prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Who was born first,  Morgan Llywelyn or Robert Jordan?

The following are given passages.
Context 1: Passage 1:
Red Branch (novel)
Red Branch (ISBN 080410591X, 1989), by the Irish-American author Morgan Llywelyn, is a novel about the life of the Irish hero Cú Chulainn   Red Branch novelizes several stories from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology, including the well-known Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) and Deirdre (of the Sorrows) 
Passage 2:
Robert Jordan
James Oliver Rigney Jr  (October 17, 1948 – September 16, 2007), better known by his pen name Robert Jordan, was an American author of epic fantasy  He is known best for his series  The Wheel of Time (finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death) which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel  He is one of several writers to have written original Conan the Barbarian novels; his are considered by fans to be some of the best of the non-Robert E  Howard efforts  Jordan also published historical fiction using the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal, a western as Jackson O'Reilly, and dance criticism as Chang Lung  Jordan claimed to have ghostwritten an "international thriller" that is still believed to have been written by someone else 

Early life
Jordan was born in Charleston, South Carolina  He went to Clemson University after high school, but dropped out after one year and enlisted in the U S  Army  He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War as a helicopter gunner  He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with "V" and oak leaf cluster, and two Vietnamese Gallantry Crosses with palm After returning from Vietnam in 1970, Jordan studied physics at The Citadel  He graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science degree and began working for the U S  Navy as a nuclear engineer  He began writing in 1977 

Personal life
Robert Jordan was a history buff and enjoyed hunting, fishing, sailing, poker, chess, pool, and pipe-collecting  He described himself as a "High church" Episcopalian and received communion more than once a week  Politically, he described himself as a "libertarian monarchist"  He lived with his wife, Harriet McDougal, who works as a book editor (currently with Tor Books; she was also Jordan's editor) in a house built in 1797  He listed John D  MacDonald, Jane Austen, Louis L'Amour, Charles Dickens, Robert A  Heinlein, Mark Twain and Montaigne as his favorite authors 

Illness and death
On March 23, 2006, Jordan disclosed that he had been diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis and that, with treatment, his median life expectancy was four years  In a separate weblog post, he encouraged his fans not to worry about him and stated that he intended to have a long and creative life He began chemotherapy at Mayo Clinic during early April 2006  He participated in a study of the drug Revlimid, which had been approved recently for multiple myeloma but not yet tested for primary amyloidosis Jordan died on September 16, 2007, from complications stemming from Multiple Myeloma  His funeral service was on September 19, 2007  He was cremated and his ashes buried in the churchyard of St  James Church in Goose Creek, outside Charleston, South Carolina Jordan's papers can be found in the special collections of the College of Charleston 

Selected works
The Wheel of Time
Jordan published 11 books of 14 in the main sequence of the Wheel of Time series  Reviewers and fans of the earlier books noted a slowing of the pace of events in the last few installments written solely by Jordan owing to the expansion of the scale of the series as a whole  Because of his health problems, Jordan did not work at full force on the final installment A Memory of Light (later split into three volumes beginning with The Gathering Storm), but blog entries confirmed that he continued work on it until his death, and he shared all of the significant plot details with his family not long before he died  He maintained that in doing so the book would get published even if "the worst actually happens"  On December 7, 2007, Tor Books announced that Brandon Sanderson had been chosen to finish the Wheel of Time series  Harriet McDougal, Jordan's widow, chose him after reading Mistborn: The Final Empire 
All paperback (PB) page totals given are for the most widely available mass-market paperback editions  The page count for the hardback (HB) editions does not include glossary or appendix page counts 
The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is an encyclopedia for the series about the unnamed world where the plot takes place, which is often referred to by fans of the series as the World of the Wheel  It is published in the United States by Tor Books and in the United Kingdom by Orbit Books  The bulk of the text was written by Teresa Patterson based on notes and information provided by Jordan, who also served as the overall editor on the project  While the information in the guide is broadly canonical, the book is deliberately written with vague, biased, or even downright false (or guessed) information in places, as Patterson felt this would reflect a key theme of the series (the mutability of knowledge across time and distance) 

Conan the Barbarian
Jordan was one of several writers who has written Conan the Barbarian stories  When Tom Doherty obtained the rights, he needed a novel very quickly, so Jordan's wife Harriet McDougal recommended him because she knew he had written his first novel, Warriors of the Altaii, in thirteen days 

So he thought I could write something fast, and he was right, and I liked it  It was fun writing something completely over the top, full of purple prose, and in a weak moment I agreed to do five more and the novelization of the second Conan movie  I've decided that those things were very good discipline for me  I had to work with a character and a world that had already been created and yet find a way to say something new about the character and the world  That was a very good exercise 
Conan the Invincible (1982)
Conan the Defender (1982)
Conan the Unconquered (1983)
Conan the Triumphant (1983)
Conan the Magnificent (1984)
Conan the Destroyer (1984) (adaptation of the movie of the same title)
Conan the Victorious (1984)They were packed into two separate volumes par Conan the Destroyer:

The Conan Chronicles
The Further Chronicles of Conan (The Conan Chronicles II in the UK, different contents)Jordan also compiled a well-known Conan Chronology 
Passage 3:
Lion of Ireland
Lion of Ireland, by the American-Irish author Morgan Llywelyn, is a novel about the life of the Irish hero and High King Brian Boru 

Plot summary
The story begins with Brian as a child of around 8 or 9 and it ends with him as an 88-year-old man  The book shows his rise to power and his struggle to maintain it  His personal life is an important part of the plot, because Brian's war against Máel Mórda (leader of the Leinstermen) and Sihtric (king of Dublin) was to be inextricably connected with his complicated marital relations, in particular his marriage to Gormlaith, Máel Mórda's sister and Sihtric's mother, who had been in turn the wife of Amlaíb Cuarán, king of Dublin and York, then of Máel Sechnaill  Even though the book is based on a historical figure, most of it is fiction 

Film adaptation
In 2003, Ireland based RiverFilms proposed a film adaptation of the book as Braveheart and El Cid meet The Vikings On March 4, 2019, it was announced in Deadline that a new movie adaptation was in the works  The series would be created by Irish author Michael Scott  The article was subsequently picked up the Sunday Times, and Irish Central who listed both Scott and BCDF Pictures as producers 
Passage 4:
List of locations in The Wheel of Time
The Wheel of Time is a series of high fantasy novels by American author Robert Jordan, with Brandon Sanderson as a co-author for the final three novels  Originally planned as a six-book series at its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time came to span 14 volumes, in addition to a prequel novel and two companion books  Jordan died in 2007 while working on what was planned to be the final volume in the series  He prepared extensive notes which enabled fellow fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to complete the final book, which grew into three volumes: The Gathering Storm (2009), Towers of Midnight (2010), and A Memory of Light (2013) 
The series draws on numerous elements of both European and Asian mythology, most notably the cyclical nature of time found in Buddhism and Hinduism; the metaphysical concepts of balance, duality, and a respect for nature found in Taoism; the Abrahamic concepts of God and Satan; and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace The Wheel of Time is notable for its length, detailed imaginary world, and magic system, and its large cast of characters  The eighth through fourteenth books each reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller list  After its completion, the series was nominated for a Hugo Award  As of 2021, the series has sold over 90 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling epic fantasy series since The Lord of the Rings  Its popularity has spawned a collectible card game, a video game, a roleplaying game, and a soundtrack album  A TV series adaptation produced by Sony Pictures and Amazon Studios premiered in 2021 

Setting
The series is set in a future unnamed world and that, due to the cyclical nature of time as depicted in the series, is simultaneously the distant past and the distant future Earth  Fans have come to refer to this world as Randland (from the name of the central character) or the World of the Wheel (cf  a section of the companion book The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time) 

Premise
At the dawn of time, a deity known as the Creator forged the universe and the Wheel of Time, which spins the Pattern of the Ages using the lives of men and women as its threads  The Wheel has seven spokes, each representing an age, and it is rotated by the One Power, which flows from the True Source  The One Power is divided into male and female halves, saidin and saidar, which work in opposition and in unison to drive the Wheel  Humans who can use its power are known as channelers; their principal organization is called the Aes Sedai or "Servants of All" in the Old Tongue 
The Creator imprisoned its antithesis, "Shai'tan", the Dark One, at the moment of creation, sealing him away from the Wheel  However, in a time called the Age of Legends, an Aes Sedai experiment inadvertently breached the Dark One's prison, allowing his influence to seep back into the world  He rallied the proud, the corrupt, and the ambitious to his cause and these servants began an effort to fully free the Dark One from his prison, so he might remake time and reality in his own image  In response to this threat, the Wheel spun out the Dragon, a channeler of immense power, to be a champion for the Light  In the Age of Legends, the Dragon was a man named Lews Therin Telamon, who eventually rose to command the Aes Sedai and their allies in the struggle against the Dark One's forces  After a grueling 10-year war, Lews Therin led his forces to victory in a daring assault on the volcano of Shayol Ghul (the site of the earthly link to the Dark One's prison) and was able to reseal the prison  However, at the moment of victory, the Dark One was able to taint saidin, driving male channelers of the One Power insane  Lews Therin killed his friends and family and then, by intentionally overloading himself with the One Power, killed himself  The other male channelers devastated the world with the One Power, unleashing earthquakes and tidal waves that reshaped the world  Eventually, the last male channeler was killed or cut off from the One Power, leaving the human race all but destroyed and only women able to wield the One Power safely  The Aes Sedai reconstituted and guided humanity out of this dark time  Mankind now lived under the shadow of a prophecy that the Dark One would break free from his prison and the Dragon would be reborn to fight him once more, and although he is humanity's only hope against the Dark One, he would devastate the world a second time in the process 
After a span of three thousand years, the human race has rebuilt a level of technology roughly comparable to that of the Late Middle Ages or Early Modern Era, though with a higher level of general education and understanding of hygiene and anatomy, but nevertheless an almost complete lack of formal science, industrial production, and academic institutions  This can be traced to the post-apocalyptic nature of the world, where much knowledge has survived, but the structures and institutions that made that knowledge possible were destroyed  One major difference from our history is that women enjoy full equality with men in most societies, and are superior in some  This is attributed to the power and prestige of the female-only Aes Sedai influencing the larger society 
Several major wars have ravaged the main continent since the defeat of the Dark One, such as the Trolloc Wars, when the surviving servants of the Dark One tried to destroy civilization once more but were defeated by an alliance of nations led by the Aes Sedai; and the War of the Hundred Years, a devastating civil war that followed the fall of a continent-spanning empire ruled by the high king, Artur Hawkwing  These wars have prevented the human race from regaining the power and high technology of the Age of Legends and also left humanity divided  Even the prestige of the Aes Sedai has fallen, with their shrinking numbers and the emergence of rival organizations such as the Children of the Light, a military order who believe that all who channel the One Power are servants of the Shadow  The nations of the modern era are able to unite in defense against the warrior-clans of the Aiel, who cross into the western kingdoms on a mission of vengeance after they suffer a grievous insult, but are too divided to work effectively together in other areas 

