Baghdad's record highest temperature of was reached on 28 July 2020. Humidity is under 50% in summer, due to Baghdad's distance from both the marshes in southern Iraq and the coasts of the Persian Gulf. Dust storms from the deserts to the west are a normal occurrence during the summer.
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Its winter temperatures are those of a hot desert climate. From December through February, Baghdad has maximum temperatures averaging , with highs possible above . Lows below freezing occur statistically a couple of times per year.
Annual rainfall, almost entirely confined to the period from November through March, averages approximately , but has been as high as and as low as . On 11 January 2008, light snow fell across Baghdad for the first time in 100 years. Snowfall was again reported on 11 February 2020, with accumulations across the city.
Governance.
Administratively, Baghdad Governorate is divided into districts which are further divided into sub-districts. Municipally, the governorate is divided into 9 municipalities, which have responsibility for local issues. Regional services, however, are coordinated and carried out by a mayor who oversees the municipalities. The governorate council is responsible for the governorate-wide policy. These official subdivisions of the city served as administrative centers for the delivery of municipal services but until 2003 had no political function. Beginning in April 2003, the U.S—controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) began the process of creating new functions for these. The process initially focused on the election of neighborhood councils in official neighborhoods, elected by neighborhood caucuses. The CPA convened a series of meetings in each neighborhood to explain local government, to describe the caucus election process and to encourage participants to spread the word and bring friends, relatives and neighbors to subsequent meetings.
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Each neighborhood process ultimately ended with a final meeting where candidates for the new neighborhood councils identified themselves and asked their neighbors to vote for them. Once all 88 neighborhood councils were in place, each neighborhood council elected representatives from among their members to serve on one of the city's nine district councils. The number of neighborhood representatives on a district council is based upon the neighborhood's population. The next step was to have each of the nine district councils elect representatives from their membership to serve on the 37 member Baghdad City Council. Later, the number of official neighborhoods were increased to 89. This three tier system of local government connected the people of Baghdad to the central government through their representatives from the neighborhood, through the district, and up to the city council. The same process was used to provide representative councils for the other communities in Baghdad Province outside of the city itself. There, local councils were elected from 20 neighborhoods ("Nahia") and these councils elected representatives from their members to serve on six district councils ("Qada").
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As within the city, the district councils then elected representatives from among their members to serve on the 35 member Baghdad Regional Council. The first step in the establishment of the system of local government for Baghdad Province was the election of the Baghdad Provincial Council. As before, the representatives to the Provincial Council were elected by their peers from the lower councils in numbers proportional to the population of the districts they represent. The 41 member Provincial Council took office in February 2004 and served until national elections held in January 2005, when a new Provincial Council was elected. This system of 127 separate councils may seem overly cumbersome; however, Baghdad Province is home to approximately seven million people. At the lowest level, the neighborhood councils, each council represents an average of 75,000 people. The nine District Advisory Councils (DAC) are as follows:
The nine districts are subdivided into 89 smaller neighborhoods which may make up sectors of any of the districts above. The following is a "selection" (rather than a complete list) of these neighborhoods:
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Demographics.
Baghdad's population was estimated at 7.22 million in 2015. The surrounding metropolitan region's population is estimated to be 10,500,000. It is second largest city in the Arab world, after Cairo and fourth largest metropolitan area in the Middle East after Cairo and Tehran. At the beginning of the 21st century, some 1.5 million people migrated to Baghdad. The 2013–2017 war following the Islamic State's invasion in 2014 caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi internally displaced people to flee to the city. The city was also home to a large Jewish community and regularly visited by Sikh pilgrims from India.
Ethnicity.
The vast majority of Baghdad's population are Iraqi Arabs. Minority ethnic groups include Feyli, Kurdish, Turkmen, Assyrians, Kawliya, Circassians, Mandaeans, and Armenians. Baghdad being Iraq's primate city, attracts peeople of several ethnic background from different parts of Iraq to seize oppurtunities for work and education, as well as representatives of these communities in the government predominantly reside in Baghdad.
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Around 300,000 Kurds live in Baghdad. Among them, about 150,000 are Shi’a mostly of Luri origin. The main Kurdish neighborhood is situated in central Baghdad, known as the Quarter of Kurds ("Akd al–Akrad"). It is itself home to more than 200 Kurdish families that have lived for generations. The pre-war population of Kurds in Baghdad was recorded 500,000. However, their number decreased as violence increased in Baghdad during the wars.
Assyrians began moving to Baghdad by the mid 20th century. The historic "Assyrian Quarter" of the city – Dora, which boasted a population of 150,000 Assyrians in 2003, made up over 3% of the capital's Assyrian population then. The community has been subject to kidnappings, death threats, vandalism, and house burnings by al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups. As of the end of 2014, only 1,500 Assyrians remained in Dora and others in Karrada district. Today most of them live in Karrada in eastern Baghdad and Mansour district in the western Baghdad.
There is a significant community of Iraqi Turkmen in Baghdad, specially in the neighborhoods of Adhamiyah and Ragheba Khatun. The surrounding areas of Baghdad is also home to Kawliya community, that traces its roots from India and are predominantly Shi'a and Sunni Muslims. Although their language is Domari, most of them today speak Arabic. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the community has persecuted by militias and denied recognition. Baghdad is home to largest community of Circassians in Iraq. There is also a Circassian neighborhood in the city.
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Religion.
The majority of the citizens are Muslims with minorities of Christians, Yezidis, Jews and Mandeans also present. There are many religious centers distributed around the city including mosques, churches, synagogues and Mashkhannas cultic huts. The city historically has a predominantly Sunni population, but by the early 21st century around 52% of the city's population were Shi'ites. Sunni Muslims make up 29–34% of Iraq's population and they are still a majority in west and north Iraq. As early as 2003, about 20% of the population of the city was the result of mixed marriages between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Following the civil war between Sunni and Shia militia groups during the occupation of Iraq, the population of Sunnis significantly decreased as they were pushed out of many neighborhoods. Today majority of the neighborhoods are either entirely Sunni or Shi'ite. While few localities are mixed, such as Yarmouk.
Before the Iraq War in 2003, Baghdad was home to 300,000–800,000 Christians, primarily concentrated in several neighborhoods with a Christian majority, the most notable being Karrada and Dora, which had around 150,000 Christians. The Christian community in Baghdad is divided among various denominations, mainly the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Syriac Catholic Church. There is also a significant presence of followers of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church, along with the largest Armenian Apostolic and Protestant communities in Iraq, which is also located in Baghdad. The city serves as the headquarters of the Chaldean Catholic Church, with its see located in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Sorrows, while the Ancient Church of the East has its see in the Cathedral of the Virgin. Today about 100,000 Christians remained in Baghdad.
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Baghdad was once home to one of the most significant Jewish communities in the world. In 1948, the Jewish population numbered approximately 150,000, constituting 33% of the city’s population. Persecution forced most Jews to flee Iraq. Even after 1948, up to 100,000 Jews remained, which decreased. Majority of the country’s 15,000 Jews lived in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein’s rule and their population dwindled, not due to persecution but because of lifted travel restrictions that allowed many to emigrate. By 2003, Iraq still had a Jewish community of about 1,500 people, majority of whom resided in Baghdad. But the population decreased sharply after the war. Today, an estimated 160 Jews live in Baghdad out of spotlight, primarily in the old Jewish quarters of Bataween and Shorja, which was once home to vibrant Jewish community. The city was historically home to over 60 synagogues, cemeteries, and shrines, many of which were preserved before 2003. However, their condition deteriorated after the war, and only a few sites, such as the Meir Taweig Synagogue and Al-Habibiyah Jewish Cemetery, remain today.
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Beyond their traditional homelands, around Amarah and Basra, Mandeans are also found in Baghdad. By the late 20th century, Mandaeans began settling in Baghdad for better opportunities. Most of them live primarily around al-Qadisiyah and Dora, which is location to their place of worship and cultural centers. However, persecution of Mandaeans have been greatly decreased since 2003. There is also a small of community of Baha'is and Sikhs, who live in Baghdad. The Sikhs are mostly Indians. Before 2003, Baghdad was regularly visited by Sikh pilgrims from India.
Economy.
Iraq's primate city, Baghdad serves as the commercial and financial hub, home to 22% of the population, and generating 40% of the Iraq's GDP. It connects trade routes between Turkey, Syria, India, and Southeast Asia. As the capital, it hosts government institutions and state enterprises, key sources of employment. The public education system follows Ba'athist socialist ideologies, for employment in the public sector. Since 2003, the public sector has struggled to provide jobs, and the private sector hasn't grown sufficiently, leading companies to hire mainly foreigners. To address this, NGOs are establishing incubation centers in the city.
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Baghdad serves as headquarters for important companies of Iraq, such as Iraq National Oil Company, State Organization for Marketing of Oil and Iraqi Airways. Baghdad is home to large insurance companies and banks — Central Bank of Iraq, Rafidain Bank, and Rashid Bank and regional headquarters for First Abu Dhabi Bank, Fransabank and Saudi National Bank. Multinational companies such as Honeywell, Shell, General Electric, SalamAir and Robert Bosch GmbH have established their regional base. Baghdad is also home to Iraq Stock Exchange, that was established in 1992. Most of these establishments are located in Al-Rasheed Street, Karrada and Mansour district.
It was once one of the main destinations in the region with a wealth of cultural attractions. Tourism has diminished due to wars, but in recent years the city has a revival in tourism although still facing challenges. There are numerous historic, scientific and artistic museums in Baghdad. Religious tourism in Baghdad has grown since 2003, with sites like Al-Kadhimiya Mosque, Abu Hanifa Mosque, Mausoleum of Abdul-Qadir Gilani, and Buratha Mosque attracting visitors from Iran, Pakistan, and India, while non-religious tourists mainly come from Turkey, France, and the United States. Around 1 million people visit the city annually for religious purposes. The pilgrims are both Shia and Sunni Muslims.
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The city contains the factories of carpets, leather and textiles, workshops, cement and tobacco factories. Industrial areas extend from the city center to outside and suburbs in the metropolitan area, such as Taji and northern Baghdad. Subsequently, it has produced a wide variety of consumer and industrial goods, including processed foods and beverages, clothes, footwear, wood products, furniture, paper and printed material, bricks, chemicals, plastics, electrical equipment, and metal and nonmetallic products. Bismayah, southeast of Baghdad, is home to world's largest precast factory. In agricultural aspect, palm groves are spread in the city, and many of its people depends on the cultivation of many yields.
Baghdad, like other provinces such as Babylon, Karbala and Qadissiya, contains metals such as aluminum, ceramics, nickel, manganese and chromium, whose size is not yet known, being recently discovered by local Iraqi cadres lacking experience and mechanisms to determine the size of these explorations. An oilfield is located in eastern Baghdad. It was believed that the quantities of oil is modest, but the drilling disclosed that its size exceeds the initial estimates, and has northern extensions in the province of Salah al-Din, and southern province of Wasit. The city is also home to Dora Refinery, a large oil refinery in Dora, which is the 3rd largest in Iraq in terms of production. The production of it exceeds per day, while its total production estimated if it was developed up to per day.
