title: Fragaria

text: The genus name derives from ("strawberry") and , a suffix used to create feminine nouns and plant names. The Latin name is thought in turn to derive from a PIE root meaning "berry". The genus name is sometimes mistakenly derived from ("to be fragrant, to reek").


title: Fragaria

text: The English word is found in Old English as "streawberige". It is commonly thought that strawberries get their name from straw being used as a mulch in cultivating the plants, though it has been suggested that the word is possibly derived from "strewn berry" in reference to the runners that "strew" or "stray away" from the base of the plants. "Streaw" in Old English means 'straw', but also "streawian" means 'to strew', from the same root. David Mikkelson argues that "the word 'strawberry' has been part of the English language for at least a thousand years, well before strawberries were cultivated as garden or farm edibles."


title: Fragaria

text: There are more than 20 different "Fragaria" species worldwide. A number of other species have been proposed, some of which are now recognized as subspecies. One key to the classification of strawberry species is that they vary in the number of chromosomes. They all have seven basic "types" of chromosomes, but exhibit different polyploidy. Some species are diploid, having two sets of the seven chromosomes (14 chromosomes total), but others are tetraploid (four sets, 28 chromosomes total), hexaploid (six sets, 42 chromosomes total), octoploid (eight sets, 56 chromosomes total), or decaploid (ten sets, 70 chromosomes total).


title: Fragaria

text: As a rough rule (with exceptions), strawberry species with more chromosomes tend to be more robust and produce larger plants with larger berries.


title: Fragaria

text: The oldest fossils confidently classifiable as "Fragaria" are from the Miocene of Poland. Fossilised "Fragaria" achenes are also known from the Pliocene of China.


title: Fragaria

text: A number of species of butterflies and moths feed on strawberry plants: see list of Lepidoptera that feed on strawberry plants.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: Abu al-Qasim Abbas ibn Firnas ibn Wirdas al-Takurini (; c. 809/810 – 887 A.D.), also known as Abbas ibn Firnas (), Latinized Armen Firman, was a Berber Andalusian polymath: an inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, Andalusi musician, and Arabic-language poet. He was reported to have experimented with a form of flight.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: Ibn Firnas made various contributions in the field of astronomy and engineering. He constructed a device which indicated the motion of the planets and stars in the Universe. In addition, ibn Firnas came up with a procedure to manufacture colourless glass and made magnifying lenses for reading, which were known as reading stones.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: Abbas ibn Firnas was born in Ronda in the Takurunna province from Berber parents and lived in Córdoba.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: Abbas Ibn Firnas devised a means of manufacturing colorless glass, invented various glass planispheres, made corrective lenses ("reading stones"), devised a chain of things that could be used to simulate the motions of the planets and stars, and developed a process for cutting rock crystal that allowed Spain to cease exporting quartz to Egypt to be cut. He introduced the "Sindhind" to al-Andalus, which had important influence on astronomy in Europe. He also designed the al-Maqata, a water clock.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: Some seven centuries after the death of Firnas, the Algerian historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari (d. 1632) wrote a description of Firnas that included the following:


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: Al-Maqqari is said to have used in his history works "many early sources no longer extant", but in the case of Firnas, he does not cite his sources for the details of the reputed flight, though he does claim that one verse in a ninth-century Arab poem is actually an allusion to Firnas's flight. The poem was written by Mu'min ibn Said, a court poet of Córdoba under Muhammad I (d. 886), who was acquainted with and usually critical of Ibn Firnas. The pertinent verse runs: "He flew faster than the phoenix in his flight when he dressed his body in the feathers of a vulture." No other surviving sources refer to the event.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: It has been suggested that Ibn Firnas's attempt at glider flight might have inspired the attempt by Eilmer of Malmesbury between 1000 and 1010 in England, but there is no evidence supporting this hypothesis.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: According to some secondary sources, about 20 years before Ibn Firnas attempted to fly he may have witnessed Firman as he wrapped himself in a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts and jumped from a tower in Córdoba, intending to use the garment as wings on which he could glide. The alleged attempt at flight was unsuccessful, but the garment slowed his fall enough that he sustained only minor injuries.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: However, there is no reference to Armen Firman in other secondary sources, all of which deal exhaustively with Ibn Firnas' flight attempt. Armen Firman is not mentioned in al-Maqqari's account.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: As this story was recorded only in a single primary source, al-Maqqari, and since Firman's jump is said to have been Ibn Firnas' source of inspiration, the lack of any mention of Firman in al-Maqqari's account may point to synthesis, the tower jump later confused with Ibn Firnas' gliding attempt in secondary writings.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: In 1973, a statue of Ibn Firnas by the sculptor Badri al-Samarrai was installed at the Baghdad International Airport in Iraq.


title: Abbas ibn Firnas

text: In 1976, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved of naming a crater on the moon after him as Ibn Firnas. In 2011, one of the bridges going over the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain, was named the "". A British one-plane airline, Firnas Airways, was also named after him.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui () was the ninth Sapa Inca (1418–1471/1472) of the Kingdom of Cusco which he transformed into the Inca Empire (). Most archaeologists now believe that the famous Inca site of Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Pachacuti.


title: Pachacuti

text: In Quechua "Pachakutiq" means "reformer of the world", and "Yupanki" means "with honor". During his reign, Cusco grew from a hamlet into an empire that could compete with, and eventually overtake, the Chimú. He began an era of conquest that, within three generations, expanded the Inca dominion from the valley of Cusco to nearly the whole of western South America. According to chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, Pachacuti created the Inti Raymi to celebrate the new year in the Andes of the Southern Hemisphere. Pachacuti is often linked to the origin and expansion of the Inti Sun Cult.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacutec was the ninth ruler of the Inca state who, from ruling a simple chiefdom, came to rule a great empire, the Tawantinsuyu.


title: Pachacuti

text: He was born in Cusco, in the palace of Cusicancha, bordering the Coricancha temple. His tutor, Micuymana, taught him history, laws and language, as well as the handling of quipus. From a very young age he was admired by the Inca nobles because he had the courage, intelligence and maturity that his brother, Inca Urco (who had been named as successor of Viracocha Inca), lacked. In the same way, he showed aptitudes for government and conquest that his brother likewise lacked.


title: Pachacuti

text: Although he had not been designated as successor by his father, Viracocha Inca, he led a military defense against the warlike army of Chanka while his father and his brother, Inca Urco, fled the manor. The victory over the Chankas made Inca Viracocha recognize him as his successor around 1438.


title: Pachacuti

text: As part of his vision of a statesman and warrior chieftain he conquered many ethnic groups and states, highlighting his conquest of the Collao that enhanced the prestige of the Inca Pachacutec. Due to the remarkable expansion of their domains he was considered an exceptional leader, enlivening glorious epic stories and hymns in tribute to his achievements. Numerous "kurakas" do not hesitate to recognise his skills and identify him as the "Son of the Sun".


title: Pachacuti

text: He conquered the provinces of Colla-Suyu and Chinchay-Suyu. Along with his sons, Tupac Ayar Manco (or Amaru Tupac Inca), and Apu Paucar Usnu, he defeated the Colla-Suyuns. Additionally, he left garrisons in subjugated lands.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti, son of Inca Viracocha and Mama Runtu, was the fourth of the Hanan dynasty. His wife's name was Mama Anahuarqui, or Quya Anawarkhi "(Coya Anahurque)". She was a native of Ayllu Chocco. He had three sons, Tupac Ayar Manco, Apu Paucar, and Tupac Inca Yupanqui.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti had his two brothers, Capac Yupanqui and Huayana Yupanqui, killed after the military campaign against the province of Chinchay-Suyu. He also killed his sons Tilca Yupanqui and Auqui Yupanqui.


title: Pachacuti

text: Amaru, the older son, was originally chosen to be co-regent and eventual successor. Pachacuti later chose Tupac Inca because Amaru was not a warrior. He was also the first one to retire.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti's given name was Cusi Yupanqui and he was not supposed to succeed his father Inca Viracocha who had appointed his brother Urco as crown prince. However, in the midst of an invasion of Cusco by the Chankas, the Incas' traditional tribal archenemies, Pachacuti had a real opportunity to demonstrate his talent. While his father and brother fled the scene, Pachacuti rallied the army and prepared for a desperate defense of his homeland. In the resulting battle, the Chankas were defeated so severely that legend tells even the stones rose up to fight on Pachacuti's side. Pachacuti became known as "The Earth Shaker" following the battle, and won the support of his people. Pachacuti captured many Chanka leaders, who Pachacuti presented to his father Viracocha for him to wipe his feet on their bodies, a traditional victory ritual. Viracocha told Pachacuti that the honor of the ritual belonged to the next Inca: Urco. Pachacuti protested and said that he had not won the victory for his brothers to step on the Chanka captives. A heated argument ensued, and Viracocha later tried to have Pachacuti assassinated. Pachacuti was tipped off to the plot, however, and the assassination plot failed. Viracocha went into exile while Pachacuti returned in triumph to Cusco, and renamed himself "Pachacuti" (meaning "Earth Shaker").