Plot summary
The prequel novel, New Spring, takes place during the Aiel War and chronicles the end of the conflict  The Aes Sedai discover that the Prophecies of the Dragon have been fulfilled and the Dragon has been Reborn  Aes Sedai agents are dispatched to try to find the newborn child before servants of the Shadow can do the same 
The series proper commences almost 20 years later in the Two Rivers district of the kingdom of Andor, a near-forgotten backwater place  A young sheep herder named Rand al’Thor (the series protagonist) and his father Tam al’Thor travel to the nearby town of Emond's Field to deliver cider  Rand, keen to further explore his romance with the mayor's daughter, Egwene al’Vere, becomes caught up with an Aes Sedai called Moiraine Damodred, and her Warder, Lan, after his father sustains a serious wound  Rand and his friends, Matrim "Mat" Cauthon and Perrin Aybara discover from Moiraine that servants of the Dark One are searching for one particular young man living in the area  Unfortunately, Moiraine is unable to determine which of three men it is: Rand himself, Mat, or Perrin, and so takes all three of them out of the Two Rivers district along with his romantic interest Egwene (whom Moiraine has determined can channel the One Power and would teach to be Aes Sedai) and the village "Wisdom" (a local healer) Nynaeve al'Meara after a terrible battle with creatures created by The Dark One  The first novel depicts their flight from various agents of the Shadow and their attempts to escape to the Aes Sedai city of Tar Valon 
From then, the story expands and protagonist Rand, as well as the other characters, are frequently split into different groups, pursuing different missions or agendas aimed at furthering the cause of the Dragon Reborn, sometimes thousands of miles apart  Broadly speaking, the original group of characters from the Two Rivers make new allies, gain experience, and become figures of some influence and authority  As they struggle to unite the western kingdoms against the Dark One's forces, their task is complicated by rulers of the nations who refuse to give up their authority and by factions such as the Children of the Light, who do not believe in the prophecies, and the Seanchan, the people of a long-lost colony of Artur Hawkwing's empire across the western ocean who have returned, believing it is their destiny to conquer the world  The Aes Sedai also become divided between those who believe the Dragon Reborn should be strictly controlled and those who believe he must lead them into battle as he did in the earlier war  As the story expands, new characters representing different factions are introduced; although this expansion of the narrative allows the sheer scale of the growing struggle to be effectively depicted, it has been criticized for slowing the pace of the novels and sometimes reducing the appearances of the original or main cast to extended cameos 
By the sixth novel, it has become clear that the Last Battle, caused when the Dark One is able to exert its influence directly on the world once more, is imminent, as only three Seals (keys to the Dark One's prison) are intact  Once the remaining Seals break, the Dark One will be free to touch the world  The Last Battle, Tarmon Gai'don, is depicted in the fourteenth and final novel in the series, A Memory of Light 

Books in the series
All paperback (PB) page totals given are for the most widely available mass-market paperback editions  The page count for the hardback (HB) editions does not include a glossary or appendix, page counts 
In 2002 the first book, The Eye of the World, was repackaged as two volumes with new illustrations for younger readers: From the Two Rivers, including an extra chapter (Ravens) before the existing prologue, and To the Blight with an expanded glossary  In 2004 the same was done with The Great Hunt, with the two parts being The Hunt Begins and New Threads in the Pattern 

Prologue eBooks
On several occasions, chapters from various books in the series were released several months in advance of publication  These were released in eBook format as promotional tools for the then-upcoming release 
The prologue eBook releases included:

Snow: The Prologue to Winter's Heart (September 2000)
Glimmers: The Prologue to Crossroads of Twilight (July 17, 2002)
Embers Falling on Dry Grass: The Prologue to Knife of Dreams (July 22, 2005) 
What the Storm Means: The Prologue to The Gathering Storm (September 17, 2009) 
Chapter 1 of The Gathering Storm, Tears from Steel, was released free on Friday September 4, 2009 on Tor com
Chapter 2 of The Gathering Storm, The Nature of Pain, was released in Audio form free on Thursday September 24, 2009 on Tor com
Distinctions: The Prologue to Towers of Midnight (Tuesday September 21, 2010) 
Chapter 1 of Towers of Midnight, Apples First, was released free on Friday October 1, 2010 on Tor com
Chapter 2 of Towers of Midnight, Questions of Leadership was released in Audio form free on Tuesday October 19, 2010
Chapter 8 of Towers of Midnight, The Seven-Striped Lass (on September 16, 2010, Chapter 8, The Seven-Striped Lass, was revealed as part of The Great Hunt scavenger hunt setup by Brandon on his website beginning August 30, 2010 in relation to his new book: The Way of Kings) 
By Grace And Banners Fallen: The Prologue to A Memory Of Light (Wednesday September 19, 2012) 
A segment of chapter 1 of A Memory Of Light was released in mid-2012 on Dragonmount com
A segment of chapter 11 of A Memory Of Light was similarly released publicly in mid-2012 on Dragonmount com

Short stories
Jordan wrote two short stories within the franchise in the late 1990s  The first, The Strike at Shayol Ghul, predates the main series by several thousand years  It was made available on the Internet and was later published in The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time  Jordan also wrote a short story entitled New Spring, for the 1998 Legends anthology edited by Robert Silverberg  Jordan later expanded this into the stand-alone novel New Spring that was published in January 2004 
During Brandon Sanderson's work on A Memory of Light, two sections of the book were cut and later published as short stories in anthologies  The first, River of Souls, was published in Unfettered: Tales by Masters of Fantasy (2013)  The second, A Fire Within the Ways was published in Unfettered III in 2019  Unlike "River of Souls", "A Fire Within the Ways" is not considered canon 

Encyclopedic works
Tor Books published a companion book to the series, entitled The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, in November 1997, which contains much hitherto unrevealed background information about the series including the first maps of the entire world and the Seanchan home continent  Jordan co-authored the book with Teresa Patterson  Jordan ruled the book broadly canonical but stated that it was written from the perspective of an historian within The Wheel of Time universe and was prone to errors of bias and guesswork On November 3, 2015, The Wheel of Time Companion: The People, Places, and History of the Bestselling Series was released in hardback format, written by Harriet McDougal, Alan Romanczuk, and Maria Simons from Tor Books  Alan Romanczuk and Maria Simons were Robert Jordan's editorial assistants  The book is an encapsulating glossary of the entire series  The authors began compiling material for the volume as early as 2005, and the final book was released after the series' conclusion Origins of The Wheel of Time by Michael Livingston was released on November 8, 2022 

Development
Writing and conception
The novel proved extremely difficult to write because characters and storylines changed considerably during the writing process  The series was originally centered on an older man who discovered relatively late in life that he was the 'chosen one' who had to save the world  However, Jordan deliberately decided to move closer to the tone and style of J  R  R  Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and made the characters younger and less experienced  Once this decision had been made, writing proceeded much more easily and Jordan completed the second volume, The Great Hunt, at roughly the same time the first book was published Jordan wrote full-time at breakneck speed for the next several years until he completed the seventh volume, A Crown of Swords, at which point he slowed down, delivering a book every two years  Fans objected when he took some time off to expand a short story into a prequel novel called New Spring, so he decided to shelve his plans for additional prequels in favor of finishing off the last two volumes in the series  He rejected criticisms of the later volumes of the series slowing down in pace in order to concentrate on minor secondary characters at the expense of the main characters from the opening volumes but acknowledged that his structure for the tenth volume, Crossroads of Twilight (where he showed a major scene from the prior book, Winter's Heart, from the perspective of the main characters that were not involved in the scene), had not worked out as he had planned  Knife of Dreams, the eleventh volume, had a much more positive reception from critics and fans alike and Jordan announced the twelfth volume, which he had previously announced would have the working title A Memory of Light, would conclude the series  According to Forbes, Jordan had intended for it to be the final book "even if it reaches 2,000 pages "

Jordan's death, and completion by Sanderson
Jordan was diagnosed with the terminal heart disease primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy in December 2005, and while he intended to finish at least A Memory of Light even if the "worse comes to worst," he made preparations in case he was not able to complete the book: "I'm getting out notes, so if the worst actually happens, someone could finish A Memory of Light and have it end the way I want it to end "With Jordan's death on September 16, 2007, the conclusion of the series was in question  On December 7, of that year the publisher Tor Books announced that fantasy author Brandon Sanderson was to finish A Memory of Light  Sanderson, a longtime fan of the series, was chosen by Jordan's widow Harriet McDougal partly because she liked Sanderson's novels and partly because of a eulogy he had written for Jordan On March 30, 2009, Tor Books announced that A Memory of Light would be split into three volumes, with Brandon Sanderson citing timing and continuity reasons  By his estimate in early 2009, the book would have taken several years to write and would have reached 800,000 words  McDougal doubted that Jordan could have concluded it in a single volume  The three volumes were published from 2009 to 2013,  as The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and A Memory of Light, with the last book using Jordan's title 

After A Memory of Light
Prior to his death, Jordan had often discussed adding an additional two prequels and an 'outrigger' sequel trilogy  In a Q&A following the release of A Memory of Light, Sanderson ruled out the completion of these works; Jordan had left very little in the way of notes for these additional novels – only two sentences in the case of the sequel trilogy Sanderson went on to release two cut portions of A Memory of Light as short stories  These were released in Unfettered anthologies, part of a charitable endeavour to support authors and artists with medical debt  River of Souls, a canonical segment removed from the published book due to pacing, was released in the first volume in 2013  A Fire in the Ways, a non-canon alternate sequence of events around the climax of the final book, was included in the third volume in 2019  A glossary to the series, The Wheel of Time Companion was released in 2015 

Themes and influences
The Wheel of Time is a novel from the modern fantasy genre, specifically high fantasy  The book is set in a world that is simultaneously the distant past and distant future of the real world, as a result of time being cyclical rather than linear  The opening of the first book establishes the concept:

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend  Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again  In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose   Jordan acknowledged the influence of J  R  R  Tolkien, including deliberately modelling the setting of the first chapters on the Shire in The Lord of the Rings  Concepts drawn from Abrahamic religions include the duality between good and evil and between "Creator" (Light) and Shai'tan, "The Dark One" (Shaitan is an Arabic word that, in Islamic contexts, is used as a name for the Devil or Satan)  Other influences include Arthurian legends, Norse mythology and Irish mythology, as well as real life history In addition, Jordan also drew influences from Eastern mythology, which was rare for a Western fantasy series  The concept of a wheel of time was drawn from Hinduism  Versions of the concept include the Yuga cycle in Hinduism and Kalachakra in Buddhism  The series was also influenced by the concepts of reincarnation and balance, and the symbol of the Aes Sedai resembles the yin and yang 
Fate is an important theme to the series  The series explores in great detail the implications of a common fantasy premise, in which an ordinary boy on the verge of adulthood discovers he is fated to lead a major struggle  It also deals with the divide between fate and free will  Some major characters are ta'veren, who have exceptional abilities to influence the course of history in a tumultuous period, but even they can only go so far as permitted by "The Pattern" that is being set by the Wheel of Time 
The series also featured alternative portrayals of the role of gender in society  The nature of magic in its world means that only women can safely use it  This disparity influences the power dynamics at multiple levels of its societies, including familial, communal and political levels; many of its societies are ruled by women 

Adaptations
Comic books
In 2004, Jordan sold the film, television, video game, and comic rights to the series to production company Red Eagle Entertainment  Dabel Brothers began adapting the series in comic book form, starting with the prequel New Spring in July 2005  The series initially ran on a monthly schedule, but then went on a three-year hiatus after the fifth issue  Red Eagle cited delays and changes to the creative team on the DB Pro end  The final three issues were ultimately completed and published in 2009–10 
In 2009 Dabel moved on to their adaptation of the first book of the series proper, The Eye of the World  On March 17, 2009, they showcased ten pages of art from the prelude to the series "The Wheel of Time: Eye of the World #0 – Dragonmount" on their website  Dynamite Entertainment published 35 issues of Robert Jordon's The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World comic book series, which concluded in March 2013 When asked in a 2013 interview about whether the comics would continue their run, Harriet McDougal replied "Well, eventually, [we'll] do the whole thing, unless it stops selling in a dreadful way  In other words, I don't really know " The 43 New Spring and Eye of the World comics were later collected together and released as a series of six graphic novels, the last of which was released in February 2015 