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Most reconstruction efforts have been devoted to the restoration and repair of badly damaged urban infrastructure. Some of the private projects includes Baghdad Renaissance Plan, Sindbad Hotel Complex and Conference Center, and Central Bank of Iraq Tower. Other project proposed includes Romantic Island and Baghdad Gate.<ref name="MSNBC/id/264259112"></ref> Numerous projects have been also impacted due to corruption. According to a report published by CNBC, there are around 150 entertainment projects planned for the city. Many of them were delayed due to government policies. Also Baghdad has witnessed the opening of dozens of tourist complexes annually with areas reaching in addition to some major tourism projects with areas exceeding with the aim of investment combining trade and tourism as a distinctive economic model. In recent years, Baghdad has also adopted modern economic trends like, establishment of startup hubs, office space and incubation center, as well as development of shopping malls such Baghdad Mall and Dijlah Village.
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Transportation.
Baghdad lacks substantial public transportation, and taxis are the primary means of transportation in the city. Roads in Baghdad are noted to be especially congested and this began since 2003. According to MP Jassim Al-Bukhati in 2021, "Baghdad's roads are designed to accommodate 700,000 cars, while now there are between 2.5 and 3 million cars on them". It is because since 2003, import of car has increased. Since then water transport from river have become a popular mode of transport. Use of boats crossing across the river saves time for travelers to escape congestion. Private organizations are working to improve transport system.
Among the major bridges connecting Karkh and Rusafa are 14th of July Bridge, Al-Aimmah Bridge and Al-Sarafiya Bridge. In 2023, the authorities announced to build 19 bridges in Baghdad. It is a part of its post-war reconstruction efforts, as many bridges were damaged during the war. Streets, avenues and alleys plays an important role in creating network of transport. Al-Sa'doun Street stretches from Liberation Square to Masbah. Abu Nuwas Street runs along the Tigris from the Jumhouriya Bridge to 14 July Suspended Bridge. Damascus Street goes from Damascus Square to the Baghdad Airport Road. Hilla Road runs from the north into Baghdad via Yarmouk. Mutanabbi Street is a street with numerous bookshops, named after the 10th century Iraqi poet Al-Mutanabbi. Caliphs Street is the site of historical mosques and churches.
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Air transport.
Iraqi Airways, the national airline of Iraq, operates out of Baghdad International Airport in Baghdad. The airport was opened by Saddam Hussein in 1982 as Saddam International Airport. It was closed as result of the Gulf War and subsequent embargo. The airport was reopened in August 2000. The airport adopted its current name after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Planned Baghdad Metro.
The Baghdad Metro project was first proposed during the 1970s but did not come to fruition due to wars and sanctions. After the Iraq war, Iraqi authorities intended to revive the project, but it was again delayed due to domestic instability. In 2019, it was reported that Korean Hyundai and French Alstom would be building the metro. However, the planned construction did not happen.
As of February 2024, the current plan consisted of fully electric and automated (driverless) trains running on an extensive railway network including an underground railway portion as well as an elevated railway. The proposed Baghdad Metro system includes seven main lines with a total length of more than 148 kilometres, 64 metro stations, four workshops and depots for trains, several operations control centers (OCC) and seven main power stations (MPS) with a capacity of 250 mega-watts, and several Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) towers. The metro will be equipped with CCTV and internet as well as USB ports for charging. Special compartments will be allocated for women and children as well as seats for people with special needs, pregnant women, and the elderly. The metro stations will be connected to other public transport networks such as buses and taxis, and 10 parking spaces will be available for commuters. The planned operating speed will be 80–140 km/hour with an estimated 3.25 million riders per day.
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In July 2024, it was announced that an international consortium of German French, Spanish, and Turkish companies was awarded $17.5 billion contract to construct Baghdad's metro. The consortium includes Alstom, Systra, SNCF, Talgo, Deutsche Bank and SENER. The consortium was then to negotiate the technical, financial and operational details of the project which is now estimated to be completed in May 2029.
Cityscape.
The Round City was the core of the city, during the establishment of Baghdad. It ceased to exist, as a result of the Mongolian siege. Urban features such as streets, avenues, alleyways and squares clusters a large number of landmarks, which itself creates an identity of cultural or intellectual hubs and define the beauty of Baghdad.
Al-Rasheed Street is one of the most significant landmarks in Baghdad. Located in al-Rusafa area, the street was an artistic, intellectual and cultural center for many Baghdadis. It also included many prominent theaters and nightclubs such as the Crescent Theatre where Egyptian Singer Umm Kulthum sang during her visit in 1932 as well as the Chakmakji Company that recorded the music of various Arab singers. The street also contains famous and well-known landmarks including the ancient Haydar-Khana Mosque as well as numerous well-known cafés such as al-Zahawi Café and the Brazilian Café.
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Mutanabbi Street is located near the old quarter of Baghdad; at Al-Rasheed Street. It is the historic center of Baghdadi book-selling, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. It was named after the 10th-century classical Iraqi poet Al-Mutanabbi. This street is well established for bookselling and has often been referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literacy and intellectual community. Firdos Square is a public open space in Baghdad and the location of two of the best-known hotels, the Palestine Hotel and the Sheraton Ishtar, which are both also the tallest buildings in Baghdad. The square was the site of the statue of Saddam Hussein that was pulled down by the coalition forces in a widely televised event during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Qushla or Qishla is a public square and the historical complex located in al-Rusafa neighborhood at the riverbank of Tigris. The place and its surroundings is where the historical features and cultural capitals of Baghdad are concentrated, from the Mutanabbi Street, Abbasid-era palace and bridges, Ottoman-era mosques to the Mustansariyah Madrasa. The square developed during the Ottoman era as a military barracks. Today, it is a place where the citizens of Baghdad find leisure such as reading poetry in gazebos. It is characterized by the iconic clock tower which was donated by George V. The entire area is submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Tentative list.
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Architecture.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam Hussein's government spent a lot of money on new monuments, mosques, palaces and hotels. The Street is also notable for its architecture and aesthetic which was inspired by Renaissance architecture and also includes the famous Iraqi shanasheel.
Landmarks.
The National Museum of Iraq whose collection of artifacts was looted during the invasion, and the iconic Hands of Victory arches. Multiple political parties are in discussions as to whether the arches should remain as historical monuments or be dismantled. Thousands of ancient manuscripts in the National Library were destroyed under Saddam's command.
Grand Festivities Square is the main square where public celebrations are held and is also the home to three important monuments commemorating Iraqi's fallen soldiers and victories in war; namely Al-Shaheed Monument, the Victory Arch and the Unknown Soldier's Monument. Al-Shaheed Monument, also known as the Martyr's Memorial, is a monument dedicated to the Iraqi soldiers who died in the Iran–Iraq War. However, now it is generally considered by Iraqis to be for all of the martyrs of Iraq, especially those allied with Iran and Syria fighting ISIS, not just of the Iran–Iraq War. The monument was opened in 1983, and was designed by the Iraqi architect Saman Kamal and the Iraqi sculptor and artist Ismail Fatah Al Turk. Though these works symbolize the ruling entity. Neverthelsess, they have remained part of architectural legacy, which beautified Baghdad.
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Masjid Al-Kadhimain is a shrine that is located in the Kādhimayn suburb of Baghdad. It contains the tombs of the seventh and ninth Twelver Shi'ite Imams, Musa al-Kadhim and Muhammad at-Taqi respectively, upon whom the title of "Kādhimayn" ("Two who swallow their anger") was bestowed. Many Shi'ites travel to the mosque from far away places to commemorate those imams. A'dhamiyyah is a predominantly Sunni area with a Mosque that is associated with the Sunni Imam Abu Hanifa. The name of "Al-Aʿẓamiyyah" is derived from Abu Hanifa's title, "al-Imām al-Aʿẓam" (the Great Imam).
The historic Jewish quarters of Bataween and Shorja is home to numerous sites that are associated with Jews. These sites were preserved during the Ba'athist regime. However, after 2003, many of them are in poor conditions. Meir Taweig Synagogue is the only active synagogue of Iraq, which have a large compound, that consist of community center, Jewish school and library. Daniel Market ("Souq Danial"), which was named after Menahem Saleh Daniel, still bears the same name. It is popular for fabrics and shoes. The Great Synagogue of Baghdad, the oldest synagogue of Iraq, is now restored as a museum. Al-Habibiyah Cemetery is the largest Jewish cemetery in Baghdad, home to around 1,000 graves. The Tomb of Joshua, now a Muslim shrine, is believed to be the burial site of Joshua. Shaykh Yitzhak Tomb and Synagogue was preserved until 2003. Today it is neglected. Other sites includes House of Sassoon Eskell and library of Mir Basri.
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The Sabian–Mandaean Mandi of Baghdad is a Mandaen temple in al-Qadisiyyah. It is the main community center for Mandaeans in Iraq. Plans are underway to demolish and build a larger one to accommodate more worshippers. A cultural institute for Mandeans is also in Baghdad. The city is home to Baba Nanak Shrine, a sacred site in Sikhism. It was destroyed during the Iraq War in 2003. In the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad, was the house of Baháʼu'lláh, (Prophet Founder of the Baha'i Faith) also known as the "Most Great House" (Bayt-i-Azam) and the "House of God", where Baháʼu'lláh mostly resided from 1853 to 1863. It is considered a holy place and a place of pilgrimage by Baha'is according to their "Most Holy Book". On 23 June 2013, the house was destroyed under unclear circumstances.
Baghdad Zoo used to be the largest zoological park in the Middle East. Within eight days following the 2003 invasion, however, only 35 of the 650 animals in the facility survived. This was a result of theft of some animals for human food, and starvation of caged animals that had no food. Conservationist Lawrence Anthony and some of the zoo keepers cared for the animals and fed the carnivores with donkeys they had bought locally. Eventually Paul Bremer, Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the invasion, ordered protection for the zoo and enlisted U.S. engineers to help reopen the facility. Al-Zawraa Park is also part of the zoo, which is main urban park of the city.
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Education.
The House of Wisdom was a major academy and public center in Baghdad. The Mustansiriya Madrasa was established in 1227 by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir. The name was changed to al-Mustansiriya University in 1963. The University of Baghdad is the largest university in Iraq and the second largest in the Arab world. Prior to the Gulf War, multiple international schools operated in Baghdad, including:
Culture.
Baghdad has always played a significant role in the broader Arab cultural sphere, contributing several significant writers, musicians and visual artists. Famous Arab poets and singers such as Nizar Qabbani, Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Salah Al-Hamdani, Ilham al-Madfai and others have performed for the city. The dialect of Arabic spoken in Baghdad today differs from that of other large urban centers in Iraq, having features more characteristic of nomadic Arabic dialects (Versteegh, "The Arabic Language"). It is possible that this was caused by the repopulating of the city with rural residents after the multiple sackings of the late Middle Ages. For poetry written about Baghdad, see Reuven Snir (ed.), "Baghdad: The City in Verse" (Harvard, 2013). Baghdad joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a City of Literature in December 2015.