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti rebuilt much of Cusco, designing it to serve the needs of an imperial city and as a representation of the empire. Each "suyu" had a sector of the city, centering on the road leading to that province; nobles and immigrants lived in the sector corresponding to their origin. Each sector was further divided into areas for the "hanan" (upper) and "hurin" (lower) moieties. Many of the most renowned monuments around Cusco, such as the great sun temple "Qurikancha", were rebuilt during Pachacuti's reign.


title: Pachacuti

text: Despite his political and military talents, Pachacuti did not improve the system of succession. His son became the next Inca without any known dispute after Pachacuti died in 1471 due to a terminal illness. But in future generations, the next Inca had to gain control of the empire by winning enough support from the "apos", priesthood, and military to win a civil war or intimidate anyone else from trying to wrest control of the empire.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti is also credited with having displaced hundreds of thousands in massive programs of relocation and resettling them to colonize the most remote edges of his empire. These forced colonists were called "mitimaes" and represented the lowest place in the Incan social hierarchy. The Incan imperial government was highly authoritative and repressive.


title: Pachacuti

text: He sent his son Tupac Inca Yupanqui an army to repeat his conquests, and extend his realm to Quito. Pachacuti then built irrigating channels, cultivated terraces, made roads and hospices. The Road of the Inca stretched from Quito to Chile.


title: Pachacuti

text: Pachacuti was a poet and the author of the Sacred Hymns of the "Situa" city purification ceremony. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa attributed one song to Pachacuti on his deathbed: "I was born as a lily in the garden, and like the lily I grew, as my age advanced / I became old and had to die, and so I withered and died."


title: Munsell color system

text: In colorimetry, the Munsell color system is a color space that specifies colors based on three properties of color: hue (basic color), chroma (color intensity), and value (lightness). It was created by Professor Albert H. Munsell in the first decade of the 20th century and adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as the official color system for soil research in the 1930s.


title: Munsell color system

text: Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a three-dimensional color solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to separate hue, value, and chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, and he was the first to illustrate the colors systematically in three-dimensional space. Munsell's system, particularly the later renotations, is based on rigorous measurements of human subjects' visual responses to color, putting it on a firm experimental scientific basis. Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell's system has outlasted its contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded for some uses by models such as CIELAB ("L*a*b*") and CIECAM02, it is still in wide use today.


title: Munsell color system

text: The system consists of three independent properties of color which can be represented cylindrically in three dimensions as an irregular color solid:


title: Munsell color system

text: Munsell determined the spacing of colors along these dimensions by taking measurements of human visual responses. In each dimension, Munsell colors are as close to perceptually uniform as he could make them, which makes the resulting shape quite irregular. As Munsell explains:


title: Munsell color system

text: Each horizontal circle Munsell divided into five principal "hues": Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple, along with 5 intermediate hues (e.g., YR) halfway between adjacent principal hues. Each of these 10 steps, with the named hue given number 5, is then broken into 10 sub-steps, so that 100 hues are given integer values. In practice, color charts conventionally specify 40 hues, in increments of 2.5, progressing as for example 10R to 2.5YR.


title: Munsell color system

text: Two colors of equal value and chroma, on opposite sides of a hue circle, are complementary colors, and mix additively to the neutral gray of the same value. The diagram below shows 40 evenly spaced Munsell hues, with complements vertically aligned.


title: Munsell color system

text: "Value", or lightness, varies vertically along the color solid, from black (value 0) at the bottom, to white (value 10) at the top. Neutral grays lie along the vertical axis between black and white.


title: Munsell color system

text: Several color solids before Munsell's plotted luminosity from black on the bottom to white on the top, with a gray gradient between them, but these systems neglected to keep perceptual lightness constant across horizontal slices. Instead, they plotted fully saturated yellow (light), and fully saturated blue and purple (dark) along the equator.


title: Munsell color system

text: "Chroma", measured radially from the center of each slice, represents the “purity” of a color (related to saturation), with lower chroma being less pure (more washed out, as in pastels). Note that there is no intrinsic upper limit to chroma. Different areas of the color space have different maximal chroma coordinates. For instance light yellow colors have considerably more potential chroma than light purples, due to the nature of the eye and the physics of color stimuli. This led to a wide range of possible chroma levels—up to the high 30s for some hue–value combinations (though it is difficult or impossible to make physical objects in colors of such high chromas, and they cannot be reproduced on current computer displays). Vivid solid colors are in the range of approximately 8.


title: Munsell color system

text: A color is fully specified by listing the three numbers for hue, value, and chroma in that order. For instance, a purple of medium lightness and fairly saturated would be 5P 5/10 with 5P meaning the color in the middle of the purple hue band, 5/ meaning medium value (lightness), and a chroma of 10 (see swatch). An achromatic color is specified by the syntax . For example, a medium grey is specified by "N 5/".


title: Munsell color system

text: In computer processing, the Munsell colors are converted to a set of "HVC" numbers. The V and C are the same as the normal chroma and value. The H (hue) number is converted by mapping the hue rings into numbers between 0 and 100, where both 0 and 100 correspond to 10RP.


title: Munsell color system

text: As the Munsell books, including the 1943 renotation, only contains colors for some points in the Munsell space, it is non-trivial to specify an arbitrary color in Munsell space. Interpolation must be used to assign meanings to non-book colors such as "2.8Y 6.95/2.3", followed by an "inversion" of the fitted Munsell-to-xyY transform. The ASTM has defined a method in 2008, but Centore 2012 is known to work better.


title: Munsell color system

text: The idea of using a three-dimensional color solid to represent all colors was developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. Several different shapes for such a solid were proposed, including: a double triangular pyramid by Tobias Mayer in 1758, a single triangular pyramid by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1772, a sphere by Philipp Otto Runge in 1810, a hemisphere by Michel Eugène Chevreul in 1839, a cone by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1860, a tilted cube by William Benson in 1868, and a slanted double cone by August Kirschmann in 1895. These systems became progressively more sophisticated, with Kirschmann’s even recognizing the difference in value between bright colors of different hues. But all of them remained either purely theoretical or encountered practical problems in accommodating all colors. Furthermore, none was based on any rigorous scientific measurement of human vision; before Munsell, the relationship between hue, value, and chroma was not understood.


title: Munsell color system

text: Albert Munsell, an artist and professor of art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design, or MassArt), wanted to create a "rational way to describe color" that would use decimal notation instead of color names (which he felt were "foolish" and "misleading"), which he could use to teach his students about color. He first started work on the system in 1898 and published it in full form in "A Color Notation" in 1905.


title: Munsell color system

text: The original embodiment of the system (the 1905 Atlas) had some deficiencies as a physical representation of the theoretical system. These were improved significantly in the 1929 "Munsell Book of Color" and through an extensive series of experiments carried out by the Optical Society of America in the 1940s resulting in the notations (sample definitions) for the modern "Munsell Book of Color". Though several replacements for the Munsell system have been invented, building on Munsell's foundational ideas—including the Optical Society of America's Uniform Color Scales, and the International Commission on Illumination’s CIELAB ("L*a*b*") and CIECAM02 color models—the Munsell system is still widely used, by, among others, ANSI to define skin color and hair color for forensic pathology, the USGS for matching soil color, in prosthodontics during the selection of tooth color for dental restorations, and breweries for matching beer color.


title: Flensburg

text: Flensburg (; Danish, Low Saxon: "Flensborg"; North Frisian: "Flansborj"; South Jutlandic: "Flensborre") is an independent town ("kreisfreie Stadt") in the north of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Flensburg is the centre of the region of Southern Schleswig. After Kiel and Lübeck, it is the third largest town in Schleswig-Holstein.


title: Flensburg

text: Flensburg is situated in the north of the German state Schleswig-Holstein, very close to the German-Danish border. After Westerland on the island of Sylt it is Germany's northernmost town. Flensburg lies at the innermost tip of the Flensburg Firth, an inlet of the Baltic Sea. Flensburg's eastern shore is part of the Anglia peninsula.


title: Flensburg

text: Clockwise from the northeast, beginning at the German shore of the Flensburg Firth, the following communities in Schleswig-Flensburg district and Denmark's Southern Denmark Region all border on Flensburg:


title: Flensburg

text: Glücksburg (Amt-free town), Wees (Amt Langballig), Maasbüll, Hürup, Tastrup and Freienwill (all in Amt Hürup), Jarplund-Weding, Handewitt (Amt Handewitt), Harrislee (Amt-free community) and Aabenraa Municipality on the Danish shore of the Flensburg Firth.


title: Flensburg

text: The town of Flensburg is divided into 13 communities, which themselves are further divided into 38 statistical areas. Constituent communities have a two-digit number and the statistical areas a three-digit number.


title: Flensburg

text: Flensburg was founded at the latest by 1200 at the innermost end of the Flensburg Firth by Danish settlers, who were soon joined by German merchants. In 1284, its town rights were confirmed and the town quickly rose to become one of the most important in the Duchy of Schleswig. Unlike Holstein, however, Schleswig did not belong to the German Holy Roman Empire. Therefore, Flensburg was not a member of the Hanseatic League, but it did maintain contacts with this important trading network.


title: Flensburg

text: Herrings, especially kippered, were what brought about the blossoming of the town's trade in the Middle Ages. They were sent inland and to almost every European country.


title: Flensburg

text: On 28 October 1412, Queen Margaret I of Denmark died of the Plague aboard a ship in Flensburg Harbour.


title: Flensburg

text: From time to time plagues such as bubonic plague, caused mainly by rat fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis, a parasite found on brown rats), "red" dysentery and other scourges killed a great deal of Flensburg's population. Lepers were strictly isolated, namely at the St.-Jürgen-Hospital ("Helligåndshospital", built before 1290), which lay far outside the town's gates, where the St. Jürgen Church is nowadays. About 1500, syphilis also appeared. The church hospital "Zum Heiligen Geist" ("To the Holy Ghost") stood in Große Straße, now Flensburg's pedestrian precinct.


title: Flensburg

text: A Flensburger's everyday life was very hard, and the old roads and paths were bad. The main streets were neither paved nor lit at night. When the streets became really bad, the citizens had to make the dung-filled streets passable with wooden pathways. Only the few upper-class houses had windows. In 1485, a great fire struck Flensburg. Storm tides also beset the town occasionally. Every household in the town kept livestock in the house and the yard. Townsfolk furthermore had their own cowherds and a swineherd.