Games
There is a Wheel of Time MUD, identified as such or by the initialism WoTMUD, which is based on a world like that of the Wheel of Time but set in a time frame around 30 world years prior   It has been in operation almost continuously since 1993  Notably, the WoTMUD had gained written permission from the author to use his creation including all but major characters A Wheel of Time computer game was released in 1999  Over the course of the game, Aes Sedai must track down a robber following an assault on the White Tower, and prevent the Dark One from being released prematurely  She eventually learns of and executes a long-forgotten ritual at Shayol Ghul to ensure the Dark Lord remains sealed within the prison  While Robert Jordan was consulted in the creation of the game, he did not write the storyline himself, and the game is not considered canon The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game was released in 2001 from Wizards of the Coast using the d20 rules developed for the third edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game  The game had a single adventure module published in 2002, Prophecies of the Dragon  Shortly after the release of the adventure book Wizards of the Coast announced they would not be releasing any further products for the game  Robert Jordan cited some problems with the roleplaying game, such as storyline details in the adventure module that contradicted the books In early 2009 EA Games announced that they had bought the rights for a MMORPG, with the plan to publish it through the EA Partners-Program  The following year Obsidian Entertainment announced that they would be working on the project, for a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC release  However, the project was seemingly dropped around 2014 

Music
In 1999, A Soundtrack for the Wheel of Time was released, featuring music by Robert Berry and inspired by the books 
The German power metal band Blind Guardian have written two songs dedicated to the Wheel of Time series as part of their 2010 album At the Edge of Time: "Ride into Obsession" and "Wheel of Time"  Swedish heavy metal band Katana also wrote a song, entitled "The Wisdom of Emond's Field", on their 2012 album Storms of War  The American power metal band Noble Beast, on their 2014 album of the same name, wrote a song entitled "The Dragon Reborn", in reference to Rand al'Thor  The American black metal band Shaidar Logoth takes its name from an adaptation of the city of Shadar Logoth, and lyrically expands on the character Padan Fain  The Austrian metal band Dragony, on their 2018 album "Masters of the Multiverse", released the song "Flame of Tar Valon", referencing the Amyrlin Seat  The Swedish metal band Freternia, on their 2019 album "The Gathering", released the song "Reborn", referencing the Dragon Reborn, Rand al'Thor  The American band Lyra wrote the song "The Sword That Could Not Be Broken", about the history of Manetheren, as well as the song "Betrayer of Hope", in reference to Ishamael  The Dread Crew of Oddwood produced the song "The Gleeman", which refers to Thom's battle with a Myrddraal in Whitebridge  The Scottish metal band Farseer, on their 2016 album "Fall Before the Dawn", released the song "Luck of the Joker", which references the most important events that happen to Matrim Cauthon during the whole series In the tradition of the literature-inspired symphonic poem, American composer Seth Stewart produced a full-scale orchestral work entitled "Age of Legends", inspired by the eponymous era of myth and magic described throughout the Wheel of Time series  The orchestral piece was premiered and recorded in 2011 at the Beall Concert Hall 

Television and film
In a 2000 chat on CNN com, Robert Jordan mentioned that NBC had purchased an option to do a miniseries of The Eye of the World  But he expressed doubts that the series would be made stating "key people involved in getting that contract together have left NBC " The series was optioned by Universal Pictures in 2008 for film adaptations, with plans to adapt The Eye of the World as the first film  Neither project ultimately emerged 
In February 2015, Red Eagle Entertainment paid air time to cable network FXX to air Winter Dragon, a  low-budget 22-minute pilot for a potential The Wheel of Time series that allowed Red Eagle to hold on to the rights to the series  The pilot, based on the prologue to The Eye of the World, starred Max Ryan as Lews Therin Thelamon and Billy Zane as Ishamael and aired after Midnight with no announcements or publicity  Harriet McDougal initially stated she was unaware of the show ahead of time, and that the film rights to The Wheel of Time were set to revert to the Bandersnatch Group, her company, a few days later on February 11, 2015  Her comments triggered a slander lawsuit with Red Eagle, which was ultimately dismissed during settlement talks that July  In an interview with io9, Red Eagle Entertainment's CEO Rick Selvage stated "it was more of an [issue of] getting it on the air "  A spokesman for FXX stated that the channel was paid to air the show, but Selvage hinted that it was indeed produced with a future series in mind  "We think there's huge demand for the television series internationally, and we're looking forward to producing it and getting it out in the marketplace "On April 29, 2016, Harriet McDougal confirmed that the legal issues had been resolved and that a TV series was in development  Further details emerged on 20 April 2017, when it was announced that Sony Pictures Television would be handling the adaptation, with Rafe Judkins as writer and executive producer  In February 2018, Amazon Studios revealed that it had struck a deal with Sony Pictures Television to co-develop the series for distribution on Amazon's video streaming service  The series was formally greenlit in October 2018  Production began in late 2019, but was hindered in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic  The series premiered on 19 November 2021 

Fan culture
Many fans of The Wheel of Time attend Dragon Con, which had an exclusive Wheel of Time content track from 2001 through 2012  The Wheel of Time now has its own annual convention, JordanCon, which has been held annually in Atlanta, Georgia, since 2009  The 2020 convention was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic  Instead, it took place over the Internet, some aspects being held through the use of the Zoom platform  The 2023 convention in April was the 15th anniversary of the founding of JordanCon 
In 2022, a new convention titled WoT Con, took place in Dublin, OH  This convention was created to be dedicated to the world of the Wheel of Time in all media aspects: novels, social media, and the television show  The second convention will take place July 14-16, 2023 
Passage 5:
The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time
The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is an encyclopedia for the bestselling The Wheel of Time epic fantasy series of novels by Robert Jordan about the unnamed world where the plot takes place, which is often referred by fans of the series as the World of the Wheel  It is published in the United States by Tor Books and in the United Kingdom by Orbit Books  The bulk of the text was written by Teresa Patterson based on notes and information provided by Jordan, who also serves as overall editor on the project  While the information in the guide is broadly canonical, the book is deliberately written with vague, biased, or even downright false (or guessed) information in places, as Patterson felt this would reflect a key theme of the series (the mutability of knowledge across time and distance) 

Publication history
The book has been printed in several formats  The original release on 6 November 1997 was a large-format hardback with a predominantly white cover  This led to the book being dubbed 'The Big White Book' by fans  Some additional fans, citing poor quality of the internal illustrations, have dubbed the volume "The Big Book With Bad Art"  This edition of the book runs to 304 pages  The book was reprinted in a slightly different edition of the same size a year later  This edition has a different cover (a map of the Westlands) and the gallery has been expanded to include the cover of the eighth novel, The Path of Daggers, which was released at the same time  A large-format paperback edition followed in November 1999  On 6 June 2002 Orbit re-released the book as a 461-page mass-market paperback, stripped of all illustrations apart from the maps  This is the 'current' UK edition 

Description
The book is an attempt to fill in the enormous backstory of The Wheel of Time novels and also serves as 'guidebook' to the world presented in the books  The original large-editions of the book were presented with full-colour art by Todd Cameron Hamilton and includes maps by Ellisa Mitchell, John M  Ford and Thomas Canty  The covers of the novels, painted by Darrell K  Sweet, were also included  The mass-market paperback editions only include the Mitchell, Ford, and Canty maps, however  The original artwork by Hamilton was fiercely criticised on release The book consists of six sections, outlined as follows:

The Wheel and the Power: a description and explanation of The Wheel of Time, the True Source and the One Power, the relationships between the three, and how they are tapped and used 
The Age of Legends: a historical overview of the Age of Legends, the War of the Shadow and the Breaking of the World  Includes biographies and character studies of the thirteen Forsaken and information on the Friends of the Dark and Shadowspawn 
The World Since the Breaking: a historical overview of events since the Breaking, including the founding of the White Tower and the rise of the Ten Nations, the Trolloc Wars, the rise of Artur Hawkwing in the War of the Second Dragon, the colonisation of Seanchan, the War of the Hundred Years, the start of the New Era, the Whitecloak War, and the Aiel War 
Narrative Paintings: the cover artwork for the first seven (expanded to eight in later editions) novels in the series  This section is missing from mass-market paperback editions of the book 
The World of the Wheel: a gazetteer to the world of the novels, including information on Shara, Seanchan, the Aiel Waste, the Land of the Madmen, and the Ogier  A map of the whole world is shown, along with a more detailed map of Shara and the Aiel Waste, and another of the Seanchan home continent  Information on history, customs, and the Seanchan exotic animals is also included 
Within the Land: focuses on the fourteen nations and the major city-states that make up the main continent shown in the books, featuring information on holidays, prophecies, military forces, governments, trade, and the influence of the Aes Sedai 
Passage 6:
Morgan Llywelyn
Morgan Llywelyn (born December 3, 1937) is an American-Irish historical interpretation author of historical and mythological fiction and historical non-fiction  Her interpretation of mythology and history has received several awards and has sold more than 40 million copies, and she herself is recipient of the 1999 Exceptional Celtic Woman of the Year Award from Celtic Women International 

Biography
Llywelyn was born Sally Snyder in New York in 1937  She was the daughter of Joseph John (an attorney) and she attended high school in Dallas  In her teens, Llywelyn moved to the Dallas area, where she developed a love of horses  By the age of 16, Llywelyn was competing in professional horse shows across the United States  By age 18, she modeled for Neiman Marcus and Arthur Murray  After 15 years of experience as a horse trainer and instructor, she tried out for and narrowly missed making the 1976 United States Olympic Team in dressage  She was instead shortlisted, missing the cut off score by  05 percent With her mother's encouragement and a successfully published article on horse training, she refocused her efforts in tracing the Llywelyn family history and eventually made a career out of writing historical novels that allowed the exploration of her Celtic roots  In reference to this career change, Llywelyn had this to say:

I have a strong strain of Welsh on my mother's side, which does indeed go back to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth  And Llywelyn the Great! (We have the proven genealogy from the College of Heralds ) She was very proud of her royal Welsh connection  That is why she was so interested in genealogy in the first place, and inspired me to get involved as well     leading in turn to THE WIND FROM HASTINGS  But both my parents were predominantly Irish – my father totally so – and I spent half the years of my childhood here  So I have always been much more interested in Ireland and its history and legends 
Llywelyn has received several awards for her works  She received the Novel of the Year Award from the National League of American Penwomen for her novel, The Horse Goddess, as well as the Woman of the Year Award from the Irish-American Heritage Committee for Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish  The latter award was presented to her by Ed Koch, then-mayor of New York City Although Llywelyn's grandparents have their roots in Ireland, it was only after the death of her parents and her husband in 1985 that she relocated to Ireland  Llywelyn now lives outside Dublin and has become an Irish citizen In 1990, Llywelyn began her focus on writing books geared for younger readers  These works started with Brian Boru: Emperor of the Irish, for which she won an Irish Children's Book Trust Bisto Award in 1991, and includes other titles, such as Strongbow: The Story of Richard and Aoife, for which she won a Bisto Award in the Historical Fiction category, 1993 and the Reading Association of Ireland Award, 1993, and Star Dancer, which departed from her usual Celtic topic and was centered on her experiences with dressage  Further works include The Vikings in Ireland, an exploration of when the Norsemen arrived in Ireland, and Pirate Queen, a younger reader's version of the story of Grace O'Malley, told through letters from Granuaile to her beloved son 