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Some of the important cultural institutions in the city include the National Theater, which was looted during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but efforts are underway to restore the theater. The live theater industry received a boost during the 1990s, when UN sanctions limited the import of foreign films. As many as 30 movie theaters were reported to have been converted to live stages, producing a wide range of comedies and dramatic productions. Institutions offering cultural education in Baghdad include The Music and Ballet School of Baghdad and the Institute of Fine Arts Baghdad. The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra is a government funded symphony orchestra in Baghdad. The INSO plays primarily classical European music, as well as original compositions based on Iraqi and Arab instruments and music. Mandaeans had cultural club in Al-Zawraa, where poetry evenings and cultural seminars were held, attended by poets, writers, artists, officials, and dignitaries of the communities. There is also a social cultural center of Mandaeans at al-Qadisiyyah. Baghdad Jewish Community Center is located in Al-Rashid Street.
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Baghdad is also home to a number of museums which housed artifacts and relics of ancient civilization; many of these were stolen, and the museums looted, during the widespread chaos immediately after United States forces entered the city.
During occupation of Iraq, AFN Iraq ("Freedom Radio") broadcast news and entertainment within Baghdad, among other locations. There is also a private radio station called "Dijlah" (named after the Arabic word for the Tigris River) that was created in 2004 as Iraq's first independent talk radio station. Radio Dijlah offices, in the Jamia neighborhood of Baghdad, have been attacked on several occasions.
Sport.
Baghdad is home to some of the most successful football (soccer) teams in Iraq, the biggest being Al-Shorta (Police), Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya (Air Force), Al-Zawraa, and Al-Talaba (Students). The largest stadium in Baghdad is Al-Shaab Stadium, which was opened in 1966. In recent years, the capital has seen the building of several football stadiums which are meant be opened in near future. The city has also had a strong tradition of horse racing ever since World War I, known to Baghdadis simply as 'Races'. There are reports of pressures by the Islamists to stop this tradition due to the associated gambling. |
Outline of biology
Biology – The natural science that studies life. Areas of focus include structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
Chemical basis.
Outline of biochemistry
Cells.
Outline of cell biology
Genetics.
Outline of Genetics
Evolution.
Outline of evolution (see also evolutionary biology)
Ecology.
Outline of ecology
See also.
Related outlines
Journals |
British thermal unit
The British thermal unit (Btu) is a measure of heat, which is a form of energy. It was originally defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It is also part of the United States customary units. The SI unit for energy is the joule (J); one Btu equals about 1,055 J (varying within the range of 1,054–1,060 J depending on the specific definition of Btu; see below).
While units of heat are often supplanted by energy units in scientific work, they are still used in some fields. For example, in the United States the price of natural gas is quoted in dollars per the amount of natural gas that would give 1 million Btu (1 "MMBtu") of heat energy if burned.
Definitions.
A Btu was originally defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of liquid water by one degree Fahrenheit at a constant pressure of one atmospheric unit. There are several different definitions of the Btu that differ slightly. This reflects the fact that the temperature change of a mass of water due to the addition of a specific amount of heat (calculated in energy units, usually joules) depends slightly upon the water's initial temperature. As seen in the table below, definitions of the Btu based on different water temperatures vary by up to 0.5%.
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Prefixes.
Units of kBtu are used in building energy use tracking and heating system sizing. Energy Use Index (EUI) represents kBtu per square foot of conditioned floor area. "k" stands for 1,000.
The unit MBtu is used in natural gas and other industries to indicate 1,000 Btu. However, there is an ambiguity in that the metric system (SI) uses the prefix "M" to indicate 'Mega-', one million (1,000,000). Even so, "MMBtu" is often used to indicate one million Btu particularly in the oil and gas industry.
Energy analysts accustomed to the metric "k" ('kilo-') for 1,000 are more likely to use MBtu to represent one million, especially in documents where M represents one million in other energy or cost units, such as MW, MWh and $.
The unit 'therm' is used to represent 100,000 Btu. A decatherm is 10 therms or one million Btu. The unit "quad" is commonly used to represent one quadrillion (1015) Btu.
Conversions.
One Btu is approximately:
A Btu can be approximated as the heat produced by burning a single wooden kitchen match or as the amount of energy it takes to lift a weight .
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Btu/h.
The SI unit of power for heating and cooling systems is the watt. Btu "per hour" (Btu/h) is sometimes used in North America and the United Kingdom - the latter for air conditioning mainly, though "Btu/h" is sometimes abbreviated to just "Btu". "MBH"—thousands of Btu per hour—is also common.
Associated units.
The Btu should not be confused with the Board of Trade Unit (BTU), an obsolete UK synonym for kilowatt hour ().
The Btu is often used to express the conversion-efficiency of heat into electrical energy in power plants. Figures are quoted in terms of the quantity of heat in Btu required to generate 1 kW⋅h of electrical energy. A typical coal-fired power plant works at , an efficiency of 32–33%.
The centigrade heat unit (CHU) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of of water by one Celsius degree. It is equal to 1.8 Btu or 1,899 joules. In 1974, this unit was "still sometimes used" in the United Kingdom as an alternative to Btu.
Another legacy unit for energy in the metric system is the calorie, which is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. |
Bugatti
Automobiles Ettore Bugatti was a German then French manufacturer of high-performance automobiles. The company was founded in 1909 in the then-German city of Molsheim, Alsace, by the Italian-born industrial designer Ettore Bugatti. The cars were known for their design beauty and numerous race victories. Famous Bugatti automobiles include the Type 35 Grand Prix cars, the Type 41 "Royale", the Type 57 "Atlantic" and the Type 55 sports car.
The death of Ettore Bugatti in 1947 proved to be a severe blow to the marque, and the death of his son Jean in 1939 meant that there was no successor to lead the factory with no more than about 8,000 cars made. The company struggled financially, and it released one last model in the 1950s before eventually being purchased for its airplane parts business in 1963.
In 1987, an Italian entrepreneur bought the brand name and revived it as Bugatti Automobili S.p.A.
A movie about the founding of the French car manufacturer Bugatti is being produced by Andrea Iervolino with the film slated for release in 2025.
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Under Ettore Bugatti.
The founder Ettore Bugatti was born in Milan, Italy, and the automobile company that bears his name was founded in 1909 in Molsheim located in the Alsace region which was part of the German Empire from 1871 to 1919. The company was known both for the level of detail of its engineering in its automobiles, and for the artistic manner in which the designs were executed, given the artistic nature of Ettore's family (his father, Carlo Bugatti (1856–1940), was an important Art Nouveau furniture and jewelry designer).
World War I and its aftermath.
During the war Ettore Bugatti was sent away, initially to Milan and later to Paris, but as soon as hostilities had been concluded he returned to his factory at Molsheim. Less than four months after the Versailles Treaty formalised the transfer of Alsace from Germany to France, Bugatti was able to obtain, at the last minute, a stand at the 15th Paris motor show in October 1919. He exhibited three light cars, all of them closely based on their pre-war equivalents, and each fitted with the same overhead camshaft 4-cylinder 1,368cc engine with four valves per cylinder. Smallest of the three was a "Type 13" with a racing body (constructed by the Bugatti themselves) and using a chassis with a wheelbase. The others were a "Type 22" and a "Type 23" with wheelbases of respectively.
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Racing successes.
The company also enjoyed great success in early Grand Prix motor racing: in 1929, a privately entered Bugatti won the first ever Monaco Grand Prix. Bugatti's racing success culminated with driver Jean-Pierre Wimille winning the 24 hours of Le Mans twice (in 1937 with Robert Benoist and in 1939 with Pierre Veyron).
Bugatti cars were extremely successful in racing. The little Bugatti Type 10 swept the top four positions at its first race. The 1924 Bugatti Type 35 is one of the most successful racing cars - developed by Bugatti with master engineer and racing driver Jean Chassagne who also drove it in the car's first ever Grand Prix in 1924 Lyon. Bugattis swept to victory in the Targa Florio for five years straight from 1925 through 1929. Louis Chiron held the most podiums in Bugatti cars, and the modern marque revival Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S. named the 1999 Bugatti 18/3 Chiron concept car in his honour. But it was the final racing success at Le Mans that is most remembered—Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron won the 1939 race with just one car and meagre resources.
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Aeroplane racing.
In the 1930s, Ettore Bugatti got involved in the creation of a racer airplane, hoping to beat the Germans in the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize. This would be the Bugatti 100P, which never flew. It was designed by Belgian engineer Louis de Monge who had already applied Bugatti Brescia engines in his "Type 7.5" lifting body.
Railcar.
Ettore Bugatti also designed a successful motorised railcar, the "".
Family tragedy.
The death of Ettore Bugatti's son, Jean Bugatti, on 11 August 1939 marked a turning point in the company's fortunes as he died while testing a Type 57 tank-bodied race car near the Molsheim factory.
After World War II.
World War II left the Molsheim factory in ruins and the company lost control of the property. During the war, Bugatti planned a new factory at Levallois, a northwestern suburb of Paris. After the war, Bugatti designed and planned to build a series of new cars, including the Type 73 road car and Type 73C single seat racing car, but in all Bugatti built only five Type 73 cars.
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Development of a 375 cc supercharged car was stopped when Ettore Bugatti died on 21 August 1947. Following his death, the business declined further and made its last appearance as a business in its own right at a Paris Motor Show in October 1952.
After a long decline, the original incarnation of Bugatti ceased operations in 1952.
Design.
Bugatti models are known to focus on design. Engine blocks were hand scraped to ensure that the surfaces were flat so that gaskets were not required for sealing, and many of the exposed surfaces of the engine compartment featured "guilloché" finishes on them. Safety wires were threaded through most fasteners in intricately laced patterns. Rather than bolt the springs to the axles as most manufacturers did, Bugatti's axles were forged such that the spring passed through an opening in the axle, a much more elegant solution requiring fewer parts. Bugatti himself described his competitor Bentley's cars as "the world's fastest lorries" for focusing on durability. According to Bugatti, "weight was the enemy".
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Gallery.
Notable finds in the modern era.
Relatives of Harold Carr found a rare 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante when cataloguing the doctor's belongings after his death in 2009. Carr's Type 57S is notable because it was originally owned by British race car driver Earl Howe. Because much of the car's original equipment is intact, it can be restored without relying on replacement parts.
On 10 July 2009, a 1925 Bugatti Brescia Type 22 which had lain at the bottom of Lake Maggiore on the border of Switzerland and Italy for 75 years was recovered from the lake. The Mullin Museum in Oxnard, California bought it at auction for $351,343 at Bonham's Rétromobile sale in Paris in 2010.
Attempts at revival.
The company attempted a comeback under Roland Bugatti in the mid-1950s with the mid-engined Type 251 race car. Designed with help from Gioacchino Colombo, the car failed to perform to expectations and the company's attempts at automobile production were halted.
In the 1960s, Virgil Exner designed a Bugatti as part of his "Revival Cars" project. A show version of this car was actually built by Ghia using the last Bugatti Type 101 chassis, and was shown at the 1965 Turin Motor Show. Finance was not forthcoming, and Exner then turned his attention to a revival of Stutz.