title: Flensburg

text: After the fall of the Hanseatic League in the 16th century, Flensburg was said to be one of the most important trading towns in the Scandinavian area. Flensburg merchants were active as far away as the Mediterranean, Greenland and the Caribbean. The most important commodities, after herring, were sugar and whale oil, the latter from whaling off Greenland. However, the Thirty Years' War put an end to this boom time. The town was becoming Protestant and thereby ever more German culturally and linguistically, while the neighbouring countryside remained decidedly Danish.


title: Flensburg

text: In the 18th century, thanks to the rum trade, Flensburg had yet another boom. Cane sugar was imported from the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) and refined in Flensburg. Only in the 19th century, as a result of industrialization, was the town at last outstripped by the competition from cities such as Copenhagen and Hamburg.


title: Flensburg

text: The rum produced in Flensburg then became re-integrated into West Indian trade routes, which as of 1864 moved away from the Danish West Indies to the British colony of Jamaica instead. It was imported from there, blended, and sold all over Europe. There is nowadays only one active rum distillery in Flensburg, "A. H. Johannsen".


title: Flensburg

text: Between 1460 and 1864, Flensburg was, after Copenhagen, the second biggest port in the Kingdom of Denmark, but it passed to the Kingdom of Prussia after the Second Schleswig War in 1864. The Battle of Flensburg was on February 6, 1864: near the city a small Hungarian mounted regiment chased a Danish infantry and Dragoon regiment. There is still a considerable Danish community in the town today. Some estimates put the percentage of Flensburgers who belong to it as high as 25%; other estimates put that percentage much lower. The SSW political party representing the minority usually gains 20–25% of the votes in local elections, but by no means are all of its voters Danes. Before 1864, more than 50% belonged to what is now the minority, witnessed even today by the great number of Danish surnames in the Flensburg telephone directory ("Asmussen, Claussen, Jacobsen, Jensen, Petersen," etc.). The upper classes and the learned at that time, however, were German, and since 1864, the German language has prevailed in the town.


title: Flensburg

text: On 1 April 1889, Flensburg became an independent city ("kreisfreie Stadt") within the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, and at the same time still kept its status as seat of the Flensburg district. In 1920, the League of Nations decided that the matter of the German-Danish border would be settled by a vote. As a result of the plebiscite, and the way the voting zones were laid out, some of Flensburg's northern neighbourhoods were ceded to Denmark, whereas Flensburg as a whole voted with a great majority to stay in Germany.


title: Flensburg

text: In return for this great pro-German majority, the town of Flensburg was given a large hall, the "Deutsches Haus", which was endowed by the government as "thanks for German loyalty".


title: Flensburg

text: During the Second World War, the town was left almost unscathed by the air raids that devastated other German cities. However, in 1943, 20 children died when their nursery school was bombed, and shortly after the war ended, an explosion at a local munitions storage site claimed many victims.


title: Flensburg

text: In 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was briefly President ("Reichspräsident") of Nazi Germany once Adolf Hitler had appointed him his successor and then killed himself, fled to Flensburg with what was left of his government. The so-called Flensburg government, led by Karl Dönitz, was in power from 1 May, the announcement of Hitler's death, for one week, until German troops surrendered and the town was occupied by Allied troops. The regime was effectively dissolved on 23 May when the British Army arrested Dönitz and his ministers in Mürwik and detained them in the Navy School in Mürwik (). The dissolution was formalized by the Berlin Declaration which was promulgated on 5 June. Flensburg was therefore, for a few weeks, the seat of the last "Third Reich" government.


title: Flensburg

text: After the Second World War, the town's population broke the 100,000 mark for a short time, thereby making Flensburg a city ("Großstadt") under one traditional definition. The population later sank below that mark, however.


title: Flensburg

text: In the years after the Second World War, there was in South Schleswig, particularly in Flensburg, a strong pro-Danish movement connected with the idea of the "Eider Politics". Its goal was for the town and all or most of Schleswig, the whole area north of the Eider River, to be united with Denmark. After 1945, Flensburg's town council was for years dominated by Danish parties, and the town had a Danish mayor.


title: Flensburg

text: The town profited from the planned location of military installations. Since the German Reunification, the number of soldiers has dropped to about 8,000. Since Denmark's entry into the European Economic Community (now the European Union), border trade has played an important role in Flensburg's economic life. Some Danish businesses, such as Danfoss, have set up shop just south of the border for tax reasons.


title: Flensburg

text: In 1970, the Flensburg district was expanded to include the municipalities in the Amt of Medelby, formerly in the Südtondern district, and in 1974 it was united with the Schleswig district to form the district of Schleswig-Flensburg, whose district seat was the town of Schleswig. Flensburg thereby lost its function as a district seat, but it remained an independent (district-free) town.


title: Flensburg

text: Until the middle of the 19th century Flensburg's municipal area comprised a total area of 2 639 ha. Beginning in 1874, however, the following communities or rural areas ("Gemarkungen") were annexed to the town of Flensburg:


title: Flensburg

text: Population figures are for respective municipal areas through time. Until 1870, figures are mostly estimates, and thereafter census results (¹) or official projections from either statistical offices or the town administration itself.


title: Flensburg

text: The Danish minority in Flensburg and the surrounding towns run their own schools, libraries and Lutheran churches from which the German majority is not excluded. The co-existence of these two groups is considered a sound and healthy symbiosis. There is a form of mixed Danish–German used on the ferries, Petuh.


title: Flensburg

text: In Denmark, Flensburg seems to be mainly known for its "border shops" where, among other things, spirits, beer and candy can be purchased at cheaper prices than in Denmark. The prices are lower because the value-added tax is lower and excise taxes are either lower (e.g. on alcohol) or do not exist (on e.g. sugar). Currently the border shops are able to sell canned beer to persons resident in Scandinavia without paying deposits as long as the beverage is not consumed in Germany.


title: Flensburg

text: The town council was led for centuries by two mayors, one for the north town (St. Marien) and the other for the south town (St. Nikolai and St. Johannis). The council members and the mayors were chosen by the council itself, that is, retiring officials had their successors named by the remaining councillors in such a way that both halves of the town had as many members. These councillors usually bore the title "Senator".


title: Flensburg

text: This "town government" lasted until 1742 when the "northern mayor" was made the "directing mayor" by the Danish King. From this position came what was later known as the First Mayor. The second mayor simply bore the title "mayor" (""Bürgermeister""). After the town had been ceded to Prussia, the mayors were elected by the townsfolk as of 1870, and the First Mayor was given the title "Oberbürgermeister", still the usual title in German towns and cities. During the Third Reich, the town head was appointed by those who held power locally at the time.


title: Flensburg

text: In 1945, after the Second World War, a twofold leadership based on a British model was introduced. Heading the town stood foremost the "Oberbürgermeister", who was chosen by the town council and whose job was as chairman of council and the municipality. Next to him was an "Oberstadtdirektor" ("Higher Town Director") who was leader of administration. In 1950, when Schleswig-Holstein brought its new laws for municipalities into force, the title "Oberbürgermeister" was transferred (once again) to this latter official. At first, and for a while, he was chosen by the council. Since that time, the former official has been called the "Stadtpräsident" ("Town President"), and is likewise chosen by the council after each municipal election. However, since 1999, the "Oberbürgermeister" has been chosen directly by the voters as once before.


title: Flensburg

text: The first directly elected "Oberbürgermeister" Hermann Stell died on 4 May 2004 of a stroke. On 14 November of the same year, the independent candidate suggested by the CDU Klaus Tscheuschner was elected to replace Stell with 59% of the vote. In the municipal election in 2003, Hans Hermann Laturnus was elected "Stadtpräsident".


title: Flensburg

text: In the municipal election of 2008, the local list WiF (Wir in Flensburg) was elected largest group in the Council Assembly of Flensburg, with its 10 city councillors out of 43, closely followed by the South Schleswig Voter Federation ("Südschleswigscher Wählerverband") (9 councillors) and the CDU (9 councillors). Also elected was the SPD (seven councillors), the Greens (3 councillors), the Left (3 councillors) and the FDP (2 councillors). Nevertheless, since the WiF-group was divided into two different caucuses, the SSW-group has been the largest group in the Council Assembly. The current City President is Dr. Christian Dewanger (WiF).


title: Flensburg

text: In the mayoral election of 2010, Simon Faber (SSW) was elected Lord Mayor of the town in a run-off election with 54.8% of the vote. He was the first person from the Danish Minority to occupy this office since the end of World War II.


title: Flensburg

text: The current Mayor of Flensburg is Simone Lange of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who was elected in 2016. She took office on 15 January 2017.


title: Flensburg

text: The Flensburg city council governs the city alongside the Mayor. The most recent city council election was held on 6 May 2018, and the results were as follows:


title: Flensburg

text: Flensburg's coat of arms shows in gold above blue and silver waves rising to the left a six-sided red tower with a blue pointed roof breaking out of which, one above the other are the two lions of Schleswig and Denmark; above is a red shield with the silver Holsatian nettle leaf on it. The town's flag is blue, overlaid with the coat of arms in colour.


title: Flensburg

text: The lions symbolize Schleswig, and the nettle leaf Holstein, thus expressing the town's unity with these two historic lands. The tower recalls Flensburg's old town rights and the old castle that was the town's namesake ("Burg" means "castle" in German). The waves refer to the town's position on the Flensburg Fjord.


title: Flensburg

text: The coat of arms was granted the town by King Wilhelm II of Prussia in 1901, and once again in modified, newly approved form on 19 January 1937 by Schleswig-Holstein's High President ("Oberpräsident")


title: Flensburg

text: The town has a well established Combined Heat and Power and District Heating scheme which was installed between 1970 and 1980. It is owned by the town.


title: Flensburg

text: West of Flensburg runs the A 7 Autobahn, leading north to the Danish border, whence it continues as European route E45. Furthermore, Federal Highways ("Bundesstraßen") B 200 and B 199 pass through the municipal area.