Bibliography
Novels and short fiction collections
1978 The Wind from Hastings, Tor Books, ISBN 9781429983563
1980 Lion of Ireland, Forge Books, ISBN 9780765302571
1983 The Horse Goddess, Tor Books, ISBN 9781429983464
1984 Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish, Tor Books, ISBN 9780765334886 
1984 Personal Habits, Doubleday
1986 Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas, Forge Books, ISBN 9781429920636
1987 Xerxes, Chelsea House Publications, ISBN 0877544476
1989 The Isles of the Blest, Olmstead Press, ISBN 9781587541131
1989 Red Branch, Ivy Books, ISBN 9780804105910
1990 Brian Boru: Emperor of the Irish, Tor Books, ISBN 9780812544619
1989 On Raven's Wing, Mandarin, ISBN 9780749302054
1991 Druids, Del Rey, ISBN 9780804108447
1992 The Last Prince of Ireland: A Novel, W  Morrow, ISBN 9780688107949
1992 O'Sullivan's March
1993 The Elementals, Tor Books, ISBN 9780312855680
1993 Star Dancer, The O'Brien Press, ISBN 9780862783310
1994 Finn Mac Cool, Forge Books, ISBN 9781250754226  
1995 Cold Places
1995 Ireland: A Graphic History (with Michael Scott)
1995 Silverhand (Arcana, Book 1; with Michael Scott), Baen, ISBN 9780671877286
1996 19 Railway Street (with Michael Scott), Poolbeg Press Ltd, ISBN 9781853716423
1996 The Vikings in Ireland
1996 Strongbow: The Story of Richard & Aoife, The O'Brien Press, ISBN 9780862782740
1996 Silverlight (Arcana, Book 2; with Michael Scott)
1996 Pride of Lions
1998 1916, A Novel Of the Irish Rebellion, Forge Books, ISBN 9780765386144 
1999 The Essential Library for Irish Americans
2000 Etruscans (with Michael Scott), Tor Books, ISBN 9780312875510
2000 A Pocket History of Irish Rebels
2000 The Earth Is Made Of Stardust, Borgo Press, ISBN 9781587151590
2001 1921, The War for Independence, Forge Books, ISBN 9780765326935 
2001 Granuaile, The Pirate Queen (republished as Pirate Queen in 2006), The O'Brien Press, ISBN 9780862789749
2003 1949, The Irish Republic, Forge Books, ISBN 9780765381347
2005 1972, A Novel of Ireland's Unfinished Revolution, Forge Books, ISBN 9780765381330
2006 The Greener Shore: A Novel of the Druids of Hibernia, Del Rey, ISBN 9780345477675, 0345477677
2006 The Young Rebels, The O'Brien Press, ISBN 9780862785796
2006 The History of Irish Rebels
2006 The Vikings in Ireland
2008 1999 - A Novel of the Celtic Tiger and the Search for Peace, Forge Books, ISBN 9781429927062
2010 Brendan - The Remarkable Life and Voyage of Brendan of Clonfert, Forge Books, ISBN 9780312860998
2012 Cave of Secrets, The O'Brien Press, ISBN 9781847172075
2013 After Rome, Forge Books, ISBN 9781429987400 
2014 1014: Brian Boru & the Battle for Ireland, Dover Publications, ISBN 9780486842004
2016 Only the Stones Survive, Forge Books, ISBN 9780765337931 
2018 Drop by Drop, Tor Books, ISBN 9781250245311 
2019 Step by Step
2020 Inch by Inch, Tor Books, ISBN 9781250245328 
2021 Breath by Breath, Tor Books, ISBN 9780765388728

Awards
Passage 7:
Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas
Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas is a 1986 historical fiction novel about Grace O'Malley (Irish: Gráinne Ní Mháille), the so-called "Sea Queen of Connemara", by American-born Irish author Morgan Llywelyn  Llywelyn's novel is a heavily fictionalized account of O'Malley's life, with the author having created characters as needed for the plot of the story  The novel was the basis for the 2007 Broadway musical The Pirate Queen 
Passage 8:
Pride of Lions (novel)
Pride of Lions (ISBN 9780812536508, 1996), by the American-Irish author Morgan Llywelyn, is a novel about the lives of the children of Irish hero and High King Brian Boru, particularly his son, Donough, after the Battle of Clontarf  It is a sequel to Lion of Ireland published in 1980 
Passage 9:
Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish
Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish is a 1984 historical fantasy novel by Morgan Llywelyn  It depicts the migration of Galicians to Ireland, led by Amergin the bard and the Sons of the Mil  It is loosely based on the Early Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn or The Book of Invasions found in several medieval manuscripts 

Plot summary
Official tagline: "The sweeping historical tale of the coming of the Irish to Ireland, and of the men and women who made the Emerald Isle their own "
In the 4th century BC a group of Gaelic speaking people living in the northwest of Iberia, the Galicians, are waning in prosperity  A group of Phoenician traders unexpectedly arrives and gives hope to the tribe 
The story follows Amergin, druid and chief bard of the Galicians, and his brothers; Éremón, Colptha, Éber Finn, Donn, and Ír - all sons of Milesios  After years of declining prosperity, the Gaelicians hope that the Phoenician traders, led by Age-Nor, will help bring them back  Unfortunately, neither side has anything of much worth to trade 
At a reception in the Heroes' Hall, Age-Nor is attacked by Ír, while Milesios is asleep and unaware  Amergin uses his bardic talent to entrance Ír, thus saving Age-Nor 
Later in the novel, Age-Nor rewards Amergin, despite the bard's vehement protests, by giving him a servant, a shipwright named Sakkar, and regaling him with a tale of a fabled land to the north, Ierne  After a series of mishaps and bad decisions, it is eventually decided that a group of the Gaelicians, led by the Sons of the Mil, will settle this land 
The tribe builds a series of ships with the help of Sakkar, and set sail 
When they arrive on Ierne, they are confronted by the mysterious Tuatha Dé Danann, People of the Goddess Danu  After a battle, the Dananns vanish with no trace, leaving Ierne for the Milesians after Éiru (A Goddess of the Tuatha De Dannan) hands over Ireland to Amergin for it was foretold 

External links
Morgan Llywelyn
Passage 10:
Finn Mac Cool (novel)
Finn Mac Cool is a 1994 novel by the Irish-American author Morgan Llywelyn  It is based on the Fenian Cycle about the Irish hero Finn Mac Cool and the fianna  Terri Windling described it as "a skilfully crafted Irish novel       in the shadowy realm between history and mythology" 
Context 2: Passage 1:
Short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs)
Short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) are non-autonomous, non-coding transposable elements (TEs) that are about 100 to 700 base pairs in length  They are a class of retrotransposons, DNA elements that amplify themselves throughout eukaryotic genomes, often through RNA intermediates  SINEs compose about 13% of the mammalian genome The internal regions of SINEs originate from tRNA and remain highly conserved, suggesting positive pressure to preserve structure and function of SINEs   While SINEs are present in many species of vertebrates and invertebrates, SINEs are often lineage specific, making them useful markers of divergent evolution between species  Copy number variation and mutations in the SINE sequence make it possible to construct phylogenies based on differences in SINEs between species  SINEs are also implicated in certain types of genetic disease in humans and other eukaryotes 
In essence, short interspersed nuclear elements are genetic parasites which have evolved very early in the history of eukaryotes to utilize protein machinery within the organism as well as to co-opt the machinery from similarly parasitic genomic elements  The simplicity of these elements make them remarkably successful at persisting and amplifying (through retrotransposition)  within the genomes of eukaryotes  These "parasites" which have become ubiquitous in genomes can be very deleterious to organisms as discussed below  However, eukaryotes have been able to integrate short-interspersed nuclear elements into different signaling, metabolic and regulatory pathways and SINEs have become a great source of genetic variability  They seem to play a particularly important role in the regulation of gene expression and the creation of RNA genes  This regulation extends to chromatin re-organization and the regulation of genomic architecture  The different lineages, mutations, and activities among eukaryotes make short-interspersed nuclear elements a useful tool in phylogenetic analysis 

Classification and structure
SINEs are classified as non-LTR retrotransposons because they do not contain long terminal repeats (LTRs)  There are three types of SINEs common to vertebrates and invertebrates: CORE-SINEs, V-SINEs, and AmnSINEs  SINEs have 50-500 base pair internal regions which contain a tRNA-derived segment with A and B boxes that serve as an internal promoter for RNA polymerase III 

Internal structure
SINEs are characterized by their different modules, which are essentially a sectioning of their sequence  SINEs can, but do not necessarily have to possess a head, a body, and a tail  The head, is at the 5' end of short-interspersed nuclear elements and is an evolutionarily derived from an RNA synthesized by RNA Polymerase III such as ribosomal RNAs and tRNAs; the 5' head is indicative of which endogenous element that SINE was derived from and was able to parasitically utilize its transcriptional machinery  For example, the 5' of the Alu sine is derived from 7SL RNA, a sequence transcribed by RNA Polymerase III which codes for the RNA element of SRP, an abundant ribonucleoprotein  The body of SINEs possess an unknown origin but often share much homology with a corresponding LINE which thus allows SINEs to parasitically co-opt endonucleases coded by LINEs (which recognize certain sequence motifs)  Lastly, the 3′ tail of SINEs is composed of short simple repeats of varying lengths; these simple repeats are sites where two (or more) short-interspersed nuclear elements can combine to form a dimeric SINE  Short-interspersed nuclear elements which only possess a head and tail are called simple SINEs whereas short-interspersed nuclear elements which also possess a body or are a combination of two or more SINEs are complex SINEs 

Transcription
Short-interspersed nuclear elements are transcribed by RNA polymerase III which is known to transcribe ribosomal RNA and tRNA, two types of RNA vital to ribosomal assembly and mRNA translation  SINEs, like tRNAs and many small-nuclear RNAs possess an internal promoter and thus are transcribed differently than most protein-coding genes   In other words, short-interspersed nuclear elements have their key promoter elements within the transcribed region itself  Though transcribed by RNA polymerase III, SINEs and other genes possessing internal promoters, recruit different transcriptional machinery and factors than genes possessing upstream promoters 

Effects on gene expression
Changes in chromosome structure influence gene expression primarily by affecting the accessibility of genes to transcriptional machinery  The chromosome has a very complex and hierarchical system of organizing the genome  This system of organization, which includes histones, methyl groups, acetyl groups, and a variety of proteins and RNAs allows different domains within a chromosome to be accessible to polymerases, transcription factors, and other associated proteins to different degrees   Furthermore, the shape and density of certain areas of a chromosome can affect the shape and density of neighboring (or even distant regions) on the chromosome through interaction facilitated by different proteins and elements  Non-coding RNAs  such as short-interspersed nuclear elements, which have been known to associate with and contribute to chromatin structure, can thus play huge role in regulating gene expression   Short-interspersed-nuclear-elements similarly can be involved in gene regulation by modifying genomic architecture 
In fact Usmanova et al  2008 suggested that short-interspersed nuclear elements can serve as direct signals in chromatin rearrangement and structure   The paper examined the global distribution of SINEs in mouse and human chromosomes and determined that this distribution was very similar to genomic distributions of genes and CpG motifs  The distribution of SINEs to genes was significantly more similar than that of other non-coding genetic elements and even differed significantly from the distribution of long-interspersed nuclear elements  This suggested that the SINE distribution was not a mere accident caused by LINE-mediated retrotransposition but rather that SINEs possessed a role in gene-regulation  Furthermore, SINEs frequently contain motifs for YY1 polycomb proteins  YY1 is a zinc-finger protein that acts as a transcriptional repressor for a wide-variety of genes essential for development and signaling   Polycomb protein YY1 is believed to mediate the activity of histone deacetylases and histone acetyltransferases to facilitate chromatin re-organization; this is often to facilitate the formation of heterochromatin (gene-silencing state)  Thus, the analysis suggests that short-interspersed nuclear elements can function as a ‘signal-booster' in the polycomb-dependent silencing of gene-sets through chromatin re-organization   In essence, it is the cumulative effect of many types of interactions that leads to the difference between euchromatin, which is not tightly packed and generally more accessible to transcriptional machinery, and heterochromatin, which is tightly packed and generally not accessible to transcriptional machinery; SINEs seem to play an evolutionary role in this process 
In addition to directly affecting chromatin structure, there are a number of ways in which SINEs can potentially regulate gene expression  For example, long non-coding RNA can directly interact with transcriptional repressors and activators, attenuating or modifying their function   This type of regulation can occur in different ways: the RNA transcript can directly bind to the transcription factor as a co-regulator; also, the RNA can regulate and modify the ability of co-regulators to associate with the transcription factor   For example, Evf-2, a certain long non-coding RNA, has been known to function as a co-activator for certain homeobox transcription factors which are critical to nervous system development and organization  Furthermore, RNA transcripts can interfere with the functionality of the transcriptional complex by interacting or associating with RNA polymerases during the transcription or loading processes  Moreover, non-coding RNAs like SINEs can bind or interact directly with the DNA duplex coding the gene and thus prevent its transcription Also, many non-coding RNAs are distributed near protein-coding genes, often in the reverse direction  This is especially true for short-interspersed nuclear elements as seen in Usmanova et al  These non-coding RNAs, which lie adjacent to or overlap gene-sets provide a mechanism by which transcription factors and machinery can be recruited to increase or repress the transcription of local genes  The particular example of SINEs potentially recruiting the YY1 polycomb transcriptional repressor is discussed above   Alternatively, it also provides a mechanism by which local gene expression can be curtailed and regulated because the transcriptional complexes can hinder or prevent nearby genes from being transcribed  There is research to suggest that this phenomenon is particularly seen in the gene-regulation of pluripotent cells In conclusion, non-coding RNAs such as SINEs are capable of affecting gene expression on a multitude of different levels and in different ways  Short-interspersed nuclear elements are believed to be deeply integrated into a complex regulatory network capable of fine-tuning gene expression across the eukaryotic genome 