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Bugatti continued manufacturing airplane parts and was sold to Hispano-Suiza, also a former auto maker turned aircraft supplier, in 1963. Snecma took over Hispano-Suiza in 1968. After acquiring Messier, Snecma merged Messier and Bugatti into Messier-Bugatti in 1977.
Modern revivals.
Bugatti Automobili S.p.A. (1987–1995).
Italian entrepreneur Romano Artioli acquired the Bugatti brand in 1987, and established Bugatti Automobili S.p.A.. Artioli commissioned architect Giampaolo Benedini to design the factory which was built in Campogalliano, Modena, Italy. Construction of the plant began in 1988, alongside the development of the first model, and it was inaugurated two years later—in 1990. By 1989, the plans for the new Bugatti revival were presented by Paolo Stanzani and Marcello Gandini, designers of the Lamborghini Miura and Lamborghini Countach.
The first production vehicle was the Bugatti EB110 GT which featured a 3.5-litre, 5-valve per cylinder, quad-turbocharged 60° V12 engine, a six-speed gearbox, and four-wheel drive. Stanzani proposed an aluminium honeycomb chassis, which was used for all early prototypes. He and president Artioli clashed over engineering decisions so Stanzani left the project and Artioli sought Nicola Materazzi to replace him in June 1990. Materazzi, who had been the chief designer for the Ferrari 288 GTO and Ferrari F40 replaced the aluminium chassis with a carbon fibre one manufactured by Aerospatiale and also altered the torque distribution of the car from 40:60 to 27:73. He remained Director until late 1992.
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Racing car designer Mauro Forghieri served as Bugatti's technical director from 1993 through 1994. On 27 August 1993, through his holding company, ACBN Holdings S.A. of Luxembourg, Romano Artioli purchased Lotus Cars from General Motors. Plans were made to list Bugatti shares on international stock exchanges.
Bugatti presented a prototype large saloon called the EB112 in 1993.
Perhaps the most famous Bugatti EB110 owner was seven-time Formula One World Champion racing driver Michael Schumacher who purchased an EB110 in 1994. Schumacher sold his EB110, which had been repaired after a severe 1994 crash, to Modena Motorsport, a Ferrari service and race preparation garage in Germany.
By the time the EB110 came to market, the North American and European economies were in recession. Poor economic conditions caused the company to fail and operations ceased in September 1995. A model specific to the US market called the "Bugatti America" was in the preparatory stages when the company ceased operations.
Bugatti's liquidators sold Lotus Cars to Proton of Malaysia. German firm Dauer Racing purchased the EB110 licence and remaining parts stock in 1997 in order to produce five more EB110 SS vehicles. These five SS versions of the EB110 were greatly refined by Dauer. The Campogalliano factory was sold to a furniture-making company, which became defunct prior to moving in, leaving the building unoccupied. After Dauer stopped producing cars in 2011, Toscana-Motors GmbH of Germany purchased the remaining parts stock from Dauer.
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Ex vice-president Jean-Marc Borel and ex-employees Federico Trombi, Gianni Sighinolfi and Nicola Materazzi established the B Engineering company and designed and built the Edonis using the chassis and engine from the Bugatti EB110 SS, but simplifying the turbocharging system and driveline (from 4WD to 2WD).
Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S. (1998–present).
Pre-Veyron.
Volkswagen Group acquired the Bugatti brand in 1998. Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S. commissioned Giorgetto Giugiaro of ItalDesign to produce Bugatti Automobiles's first concept vehicle, the EB118, a coupé that debuted at the 1998 Paris Auto Show. The EB118 concept featured a , W-18 engine. After its Paris debut, the EB118 concept was shown again in 1999 at the Geneva Auto Show and the Tokyo Motor Show. Bugatti introduced its next concepts, the EB 218 at the 1999 Geneva Motor Show and the 18/3 Chiron at the 1999 Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA).
Veyron era (2005–2015).
Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S. began assembling its first regular-production vehicle, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 (the 1001 PS super car with an 8-litre W-16 engine with four turbochargers) in September 2005 at the Bugatti Molsheim, France assembly "studio". On 23 February 2015, Bugatti sold its last Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse, which was named La Finale.
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Chiron era (2016–present).
The Bugatti Chiron is a mid-engined, two-seated sports car, designed by Achim Anscheidt, developed as the successor to the Bugatti Veyron. The Chiron was first revealed at the Geneva Motor Show on March 1, 2016.
In February 2024, Bugatti announced the successor to the Chiron, which will use a V16 hybrid-electric powertrain. In June 2024 the successor was confirmed as the Bugatti Tourbillon. |
Band
Band or BAND may refer to: |
Black Death
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as people perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population. The disease is caused by the bacterium "Yersinia pestis" and spread by fleas and through the air. One of the most significant events in European history, the Black Death had far-reaching population, economic, and cultural impacts. It was the beginning of the second plague pandemic. The plague created religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.
The origin of the Black Death is disputed. Genetic analysis suggests "Yersinia pestis" bacteria evolved approximately 7,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic, with flea-mediated strains emerging around 3,800 years ago during the late Bronze Age. The immediate territorial origins of the Black Death and its outbreak remain unclear, with some evidence pointing towards Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe. |
The immediate territorial origins of the Black Death and its outbreak remain unclear, with some evidence pointing towards Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and Europe. The pandemic was reportedly first introduced to Europe during the siege of the Genoese trading port of Kaffa in Crimea by the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg in 1347. From Crimea, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin and reaching North Africa, West Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula. There is evidence that once it came ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person-to-person as pneumonic plague, thus explaining the quick inland spread of the epidemic, which was faster than would be expected if the primary vector was rat fleas causing bubonic plague. In 2022, it was discovered that there was a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the Black Death in the late 1330s; when combined with genetic evidence, this implies that the initial spread may have been unrelated to the 14th century Mongol conquests previously postulated as the cause.
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The Black Death was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages (the first one being the Great Famine of 1315–1317) and is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of the European population, as well as approximately 33% of the population of the Middle East. There were further outbreaks throughout the Late Middle Ages and, also due to other contributing factors (the crisis of the late Middle Ages), the European population did not regain its 14th century level until the 16th century. Outbreaks of the plague recurred around the world until the early 19th century.
Names.
European writers contemporary with the plague described the disease in Latin as or ; ; . In English prior to the 18th century, the event was called the "pestilence" or "great pestilence", "the plague" or the "great death". Subsequent to the pandemic "the "furste moreyn"" (first murrain) or "first pestilence" was applied, to distinguish the mid-14th century phenomenon from other infectious diseases and epidemics of plague.
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The 1347 pandemic plague was not referred to specifically as "black" in the time of occurrence in any European language, though the expression "black death" had occasionally been applied to fatal disease beforehand. "Black death" was not used to describe the plague pandemic in English until the 1750s; the term is first attested in 1755, where it translated . This expression as a proper name for the pandemic had been popularized by Swedish and Danish chroniclers in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and in the 16th and 17th centuries was transferred to other languages as a calque: , , and . Previously, most European languages had named the pandemic a variant or calque of the .
The phrase 'black death' – describing Death as black – is very old. Homer used it in the Odyssey to describe the monstrous Scylla, with her mouths "full of black Death" (). Seneca the Younger may have been the first to describe an epidemic as 'black death', () but only in reference to the acute lethality and dark prognosis of disease. The 12th–13th century French physician Gilles de Corbeil had already used "" to refer to a "pestilential fever" () in his work "On the Signs and Symptoms of Diseases" (). The phrase , was used in 1350 by Simon de Covino (or Couvin), a Belgian astronomer, in his poem "On the Judgement of the Sun at a Feast of Saturn" (), which attributes the plague to an astrological conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. His use of the phrase is not connected unambiguously with the plague pandemic of 1347 and appears to refer to the fatal outcome of disease.
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The historian Elizabeth Penrose, writing under the pen-name "Mrs Markham", described the 14th-century outbreak as the "black death" in 1823. The historian Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet wrote about the Great Pestilence in 1893 and suggested that it had been "some form of the ordinary Eastern or bubonic plague". In 1908, Gasquet said use of the name ' for the 14th-century epidemic first appeared in a 1631 book on Danish history by J. I. Pontanus: "Commonly and from its effects, they called it the black death" (').
Previous plague epidemics.
Research from 2017 suggests plague first infected humans in Europe and Asia in the Late Neolithic-Early Bronze Age. Research in 2018 found evidence of "Yersinia pestis" in an ancient Swedish tomb, which may have been associated with the "Neolithic decline" around 3000 BCE, in which European populations fell significantly. This "Y. pestis" may have been different from more modern types, with bubonic plague transmissible by fleas first known from Bronze Age remains near Samara.
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The symptoms of bubonic plague are first attested in a fragment of Rufus of Ephesus preserved by Oribasius; these ancient medical authorities suggest bubonic plague had appeared in the Roman Empire before the reign of Trajan, six centuries before arriving at Pelusium in the reign of Justinian I. In 2013, researchers confirmed earlier speculation that the cause of the Plague of Justinian (541–549 CE, with recurrences until 750) was "Y". "pestis". This is known as the first plague pandemic. In 610, the Chinese physician Chao Yuanfang described a "malignant bubo" "coming in abruptly with high fever together with the appearance of a bundle of nodes beneath the tissue." The Chinese physician Sun Simo who died in 652 also mentioned a "malignant bubo" and plague that was common in Lingnan (Guangzhou). Ole Jørgen Benedictow believes that this indicates it was an offshoot of the first plague pandemic which made its way eastward to Chinese territory by around 600.
14th-century plague.
Causes.
Early theory.
A report by the Medical Faculty of Paris stated that a conjunction of planets had caused "a great pestilence in the air" (miasma theory). Muslim religious scholars taught that the pandemic was a "martyrdom and mercy" from God, assuring the believer's place in paradise. For non-believers, it was a punishment. Some Muslim doctors cautioned against trying to prevent or treat a disease sent by God. Others adopted preventive measures and treatments for plague used by Europeans. These Muslim doctors also depended on the writings of the ancient Greeks.
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Predominant modern theory.
Due to climate change in Asia, rodents began to flee the dried-out grasslands to more populated areas, spreading the disease. The plague disease, caused by the bacterium "Yersinia pestis", is enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas, including Central Asia, Kurdistan, West Asia, North India, Uganda, and the western United States.
"Y. pestis" was discovered by Alexandre Yersin, a pupil of Louis Pasteur, during an epidemic of bubonic plague in Hong Kong in 1894; Yersin also proved this bacterium was present in rodents and suggested the rat was the main vehicle of transmission. The mechanism by which "Y. pestis" is usually transmitted was established in 1898 by Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose midguts had become obstructed by replicating "Y. pestis" several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage starves the fleas, drives them to aggressive feeding behaviour, and causes them to try to clear the blockage via regurgitation, resulting in thousands of plague bacteria flushing into the feeding site and infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease, which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic, and a second that lacks resistance. When the second population dies, the fleas move on to other hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.
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DNA evidence.