title: Flensburg

text: Local transport is provided by several buslines such as "Aktiv Bus GmbH" and "Allgemeinen Flensburger Autobus Gesellschaft" (AFAG) along with others. They all operate within an integrated fare system within the Flensburg transport community ("Verkehrsgemeinschaft Flensburg"). They also all subscribe to the Schleswig-Holstein tariff system whereby anyone travelling from anywhere in Schleswig-Holstein or Hamburg may use Flensburg buses free to connect with their final destinations. It works both ways, of course, and a rider boarding any bus in Flensburg need only name his destination anywhere in Schleswig-Holstein or Hamburg, pay his fare, and travel all the way to that destination on the one ticket.


title: Flensburg

text: The current Flensburg station was opened in 1927 south of the Old Town. From there, trains run on the main line to Neumünster and on to Hamburg and to Fredericia, among them some InterCity connections as well as trains serving the line running to Eckernförde and Kiel. Another stop for regional trains to Neumünster is to be found in Flensburg-Weiche. The stretch of line to Niebüll has been out of service since 1981, efforts to open it again notwithstanding. The secondary line to Husum and the lesser lines to Kappeln and Satrup no longer exist. Even the tramway, which opened in 1881 to horse-drawn trams, was electrified in 1906 and at one point ran four lines was replaced with buses in 1973.


title: Flensburg

text: In Flensburg, the "Flensburger Tageblatt", from the "Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag" (newspaper publisher) is published daily, as is the bilingual (German and Danish) "Flensborg Avis". There are also two weekly advertising flyers, "MoinMoin" (named for a common regional greeting) and "Wochenschau" ("Newsreel") as well as an illustrated town paper ("Flensburg Journal"), the Flensburg "campus newspaper" and a town magazine ("Partout"). Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) runs one of its oldest studios right near the Deutsches Haus. Flensburg is the site of a number of radio transmission facilities: on the Fuchsberg in the community of Engelsby, Norddeutscher Rundfunk runs a transmission facility for VHF, television and medium wave. A cage aerial is mounted on a guyed, earthed steel-lattice mast. This transmitter is successor to the Flensburg transmitter through which the announcement of Germany's surrender was broadcast on 8 May 1945.


title: Flensburg

text: The broadcasting tower on the Fuchsberg is used for the programmes of Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Danmarks Radio while the countrywide VHF radio programmes of R.SH, delta radio, Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandradio are aired from the Flensburg-Freienwill tower.


title: Flensburg

text: Flensburg has no local transmitter of its own because Schleswig-Holstein's state broadcasting laws only allow transmitters that broadcast statewide. From 1993 to 1996, "Radio Flensburg" tried to establish a local Flensburg radio station by using a local transmitter just across the border in Denmark. It had to be shut down, however, owing to the Danish transmitter's own financial problems. From October 2006 Radio Flensburg broadcast as an internet radio.


title: Flensburg

text: The "Offener Kanal" ("Open Channel") shows programmes made by local citizens seven days a week, mostly in the evenings, and can also be seen on cable television.


title: Flensburg

text: Also on hand in Flensburg is a complete range of training and professional schools, including a number of Danish ones. Flensburg is home to Schleswig-Holstein's Central State Library, a university library, a town bookshop and the Danish Central Library for South Schleswig. The last named offers not only intensive courses in Danish, but also, with its "Slesvigsk samling" collection, a vast repository of unique material about the border area's history and culture. Flensburg has an extensive town archive. The Danish minority's archive is housed at the Danish Central Library.


title: Flensburg

text: Flensburg has a well preserved Old Town with many things to see from centuries gone by. Characteristic is the row along the waterfront. Three of the four old town cores are found along this north–south axis. The building boom in Imperial times led to a partial rebuilding of the Old Town, but without destroying its structure, and rather leading to notable expansion of the town. Virtually unscathed in the Second World War, Flensburg, like other places in Germany, adopted a policy of getting rid of old buildings and building anew in the style of the times. This trend was limited in Flensburg by a lack of money, but before the policy was finally stopped in the late 1970s, countless old buildings had been demolished in the north and east Old Town to be replaced by newer structures. Despite great losses, Flensburg still comes across as having a compact, well preserved Old Town in the valley with good additions to what was built in the founders' time on the surrounding heights.


title: Flensburg

text: The town of Flensburg has bestowed honorary citizenship upon the following persons, listed chronologically:


Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia (; 22 April 1847 – 17 February 1909) was a son of Emperor Alexander II of Russia, a brother of Emperor Alexander III of Russia and the senior Grand Duke of the House of Romanov during the reign of his nephew, Emperor Nicholas II.


title: Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia

text: Grand Duke Vladimir followed a military career and occupied important military positions during the reigns of the last three Russian Emperors. Interested in artistic and intellectual pursuits; he was appointed President of the Academy of Fine Arts. He functioned as a patron of many artists and as a sponsor of the Imperial ballet.


text: During the reign of his father, Emperor Alexander II, he was made Adjutant-General, senator in 1868 and a member of the Council of State in 1872. His brother, Alexander III, also promoted his career. He became a member of the Council of Ministers, Commander of the Imperial Guards Corps and Military Governor of Saint Petersburg. He tried to exert some influence over his nephew Tsar Nicholas II, but had to content himself with holding a rival court with his wife Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna at his palace in Saint Petersburg. The events of Bloody Sunday in 1905, while he was Military Governor of St Petersburg, tarnished his reputation. During the last years of his life, the rift between his family and that of Nicholas II widened. He died after a stroke in 1909.


text: Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich was born on 22 April 1847 at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. He was fourth among the eight children of Alexander II of Russia and his wife Maria Alexandrovna, born Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt.


text: He was eight years old when at the death of his grandfather Nicholas I, his father became Russian tsar. Grand Duke Vladimir was well educated and through his life he was interested in literature and the arts. However, as all male members of the Romanov family he had to follow a military career. As only the third son in a numerous family, he was far from the succession to the Russian throne. Nevertheless, in 1865, the early death of his eldest brother, the Tsarevich Nicholas, left Vladimir unexpectedly close to the throne as heir presumptive after his second brother Alexander. Unlike Alexander, the new heir, Vladimir was witty and ambitious. Rumors circulated at the time, that Alexander II would have his eldest surviving son removed from the succession placing Vladimir as his heir. Alexander himself would have preferred to step aside from the succession hoping to marry morganatically, but eventually he yielded to family pressure and married a suitable bride. Relations between the two brothers, although cordial, were never warm.


text: In 1867 Grand Duke Vladimir was named honorary president of the Russian ethnographic society, the same year he accompanied his father and his brother Alexander to the World Fair in Paris, where his father was shot by a Polish nationalist. In 1871 he visited the Caucasus region, Georgia, Chechnya and Dagestan with his father and his brothers. In 1872 he accompanied his father to Vienna at the reunion of the three emperors: Russia, Germany and Austria.


text: A member of the European beau monde, he made frequent trips to Paris. He became portly as a young man, although in later life he slimmed down. He was a skillful painter and gathered an important book collection. He was a well known gourmet, accumulating a collection of menus copied after meals, adding notations with his impressions about the food.


text: While traveling through Germany with his family in June 1871, Grand Duke Vladimir met Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (14 May 1854 – 6 September 1920), daughter of Friedrich Franz II, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Augusta of Reuss-Köstritz. She was seventeen years old and was already engaged to a distant relative, Prince George of Schwarzburg. Grand Duke Vladimir was then twenty four. They were smitten with each other. Vladimir was a second cousin of Maria's father Friedrich Franz II, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a grandson of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna of Russia. They were also second cousins in descent from Frederick William III of Prussia. In order to marry Vladimir, Maria broke off her previous engagement, but she refused to yield to the necessary conversion to the Orthodox religion. This delayed the couple's engagement for almost two years. Finally, Tsar Alexander II consented to Marie's continued adherence to her Lutheran faith, allowing Vladimir to marry her without loss of his rights to the Russian throne. The engagement was announced in April 1874.


text: The wedding took place in Saint Petersburg on 28 August 1874 at the Winter palace. Vladimir's wife adopted the patronymic Pavlovna upon her marriage and was known as Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia. Only decades later, after Vladimir's death, she converted to the Russian Orthodox confession, then, Emperor Nicholas II bestowed her the title "the Orthodox Grand Duchess". Grand Duke Vladimir and his wife were both witty and ambitious. They enjoyed entertaining and their residence in St. Petersburg became the heart of the Imperial capital social life. Well suited to each other, they had a long and happy marriage.


text: By the time of his marriage, construction had already been completed on Vladimir's own residence and he moved there with his wife. Named the Vladimir Palace, it was one of the last imperial palaces constructed in Saint Petersburg. Grand Duke Vladimir appointed architect Aleksandr Rezanov to head the project because of his knowledge of ancient Russian architecture. A team of architects assisted Rezanov: Vasily Kenel, , and Vladimir Shreter. The foundation stone was laid on 15 July 1867. Construction work lasted five years, from 1867 to 1872. The furniture was designed by architect Victor Shroeter.


text: The site chosen for the palace was the Embankment near the Winter Palace in the center of St Petersburg. It had previously been occupied by the house of Count which had been bought by the treasury. The lot was enlarged by purchasing the neighboring house of Madame Karatinga. The total construction and furnishing cost of Vladimir Palace was 820,000 rubles, a much modest amount than the one spent building previous palaces for other grand dukes a decade earlier.


text: The Vladimir palace stands, like the Winter Palace and the Marble Palace, by the Neva on the Dvorstsovaya Embankment. The façade, richly ornamented with stucco rustication, was patterned after Leon Battista Alberti's palazzi in Florence. The main porch is built of Bremen sandstone and adorned with griffins, coats-of-arms, and cast-iron lanterns. Other details are cast in Portland cement.