Propagation and regulation
The RNA coded by the short-interspersed nuclear element does not code for any protein product but is nonetheless reverse-transcribed and inserted back into an alternate region in the genome  For this reason, short interspersed nuclear elements are believed to have co-evolved with long interspersed nuclear element (LINEs), as LINEs do in fact encode protein products which enable them to be reverse- transcribed and integrated back into the genome   SINEs are  believed to have co-opted the proteins coded by LINEs which are contained in 2 reading frames  Open reading frame 1 (ORF 1)  encodes a protein which binds to RNA and acts as a chaperone to facilitate and maintain the LINE protein-RNA complex structure  Open reading frame 2 (ORF 2) codes a protein which possesses both endonuclease and reverse transcriptase activities  This enables the LINE mRNA to be reverse-transcribed into DNA and integrated into the genome based on the sequence-motifs recognized by the protein's endonuclease domain 
LINE-1 (L1) is transcribed and retrotransposed most frequently in the germ-line and during early development; as a result SINEs move around the genome most during these periods  SINE transcription is down-regulated by transcription factors in somatic cells after early development, though stress can cause up-regulation of normally silent SINEs  SINEs can be transferred between individuals or species via horizontal transfer through a viral vector SINEs are known to share sequence homology with LINES which gives a basis by which the LINE machinery can reverse transcribe and integrate SINE transcripts  Alternately, some SINEs are believed to use a much more complex system of integrating back into the genome; this system involves the use random double-stranded DNA breaks (rather than the endonuclease coded by related long-interspersed nuclear elements creating an insertion-site)  These DNA breaks are utilized to prime reverse transcriptase, ultimately integrating the SINE transcript back into the genome  SINEs nonetheless depend on enzymes coded by other DNA elements and are thus known as non-autonomous retrotransposons as they depend on the machinery of LINEs, which are known as autonomous retrotransposons <The theory that short-interspersed nuclear elements have evolved to utilize the retrotransposon machinery of long-interspersed nuclear elements is supported by studies which examine the presence and distribution of LINEs and SINEs in taxa of different species  For example, LINEs and SINEs in rodents and primates show very strong homology at the insertion-site motif  Such evidence is a basis for the proposed mechanism in which integration of the SINE transcript can be co-opted with LINE-coded protein products  This is specifically demonstrated by a detailed analysis of over 20 rodent species profiled LINEs and SINEs, mainly L1s and B1s respectively; these are families of LINEs and SINEs found at high frequencies in rodents along with other mammals  The study sought to provide phylogenetic clarity within the context of LINE and SINE activity 
The study arrived at a candidate taxa believed to be the first instance of L1 LINE extinction; it expectedly discovered that there was no evidence to suggest that B1 SINE activity occurred in species which did not have L1 LINE activity  Also, the study suggested that B1 short-interspersed nuclear element silencing in fact occurred before L1 long-interspersed nuclear element extinction; this is due to the fact that B1 SINEs are silenced in the genus most-closely related to the genus which does not contain active L1 LINEs (though the genus with B1 SINE silencing still contains active L1 LINEs)   Another genus was also found which similarly contained active L1 long-interspersed nuclear elements but did not contain B1 short-interspersed nuclear elements; the opposite scenario, in which active B1 SINEs were present in a genus which did not possess active L1 LINEs was not found  This result was expected and strongly supports the theory that SINEs have evolved to co-opt the RNA-binding proteins, endonucleases, and reverse-transcriptases coded by LINEs  In taxa which do not actively transcribe and translate long-interspersed nuclear elements protein-products, SINEs do not have the theoretical foundation by which to retrotranspose within the genome  The results obtained in Rinehart et al  are thus very supportive of the current model of SINE retrotransposition 

Effects of SINE transposition
Insertion of a SINE upstream of a coding region may result in exon shuffling or changes to the regulatory region of the gene  Insertion of a SINE into the coding sequence of a gene can have deleterious effects and unregulated transposition can cause genetic disease  The transposition and recombination of SINEs and other active nuclear elements is thought to be one of the major contributions of genetic diversity between lineages during speciation 

Common SINEs
Short-interspersed nuclear elements are believed to have parasitic origins in eukaryotic genomes  These SINEs have mutated and replicated themselves a large number of times on an evolutionary time-scale and thus form many different lineages  Their early evolutionary origin has caused them to be ubiquitous in many eukaryotic lineages 
Alu elements, short-interspersed nuclear element of about 300 nucleotides, are the most common SINE in humans, with >1,000,000 copies throughout the genome, which is over 10 percent of the total genome; this is not uncommon among other species  Alu element copy number differences can be used to distinguish between and construct phylogenies of primate species  Canines differ primarily in their abundance of SINEC_Cf repeats throughout the genome, rather than other gene or allele level mutations  These dog-specific SINEs may code for a splice acceptor site, altering the sequences that appear as exons or introns in each species Apart from mammals, SINEs can reach high copy numbers in a range of species, including nonbony vertebrates (elephant shark) and some fish species (coelacanths)  In plants, SINEs are often restricted to closely related species and have emerged, decayed, and vanished frequently during evolution  Nevertheless, some SINE families such as the Au-SINEs and the Angio-SINEs are unusually widespread across many often unrelated plant species 

Diseases
There are >50 human diseases associated with SINEs  When inserted near or within the exon, SINEs can cause improper splicing, become coding regions, or change the reading frame, often leading to disease phenotypes in humans and other animals  Insertion of Alu elements in the human genome is associated with breast cancer, colon cancer, leukemia, hemophilia, Dent's disease, cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, and many others 

microRNAs
The role of short-interspersed nuclear elements in gene regulation within cells has been supported by multiple studies  One such study examined the correlation between a certain family of SINEs with microRNAs (in zebrafish)  The specific family of SINEs being examined was the Anamnia V-SINEs; this family of short interspersed nuclear elements is often found in the untranslated region of the 3' end of many genes and is present in vertebrate genomes   The study involved a computational analysis in which the genomic distribution and activity of the Anamnia V-SINEs in Danio rerio zebrafish was examined; furthermore, these V-SINEs potential to generate novel microRNA loci was analyzed   It was found that genes which were predicted to possess V-SINEs were targeted by microRNAs with significantly higher hybridization E-values (relative to other areas in the genome)   The genes that had high hybridization E-values were genes particularly involved in metabolic and signaling pathways  Almost all miRNAs identified to have a strong ability to hybridize to putative V-SINE sequence motifs in genes have been identified (in mammals) to have regulatory roles  These results which establish a correlation between short-interspersed nuclear elements and different regulatory microRNAs strongly suggest that V-SINEs have a significant role in attenuating responses to different signals and stimuli related to metabolism, proliferation and differentiation  Many other studies must be undertaken to establish the validity and extent of short-interspersed nuclear element retrotransposons' role in regulatory gene-expression networks  In conclusion, though not much is known about the role and mechanism by which SINEs generate miRNA gene loci  it is generally understood that SINEs have played a significant evolutionary role in the creation of "RNA-genes", this is also touched upon above in SINEs and pseudogenes 
With such evidence suggesting that short-interspersed nuclear elements have been evolutionary sources for microRNA loci generation it is important to further discuss the potential relationships between the two as well as the mechanism by which the microRNA regulates RNA degradation and more broadly, gene expression   A microRNA is a non-coding RNA generally 22 nucleotides in length  This non-protein coding oligonucleotide is itself coded by longer nuclear DNA sequence usually transcribed by RNA polymerase II which is also responsible for the transcription of most mRNAs and snRNAs in eukaryotes   However, some research suggests that some microRNAs that possess upstream short-interspersed nuclear elements are transcribed by RNA polymerase III which is widely implicated in ribosomal RNA and tRNA, two transcripts vital to mRNA translation   This provides an alternate mechanism by which short-interspersed nuclear elements could be interacting with or mediating gene-regulatory networks involving microRNAs 
The regions coding miRNA can be independent RNA-genes often being anti-sense to neighboring protein-coding genes, or can be found within the introns of protein-coding genes  The co-localization of microRNA and protein-coding genes provides a mechanistic foundation by which microRNA regulates gene-expression  Furthermore, Scarpato et al   reveals (as discussed above) that genes predicted to possess short-interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) through sequence analysis were targeted and hybridized by microRNAs significantly greater than other genes  This provides an evolutionarily path by which the parasitic SINEs were co-opted and utilized to form RNA-genes (such as microRNAs) which have evolved to play a role in complex gene-regulatory networks 
The microRNAs are transcribed as part of longer RNA strands of generally about 80 nucleotides which through complementary base-pairing are able to form hairpin loop structures These structures are recognized and processed in the nucleus by the nuclear protein DiGeorge Syndrome Critical Region 8 (DGCR8) which recruits and associates with the Drosha protein   This complex is responsible for cleaving some of the hair-pin structures from the pre-microRNA which is transported to the cytoplasm  The pre-miRNA is processed by the protein DICER into a double stranded 22 nucleotide   Thereafter, one of the strands is incorporated into a multi-protein RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC)  Among these proteins are proteins from the Argonaute family which are critical to the complex's ability to interact with and repress the translation of the target mRNA Understanding the different ways in which microRNA regulates gene-expression, including mRNA-translation and degradation is key to understanding the potential evolutionary role of SINEs in gene-regulation and in the generation of microRNA loci  This, in addition to SINEs' direct role in regulatory networks (as discussed in SINEs as long non-coding RNAs) is crucial to beginning to understand the relationship between SINEs and certain diseases  Multiple studies have suggested that increased SINE activity is correlated with certain gene-expression profiles and post-transcription regulation of certain genes   In fact, Peterson et al  2013 demonstrated that high SINE RNA expression correlates with post-transcriptional downregulation of BRCA1, a tumor suppressor implicated in multiple forms of cancer, namely breast cancer  Furthermore, studies have established a strong correlation between transcriptional mobilization of SINEs and certain cancers and conditions such as hypoxia; this can be due to the genomic instability caused by SINE activity as well as more direct-downstream effects   SINEs have also been implicated in countless other diseases  In essence, short-interspersed nuclear elements have become deeply integrated in countless regulatory, metabolic and signaling pathways and thus play an inevitable role in causing disease  Much is still to be known about these genomic parasites but it is clear they play a significant role within eukaryotic organisms 