Definitive confirmation of the role of "Y. pestis" arrived in 2010 with a publication in "PLOS Pathogens" by Haensch et al. They assessed the presence of DNA/RNA with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques for "Y. pestis" from the tooth sockets in human skeletons from mass graves in northern, central and southern Europe that were associated archaeologically with the Black Death and subsequent resurgences. The authors concluded that this new research, together with prior analyses from the south of France and Germany, "ends the debate about the cause of the Black Death, and unambiguously demonstrates that "Y. pestis" was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages". In 2011 these results were further confirmed with genetic evidence derived from Black Death victims in the East Smithfield burial site in England. Schuenemann et al. concluded in 2011 "that the Black Death in medieval Europe was caused by a variant of "Y. pestis" that may no longer exist".
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Later in 2011, Bos et al. reported in "Nature" the first draft genome of "Y. pestis" from plague victims from the same East Smithfield cemetery and indicated that the strain that caused the Black Death is ancestral to most modern strains of "Y. pestis".
Later genomic papers have further confirmed the phylogenetic placement of the "Y. pestis" strain responsible for the Black Death as both the ancestor of later plague epidemics—including the third plague pandemic—and the descendant of the strain responsible for the Plague of Justinian. In addition, plague genomes from prehistory have been recovered.
DNA taken from 25 skeletons from 14th-century London showed that plague is a strain of "Y. pestis" almost identical to that which hit Madagascar in 2013. Further DNA evidence also proves the role of "Y. pestis" and traces the source to the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan.
Alternative explanations.
Researchers are hampered by a lack of reliable statistics from this period. Most work has been done on the spread of the disease in England, where estimates of overall population at the start of the plague vary by over 100%, as no census was undertaken in England between the time of publication of the Domesday Book of 1086 and the poll tax of the year 1377. Estimates of plague victims are usually extrapolated from figures for the clergy.
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Mathematical modelling is used to match the spreading patterns and the means of transmission. In 2018 researchers suggested an alternative model in which ""the disease was spread from human fleas and body lice to other people"." The second model claims to better fit the trends of the plague's death toll, as the rat-flea-human hypothesis would have produced a delayed but very high spike in deaths, contradicting historical death data.
Lars Walløe argued that these authors "take it for granted that Simond's infection model, black rat → rat flea → human, which was developed to explain the spread of plague in India, is the only way an epidemic of "Yersinia pestis" infection could spread". Similarly, Monica Green has argued that greater attention is needed to the range of (especially non-commensal) animals that might be involved in the transmission of plague.
Archaeologist Barney Sloane has argued that there is insufficient evidence of the extinction of numerous rats in the archaeological record of the medieval waterfront in London, and that the disease spread too quickly to support the thesis that "Y. pestis" was spread from fleas on rats; he argues that transmission must have been person to person. This theory is supported by research in 2018 which suggested transmission was more likely by body lice and fleas during the second plague pandemic.
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Summary.
Academic debate continues, but no single alternative explanation for the plague's spread has achieved widespread acceptance. Many scholars arguing for "Y. pestis" as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other diseases, including typhus, smallpox, and respiratory infections. In addition to the bubonic infection, others point to additional septicemic and pneumonic forms of plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks throughout the seasons and help account for its high mortality rate and additional recorded symptoms. In 2014, Public Health England announced the results of an examination of 25 bodies exhumed in the Clerkenwell area of London, as well as of wills registered in London during the period, which supported the pneumonic hypothesis. Currently, while osteoarcheologists have conclusively verified the presence of "Y. pestis" bacteria in burial sites across northern Europe through examination of bones and dental pulp, no other epidemic pathogen has been discovered to bolster the alternative explanations.
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Transmission.
Lack of hygiene.
The importance of hygiene was not recognized until the 19th century and the germ theory of disease. Until then streets were usually unhygienic, with live animals and human parasites facilitating the spread of transmissible disease.
By the early 14th century, so much filth had collected inside urban Europe that French and Italian cities were naming streets after human waste. In medieval Paris, several street names were inspired by merde, the French word for "shit". There were rue Merdeux, rue Merdelet, rue Merdusson, rue des Merdons and rue Merdiere—as well as a rue du Pipi. Pigs, cattle, chickens, geese, goats and horses roamed the streets of medieval London and Paris.
Medieval homeowners were supposed to police their housefronts, including removing animal dung, but most urbanites were careless. William E. Cosner, a resident of the London suburb of Farringdon Without, received a complaint alleging that "men could not pass [by his house] for the stink [of] . . . horse dung and horse piss." One irate Londoner complained that the runoff from the local slaughterhouse had made his garden "stinking and putrid", while another charged that the blood from slain animals flooded nearby streets and lanes, "making a foul corruption and abominable sight to all dwelling near." In much of medieval Europe, sanitation legislation consisted of an ordinance requiring homeowners to shout, "Look out below!" three times before dumping a full chamber pot into the street.
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Early Christians considered bathing a temptation. With this danger in mind, St. Benedict declared, "To those who are well, and especially to the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted." St. Agnes took the injunction to heart and died without ever bathing.
Territorial origins.
According to a team of medical geneticists led by Mark Achtman, "Yersinia pestis" "evolved in or near China" over 2,600 years ago. Later research by a team led by Galina Eroshenko placed its origins more specifically in the Tian Shan mountains on the border between Kyrgyzstan and China. However more recent research notes that the previous sampling contained East Asian bias and that sampling since then has discovered strains of "Y. pestis" in the Caucasus region previously thought to be restricted to China. There is also no physical or specific textual evidence of the Black Death in 14th century China. As a result, China's place in the sequence of the plague's spread is still debated to this day. According to Charles Creighton, records of epidemics in 14th-century China suggest nothing more than typhus and major Chinese outbreaks of epidemic disease post-date the European epidemic by several years. The earliest Chinese descriptions of the bubonic plague do not appear until the 1640s.
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Nestorian gravesites dating from 1338 to 1339 near Issyk-Kul have inscriptions referring to plague, which has led some historians and epidemiologists to think they mark the outbreak of the epidemic; this is supported by recent direct findings of "Y. pestis" DNA in teeth samples from graves in the area with inscriptions referring to "pestilence" as the cause of death. Epidemics killed an estimated 25 million across Asia during the fifteen years before the Black Death reached Constantinople in 1347.
According to John Norris, evidence from Issyk-Kul indicates a small sporadic outbreak characteristic of transmission from rodents to humans with no wide-scale impact. According to Achtman, the dating of the plague suggests that it was not carried along the Silk Road, and its widespread appearance in that region probably postdates the European outbreak. Additionally, the Silk Road had already been heavily disrupted before the spread of the Black Death; Western and Middle Eastern traders found it difficult to trade on the Silk Road by 1325 and impossible by 1340, making its role in the spread of plague less likely. There are no records of the symptoms of the Black Death from Mongol sources or writings from travelers east of the Black Sea prior to the Crimean outbreak in 1346.
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Others still favor an origin in China. The theory of Chinese origin implicates the Silk Road, the disease possibly spreading alongside Mongol armies and traders, or possibly arriving via ship—however, this theory is still contested. It is speculated that rats aboard Zheng He's ships in the 15th century may have carried the plague to Southeast Asia, India, and Africa.
Research on the Delhi Sultanate and the Yuan dynasty shows no evidence of any serious epidemic in fourteenth-century India and no specific evidence of plague in 14th-century China, suggesting that the Black Death may not have reached these regions. Ole Benedictow argues that since the first clear reports of the Black Death come from Kaffa, the Black Death most likely originated in the nearby plague focus on the northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea.
Monica Green suggests that other parts of Eurasia outside the west do not contain the same evidence of the Black Death, because there were actually four strains of "Yersinia pestis" that became predominant in different parts of the world. Mongol records of illness such as food poisoning may have been referring to the Black Death. Another theory is that the plague originated near Europe and cycled through the Mediterranean, Northern Europe and Russia before making its way to China. Other historians, such as John Norris and Ole Benedictaw, believe the plague likely originated in Europe or the Middle East, and never reached China. Norris specifically argues for an origin in Kurdistan rather than Central Asia.
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European outbreak.
Plague was reportedly first introduced to Europe via Genoese traders from their port city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347. During a protracted siege of the city in 1345–1346, the Mongol Golden Horde army of Jani Beg—whose mainly Tatar troops were suffering from the disease—catapulted infected corpses over the city walls of Kaffa to infect the inhabitants, though it is also likely that infected rats travelled across the siege lines to spread the epidemic to the inhabitants. As the disease took hold, Genoese traders fled across the Black Sea to Constantinople, where the disease first arrived in Europe in summer 1347.
The epidemic there killed the 13-year-old son of the Byzantine emperor, John VI Kantakouzenos, who wrote a description of the disease modelled on Thucydides's account of the 5th century BCE Plague of Athens, noting the spread of the Black Death by ship between maritime cities. Nicephorus Gregoras, while writing to Demetrios Kydones, described the rising death toll, the futility of medicine, and the panic of the citizens. The first outbreak in Constantinople lasted a year, but the disease recurred ten times before 1400.
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Carried by twelve Genoese galleys, plague arrived by ship in Sicily in October 1347; the disease spread rapidly all over the island. Galleys from Kaffa reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348, but it was the outbreak in Pisa a few weeks later that was the entry point into northern Italy. Towards the end of January, one of the galleys expelled from Italy arrived in Marseilles.
From Italy, the disease spread northwest across Europe, striking France, Spain, Portugal, and England by June 1348, then spreading east and north through Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia from 1348 to 1350. It was introduced into Norway in 1349 when a ship landed at Askøy, then spread to Bjørgvin (modern Bergen). Finally, it spread to northern Russia in 1352 and reached Moscow in 1353. Plague was less common in parts of Europe with less-established trade relations, including the majority of the Basque Country, isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands, and isolated Alpine villages throughout the continent.
According to some epidemiologists, periods of unfavorable weather decimated plague-infected rodent populations, forcing their fleas onto alternative hosts, inducing plague outbreaks which often peaked in the hot summers of the Mediterranean and during the cool autumn months of the southern Baltic region. Among many other culprits of plague contagiousness, pre-existing malnutrition weakened the immune response, contributing to an immense decline in European population.
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West Asian and North African outbreak.
The disease struck various regions in the Middle East and North Africa during the pandemic, leading to serious depopulation and permanent change in both economic and social structures.
By autumn 1347, plague had reached Alexandria in Egypt, transmitted by sea from Constantinople via a single merchant ship carrying slaves. By late summer 1348, it reached Cairo, capital of the Mamluk Sultanate, cultural center of the Islamic world, and the largest city in the Mediterranean Basin; the Bahriyya child sultan an-Nasir Hasan fled and more than a third of the 600,000 residents died. The Nile was choked with corpses despite Cairo having a medieval hospital, the late 13th-century bimaristan of the Qalawun complex. The historian al-Maqrizi described the abundant work for grave-diggers and practitioners of funeral rites; plague recurred in Cairo more than fifty times over the following one and a half centuries.