text: The palace and its outbuildings contain some 360 rooms, all decorated in eclectic historic styles: Neo-Renaissance (reception room, parlor), Gothic Revival (dining room), Russian Revival (Oak Hall), Rococo (White Hall), Byzantine style (study), Louis XIV, various oriental styles, and so on. This interior ornamentation, further augmented by Maximilian Messmacher in 1881–1891, is considered by art historians, such as Nikolay Punin, a major monument to the 19th-century passion for historicism. Grand Duke Vladimir decorated his apartments with his collection of Russian paintings by the best artists of his time, such as Ilya Repin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Feodor Bruni, Vasili Vereshchagin, Ivan Kramskoy, Mikhail Vrubel, Nikolai Sverchkov and .


text: Grand Duke Vladimir occupied important military positions during three reigns. He experienced battle in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, taking part in the campaign alongside his father and his brothers Alexander and Sergei. He fought against the Turkish troops as the commanding officer of the XII Corps of the Russian army. However, his military career interested him less than art and literature. In 1880 his father appointed him President of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He also became a member of the Academy of Science and an agent of the Rumyantsev Museum. Grand Duke Vladimir was in the Imperial capital when his father was assassinated and succeeded by Alexander III in 1881. It fell upon Vladimir, who regained his composure more quickly than his brother, to announce their father's death to the public. Vladimir inherited his father's personal library, which the Grand Duke added to his large book-collection that was arranged in three libraries at the Vladimir Palace. (After the Russian Revolution of 1917 these books were sold off randomly by weight and currently form part of several American university-collections.)


text: Although Alexander III was not close to Vladimir and there was a rivalry between their wives, he promoted his brother's career. The day after their father's death he appointed Vladimir as Military Governor of St Petersburg, a post previously held by their uncle Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. Vladimir served on the State Council and chaired the official commission that supervised the building of the Church of the Saviour, built between 1883 and 1907 on the site of the assassination of his father, Emperor Alexander II of Russia.


text: Grand Duke Vladimir was a keen philanthropist. A talented painter himself, he became a famous patron of the arts. He frequented many artists and gathered a valuable collection of paintings and old icons. He later took a great interest in ballet. He financed the tour of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.


text: Emperor Alexander III's three sons rendered Vladimir and Vladimir's own three sons remote in the line of succession to Russia's throne. Nevertheless, Vladimir seemed unexpectedly close to becoming Emperor in 1888 when Alexander III with his wife and all of their children were involved in a train accident at Borki (in present-day Ukraine). Vladimir and his wife, then in Paris, did not bother to come back to Russia. This annoyed Alexander III, who commented that if he had died with his children, Vladimir would have rushed to return to Russia to become Emperor. At Alexander III's death in 1894 there were unfounded rumors that the army intended to proclaim Grand Duke Vladimir emperor in place of his nephew Nicholas II. Vladimir tried to influence the new Emperor, particularly at the beginning of Nicholas II's reign.


text: Although the Grand Duke was conservative in his political views, he did not believe in human virtues. Something of a rascal himself, he preferred the company of amusing witty people - regardless of their ideology or background. The more liberal members of Russian society were invited to lavish parties at his residence. He often intimidated people with his coarseness, rudeness and hot temper. Vladimir Alexandrovich was also a devoted family man, close to his children.


text: In January 1905 a wave of strikes broke out in St. Petersburg. On 9 January (O.S.)/22 (N.S.) a peaceful procession of workers led by a priest, Father Georgy Gapon, marched towards the Winter Palace from different points in the city hoping to present requests for reforms directly to Emperor Nicholas II. The Tsar, however, was not in the capital. General Ivan Fullon, St Petersburg Governor, tried to stop the march. When a large group of workers reached Winter Palace Square, troops acting on direct orders from Guards Commander Prince Sergei Vasilchikov opened fire upon the demonstrators. More than 100 marchers were killed and several hundred were wounded. Although Grand Duke Vladimir claimed no direct responsibility about that tragedy, since he was also away from the city, his reputation was tarnished. The massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, was followed by a series of strikes in other cities, peasant uprisings in the country, and mutinies in the armed forces, which seriously threatened the tsarist regime and became known as the Revolution of 1905. A month after Bloody Sunday, Vladimir's brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was killed by a terrorist bomb in Moscow.


text: In October 1905, Vladimir's eldest son and heir Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia married his first cousin Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, daughter of Vladimir's sister Maria. Nicholas II was enraged by the marriage, which was contracted without his permission and was in violation of the Russian Orthodox ban on marriages between first cousins. Nicholas stripped Kirill of his imperial titles and banished him. Vladimir protested the treatment given to his son and resigned from all his posts in protest. Vladimir “shouted so violently at his nephew that the court chamberlain, waiting outside the door, feared for his master’s safety and almost ran off to summon the imperial guards.” Vladimir slammed his fists on Nicholas' desk and ripped off the military decorations from his uniform, shouting, "I have served your father, your grandfather and you. But now as you have degraded my son I no longer wish to serve you.” Eventually, Nicholas II relented and forgave his cousins for marrying without his consent, but he did not allow them to return to Russia. The full pardon came only after several deaths in the family, including Vladimir's own, had placed Kirill third in the line of succession to the Imperial Throne.


text: Grand Duke Vladimir died suddenly on 4(O.S.)/17(N.S.) February 1909 after suffering a major cerebral hemorrhage. Vladimir's widow and their four children survived the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1924 in exile, Kirill proclaimed himself Emperor "de jure", Vladimir's line thereby claimed headship of the Imperial House. Vladimir was the paternal grandfather and namesake of the future pretender claimant Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, born 1917. His granddaughter Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark becomes a British princess by marriage to Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary, in 1934. Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich's great granddaughter, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, is the current claimant and his great grandson Prince Michael becomes a honorary member of the Romanov Family Association.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: Northern Ireland is divided into six counties, namely: Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. Six largely rural administrative counties based on these were among the eight primary local government areas of Northern Ireland from its 1921 creation until 1973. The other two local government areas were the urban county boroughs of Derry (geographically part of the County of Londonderry) and Belfast (geographically split between the counties of Antrim and Down).


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: The six counties date from the Kingdom of Ireland; five were created between 1570 and 1591 in the Tudor conquest of Ireland, while county Londonderry dates from 1613 and the Plantation of Ulster. The total number of counties in the island of Ireland is 32, with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland often respectively called "the Six Counties" and "the Twenty-Six Counties", especially by Irish nationalists opposed to the partition of Ireland. The 1898–1973 administrative counties were subdivided into county districts. The two-tier county/district system was replaced with a single-tier of "districts", and rationalised into 11 in 2015. The areas corresponding to the six counties and two county boroughs remain in use for some administrative purposes, and the six historic counties retain a popular identity.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: The English administration in Ireland in the years following the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland created counties as the major subdivisions of an Irish province. This process lasted a period from the 13th to 17th centuries; however, the number and shape of the counties that would form the future Northern Ireland would not be defined until the Flight of the Earls allowed the shiring of Ulster from 1604. Each county would have an associated county town, with county courts of quarter sessions and assizes.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: The area of the modern counties of Antrim and Down was the Earldom of Ulster based on John de Courcy's 1170s conquest of Gaelic Ulaid. Between the late 13th and early 14th centuries it was subdivided into multiple shires based around centres of Norman power such as Antrim, Carrickfergus, and Newtownards. The Bruce invasion (1315–18) saw the devastation of the Earldom of Ulster and its overlordship over the neighbouring Gaelic districts. With the murder of the last de Burgh earl in 1333, the resulting Gaelic recovery expanded Clandeboy and eroded the earldom's territory until by the 15th century only the areas of Carrickfergus and coastal enclaves in Down remained.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: It was not until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that Ulster would be shired into more counties. After the 1567 death and 1570 attainder of Shane O'Neill, much of Clandeboy was added to the surviving English enclaves to form the new counties of Antrim and Down, preparing for an abortive private English plantation. In 1584, Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir John Perrott created six counties in Ulster, based largely on the boundaries of existing lordships; four of the six are now Northern Ireland: Armagh, Coleraine, Fermanagh, and Tyrone. The noncooperation and later rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone made Perrott's scheme largely notional until the Nine Years' War ended and the Flight of the Earls allowed the Plantation of Ulster to reinforce the county government. The County of the town of Carrickfergus remained separate from County Antrim until the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, which also promoted the boroughs of Belfast and Derry to county boroughs separate from the adjoining administrative counties.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: Each county is divided into a number of baronies, midway between a county and a parish. Baronies are now obsolete as administrative units, partially derived from the territory of an Irish chieftain. By the time the process of turning local Irish kingdoms into baronies occurred throughout the whole of Ulster by the early 17th century as part of the Plantation of Ulster, it was already being used for taxation and administrative purposes.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: Baronies were used for many records from the 17th to 19th centuries such as: the Civil Survey; Petty's Down Survey; the Books of Survey and Distribution; the 19th century valuation books and census returns. The Grand Jury representment system would also be based on the barony.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: The counties were also used as the administrative unit of local government introduced in Ireland under the 1898 Local Government Act along with county boroughs. In regards to Northern Ireland the cities of Belfast and Londonderry became county boroughs. The administrative counties and county boroughs were abolished as local government areas in Northern Ireland in 1972 and replaced with twenty-six unitary councils, many of which cross county boundaries.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: The six administrative counties and two county boroughs remain in use for some purposes, including car number plates. The six counties were also used as postal counties by the Royal Mail for sorting purposes until their abolition in 1996. Outside government, the counties are used for cultural purposes, for example in the Gaelic Athletic Association.


title: Counties of Northern Ireland

text: Like the rest of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland is divided into lieutenancy areas (see map on right). These are areas that have an appointed Lord Lieutenant—the representative of the British monarch. Northern Ireland has eight lieutenancy areas: The counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone; and the cities of Londonderry, and Belfast. These are contiguous with the six administrative counties and two county boroughs, established by the 1898 Local Government Act.