SINEs and pseudogenes
The activity of SINEs however has genetic vestiges which do not seem to play a significant role, positive or negative, and manifest themselves in the genome as pseudogenes   SINEs however should not be mistaken as RNA pseudogenes  In general, pseudogenes are generated when processed mRNAs of protein-coding genes are reverse-transcribed and incorporated back into the genome (RNA pseudogenes are reverse transcribed RNA genes)  Pseudogenes are generally functionless as they descend from processed RNAs independent of their evolutionary-context which includes introns and different regulatory elements which enable transcription and processing  These pseudogenes, though non-functional may in some cases still possess promoters, CpG islands, and other features which enable transcription; they thus can still be transcribed and may possess a role in the regulation of gene expression (like SINEs and other non-coding elements)   Pseudogenes thus differ from SINEs in that they are derived from transcribed- functional RNA whereas SINEs are DNA elements which retrotranspose by co-opting RNA genes transcriptional machinery  However, there are studies which suggest  that retro-transposable elements such as short-interspersed nuclear elements are not only capable of copying themselves in alternate regions in the genome but are also able to do so for random genes too   Thus SINEs can be playing a vital role in the generation of pseudogenes, which themselves are known to be involved in regulatory networks  This is perhaps another means by which SINEs have been able to influence and contribute to gene-regulation 
Passage 2:
Exonuclease VII
The enzyme exodeoxyribonuclease VII (EC 3 1 11 6, Escherichia coli exonuclease VII, E  coli exonuclease VII, endodeoxyribonuclease VII, exodeoxyribonuclease VII) is a bacterial exonuclease enzyme  It is composed of two nonidentical subunits; one large subunit and 4 small ones  that catalyses exonucleolytic cleavage in either 5′- to 3′- or 3′- to 5′-direction to yield nucleoside 5′-phosphates  The large subunit also contains an N-terminal OB-fold domain that binds to nucleic acids 
Passage 3:
Ribosomal protein
A ribosomal protein (r-protein or rProtein) is any of the proteins that, in conjunction with rRNA, make up the ribosomal subunits involved in the cellular process of translation  E  coli, other bacteria and Archaea have a 30S small subunit and a 50S large subunit, whereas humans and yeasts have a 40S small subunit and a 60S large subunit  Equivalent subunits are frequently numbered differently between bacteria, Archaea, yeasts and humans A large part of the knowledge about these organic molecules has come from the study of E  coli ribosomes  All ribosomal proteins have been isolated and many specific antibodies have been produced  These, together with electronic microscopy and the use of certain reactives, have allowed for the determination of the topography of the proteins in the ribosome   More recently, a near-complete (near)atomic picture of the ribosomal proteins is emerging from the latest high-resolution cryo-EM data (including PDB: 5AFI​) 

Conservation
Ribosomal proteins are among the most highly conserved proteins across all life forms  Among the 40 proteins found in various small ribosomal subunits (RPSs), 15 subunits are universally conserved across prokaryotes and eukaryotes  However, 7 subunits are only found in bacteria (bS21, bS6, bS16, bS18, bS20, bS21, and bTHX), while 17 subunits are only found in archaea and eukaryotes  Typically 22 proteins are found in bacterial small subunits and 32 in yeast, human and most likely most other eukaryotic species  Twenty-seven (out of 32) proteins of the eukaryotic small ribosomal subunit proteins are also present in archaea (no ribosomal protein is exclusively found in archaea), confirming that they are more closely related to eukaryotes than to bacteria Among the large ribosomal subunit (RPLs), 18 proteins are universal, i e  found in both bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea  14 proteins are only found in bacteria, while 27 proteins are only found in archaea and eukaryotes  Again, archaea have no proteins unique to them 

Essentiality
Despite their high conservation over billions of years of evolution, the absence of several ribosomal proteins in certain species shows that ribosomal subunits have been added and lost over the course of evolution  This is also reflected by the fact that several ribosomal proteins do not appear to be essential when deleted  For instance, in E  coli nine ribosomal proteins (uL15, bL21, uL24, bL27, uL29, uL30, bL34, uS9, and uS17) are nonessential for survival when deleted  Taken together with previous results, 22 of the 54 E  coli ribosomal protein genes can be individually deleted from the genome  Similarly, 16 ribosomal proteins (uL1, bL9, uL15, uL22, uL23, bL28, uL29, bL32, bL33 1, bL33 2, bL34, bL35, bL36, bS6, bS20, and bS21) were successfully deleted in Bacillus subtilis  In conjunction with previous reports, 22 ribosomal proteins have been shown to be nonessential in B  subtilis, at least for cell proliferation 

Assembly
In E  coli
The ribosome of E  coli has about 22 proteins in the small subunit (labelled S1 to S22) and 33 proteins in the large subunit (somewhat counter-intuitively called L1 to L36)  All of them are different with three exceptions: one protein is found in both subunits (S20 and L26), L7 and L12 are acetylated and methylated forms of the same protein, and L8 is a complex of L7/L12 and L10  In addition, L31 is known to exist in two forms, the full length at 7 9 kilodaltons (kDa) and fragmented at 7 0 kDa  This is why the number of proteins in a ribosome is of 56  Except for S1 (with a molecular weight of 61 2 kDa), the other proteins range in weight between 4 4 and 29 7 kDa Recent de novo proteomics experiments where the authors characterized in vivo ribosome-assembly intermediates and associated assembly factors from wild-type Escherichia coli cells using a general quantitative mass spectrometry (qMS) approach have confirmed the presence of all the known small and large subunit components and have identified a total of 21 known and potentially new ribosome-assembly-factors that co-localise with various ribosomal particles 

Disposition in the small ribosomal subunit
In the small (30S) subunit of E  coli ribosomes, the proteins denoted uS4, uS7, uS8, uS15, uS17, bS20 bind independently to 16S rRNA  After assembly of these primary binding proteins, uS5, bS6, uS9, uS12, uS13, bS16, bS18, and uS19 bind to the growing ribosome  These proteins also potentiate the addition of uS2, uS3, uS10, uS11, uS14, and bS21  Protein binding to helical junctions is important for initiating the correct tertiary fold of RNA and to organize the overall structure  Nearly all the proteins contain one or more globular domains  Moreover, nearly all contain long extensions that can contact the RNA in far-reaching regions  Additional stabilization results from the proteins' basic residues, as these neutralize the charge repulsion of the RNA backbone  Protein–protein interactions also exist to hold structure together by electrostatic and hydrogen bonding interactions  Theoretical investigations pointed to correlated effects of protein-binding onto binding affinities during the assembly processIn one study, the net charges (at pH 7 4) of the ribosomal proteins comprising the highly conserved S10-spc cluster were found to have an inverse relationship with the halophilicity/halotolerance levels in bacteria and archaea  In non-halophilic bacteria, the S10-spc proteins are generally basic, contrasting with the overall acidic whole proteomes of the extremely halophiles  The universal uL2 lying in the oldest part of the ribosome, is always positively charged irrespective of the strain/organism it belongs to 

In eukaryotes
Ribosomes in eukaryotes contain 79–80 proteins and four ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules 
General or specialized chaperones solubilize the ribosomal proteins and facilitate their import into the nucleus  Assembly of the eukaryotic ribosome appears to be driven by the ribosomal proteins in vivo when assembly is also aided by chaperones   Most ribosomal proteins assemble with rRNA co-transcriptionally, becoming associated more stably as assembly proceeds, and the active sites of both subunits are constructed last 

Table of ribosomal proteins
In the past, different nomenclatures were used for the same ribosomal protein in different organisms  Not only were the names not consistent across domains; the names also differed between organisms within a domain, such as humans and S  cervisiae, both eukaryotes  This was due to researchers assigning names before the sequences were known, causing trouble for later research  The following tables use the unified nomenclature by Ban et al , 2014  The same nomenclature is used by UniProt's "family" curation In general, cellular ribosomal proteins are to be called simply using the cross domain name, e g  "uL14" for what is currently called L23 in humans  A suffix is used for the organellar versions, so that "uL14m" refers to the human mitochondrial uL14 (MRPL14)  Organelle-specific proteins use their own cross-domain prefixes, for example "mS33" for MRPS33: Table S3,S4  and "cL37" for PSRP5 : Table S2,S3  (See the two proceeding citations, also partially by Ban N, for the organelle nomenclatures )

See also
Alpha operon ribosome binding site
Ribosomal protein L20 leader
Mitochondrial ribosome, for a list of its protein subunits
Passage 4:
Nuclear cap-binding protein complex
Nuclear cap-binding protein complex is a RNA-binding protein which binds to the 5' cap of pre-mRNA  The cap and nuclear cap-binding protein have many functions in mRNA biogenesis including splicing, 3'-end formation by stabilizing the interaction of the 3'-end processing machinery, nuclear export and protection of the transcripts from nuclease degradation  When RNA is exported to the cytoplasm the nuclear cap-binding protein complex is replaced by cytoplasmic cap binding complex  The nuclear cap-binding complex is a functional heterodimer and composed of Cbc1/Cbc2 in yeast and CBC20/CBC80 in multicellular eukaryotes  Human nuclear cap-binding protein complex shows the large subunit, CBC80 consists of 757 amino acid residues  Its secondary structure contains approximately sixty percent of helical and one percent of beta sheet in the strand  The small subunit, CBC20 has 98 amino acid residues  Its secondary structure contains approximately twenty percent of helical and twenty-four percent of beta sheet in the strand  Human nuclear cap-binding protein complex plays important role in the maturation of pre-mRNA and in uracil-rich small nuclear RNA 
Passage 5:
Ribozyme
Ribozymes (ribonucleic acid enzymes) are RNA molecules that have the ability to catalyze specific biochemical reactions, including RNA splicing in gene expression, similar to the action of protein enzymes  The 1982 discovery of ribozymes demonstrated that RNA can be both genetic material (like DNA) and a biological catalyst (like protein enzymes), and contributed to the RNA world hypothesis, which suggests that RNA may have been important in the evolution of prebiotic self-replicating systems The most common activities of natural or in vitro evolved ribozymes are the cleavage (or ligation) of RNA and DNA and peptide bond formation  For example, the smallest ribozyme known (GUGGC-3') can aminoacylate a GCCU-3' sequence in the presence of PheAMP  Within the ribosome, ribozymes function as part of the large subunit ribosomal RNA to link amino acids during protein synthesis  They also participate in a variety of RNA processing reactions, including RNA splicing, viral replication, and transfer RNA biosynthesis  Examples of ribozymes include the hammerhead ribozyme, the VS ribozyme, leadzyme, and the hairpin ribozyme 
Researchers who are investigating the origins of life through the RNA world hypothesis have been working on discovering a ribozyme with the capacity to self-replicate, which would require it to have the ability to catalytically synthesize polymers of RNA  This should be able to happen in prebiotically plausible conditions with high rates of copying accuracy to prevent degradation of information but also allowing for the occurrence of occasional errors during the copying process to allow for Darwinian evolution to proceed Attempts have been made to develop ribozymes as therapeutic agents, as enzymes which target defined RNA sequences for cleavage, as biosensors, and for applications in functional genomics and gene discovery 