During 1347, the disease travelled eastward to Gaza by April; by July it had reached Damascus, and in October plague had broken out in Aleppo. That year, in the territory of modern Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Palestine, the cities of Ascalon, Acre, Jerusalem, Sidon, and Homs were all infected. In 1348–1349, the disease reached Antioch. The city's residents fled to the north, but most of them ended up dying during the journey. Within two years, the plague had spread throughout the Islamic world, from Arabia across North Africa.
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The pandemic spread westwards from Alexandria along the African coast, while in April 1348 Tunis was infected by ship from Sicily. Tunis was then under attack by an army from Morocco; this army dispersed in 1348 and brought the contagion with them to Morocco, whose epidemic may also have been seeded from the Islamic city of Almería in al-Andalus.
Mecca became infected in 1348 by pilgrims performing the Hajj. In 1351 or 1352, the Rasulid sultan of the Yemen, al-Mujahid Ali, was released from Mamluk captivity in Egypt and carried plague with him on his return home. During 1349, records show the city of Mosul suffered a massive epidemic, and the city of Baghdad experienced a second round of the disease.
Signs and symptoms.
Bubonic plague.
Symptoms of the plague include fever of , headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, 80% of victims die within eight days.
Contemporary accounts of the pandemic are varied and often imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes (or "gavocciolos") in the groin, neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened. Boccaccio's description:
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This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most people died two to seven days after initial infection. Freckle-like spots and rashes, which may have been caused by flea-bites, were identified as another potential sign of plague.
Pneumonic plague.
Lodewijk Heyligen, whose master Cardinal Giovanni Colonna died of plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease, pneumonic plague, that infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems. Symptoms include fever, cough and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free-flowing and bright red. Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90–95%.
Septicemic plague.
Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with an untreated mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches (purpura due to disseminated intravascular coagulation). In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague, the progress of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.
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Consequences.
Deaths.
There are no exact figures for the death toll; the rate varied widely by locality. Urban centers with higher populations suffered longer periods of abnormal mortality. Some estimate that it may have killed between 75,000,000 and 200,000,000 people in Eurasia.<ref name="ABC/Reuters"></ref> A study published in 2022 of pollen samples across Europe from 1250 to 1450 was used to estimate changes in agricultural output before and after the Black Death. The authors found great variability in different regions, with evidence for high mortality in areas of Scandinavia, France, western Germany, Greece, and central Italy, but uninterrupted agricultural growth in central and eastern Europe, Iberia, and Ireland. The authors concluded that "the pandemic was immensely destructive in some areas, but in others it had a far lighter touch ... [the study methodology] invalidates histories of the Black Death that assume Y. pestis was uniformly prevalent, or nearly so, across Europe and that the pandemic had a devastating demographic impact everywhere."
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The Black Death killed, by various estimations, from 25 to 60% of Europe's population. Robert Gottfried writes that as early as 1351, "agents for Pope Clement VI calculated the number of dead in Christian Europe at 23,840,000. With a preplague population of about 75 million, Clement's figure accounts for mortality of 31%-a rate about midway between the 50% mortality estimated for East Anglia, Tuscany, and parts of Scandinavia, and the less-than-15% morbidity for Bohemia and Galicia. And it is unerringly close to Froissart's claim that "a third of the world died," a measurement probably drawn from St. John's figure of mortality from plague in the Book of Revelation, a favorite medieval source of information." Ole J. Benedictow proposes 60% mortality rate for Europe as a whole based on available data, with up to 80% based on poor nutritional conditions in the 14th century. According to medieval historian Philip Daileader, it is likely that over four years, 45–50% of the European population died of plague.
The overwhelming number of deaths in Europe sometimes made mass burials necessary, and some sites had hundreds or thousands of bodies. The mass burial sites that have been excavated have allowed archaeologists to continue interpreting and defining the biological, sociological, historical, and anthropological implications of the Black Death. The mortality rate of the Black Death in the 14th century was far greater than the worst 20th-century outbreaks of "Y. pestis" plague, which occurred in India and killed as much as 3% of the population of certain cities.
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In 1348, the disease spread so rapidly that nearly a third of the European population perished before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die. Half of Paris' population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from between 110,000 and 120,000 inhabitants in 1338 to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well, leaving a death toll of approximately 62,000 between 1346 and 1353. Florence's tax records suggest that 80% of the city's population died within four months in 1348. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450. The disease bypassed some areas, with the most isolated areas being less vulnerable to contagion. Plague did not appear in Flanders until the turn of the 15th century, and the impact was less severe on the populations of Hainaut, Finland, northern Germany, and areas of Poland. Monks, nuns, and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for people ill with the plague. The level of mortality in the rest of Eastern Europe was likely similar to that of Western Europe in the first outbreak, with descriptions suggesting a similar effect on Russian towns, and the cycles of plague in Russia being roughly equivalent.
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In 1382, the physician to the Avignon Papacy, Raimundo Chalmel de Vinario (), observed the decreasing mortality rate of successive outbreaks of plague in 1347–1348, 1362, 1371 and 1382 in his treatise "On Epidemics" (). In the first outbreak, two thirds of the population contracted the illness and most patients died; in the next, half the population became ill but only some died; by the third, a tenth were affected and many survived; while by the fourth occurrence, only one in twenty people were sickened and most of them survived. By the 1380s in Europe, the plague predominantly affected children. Chalmel de Vinario recognised that bloodletting was ineffective (though he continued to prescribe bleeding for members of the Roman Curia, whom he disliked), and said that all true cases of plague were caused by astrological factors and were incurable; he was never able to effect a cure.
The populations of some Italian cities, notably Florence, did not regain their pre-14th century size until the 19th century. Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura recorded his experience from Siena, where plague arrived in May 1348:
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The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, and Syria, during this time, is for a death toll of about a third of the population. The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population. In Cairo, with a population numbering as many as 600,000, and possibly the largest city west of China, between one third and 40% of the inhabitants died within eight months. By the 18th century, the population of Cairo was halved from its numbers in 1347.
Economic.
It has been suggested that the Black Death, like other outbreaks through history, disproportionately affected the poorest people and those already in worse physical condition than the wealthier citizens.
But along with population decline from the pandemic, wages soared in response to a subsequent labour shortage. In some places rents collapsed (e.g., lettings "used to bring in £5, and now but £1.")
However, many labourers, artisans, and craftsmen—those living from money-wages alone—suffered a reduction in real incomes owing to rampant inflation. Landowners were also pushed to substitute monetary rents for labour services in an effort to keep tenants. Taxes and tithes became difficult to collect, with living poor refusing to cover the share of the rich deceased, because many properties were empty and unfarmed, and because tax-collectors, where they could be employed, refused to go to plague spots.
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The trade disruptions in the Mongol Empire caused by the Black Death was one of the reasons for its collapse.
Environmental.
A study performed by Thomas Van Hoof of the Utrecht University suggests that the innumerable deaths brought on by the pandemic cooled the climate by freeing up land and triggering reforestation. This may have led to the Little Ice Age.
Persecutions.
Renewed religious fervor and fanaticism increased in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted "various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims", lepers, and Romani, blaming them for the crisis. Lepers, and others with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were killed throughout Europe.
Because 14th-century healers and governments were at a loss to explain or stop the disease, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for outbreaks. Many believed the epidemic was a punishment by God for their sins, and could be relieved by winning God's forgiveness.
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There were many attacks against Jewish communities. In the Strasbourg massacre of February 1349, about 2,000 Jews were murdered. In August 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were annihilated. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed. During this period many Jews relocated to Poland, where they received a welcome from King Casimir the Great.
Social.
One theory that has been advanced is that the Black Death's devastation of Florence, between 1348 and 1350, resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th-century Italy that ultimately led to the Renaissance. Italy was particularly badly hit by the pandemic, and the resulting familiarity with death may have caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art.
This does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred in Italy in the 14th century; the Renaissance's emergence was most likely the result of the complex interaction of the above factors, in combination with an influx of Greek scholars after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. As a result of the drastic reduction in the populace the value of the working class increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer the increased need for labour, workers travelled in search of the most favorable position economically.
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Prior to the emergence of the Black Death, the continent was considered a feudalistic society, composed of fiefs and city-states frequently managed by the Catholic Church. The pandemic completely restructured both religion and political forces; survivors began to turn to other forms of spirituality and the power dynamics of the fiefs and city-states crumbled. The survivors of the pandemic found not only that the prices of food were lower but also that lands were more abundant, and many of them inherited property from their dead relatives, and this probably contributed to the destabilization of feudalism.
The word "quarantine" has its roots in this period, though the practice of isolating people to prevent the spread of disease is older. In the city-state of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia), a thirty-day isolation period was implemented in 1377 for new arrivals to the city from plague-affected areas. The isolation period was later extended to forty days, and given the name "quarantino" from the Italian word for "forty".
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All institutions were affected. Smaller monasteries and convents became unviable and closed. Up to half parish churches lost their priest, apart from the parishioners. Religious sensibilities changed:
Recurrences.
Second plague pandemic.
The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. According to Jean-Noël Biraben, the plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671 (although some researchers have cautions about the uncritical use of Biraben's data). The second pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the plague's retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and North Africa (19th century).
Historian George Sussman argued that the plague had not occurred in East Africa until the 20th century. However, other sources suggest that the second pandemic did indeed reach sub-Saharan Africa.
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According to historian Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to the plague in the epidemic of 1628–31." In the first half of the 17th century, a plague killed some 1.7 million people in Italy. More than 1.25 million deaths resulted from the extreme incidence of plague in 17th-century Spain.
The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world. Plague could be found in the Islamic world almost every year between 1500 and 1850. Sometimes the outbreaks affected small areas, while other outbreaks affected multiple regions. Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30,000–50,000 inhabitants to it in 1620–1621, and again in 1654–1657, 1665, 1691, and 1740–1742. Cairo suffered more than fifty plague epidemics within 150 years from the plague's first appearance, with the final outbreak of the second pandemic there in the 1840s. Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population died.
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Third plague pandemic.
The third plague pandemic (1855–1859) started in China in the mid-19th century, spreading to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone. The investigation of the pathogen that caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, for whom the pathogen was named.
Twelve plague outbreaks in Australia between 1900 and 1925 resulted in over 1,000 deaths, chiefly in Sydney. This led to the establishment of a Public Health Department there which undertook some leading-edge research on plague transmission from rat fleas to humans via the bacillus "Yersinia pestis".
The first North American plague epidemic was the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904, followed by another outbreak in 1907–1908.
Modern-day.
Modern treatment methods include insecticides, the use of antibiotics, and a plague vaccine. It is feared that the plague bacterium could develop drug resistance and again become a major health threat. One case of a drug-resistant form of the bacterium was found in Madagascar in 1995. Another outbreak in Madagascar was reported in November 2014. In October 2017, the deadliest outbreak of the plague in modern times hit Madagascar, killing 170 people and infecting thousands.
An estimate of the case fatality rate for the modern plague, after the introduction of antibiotics, is 11%, although it may be higher in underdeveloped regions. |
Biotechnology
Biotechnology is a multidisciplinary field that involves the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms and parts thereof for products and services. Specialists in the field are known as biotechnologists.