title: Human microbiome

text: The human microbiome is the aggregate of all microbiota that reside on or within human tissues and biofluids along with the corresponding anatomical sites in which they reside, including the skin, mammary glands, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, biliary tract, and gastrointestinal tract. Types of human microbiota include bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and viruses. Though micro-animals can also live on the human body, they are typically excluded from this definition. In the context of genomics, the term "human microbiome" is sometimes used to refer to the collective genomes of resident microorganisms; however, the term "human metagenome" has the same meaning.


title: Human microbiome

text: Humans are colonized by many microorganisms, with approximately the same order of magnitude of non-human cells as human cells. Some microorganisms that colonize humans are commensal, meaning they co-exist without harming humans; others have a mutualistic relationship with their human hosts. Conversely, some non-pathogenic microorganisms can harm human hosts via the metabolites they produce, like trimethylamine, which the human body converts to trimethylamine N-oxide via FMO3-mediated oxidation. Certain microorganisms perform tasks that are known to be useful to the human host, but the role of most of them is not well understood. Those that are expected to be present, and that under normal circumstances do not cause disease, are sometimes deemed "normal flora" or "normal microbiota".


title: Human microbiome

text: The Human Microbiome Project (HMP) took on the project of sequencing the genome of the human microbiota, focusing particularly on the microbiota that normally inhabit the skin, mouth, nose, digestive tract, and vagina. It reached a milestone in 2012 when it published its initial results.


title: Human microbiome

text: Though widely known as "flora or" "microflora", this is a misnomer in technical terms, since the word root "flora" pertains to plants, and "biota" refers to the total collection of organisms in a particular ecosystem. Recently, the more appropriate term "microbiota" is applied, though its use has not eclipsed the entrenched use and recognition of "flora" with regard to bacteria and other microorganisms. Both terms are being used in different literature.


title: Human microbiome

text: As of 2014, it was reported in popular media and in the scientific literature that there are about 10 times as many microbial cells in the human body as there are human cells; this figure was based on estimates that the human microbiome includes around 100 trillion bacterial cells and that an adult human typically has around 10 trillion human cells. In 2014, the American Academy of Microbiology published a FAQ that emphasized that the number of microbial cells and the number of human cells are both estimates, and noted that recent research had arrived at a new estimate of the number of human cellsapproximately 37.2 trillion, meaning that the ratio of microbial-to-human cells, if the original estimate of 100 trillion bacterial cells is correct, is closer to 3:1. In 2016, another group published a new estimate of the ratio being roughly 1:1 (1.3:1, with "an uncertainty of 25% and a variation of 53% over the population of standard 70-kg [] males").


title: Human microbiome

text: A more recent estimate is a ratio of 1.3:1 bacterial cells for every human cell, whereas the number of phages and viruses outnumber bacterial cells by at least an order of magnitude more. The number of bacterial genes (assuming 1000 bacterial species in the gut with 2000 genes per species) is estimated to be 2,000,000 genes, 100 times the number of approximately 20,000 human genes.


title: Human microbiome

text: The problem of elucidating the human microbiome is essentially identifying the members of a microbial community, which includes bacteria, eukaryotes, and viruses. This is done primarily using deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-based studies, though ribonucleic acid (RNA), protein and metabolite based studies are also performed. DNA-based microbiome studies typically can be categorized as either targeted amplicon studies or, more recently, shotgun metagenomic studies. The former focuses on specific known marker genes and is primarily informative taxonomically, while the latter is an entire metagenomic approach which can also be used to study the functional potential of the community. One of the challenges that is present in human microbiome studies, but not in other metagenomic studies, is to avoid including the host DNA in the study.


title: Human microbiome

text: Aside from simply elucidating the composition of the human microbiome, one of the major questions involving the human microbiome is whether there is a "core", that is, whether there is a subset of the community that is shared among most humans. If there is a core, then it would be possible to associate certain community compositions with disease states, which is one of the goals of the HMP. It is known that the human microbiome (such as the gut microbiota) is highly variable both within a single subject and among different individuals, a phenomenon which is also observed in mice.


title: Human microbiome

text: On 13 June 2012, a major milestone of the HMP was announced by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins. The announcement was accompanied with a series of coordinated articles published in Nature and several journals in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) on the same day. By mapping the normal microbial make-up of healthy humans using genome sequencing techniques, the researchers of the HMP have created a reference database and the boundaries of normal microbial variation in humans. From 242 healthy U.S. volunteers, more than 5,000 samples were collected from tissues from 15 (men) to 18 (women) body sites such as mouth, nose, skin, lower intestine (stool), and vagina. All the DNA, human and microbial, were analyzed with DNA sequencing machines. The microbial genome data were extracted by identifying the bacterial specific ribosomal RNA, 16S rRNA. The researchers calculated that more than 10,000 microbial species occupy the human ecosystem, and they have identified 81–99% of the genera.


title: Human microbiome

text: The statistical analysis is essential to validate the obtained results (ANOVA can be used to size the differences between the groups); if it is paired with graphical tools, the outcome is easily visualized and understood.


title: Human microbiome

text: Once a metagenome is assembled, it is possible to infer the functional potential of the microbiome. The computational challenges for this type of analysis are greater than for single genomes, because usually metagenomes assemblers have poorer quality, and many recovered genes are non-complete or fragmented. After the gene identification step, the data can be used to carry out a functional annotation by means of multiple alignment of the target genes against orthologs databases.


title: Human microbiome

text: It is a technique that exploits primers to target a specific genetic region and enables to determine the microbial phylogenies. The genetic region is characterized by a highly variable region which can confer detailed identification; it is delimited by conserved regions, which function as binding sites for primers used in PCR. The main gene used to characterize bacteria and archaea is 16S rRNA gene, while fungi identification is based on Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS). The technique is fast and not so expensive and enables to obtain a low-resolution classification of a microbial sample; it is optimal for samples that may be contaminated by host DNA. Primer affinity varies among all DNA sequences, which may result in biases during the amplification reaction; indeed, low-abundance samples are susceptible to overamplification errors, since the other contaminating microorganisms result to be over-represented in case of increasing the PCR cycles. Therefore, the optimization of primer selection can help to decrease such errors, although it requires complete knowledge of the microorganisms present in the sample, and their relative abundances.


title: Human microbiome

text: Marker gene analysis can be influenced by the primer choice; in this kind of analysis it's desirable to use a well-validated protocol (such as the one used in the Earth Microbiome Project). The first thing to do in a marker gene amplicon analysis is to remove sequencing errors; a lot of sequencing platforms are very reliable, but most of the apparent sequence diversity is still due to errors during the sequencing process. To reduce this phenomenon a first approach is to cluster sequences into Operational taxonomic unit (OTUs): this process consolidates similar sequences (a 97% similarity threshold is usually adopted) into a single feature that can be used in further analysis steps; this method however would discard SNPs because they would get clustered into a single OTU. Another approach is Oligotyping, which includes position-specific information from 16s rRNA sequencing to detect small nucleotide variations and from discriminating between closely related distinct taxa. These methods give as an output a table of DNA sequences and counts of the different sequences per sample rather than OTU.


title: Human microbiome

text: Another important step in the analysis is to assign a taxonomic name to microbial sequences in the data. This can be done using machine learning approaches that can reach an accuracy at genus-level of about 80%. Other popular analysis packages provide support for taxonomic classification using exact matches to reference databases and should provide greater specificity, but poor sensitivity. Unclassified microorganism should be further checked for organelle sequences.


title: Human microbiome

text: Many methods that exploit phylogenetic inference use the 16SRNA gene for Archea and Bacteria and the 18SRNA gene for Eukaryotes. Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCS) are based on the comparison of multiple traits among microorganisms; the principle is: the closely they are related, the higher number of traits they share. Usually PCS are coupled with phylogenetic generalized least square (PGLS) or other statistical analysis to get more significant results. Ancestral state reconstruction is used in microbiome studies to impute trait values for taxa whose traits are unknown. This is commonly performed with PICRUSt, which relies on available databases. Phylogenetic variables are chosen by researchers according to the type of study: through the selection of some variables with significant biological informations, it is possible to reduce the dimension of the data to analyse.


title: Human microbiome

text: Phylogenetic aware distance is usually performed with UniFrac or similar tools, such as Soresen's index or Rao's D, to quantify the differences between the different communities. All this methods are negatively affected by horizontal gene transmission (HGT), since it can generate errors and lead to the correlation of distant species. There are different ways to reduce the negative impact of HGT: the use of multiple genes or computational tools to assess the probability of putative HGT events.


title: Human microbiome

text: Populations of microbes (such as bacteria and yeasts) inhabit the skin and mucosal surfaces in various parts of the body. Their role forms part of normal, healthy human physiology, however if microbe numbers grow beyond their typical ranges (often due to a compromised immune system) or if microbes populate (such as through poor hygiene or injury) areas of the body normally not colonized or sterile (such as the blood, or the lower respiratory tract, or the abdominal cavity), disease can result (causing, respectively, bacteremia/sepsis, pneumonia, and peritonitis).


title: Human microbiome

text: The Human Microbiome Project found that individuals host thousands of bacterial types, different body sites having their own distinctive communities. Skin and vaginal sites showed smaller diversity than the mouth and gut, these showing the greatest richness. The bacterial makeup for a given site on a body varies from person to person, not only in type, but also in abundance. Bacteria of the same species found throughout the mouth are of multiple subtypes, preferring to inhabit distinctly different locations in the mouth. Even the enterotypes in the human gut, previously thought to be well understood, are from a broad spectrum of communities with blurred taxon boundaries.


title: Human microbiome

text: It is estimated that 500 to 1,000 species of bacteria live in the human gut but belong to just a few phyla: Bacillota and Bacteroidota dominate but there are also Pseudomonadota, Verrucomicrobiota, Actinobacteriota, Fusobacteriota, and "Cyanobacteria".