Discovery
Before the discovery of ribozymes, enzymes—which are defined as catalytic proteins—were the only known biological catalysts  In 1967, Carl Woese, Francis Crick, and Leslie Orgel were the first to suggest that RNA could act as a catalyst  This idea was based upon the discovery that RNA can form complex secondary structures  These ribozymes were found in the intron of an RNA transcript, which removed itself from the transcript, as well as in the RNA component of the RNase P complex, which is involved in the maturation of pre-tRNAs  In 1989, Thomas R  Cech and Sidney Altman shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their "discovery of catalytic properties of RNA"  The term ribozyme was first introduced by Kelly Kruger et al  in a paper published in Cell in 1982 It had been a firmly established belief in biology that catalysis was reserved for proteins  However, the idea of RNA catalysis is motivated in part by the old question regarding the origin of life: Which comes first, enzymes that do the work of the cell or nucleic acids that carry the information required to produce the enzymes? The concept of "ribonucleic acids as catalysts" circumvents this problem  RNA, in essence, can be both the chicken and the egg In the 1980s, Thomas Cech, at the University of Colorado Boulder, was studying the excision of introns in a ribosomal RNA gene in Tetrahymena thermophila  While trying to purify the enzyme responsible for the splicing reaction, he found that the intron could be spliced out in the absence of any added cell extract  As much as they tried, Cech and his colleagues could not identify any protein associated with the splicing reaction  After much work, Cech proposed that the intron sequence portion of the RNA could break and reform phosphodiester bonds  At about the same time, Sidney Altman, a professor at Yale University, was studying the way tRNA molecules are processed in the cell when he and his colleagues isolated an enzyme called RNase-P, which is responsible for conversion of a precursor tRNA into the active tRNA  Much to their surprise, they found that RNase-P contained RNA in addition to protein and that RNA was an essential component of the active enzyme  This was such a foreign idea that they had difficulty publishing their findings  The following year, Altman demonstrated that RNA can act as a catalyst by showing that the RNase-P RNA subunit could catalyze the cleavage of precursor tRNA into active tRNA in the absence of any protein component 
Since Cech's and Altman's discovery, other investigators have discovered other examples of self-cleaving RNA or catalytic RNA molecules  Many ribozymes have either a hairpin – or hammerhead – shaped active center and a unique secondary structure that allows them to cleave other RNA molecules at specific sequences  It is now possible to make ribozymes that will specifically cleave any RNA molecule  These RNA catalysts may have pharmaceutical applications  For example, a ribozyme has been designed to cleave the RNA of HIV  If such a ribozyme were made by a cell, all incoming virus particles would have their RNA genome cleaved by the ribozyme, which would prevent infection 

Structure and mechanism
Despite having only four choices for each monomer unit (nucleotides), compared to 20 amino acid side chains found in proteins, ribozymes have diverse structures and mechanisms



ground_truth: Morgan Llywelyn

prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: The large subunit and small subunit that use two types of RNA are major components that make up what?

The following are given passages.
Context 2:  In many cases they are able to mimic the mechanism used by their protein counterparts  For example, in self cleaving ribozyme RNAs, an in-line SN2 reaction is carried out using the 2’ hydroxyl group as a nucleophile attacking the bridging phosphate and causing 5’ oxygen of the N+1 base to act as a leaving group  In comparison, RNase A, a protein that catalyzes the same reaction, uses a coordinating histidine and lysine to act as a base to attack the phosphate backbone Like many protein enzymes, metal binding is also critical to the function of many ribozymes  Often these interactions use both the phosphate backbone and the base of the nucleotide, causing drastic conformational changes  There are two mechanism classes for the cleavage of a phosphodiester backbone in the presence of metal  In the first mechanism, the internal 2’- OH group attacks the phosphorus center in a SN2 mechanism  Metal ions promote this reaction by first coordinating the phosphate oxygen and later stabling the oxyanion  The second mechanism also follows a SN2 displacement, but the nucleophile comes from water or exogenous hydroxyl groups rather than RNA itself  The smallest ribozyme is UUU, which can promote the cleavage between G and A of the GAAA tetranucleotide via the first mechanism in the presence of Mn2+  The reason why this trinucleotide (rather than the complementary tetramer) catalyzes this reaction may be because the UUU-AAA pairing is the weakest and most flexible trinucleotide among the 64 conformations, which provides the binding site for Mn2+ Phosphoryl transfer can also be catalyzed without metal ions  For example, pancreatic ribonuclease A and hepatitis delta virus (HDV) ribozymes can catalyze the cleavage of RNA backbone through acid-base catalysis without metal ions  Hairpin ribozyme can also catalyze the self-cleavage of RNA without metal ions, but the mechanism for this is still unclear Ribozyme can also catalyze the formation of peptide bond between adjacent amino acids by lowering the activation entropy 

Activities
Although ribozymes are quite rare in most cells, their roles are sometimes essential to life  For example, the functional part of the ribosome, the biological machine that translates RNA into proteins, is fundamentally a ribozyme, composed of RNA tertiary structural motifs that are often coordinated to metal ions such as Mg2+ as cofactors  In a model system, there is no requirement for divalent cations in a five-nucleotide RNA catalyzing trans-phenylalanation of a four-nucleotide substrate with 3 base pairs complementary with the catalyst, where the catalyst/substrate were devised by truncation of the C3 ribozyme The best-studied ribozymes are probably those that cut themselves or other RNAs, as in the original discovery by Cech and Altman  However, ribozymes can be designed to catalyze a range of reactions, many of which may occur in life but have not been discovered in cells RNA may catalyze folding of the pathological protein conformation of a prion in a manner similar to that of a chaperonin 

Ribozymes and the origin of life
RNA can also act as a hereditary molecule, which encouraged Walter Gilbert to propose that in the distant past, the cell used RNA as both the genetic material and the structural and catalytic molecule rather than dividing these functions between DNA and protein as they are today; this hypothesis is known as the "RNA world hypothesis" of the origin of life  Since nucleotides and RNA (and thus ribozymes) can arise by inorganic chemicals, they are candidates for the first enzymes, and in fact, the first "replicators" (i e , information-containing macro-molecules that replicate themselves)  An example of a self-replicating ribozyme that ligates two substrates to generate an exact copy of itself was described in 2002 
The discovery of the catalytic activity of RNA solved the "chicken and egg" paradox of the origin of life, solving the problem of origin of peptide and nucleic acid central dogma  According to this scenario, at the origin of life, all enzymatic activity and genetic information encoding was done by one molecule: RNA 
Ribozymes have been produced in the laboratory that are capable of catalyzing the synthesis of other RNA molecules from activated monomers under very specific conditions, these molecules being known as RNA polymerase ribozymes  The first RNA polymerase ribozyme was reported in 1996, and was capable of synthesizing RNA polymers up to 6 nucleotides in length  Mutagenesis and selection has been performed on an RNA ligase ribozyme from a large pool of random RNA sequences, resulting in isolation of the improved "Round-18" polymerase ribozyme in 2001 which could catalyze RNA polymers now up to 14 nucleotides in length  Upon application of further selection on the Round-18 ribozyme, the B6 61 ribozyme was generated and was able to add up to 20 nucleotides to a primer template in 24 hours, until it decomposes by cleavage of its phosphodiester bonds The rate at which ribozymes can polymerize an RNA sequence multiples substantially when it takes place within a micelle The next ribozyme discovered was the "tC19Z" ribozyme, which can add up to 95 nucleotides with a fidelity of 0 0083 mutations/nucleotide  Next, the "tC9Y" ribozyme was discovered by researchers and was further able to synthesize RNA strands up to 206 nucleotides long in the eutectic phase conditions at below-zero temperature, conditions previously shown to promote ribozyme polymerase activity The RNA polymerase ribozyme (RPR) called tC9-4M was able to polymerize RNA chains longer than itself (i e  longer than 177 nt) in magnesium ion concentrations close to physiological levels, whereas earlier RPRs required prebiotically implausible concentrations of up to 200 mM  The only factor required for it to achieve this was the presence of a very simple amino acid polymer called lysine decapeptide The most complex RPR synthesized by that point was called 24-3, which was newly capable of polymerizing the sequences of a substantial variety of nucleotide sequences and navigating through complex secondary structures of RNA substrates inaccessible to previous ribozymes  In fact, this experiment was the first to use a ribozyme to synthesize a tRNA molecule  Starting with the 24-3 ribozyme, Tjhung et al  applied another fourteen rounds of selection to obtain an RNA polymerase ribozyme by in vitro evolution termed '38-6' that has an unprecedented level of activity in copying complex RNA molecules  However, this ribozyme is unable to copy itself and its RNA products have a high mutation rate  In a subsequent study, the researchers began with the 38-6 ribozyme and applied another 14 rounds of selection to generate the '52-2' ribozyme, which compared to 38-6, was again many times more active and could begin generating detectable and functional levels of the class I ligase, although it was still limited in its fidelity and functionality in comparison to copying of the same template by proteins such as the T7 RNA polymerase An RPR called t5(+1) adds triplet nucleotides at a time instead of just one nucleotide at a time  This heterodimeric RPR can navigate secondary structures inaccessible to 24-3, including hairpins  In the initial pool of RNA variants derived only from a previously synthesized RPR known as the Z RPR, two sequences separately emerged and evolved to be mutualistically dependent on each other  The Type 1 RNA evolved to be catalytically inactive, but complexing with the Type 5 RNA boosted its polymerization ability and enabled intermolecular interactions with the RNA template substrate obviating the need to tether the template directly to the RNA sequence of the RPR, which was a limitation of earlier studies  Not only did t5(+1) not need tethering to the template, but a primer was not needed either as t5(+1) had the ability to polymerize a template in both 3' → 5' and 5' 3 → 3' directions A highly evolved RNA polymerase ribozyme was able to function as a reverse transcriptase, that is, it can synthesize a DNA copy using an RNA template  Such an activity is considered to have been crucial for the transition from RNA to DNA genomes during the early history of life on earth  Reverse transcription capability could have arisen as a secondary function of an early RNA-dependent RNA polymerase ribozyme 
An RNA sequence that folds into a ribozyme is capable of invading duplexed RNA, rearranging into an open holopolymerase complex, and then searching for a specific RNA promoter sequence, and upon recognition rearrange again into a processive form that polymerizes a complementary strand of the sequence  This ribozyme is capable of extending duplexed RNA by up to 107 nucleotides, and does so without needing to tether the sequence being polymerized 

Artificial ribozymes
Since the discovery of ribozymes that exist in living organisms, there has been interest in the study of new synthetic ribozymes made in the laboratory  For example, artificially produced self-cleaving RNAs with good enzymatic activity have been produced  Tang and Breaker isolated self-cleaving RNAs by in vitro selection of RNAs originating from random-sequence RNAs  Some of the synthetic ribozymes that were produced had novel structures, while some were similar to the naturally occurring hammerhead ribozyme 
In 2015, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Chicago engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell  Called Ribosome-T, or Ribo-T, the artificial ribosome was created by Michael Jewett and Alexander Mankin  The techniques used to create artificial ribozymes involve directed evolution  This approach takes advantage of RNA's dual nature as both a catalyst and an informational polymer, making it easy for an investigator to produce vast populations of RNA catalysts using polymerase enzymes  The ribozymes are mutated by reverse transcribing them with reverse transcriptase into various cDNA and amplified with error-prone PCR  The selection parameters in these experiments often differ  One approach for selecting a ligase ribozyme involves using biotin tags, which are covalently linked to the substrate  If a molecule possesses the desired ligase activity, a streptavidin matrix can be used to recover the active molecules 
Lincoln and Joyce used in vitro evolution to develop ribozyme ligases capable of self-replication in about an hour, via the joining of pre-synthesized highly complementary oligonucleotides Although not true catalysts, the creation of artificial self-cleaving riboswitches, termed aptazymes, has also been an active area of research  Riboswitches are regulatory RNA motifs that change their structure in response to a small molecule ligand to regulate translation  While there are many known natural riboswitches that bind a wide array of metabolites and other small organic molecules, only one ribozyme based on a riboswitch has been described: glmS  Early work in characterizing self-cleaving riboswitches was focused on using theophylline as the ligand  In these studies, an RNA hairpin is formed which blocks the ribosome binding site, thus inhibiting translation  In the presence of the ligand, in these cases theophylline, the regulatory RNA region is cleaved off, allowing the ribosome to bind and translate the target gene  Much of this RNA engineering work was based on rational design and previously determined RNA structures rather than directed evolution as in the above examples  More recent work has broadened the ligands used in ribozyme riboswitches to include thymine pyrophosphate  Fluorescence-activated cell sorting has also been used to engineering aptazymes 