The term "biotechnology" was first used by Károly Ereky in 1919 to refer to the production of products from raw materials with the aid of living organisms. The core principle of biotechnology involves harnessing biological systems and organisms, such as bacteria, yeast, and plants, to perform specific tasks or produce valuable substances.
Biotechnology had a significant impact on many areas of society, from medicine to agriculture to environmental science. One of the key techniques used in biotechnology is genetic engineering, which allows scientists to modify the genetic makeup of organisms to achieve desired outcomes. This can involve inserting genes from one organism into another, and consequently, create new traits or modifying existing ones.
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Other important techniques used in biotechnology include tissue culture, which allows researchers to grow cells and tissues in the lab for research and medical purposes, and fermentation, which is used to produce a wide range of products such as beer, wine, and cheese.
The applications of biotechnology are diverse and have led to the development of products like life-saving drugs, biofuels, genetically modified crops, and innovative materials. It has also been used to address environmental challenges, such as developing biodegradable plastics and using microorganisms to clean up contaminated sites.
Biotechnology is a rapidly evolving field with significant potential to address pressing global challenges and improve the quality of life for people around the world; however, despite its numerous benefits, it also poses ethical and societal challenges, such as questions around genetic modification and intellectual property rights. As a result, there is ongoing debate and regulation surrounding the use and application of biotechnology in various industries and fields.
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Definition.
The concept of biotechnology encompasses a wide range of procedures for modifying living organisms for human purposes, going back to domestication of animals, cultivation of plants, and "improvements" to these through breeding programs that employ artificial selection and hybridization. Modern usage also includes genetic engineering, as well as cell and tissue culture technologies. The American Chemical Society defines "biotechnology" as the application of biological organisms, systems, or processes by various industries to learning about the science of life and the improvement of the value of materials and organisms, such as pharmaceuticals, crops, and livestock. As per the European Federation of Biotechnology, biotechnology is the integration of natural science and organisms, cells, parts thereof, and molecular analogues for products and services. Biotechnology is based on the basic biological sciences (e.g., molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, embryology, genetics, microbiology) and conversely provides methods to support and perform basic research in biology.
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Biotechnology is the research and development in the laboratory using bioinformatics for exploration, extraction, exploitation, and production from any living organisms and any source of biomass by means of biochemical engineering where high value-added products could be planned (reproduced by biosynthesis, for example), forecasted, formulated, developed, manufactured, and marketed for the purpose of sustainable operations (for the return from bottomless initial investment on R & D) and gaining durable patents rights (for exclusives rights for sales, and prior to this to receive national and international approval from the results on animal experiment and human experiment, especially on the pharmaceutical branch of biotechnology to prevent any undetected side-effects or safety concerns by using the products). The utilization of biological processes, organisms or systems to produce products that are anticipated to improve human lives is termed biotechnology.
By contrast, bioengineering is generally thought of as a related field that more heavily emphasizes higher systems approaches (not necessarily the altering or using of biological materials "directly") for interfacing with and utilizing living things. Bioengineering is the application of the principles of engineering and natural sciences to tissues, cells, and molecules. This can be considered as the use of knowledge from working with and manipulating biology to achieve a result that can improve functions in plants and animals. Relatedly, biomedical engineering is an overlapping field that often draws upon and applies "biotechnology" (by various definitions), especially in certain sub-fields of biomedical or chemical engineering such as tissue engineering, biopharmaceutical engineering, and genetic engineering.
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History.
Although not normally what first comes to mind, many forms of human-derived agriculture clearly fit the broad definition of "utilizing a biotechnological system to make products". Indeed, the cultivation of plants may be viewed as the earliest biotechnological enterprise.
Agriculture has been theorized to have become the dominant way of producing food since the Neolithic Revolution. Through early biotechnology, the earliest farmers selected and bred the best-suited crops (e.g., those with the highest yields) to produce enough food to support a growing population. As crops and fields became increasingly large and difficult to maintain, it was discovered that specific organisms and their by-products could effectively fertilize, restore nitrogen, and control pests. Throughout the history of agriculture, farmers have inadvertently altered the genetics of their crops through introducing them to new environments and breeding them with other plants — one of the first forms of biotechnology.
These processes also were included in early fermentation of beer. These processes were introduced in early Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, and still use the same basic biological methods. In brewing, malted grains (containing enzymes) convert starch from grains into sugar and then adding specific yeasts to produce beer. In this process, carbohydrates in the grains broke down into alcohols, such as ethanol. Later, other cultures produced the process of lactic acid fermentation, which produced other preserved foods, such as soy sauce. Fermentation was also used in this time period to produce leavened bread. Although the process of fermentation was not fully understood until Louis Pasteur's work in 1857, it is still the first use of biotechnology to convert a food source into another form.
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Before the time of Charles Darwin's work and life, animal and plant scientists had already used selective breeding. Darwin added to that body of work with his scientific observations about the ability of science to change species. These accounts contributed to Darwin's theory of natural selection.
For thousands of years, humans have used selective breeding to improve the production of crops and livestock to use them for food. In selective breeding, organisms with desirable characteristics are mated to produce offspring with the same characteristics. For example, this technique was used with corn to produce the largest and sweetest crops.
In the early twentieth century scientists gained a greater understanding of microbiology and explored ways of manufacturing specific products. In 1917, Chaim Weizmann first used a pure microbiological culture in an industrial process, that of manufacturing corn starch using "Clostridium acetobutylicum," to produce acetone, which the United Kingdom desperately needed to manufacture explosives during World War I.
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Biotechnology has also led to the development of antibiotics. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the mold "Penicillium". His work led to the purification of the antibiotic formed by the mold by Howard Florey, Ernst Boris Chain and Norman Heatley – to form what we today know as penicillin. In 1940, penicillin became available for medicinal use to treat bacterial infections in humans.
The field of modern biotechnology is generally thought of as having been born in 1971 when Paul Berg's (Stanford) experiments in gene splicing had early success. Herbert W. Boyer (Univ. Calif. at San Francisco) and Stanley N. Cohen (Stanford) significantly advanced the new technology in 1972 by transferring genetic material into a bacterium, such that the imported material would be reproduced. The commercial viability of a biotechnology industry was significantly expanded on June 16, 1980, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that a genetically modified microorganism could be patented in the case of "Diamond v. Chakrabarty". Indian-born Ananda Chakrabarty, working for General Electric, had modified a bacterium (of the genus "Pseudomonas") capable of breaking down crude oil, which he proposed to use in treating oil spills. (Chakrabarty's work did not involve gene manipulation but rather the transfer of entire organelles between strains of the "Pseudomonas" bacterium).
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The MOSFET invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960, Two years later, Leland C. Clark and Champ Lyons invented the first biosensor in 1962. Biosensor MOSFETs were later developed, and they have since been widely used to measure physical, chemical, biological and environmental parameters. The first BioFET was the ion-sensitive field-effect transistor (ISFET), invented by Piet Bergveld in 1970. It is a special type of MOSFET, where the metal gate is replaced by an ion-sensitive membrane, electrolyte solution and reference electrode. The ISFET is widely used in biomedical applications, such as the detection of DNA hybridization, biomarker detection from blood, antibody detection, glucose measurement, pH sensing, and genetic technology.
By the mid-1980s, other BioFETs had been developed, including the gas sensor FET (GASFET), pressure sensor FET (PRESSFET), chemical field-effect transistor (ChemFET), reference ISFET (REFET), enzyme-modified FET (ENFET) and immunologically modified FET (IMFET). By the early 2000s, BioFETs such as the DNA field-effect transistor (DNAFET), gene-modified FET (GenFET) and cell-potential BioFET (CPFET) had been developed.
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A factor influencing the biotechnology sector's success is improved intellectual property rights legislation—and enforcement—worldwide, as well as strengthened demand for medical and pharmaceutical products.
Rising demand for biofuels is expected to be good news for the biotechnology sector, with the Department of Energy estimating ethanol usage could reduce U.S. petroleum-derived fuel consumption by up to 30% by 2030. The biotechnology sector has allowed the U.S. farming industry to rapidly increase its supply of corn and soybeans—the main inputs into biofuels—by developing genetically modified seeds that resist pests and drought. By increasing farm productivity, biotechnology boosts biofuel production.
Examples.
Biotechnology has applications in four major industrial areas, including health care (medical), crop production and agriculture, non-food (industrial) uses of crops and other products (e.g., biodegradable plastics, vegetable oil, biofuels), and environmental uses.
For example, one application of biotechnology is the directed use of microorganisms for the manufacture of organic products (examples include beer and milk products). Another example is using naturally present bacteria by the mining industry in bioleaching. Biotechnology is also used to recycle, treat waste, clean up sites contaminated by industrial activities (bioremediation), and also to produce biological weapons.
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A series of derived terms have been coined to identify several branches of biotechnology, for example:
Medicine.
In medicine, modern biotechnology has many applications in areas such as pharmaceutical drug discoveries and production, pharmacogenomics, and genetic testing (or genetic screening). In 2021, nearly 40% of the total company value of pharmaceutical biotech companies worldwide were active in Oncology with Neurology and Rare Diseases being the other two big applications.
Pharmacogenomics (a combination of pharmacology and genomics) is the technology that analyses how genetic makeup affects an individual's response to drugs. Researchers in the field investigate the influence of genetic variation on drug responses in patients by correlating gene expression or single-nucleotide polymorphisms with a drug's efficacy or toxicity. The purpose of pharmacogenomics is to develop rational means to optimize drug therapy, with respect to the patients' genotype, to ensure maximum efficacy with minimal adverse effects. Such approaches promise the advent of "personalized medicine"; in which drugs and drug combinations are optimized for each individual's unique genetic makeup.
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Biotechnology has contributed to the discovery and manufacturing of traditional small molecule pharmaceutical drugs as well as drugs that are the product of biotechnology – biopharmaceutics. Modern biotechnology can be used to manufacture existing medicines relatively easily and cheaply. The first genetically engineered products were medicines designed to treat human diseases. To cite one example, in 1978 Genentech developed synthetic humanized insulin by joining its gene with a plasmid vector inserted into the bacterium "Escherichia coli". Insulin, widely used for the treatment of diabetes, was previously extracted from the pancreas of abattoir animals (cattle or pigs). The genetically engineered bacteria are able to produce large quantities of synthetic human insulin at relatively low cost. Biotechnology has also enabled emerging therapeutics like gene therapy. The application of biotechnology to basic science (for example through the Human Genome Project) has also dramatically improved our understanding of biology and as our scientific knowledge of normal and disease biology has increased, our ability to develop new medicines to treat previously untreatable diseases has increased as well.
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Genetic testing allows the genetic diagnosis of vulnerabilities to inherited diseases, and can also be used to determine a child's parentage (genetic mother and father) or in general a person's ancestry. In addition to studying chromosomes to the level of individual genes, genetic testing in a broader sense includes biochemical tests for the possible presence of genetic diseases, or mutant forms of genes associated with increased risk of developing genetic disorders. Genetic testing identifies changes in chromosomes, genes, or proteins. Most of the time, testing is used to find changes that are associated with inherited disorders. The results of a genetic test can confirm or rule out a suspected genetic condition or help determine a person's chance of developing or passing on a genetic disorder. As of 2011 several hundred genetic tests were in use. Since genetic testing may open up ethical or psychological problems, genetic testing is often accompanied by genetic counseling.