title: Human microbiome

text: A number of types of bacteria, such as "Actinomyces viscosus" and "A. naeslundii", live in the mouth, where they are part of a sticky substance called plaque. If this is not removed by brushing, it hardens into calculus (also called tartar). The same bacteria also secrete acids that dissolve tooth enamel, causing tooth decay.


title: Human microbiome

text: The vaginal microflora consist mostly of various lactobacillus species. It was long thought that the most common of these species was "Lactobacillus acidophilus", but it has later been shown that "L. iners" is in fact most common, followed by "L. crispatus". Other lactobacilli found in the vagina are "L. jensenii, L. delbruekii" and "L. gasseri". Disturbance of the vaginal flora can lead to infections such as bacterial vaginosis or candidiasis ("yeast infection").


title: Human microbiome

text: Archaea are present in the human gut, but, in contrast to the enormous variety of bacteria in this organ, the numbers of archaeal species are much more limited. The dominant group are the methanogens, particularly "Methanobrevibacter smithii" and "Methanosphaera stadtmanae". However, colonization by methanogens is variable, and only about 50% of humans have easily detectable populations of these organisms.


title: Human microbiome

text: As of 2007, no clear examples of archaeal pathogens were known, although a relationship has been proposed between the presence of some methanogens and human periodontal disease.


title: Human microbiome

text: Fungi, in particular yeasts, are present in the human gut. The best-studied of these are "Candida" species due to their ability to become pathogenic in immunocompromised and even in healthy hosts. Yeasts are also present on the skin, such as "Malassezia" species, where they consume oils secreted from the sebaceous glands.


title: Human microbiome

text: Viruses, especially bacterial viruses (bacteriophages), colonize various body sites. These colonized sites include the skin, gut, lungs, and oral cavity. Virus communities have been associated with some diseases, and do not simply reflect the bacterial communities.


title: Human microbiome

text: A study of 20 skin sites on each of ten healthy humans found 205 identified genera in 19 bacterial phyla, with most sequences assigned to four phyla: Actinomycetota (51.8%), Bacillota (24.4%), Pseudomonadota (16.5%), and Bacteroidota (6.3%). A large number of fungal genera are present on healthy human skin, with some variability by region of the body; however, during pathological conditions, certain genera tend to dominate in the affected region. For example, "Malassezia" is dominant in atopic dermatitis and "Acremonium" is dominant on dandruff-affected scalps.


title: Human microbiome

text: The skin acts as a barrier to deter the invasion of pathogenic microbes. The human skin contains microbes that reside either in or on the skin and can be residential or transient. Resident microorganism types vary in relation to skin type on the human body. A majority of microbes reside on superficial cells on the skin or prefer to associate with glands. These glands such as oil or sweat glands provide the microbes with water, amino acids, and fatty acids. In addition, resident bacteria that associated with oil glands are often Gram-positive and can be pathogenic.


title: Human microbiome

text: A small number of bacteria and fungi are normally present in the conjunctiva. Classes of bacteria include Gram-positive cocci (e.g., "Staphylococcus" and Streptococcus) and Gram-negative rods and cocci (e.g., "Haemophilus" and "Neisseria") are present. Fungal genera include "Candida", "Aspergillus", and "Penicillium". The lachrymal glands continuously secrete, keeping the conjunctiva moist, while intermittent blinking lubricates the conjunctiva and washes away foreign material. Tears contain bactericides such as lysozyme, so that microorganisms have difficulty in surviving the lysozyme and settling on the epithelial surfaces.


title: Human microbiome

text: In humans, the composition of the gastrointestinal microbiome is established during birth. Birth by Cesarean section or vaginal delivery also influences the gut's microbial composition. Babies born through the vaginal canal have non-pathogenic, beneficial gut microbiota similar to those found in the mother. However, the gut microbiota of babies delivered by C-section harbors more pathogenic bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus and it takes longer to develop non-pathogenic, beneficial gut microbiota.


title: Human microbiome

text: The relationship between some gut microbiota and humans is not merely commensal (a non-harmful coexistence), but rather a mutualistic relationship. Some human gut microorganisms benefit the host by fermenting dietary fiber into short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), such as acetic acid and butyric acid, which are then absorbed by the host. Intestinal bacteria also play a role in synthesizing vitamin B and vitamin K as well as metabolizing bile acids, sterols, and xenobiotics. The systemic importance of the SCFAs and other compounds they produce are like hormones and the gut flora itself appears to function like an endocrine organ, and dysregulation of the gut flora has been correlated with a host of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.


title: Human microbiome

text: The composition of human gut microbiota changes over time, when the diet changes, and as overall health changes. A systematic review of 15 human randomized controlled trials from July 2016 found that certain commercially available strains of probiotic bacteria from the "Bifidobacterium" and "Lactobacillus" genera ("B. longum", "B. breve", "B. infantis", "L. helveticus", "L. rhamnosus", "L. plantarum", and "L. casei"), when taken by mouth in daily doses of 10–10 colony forming units (CFU) for 1–2 months, possess treatment efficacy (i.e., improves behavioral outcomes) in certain central nervous system disorders – including anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorder, and obsessive–compulsive disorder – and improves certain aspects of memory.


title: Human microbiome

text: The genitourinary system appears to have a microbiota, which is an unexpected finding in light of the long-standing use of standard clinical microbiological culture methods to detect bacteria in urine when people show signs of a urinary tract infection; it is common for these tests to show no bacteria present. It appears that common culture methods do not detect many kinds of bacteria and other microorganisms that are normally present. As of 2017, sequencing methods were used to identify these microorganisms to determine if there are differences in microbiota between people with urinary tract problems and those who are healthy. To properly assess the microbiome of the bladder as opposed to the genitourinary system, the urine specimen should be collected directly from the bladder, which is often done with a catheter.


title: Human microbiome

text: Vaginal microbiota refers to those species and genera that colonize the vagina. These organisms play an important role in protecting against infections and maintaining vaginal health. The most abundant vaginal microorganisms found in premenopausal women are from the genus "Lactobacillus", which suppress pathogens by producing hydrogen peroxide and lactic acid. Bacterial species composition and ratios vary depending on the stage of the menstrual cycle. Ethnicity also influences vaginal flora. The occurrence of hydrogen peroxide-producing lactobacilli is lower in African American women and vaginal pH is higher. Other influential factors such as sexual intercourse and antibiotics have been linked to the loss of lactobacilli. Moreover, studies have found that sexual intercourse with a condom does appear to change lactobacilli levels, and does increase the level of "Escherichia coli" within the vaginal flora. Changes in the normal, healthy vaginal microbiota is an indication of infections, such as candidiasis or bacterial vaginosis. "Candida albicans" inhibits the growth of "Lactobacillus" species, while "Lactobacillus" species which produce hydrogen peroxide inhibit the growth and virulence of "Candida albicans" in both the vagina and the gut.


title: Human microbiome

text: Fungal genera that have been detected in the vagina include "Candida", "Pichia", "Eurotium", "Alternaria", "Rhodotorula", and "Cladosporium", among others.


title: Human microbiome

text: Until recently the placenta was considered to be a sterile organ but commensal, nonpathogenic bacterial species and genera have been identified that reside in the placental tissue. However, the existence of a microbiome in the placenta is controversial as criticized in several researches. So called "placental microbiome" is likely derived from contamination of regents because low-biomass samples are easily contaminated.


title: Human microbiome

text: Until recently, the upper reproductive tract of women was considered to be a sterile environment. A variety of microorganisms inhabit the uterus of healthy, asymptomatic women of reproductive age. The microbiome of the uterus differs significantly from that of the vagina and gastrointestinal tract.


title: Human microbiome

text: The environment present in the human mouth allows the growth of characteristic microorganisms found there. It provides a source of water and nutrients, as well as a moderate temperature. Resident microbes of the mouth adhere to the teeth and gums to resist mechanical flushing from the mouth to stomach where acid-sensitive microbes are destroyed by hydrochloric acid.


title: Human microbiome

text: Anaerobic bacteria in the oral cavity include: "Actinomyces", "Arachnia", "Bacteroides", "Bifidobacterium", "Eubacterium", "Fusobacterium", "Lactobacillus", "Leptotrichia", "Peptococcus", "Peptostreptococcus", "Propionibacterium", "Selenomonas", "Treponema", and "Veillonella". Genera of fungi that are frequently found in the mouth include "Candida", "Cladosporium", "Aspergillus", "Fusarium", "Glomus", "Alternaria", "Penicillium", and "Cryptococcus", among others.


title: Human microbiome

text: Bacteria accumulate on both the hard and soft oral tissues in biofilm allowing them to adhere and strive in the oral environment while protected from the environmental factors and antimicrobial agents. Saliva plays a key biofilm homeostatic role allowing recolonization of bacteria for formation and controlling growth by detaching biofilm buildup. It also provides a means of nutrients and temperature regulation. The location of the biofilm determines the type of exposed nutrients it receives.


title: Human microbiome

text: Oral bacteria have evolved mechanisms to sense their environment and evade or modify the host. However, a highly efficient innate host defense system constantly monitors the bacterial colonization and prevents bacterial invasion of local tissues. A dynamic equilibrium exists between dental plaque bacteria and the innate host defense system.


title: Human microbiome

text: This dynamic between host oral cavity and oral microbes plays a key role in health and disease as it provides entry into the body.


title: Human microbiome

text: A healthy equilibrium presents a symbiotic relationship where oral microbes limit growth and adherence of pathogens while the host provides an environment for them to flourish. Ecological changes such as change of immune status, shift of resident microbes and nutrient availability shift from a mutual to parasitic relationship resulting in the host being prone to oral and systemic disease. Systemic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases has been correlated to poor oral health. Of particular interest is the role of oral microorganisms in the two major dental diseases: dental caries and periodontal disease. Pathogen colonization at the periodontium cause an excessive immune response resulting in a periodontal pocket- a deepened space between the tooth and gingiva. This acts as a protected blood-rich reservoir with nutrients for anaerobic pathogens. Systemic disease at various sites of the body can result from oral microbes entering the blood bypassing periodontal pockets and oral membranes.