Agriculture.
Genetically modified crops ("GM crops", or "biotech crops") are plants used in agriculture, the DNA of which has been modified with genetic engineering techniques. In most cases, the main aim is to introduce a new trait that does not occur naturally in the species. Biotechnology firms can contribute to future food security by improving the nutrition and viability of urban agriculture. Furthermore, the protection of intellectual property rights encourages private sector investment in agrobiotechnology.
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Examples in food crops include resistance to certain pests, diseases, stressful environmental conditions, resistance to chemical treatments (e.g. resistance to a herbicide), reduction of spoilage, or improving the nutrient profile of the crop. Examples in non-food crops include production of pharmaceutical agents, biofuels, and other industrially useful goods, as well as for bioremediation.
Farmers have widely adopted GM technology. Between 1996 and 2011, the total surface area of land cultivated with GM crops had increased by a factor of 94, from . 10% of the world's crop lands were planted with GM crops in 2010. As of 2011, 11 different transgenic crops were grown commercially on in 29 countries such as the US, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, China, Paraguay, Pakistan, South Africa, Uruguay, Bolivia, Australia, Philippines, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Mexico and Spain.
Genetically modified foods are foods produced from organisms that have had specific changes introduced into their DNA with the methods of genetic engineering. These techniques have allowed for the introduction of new crop traits as well as a far greater control over a food's genetic structure than previously afforded by methods such as selective breeding and mutation breeding. Commercial sale of genetically modified foods began in 1994, when Calgene first marketed its Flavr Savr delayed ripening tomato. To date most genetic modification of foods have primarily focused on cash crops in high demand by farmers such as soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seed oil. These have been engineered for resistance to pathogens and herbicides and better nutrient profiles. GM livestock have also been experimentally developed; in November 2013 none were available on the market, but in 2015 the FDA approved the first GM salmon for commercial production and consumption.
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There is a scientific consensus that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, but that each GM food needs to be tested on a case-by-case basis before introduction. Nonetheless, members of the public are much less likely than scientists to perceive GM foods as safe. The legal and regulatory status of GM foods varies by country, with some nations banning or restricting them, and others permitting them with widely differing degrees of regulation.
GM crops also provide a number of ecological benefits, if not used in excess. Insect-resistant crops have proven to lower pesticide usage, therefore reducing the environmental impact of pesticides as a whole. However, opponents have objected to GM crops per se on several grounds, including environmental concerns, whether food produced from GM crops is safe, whether GM crops are needed to address the world's food needs, and economic concerns raised by the fact these organisms are subject to intellectual property law.
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Biotechnology has several applications in the realm of food security. Crops like Golden rice are engineered to have higher nutritional content, and there is potential for food products with longer shelf lives. Though not a form of agricultural biotechnology, vaccines can help prevent diseases found in animal agriculture. Additionally, agricultural biotechnology can expedite breeding processes in order to yield faster results and provide greater quantities of food. Transgenic biofortification in cereals has been considered as a promising method to combat malnutrition in India and other countries.
Industrial.
Industrial biotechnology (known mainly in Europe as white biotechnology) is the application of biotechnology for industrial purposes, including industrial fermentation. It includes the practice of using cells such as microorganisms, or components of cells like enzymes, to generate industrially useful products in sectors such as chemicals, food and feed, detergents, paper and pulp, textiles and biofuels. In the current decades, significant progress has been done in creating genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that enhance the diversity of applications and economical viability of industrial biotechnology. By using renewable raw materials to produce a variety of chemicals and fuels, industrial biotechnology is actively advancing towards lowering greenhouse gas emissions and moving away from a petrochemical-based economy.
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Synthetic biology is considered one of the essential cornerstones in industrial biotechnology due to its financial and sustainable contribution to the manufacturing sector. Jointly biotechnology and synthetic biology play a crucial role in generating cost-effective products with nature-friendly features by using bio-based production instead of fossil-based. Synthetic biology can be used to engineer model microorganisms, such as "Escherichia coli", by genome editing tools to enhance their ability to produce bio-based products, such as bioproduction of medicines and biofuels. For instance, "E. coli" and "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" in a consortium could be used as industrial microbes to produce precursors of the chemotherapeutic agent paclitaxel by applying the metabolic engineering in a co-culture approach to exploit the benefits from the two microbes.
Another example of synthetic biology applications in industrial biotechnology is the re-engineering of the metabolic pathways of "E. coli" by CRISPR and CRISPRi systems toward the production of a chemical known as 1,4-butanediol, which is used in fiber manufacturing. In order to produce 1,4-butanediol, the authors alter the metabolic regulation of the "Escherichia coli" by CRISPR to induce point mutation in the "glt"A gene, knockout of the "sad" gene, and knock-in six genes ("cat"1, "suc"D, "4hbd", "cat"2, "bld", and "bdh"). Whereas CRISPRi system used to knockdown the three competing genes ("gab"D, "ybg"C, and "tes"B) that affect the biosynthesis pathway of 1,4-butanediol. Consequently, the yield of 1,4-butanediol significantly increased from 0.9 to 1.8 g/L.
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Environmental.
Environmental biotechnology includes various disciplines that play an essential role in reducing environmental waste and providing environmentally safe processes, such as biofiltration and biodegradation. The environment can be affected by biotechnologies, both positively and adversely. Vallero and others have argued that the difference between beneficial biotechnology (e.g., bioremediation is to clean up an oil spill or hazard chemical leak) versus the adverse effects stemming from biotechnological enterprises (e.g., flow of genetic material from transgenic organisms into wild strains) can be seen as applications and implications, respectively. Cleaning up environmental wastes is an example of an application of environmental biotechnology; whereas loss of biodiversity or loss of containment of a harmful microbe are examples of environmental implications of biotechnology.
Many cities have installed CityTrees, which use biotechnology to filter pollutants from urban atmospheres.
Regulation.
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Database for the GMOs used in the EU.
The EUginius (European GMO Initiative for a Unified Database System) database is intended to help companies, interested private users and competent authorities to find precise information on the presence, detection and identification of GMOs used in the European Union. The information is provided in English.
Learning.
In 1988, after prompting from the United States Congress, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (National Institutes of Health) (NIGMS) instituted a funding mechanism for biotechnology training. Universities nationwide compete for these funds to establish Biotechnology Training Programs (BTPs). Each successful application is generally funded for five years then must be competitively renewed. Graduate students in turn compete for acceptance into a BTP; if accepted, then stipend, tuition and health insurance support are provided for two or three years during the course of their PhD thesis work. Nineteen institutions offer NIGMS supported BTPs. Biotechnology training is also offered at the undergraduate level and in community colleges. |
Battle of Poitiers
The Battle of Poitiers was fought on 19September 1356 between a French army commanded by King JohnII and an Anglo-Gascon force under Edward, the Black Prince, during the Hundred Years' War. It took place in western France, south of Poitiers, when approximately 14,000 to 16,000 French attacked a strong defensive position held by 6,000 Anglo-Gascons.
Nineteen years after the start of the war, the Black Prince, eldest son and heir of the English King, set out on a major campaign in south-west France. His army marched from Bergerac to the River Loire, which they were unable to cross. John gathered a large and unusually mobile army and pursued Edward's forces. The Anglo-Gascons had by this point established a strong defensive position near Poitiers, and after unsuccessful negotiations between the two sides, were attacked by the French.
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John was captured, as was one of his sons and between 2,000 and 3,000 men-at-arms. Approximately 2,500 French men-at-arms were killed. Additionally, either 1,500 or 3,800 French common infantry were killed or captured. The surviving French dispersed, while the Anglo-Gascons continued their withdrawal to Gascony. The following spring a two-year truce was agreed and the Black Prince escorted John to London. Populist revolts broke out across France. Negotiations to end the war and ransom John dragged out. In response Edward launched a further campaign in 1359. During this, both sides compromised and the Treaty of Brétigny was agreed in 1360 by which vast areas of France were ceded to England, to be ruled by the Black Prince, and John was ransomed for three million gold écu. At the time this seemed to end the war, but the French resumed hostilities in 1369 and recaptured most of the lost territory. The war eventually ended with a French victory in 1453.
Background.
Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, English monarchs had held titles and lands within France, the possession of which made them vassals of the kings of France. By the first quarter of the fourteenth century, the only significant French possession still held by the English in France was Gascony in the south-west. But Gascony was disproportionately important: duty levied by the English Crown on wine from Bordeaux, the capital of Gascony, totalled more than all other English customs duties combined and was by far the largest source of state income. Bordeaux had a population of more than 50,000, greater than London's, and Bordeaux was possibly richer. Following a series of disagreements between Philip VI of France () and Edward III of England (), on 24 May 1337 Philip's Great Council agreed that the lands held by EdwardIII in France should be taken back into Philip's hands on the grounds that EdwardIII was in breach of his obligations as a vassal. This marked the start of the Hundred Years' War, which was to last 116 years.
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Although Gascony was the cause of the war, EdwardIII was able to spare few resources for its defence. In most campaigning seasons the Gascons had to rely on their own resources and had been hard-pressed by the French. Typically the Gascons could field 3,000 to 6,000 men, the large majority infantry, although up to two-thirds of them would be tied down in garrisoning their fortifications. In 1345 and 1346 Henry, Earl of Lancaster, led a series of successful Anglo-Gascon campaigns in Aquitaine and was able to push the focus of the fighting away from the heart of Gascony.
The French port of Calais fell to the English in August 1347 after the Crécy campaign. Shortly after this the Truce of Calais was signed, partially the result of both countries being financially exhausted. The same year the Black Death reached northern France and southern England and is estimated to have killed a third of the population of Western Europe; the death rate was over 40% in southern England. This catastrophe, which lasted until 1350, temporarily halted the fighting. The treaty was extended repeatedly over the years; this did not stop ongoing naval clashes, nor small-scale fightingwhich was especially fierce in south-west Francenor occasional fighting on a larger scale.
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A treaty to end the war was negotiated at Guînes and signed on 6 April 1354. However, the composition of the inner council of the French king, JohnII (), changed and sentiment turned against its terms. John decided not to ratify it, and it was clear that from the summer of 1355 both sides would be committed to full-scale war. In April 1355 EdwardIII and his council, with the treasury in an unusually favourable financial position, decided to launch offensives that year in both northern France and Gascony. John attempted to strongly garrison his northern towns and fortifications against the expected descent by EdwardIII, at the same time as assembling a field army; he was unable to, largely because of a lack of money.
Black Prince arrives.
In 1355 EdwardIII's eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, later known as the Black Prince, was given the Gascon command and began assembling men, shipping and supplies. He arrived in Bordeaux on 20September accompanied by 2,200 English soldiers. The next day he was formally acknowledged as the king's lieutenant in Gascony, with plenipotentiary powers, by the Gascon officials and dignitaries. Gascon nobles reinforced him to a strength of somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 and provided a bridging train and a substantial supply train.
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