title: Human microbiome

text: Persistent proper oral hygiene is the primary method for preventing oral and systemic disease. It reduces the density of biofilm and overgrowth of potential pathogenic bacteria resulting in disease. However, proper oral hygiene may not be enough as the oral microbiome, genetics, and changes to immune response play a factor in developing chronic infections. Use of antibiotics could treat already spreading infection but ineffective against bacteria within biofilms.


title: Human microbiome

text: The healthy nasal microbiome is dominated by Corynebacterium, and Staphylococcus. The mucosal microbiome plays a critical role in modulating viral infection.


title: Human microbiome

text: Much like the oral cavity, the upper and lower respiratory system possess mechanical deterrents to remove microbes. Goblet cells produce mucous which traps microbes and moves them out of the respiratory system via continuously moving ciliated epithelial cells. In addition, a bactericidal effect is generated by nasal mucus which contains the enzyme lysozyme. The upper and lower respiratory tract appears to have its own set of microbiota. Pulmonary bacterial microbiota belong to 9 major bacterial genera: "Prevotella", "Sphingomonas", "Pseudomonas", "Acinetobacter", "Fusobacterium", "Megasphaera", "Veillonella", "Staphylococcus", and "Streptococcus". Some of the bacteria considered "normal biota" in the respiratory tract can cause serious disease especially in immunocompromised individuals; these include "Streptococcus pyogenes", "Haemophilus influenzae", "Streptococcus pneumoniae", "Neisseria meningitidis", and "Staphylococcus aureus". Fungal genera that compose the pulmonary mycobiome include "Candida", "Malassezia", "Neosartorya", "Saccharomyces", and "Aspergillus", among others.


title: Human microbiome

text: Unusual distributions of bacterial and fungal genera in the respiratory tract is observed in people with cystic fibrosis. Their bacterial flora often contains antibiotic-resistant and slow-growing bacteria, and the frequency of these pathogens changes in relation to age.


title: Human microbiome

text: Traditionally the biliary tract has been considered to be normally sterile, and the presence of microorganisms in bile is a marker of pathological process. This assumption was confirmed by failure in allocation of bacterial strains from the normal bile duct. Papers began emerging in 2013 showing that the normal biliary microbiota is a separate functional layer which protects a biliary tract from colonization by exogenous microorganisms.


title: Human microbiome

text: Human bodies rely on the innumerable bacterial genes as the source of essential nutrients. Both metagenomic and epidemiological studies indicate vital roles for the human microbiome in preventing a wide range of diseases, from type 2 diabetes and obesity to inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's disease, and even mental health conditions like depression. A symbiotic relationship between the gut microbiota and different bacteria may influence an individual's immune response. Metabolites generated by gut microbes appear to be causative factors in type 2 diabetes. Although in its infancy, microbiome-based treatment is also showing promise, most notably for treating drug-resistant "C. difficile" infection and in diabetes treatment.


title: Human microbiome

text: An overwhelming presence of the bacteria, "C. difficile," leads to an infection of the gastrointestinal tract, normally associated to dysbiosis with the microbiota believed to have been caused by the administration of antibiotics. Use of antibiotics eradicates the beneficial gut flora within the gastrointestinal tract, which normally prevents pathogenic bacteria from establishing dominance. Traditional treatment for "C. difficile" infections includes an additional regime of antibiotics, however, efficacy rates average between 20 and 30%. Recognizing the importance of healthy gut bacteria, researchers turned to a procedure known as fecal microbiota transplant, where patients experiencing gastrointestinal diseases, such as "C. difficile" infection, receive fecal content from a healthy individual in hopes of restoring a normal functioning intestinal microbiota. Fecal microbiota transplant is approximately 85–90% effective in people with CDI for whom antibiotics have not worked or in whom the disease recurs following antibiotics. Most people with CDI recover with one FMT treatment.


title: Human microbiome

text: Although cancer is generally a disease of host genetics and environmental factors, microorganisms are implicated in some 20% of human cancers. Particularly for potential factors in colon cancer, bacterial density is one million times higher than in the small intestine, and approximately 12-fold more cancers occur in the colon compared to the small intestine, possibly establishing a pathogenic role for microbiota in colon and rectal cancers. Microbial density may be used as a prognostic tool in assessment of colorectal cancers.


title: Human microbiome

text: The microbiota may affect carcinogenesis in three broad ways: (i) altering the balance of tumor cell proliferation and death, (ii) regulating immune system function, and (iii) influencing metabolism of host-produced factors, foods and pharmaceuticals. Tumors arising at boundary surfaces, such as the skin, oropharynx and respiratory, digestive and urogenital tracts, harbor a microbiota. Substantial microbe presence at a tumor site does not establish association or causal links. Instead, microbes may find tumor oxygen tension or nutrient profile supportive. Decreased populations of specific microbes or induced oxidative stress may also increase risks. Of the around 10 microbes on earth, ten are designated by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as human carcinogens. Microbes may secrete proteins or other factors directly drive cell proliferation in the host, or may up- or down-regulate the host immune system including driving acute or chronic inflammation in ways that contribute to carcinogenesis.


title: Human microbiome

text: Concerning the relationship of immune function and development of inflammation, mucosal surface barriers are subject to environmental risks and must rapidly repair to maintain homeostasis. Compromised host or microbiota resiliency also reduce resistance to malignancy, possibly inducing inflammation and cancer. Once barriers are breached, microbes can elicit proinflammatory or immunosuppressive programs through various pathways. For example, cancer-associated microbes appear to activate NF-κΒ signaling within the tumor microenviroment. Other pattern recognition receptors, such as nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain–like receptor (NLR) family members "NOD-2", "NLRP3", "NLRP6" and "NLRP12", may play a role in mediating colorectal cancer. Likewise "Helicobacter pylori" appears to increase the risk of gastric cancer, due to its driving a chronic inflammatory response in the stomach.


title: Human microbiome

text: Inflammatory bowel disease consists of two different diseases: ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease and both of these diseases present with disruptions in the gut microbiota (also known as dysbiosis). This dysbiosis presents itself in the form of decreased microbial diversity in the gut, and is correlated to defects in host genes that changes the innate immune response in individuals.


title: Human microbiome

text: The HIV disease progression influences the composition and function of the gut microbiota, with notable differences between HIV-negative, HIV-positive, and post-ART HIV-positive populations. HIV decreases the integrity of the gut epithelial barrier function by affecting tight junctions. This breakdown allows for translocation across the gut epithelium, which is thought to contribute to increases in inflammation seen in people with HIV.


title: Human microbiome

text: Vaginal microbiota plays a role in the infectivity of HIV, with an increased risk of infection and transmission when the woman has bacterial vaginosis, a condition characterized by an abnormal balance of vaginal bacteria. The enhanced infectivity is seen with the increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines and CCR5 + CD4+ cells in the vagina. However, a decrease in infectivity is seen with increased levels of vaginal "Lactobacillus," which promotes an anti-inflammatory condition.


title: Human microbiome

text: With death, the microbiome of the living body collapses and a different composition of microorganisms named "necrobiome" establishes itself as an important active constituent of the complex physical decomposition process. Its predictable changes over time are thought to be useful to help determine the time of death.


title: Human microbiome

text: Studies in 2009 questioned whether the decline in biota (including microfauna) as a result of human intervention might impede human health, hospital safety procedures, food product design, and treatments of disease.


title: Human microbiome

text: Preliminary research indicates that immediate changes in the microbiota may occur when a person migrates from one country to another, such as when Thai immigrants settled in the United States or when Latin Americans immigrated into the United States. Losses of microbiota diversity were greater in obese individuals and children of immigrants.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: The Voice of Holland, also known as TVOH, is a Dutch reality TV singing competition, that became a near global TV format franchise, created by media tycoon John de Mol and musician Roel van Velzen, in the Netherlands airing on RTL 4.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: For the first nine seasons, The Voice of Holland was hosted by Martijn Krabbé and Wendy van Dijk. Starting from the tenth season (2019–2020), Wendy van Dijk was replaced by Chantal Janzen.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: The central focus of the show is the singing talent and quality of the contestants. Three or four coaches / jurors, themselves successful performing artists, train the talents in their teams, and occasionally perform with them.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: After many preliminary off-screen audition rounds, the most promising talents are selected for the TV shows. Crucially, this happens in so-called ""blind auditions"", during which the coaches cannot "see", but only "hear" the candidates perform. Not until the talent gets chosen by a coach, or when they have finished singing, do the coaches' chairs rotate towards them, and are they revealed to the coaches.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: The first TV-episodes are prerecorded in front of a live studio audience, so that the coaches can experience the audience's reaction to the candidate, and are sometimes influenced by it.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: Next episodes are recorded wherein some singers lose their spot on the team, and others are promoted to subsequent rounds, through singing challenges in various formats, until only a small group remain in the contest. At this point the show-format switches to several "live shows", in which the TV audience take an active part in the judging process, and more singers are voted out until one season winner remains.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: After many audition rounds off screen it's time for the "Blind auditions". In the first televised stage the auditioners sing in front of the official coaches. All coaches will be sitting in a chair that is turned back from the stage. Supposedly the coaches will first judge by the power, clarity, type and uniqueness of the artists singing. If they like what they hear and want to mentor the artist for the next stage, they will push a button that will turn their chair around to face the stage for the first time and see the artist. If more than one chair turns around, the auditioner can pick their coach of choice. If no chair turns around, the auditioning artist's journey on the Voice ends.


title: The Voice of Holland

text: At the end, each of the coaches will have a certain number of artists in their team who will be advancing to the next round. A new twist was added on the twelfth season: the block button. Each coach has the power to block another coach from getting an artist. To ensure that the coaches will not block each other indefinitely, it is only allowed to use the block button once in the entire blind auditions.