Applications
Ribozymes have been proposed and developed for the treatment of disease through gene therapy  One major challenge of using RNA-based enzymes as a therapeutic is the short half-life of the catalytic RNA molecules in the body  To combat this, the 2’ position on the ribose is modified to improve RNA stability  One area of ribozyme gene therapy has been the inhibition of RNA-based viruses 
A type of synthetic ribozyme directed against HIV RNA called gene shears has been developed and has entered clinical testing for HIV infection Similarly, ribozymes have been designed to target the hepatitis C virus RNA, SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Adenovirus and influenza A and B virus RNA  The ribozyme is able to cleave the conserved regions of the virus's genome, which has been shown to reduce the virus in mammalian cell culture  Despite these efforts by researchers, these projects have remained in the preclinical stage 

Known ribozymes
Well-validated naturally occurring ribozyme classes:

See also
Notes and references
Further reading
External links
Tom Cech's Short Talk: "Discovering Ribozymes"
Passage 6:
Ribosome
Ribosomes () are macromolecular machines, found within all  cells, that perform biological protein synthesis (mRNA translation)  Ribosomes link amino acids together in the order specified by the codons of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules to form polypeptide chains  Ribosomes consist of two major components: the small and large ribosomal subunits  Each subunit consists of one or more ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules and many ribosomal proteins (RPs or r-proteins)  The ribosomes and associated molecules are also known as the translational apparatus 

Overview
The sequence of DNA that encodes the sequence of the amino acids in a protein is transcribed into a messenger RNA chain  Ribosomes bind to messenger RNAs and use their sequences for determining the correct sequence of amino acids to generate a given protein  Amino acids are selected and carried to the ribosome by transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules, which enter the ribosome and bind to the messenger RNA chain via an anti-codon stem loop  For each coding triplet (codon) in the messenger RNA, there is a unique transfer RNA that must have the exact anti-codon match, and carries the correct amino acid for incorporating into a growing polypeptide chain  Once the protein is produced, it can then fold to produce a functional three-dimensional structure 
A ribosome is made from complexes of RNAs and proteins and is therefore a ribonucleoprotein complex  Each ribosome is composed of small (30S) and large (50S) components, called subunits, which are bound to each other:

(30S) has mainly a decoding function and is also bound to the mRNA
(50S) has mainly a catalytic function and is also bound to the aminoacylated tRNAs The synthesis of proteins from their building blocks takes place in four phases: initiation, elongation, termination, and recycling  The start codon in all mRNA molecules has the sequence AUG  The stop codon is one of UAA, UAG, or UGA; since there are no tRNA molecules that recognize these codons, the ribosome recognizes that translation is complete  When a ribosome finishes reading an mRNA molecule, the two subunits separate and are usually broken up but can be re-used  Ribosomes are ribozymes, because the catalytic peptidyl transferase activity that links amino acids together is performed by the ribosomal RNA Ribosomes are often associated with the intracellular membranes that make up the rough endoplasmic reticulum 
Ribosomes from bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes in the three-domain system resemble each other to a remarkable degree, evidence of a common origin  They differ in their size, sequence, structure, and the ratio of protein to RNA  The differences in structure allow some antibiotics to kill bacteria by inhibiting their ribosomes, while leaving human ribosomes unaffected  In all species, more than one ribosome may move along a single mRNA chain at one time (as a polysome), each "reading" a specific sequence and producing a corresponding protein molecule 
The mitochondrial ribosomes of eukaryotic cells functionally resemble many features of those in bacteria, reflecting the likely evolutionary origin of mitochondria 

Discovery
Ribosomes were first observed in the mid-1950s by Romanian-American cell biologist George Emil Palade, using an electron microscope, as dense particles or granules   They were initially called  Palade granules due to their granular structure   The term "ribosome" was proposed in 1958:

During the course of the symposium a semantic difficulty became apparent  To some of the participants, "microsomes" mean the ribonucleoprotein particles of the microsome fraction contaminated by other protein and lipid material; to others, the microsomes consist of protein and lipid contaminated by particles  The phrase "microsomal particles" does not seem adequate, and "ribonucleoprotein particles of the microsome fraction" is much too awkward  During the meeting, the word "ribosome" was suggested, which has a very satisfactory name and a pleasant sound  The present confusion would be eliminated if "ribosome" were adopted to designate ribonucleoprotein particles in sizes ranging from 35 to 100S 
Albert Claude, Christian de Duve, and George Emil Palade were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1974, for the discovery of the ribosome  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A  Steitz and Ada E  Yonath for determining the detailed structure and mechanism of the ribosome 

Structure
The ribosome is a complex cellular machine  It is largely made up of specialized RNA known as ribosomal RNA (rRNA) as well as dozens of distinct proteins (the exact number varies slightly between species)  The ribosomal proteins and rRNAs are arranged into two distinct ribosomal pieces of different sizes, known generally as the large and small subunit of the ribosome  Ribosomes consist of two subunits that fit together (Figure 2) and work as one to translate the mRNA into a polypeptide chain during protein synthesis (Figure 1)  Because they are formed from two subunits of non-equal size, they are slightly longer in the axis than in diameter 

Prokaryotic ribosomes
Prokaryotic ribosomes are around 20 nm (200 Å) in diameter and are composed of 65% rRNA and 35% ribosomal proteins  Eukaryotic ribosomes are between 25 and 30 nm (250–300 Å) in diameter with an rRNA-to-protein ratio that is close to 1  Crystallographic work has shown that there are no ribosomal proteins close to the reaction site for polypeptide synthesis  This suggests that the protein components of ribosomes do not directly participate in peptide bond formation catalysis, but rather that these proteins act as a scaffold that may enhance the ability of rRNA to synthesize protein (See: Ribozyme) 

The ribosomal subunits of prokaryotes and eukaryotes are quite similar The unit of measurement used to describe the ribosomal subunits and the rRNA fragments is the Svedberg unit, a measure of the rate of sedimentation in centrifugation rather than size  This accounts for why fragment names do not add up: for example, bacterial 70S ribosomes are made of 50S and 30S subunits 
Prokaryotes have 70S ribosomes, each consisting of a small (30S) and a large (50S) subunit  E  coli, for example, has a 16S RNA subunit (consisting of 1540 nucleotides) that is bound to 21 proteins  The large subunit is composed of a 5S RNA subunit (120 nucleotides), a 23S RNA subunit (2900 nucleotides) and 31 proteins 
Affinity label for the tRNA binding sites on the E  coli ribosome allowed the identification of A and P site proteins most likely associated with the peptidyltransferase activity; labelled proteins are L27, L14, L15, L16, L2; at least L27 is located at the donor site, as shown by E  Collatz and A P  Czernilofsky  Additional research has demonstrated that the S1 and S21 proteins, in association with the 3′-end of 16S ribosomal RNA, are involved in the initiation of translation 

Archaeal ribosomes
Archaeal ribosomes share the same general dimensions of bacteria ones, being a 70S ribosome made up from a 50S large subunit, a 30S small subunit, and containing three rRNA chains  However, on the sequence level, they are much closer to eukaryotic ones than to bacterial ones  Every extra ribosomal protein archaea have compared to bacteria has a eukaryotic counterpart, while no such relation applies between archaea and bacteria 

Eukaryotic ribosomes
Eukaryotes have 80S ribosomes located in their cytosol, each consisting of a small (40S) and large (60S) subunit  Their 40S subunit has an 18S RNA (1900 nucleotides) and 33 proteins  The large subunit is composed of a 5S RNA (120 nucleotides), 28S RNA (4700 nucleotides), a 5 8S RNA (160 nucleotides) subunits and 49 proteins 
During 1977, Czernilofsky published research that used affinity labeling to identify tRNA-binding sites on rat liver ribosomes  Several proteins, including L32/33, L36, L21, L23, L28/29 and L13 were implicated as being at or near the peptidyl transferase center 

Plastoribosomes and mitoribosomes
In eukaryotes, ribosomes are present in mitochondria (sometimes called mitoribosomes) and in plastids such as chloroplasts (also called plastoribosomes)  They also consist of large and small subunits bound together with proteins into one 70S particle  These ribosomes are similar to those of bacteria and these organelles are thought to have originated as symbiotic bacteria  Of the two, chloroplastic ribosomes are closer to bacterial ones than mitochondrial ones are  Many pieces of ribosomal RNA in the mitochondria are shortened, and in the case of 5S rRNA, replaced by other structures in animals and fungi  In particular, Leishmania tarentolae has a minimalized set of mitochondrial rRNA  In contrast, plant mitoribosomes have both extended rRNA and additional proteins as compared to bacteria, in particular, many pentatricopetide repeat proteins The cryptomonad and chlorarachniophyte algae may contain a nucleomorph that resembles a vestigial eukaryotic nucleus  Eukaryotic 80S ribosomes may be present in the compartment containing the nucleomorph 

Making use of the differences
The differences between the bacterial and eukaryotic ribosomes are exploited by pharmaceutical chemists to create antibiotics that can destroy a bacterial infection without harming the cells of the infected person  Due to the differences in their structures, the bacterial 70S ribosomes are vulnerable to these antibiotics while the eukaryotic 80S ribosomes are not  Even though mitochondria possess ribosomes similar to the bacterial ones, mitochondria are not affected by these antibiotics because they are surrounded by a double membrane that does not easily admit these antibiotics into the organelle  A noteworthy counterexample, however, includes the antineoplastic antibiotic chloramphenicol, which successfully inhibits bacterial 50S and eukaryotic mitochondrial 50S ribosomes  Ribosomes in chloroplasts, however, are different: Antibiotic resistance in chloroplast ribosomal proteins is a trait that has to be introduced as a marker, with genetic engineering 

Common properties
The various ribosomes share a core structure, which is quite similar despite the large differences in size  Much of the RNA is highly organized into various tertiary structural motifs, for example pseudoknots that exhibit coaxial stacking  The extra RNA in the larger ribosomes is in several long continuous insertions, such that they form loops out of the core structure without disrupting or changing it  All of the catalytic activity of the ribosome is carried out by the RNA; the proteins reside on the surface and seem to stabilize the structure 

High-resolution structure
The general molecular structure of the ribosome has been known since the early 1970s  In the early 2000s, the structure has been achieved at high resolutions, of the order of a few ångströms 
The first papers giving the structure of the ribosome at atomic resolution were published almost simultaneously in late 2000  The 50S (large prokaryotic) subunit was determined from the archaeon Haloarcula marismortui and the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, and the structure of the 30S subunit was determined from Thermus thermophilus  These structural studies were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009  In May 2001 these coordinates were used to reconstruct the entire T  thermophilus 70S particle at 5 5 Å resolution Two papers were published in November 2005 with structures of the Escherichia coli 70S ribosome  The structures of a vacant ribosome were determined at 3 5 Å resolution using X-ray crystallography  Then, two weeks later, a structure based on cryo-electron microscopy was published, which depicts the ribosome at 11–15 Å resolution in the act of passing a newly synthesized protein strand into the protein-conducting channel 
The first atomic structures of the ribosome complexed with tRNA and mRNA molecules were solved by using X-ray crystallography by two groups independently, at 2 8 Å and at 3 7 Å  These structures allow one to see the details of interactions of the Thermus thermophilus ribosome with mRNA and with tRNAs bound at classical ribosomal sites  Interactions of the ribosome with long mRNAs containing Shine-Dalgarno sequences were visualized soon after that at 4 5–5 5 Å resolution In 2011, the first complete atomic structure of the eukaryotic 80S ribosome from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae   was obtained by crystallography  The model reveals the architecture of eukaryote-specific elements and their interaction with the universally conserved core  At the same time, the complete model of a eukaryotic 40S ribosomal structure in Tetrahymena thermophila was published and described the structure of the 40S subunit, as well as much about the 40S subunit's interaction with eIF1 during translation initiation  Similarly, the eukaryotic 60S subunit structure was also determined from Tetrahymena thermophila in complex with eIF6 

Function
Ribosomes are minute particles consisting of RNA and associated proteins that function to synthesize proteins  Proteins are needed for many cellular functions such as repairing damage or directing chemical processes  Ribosomes can be found floating within the cytoplasm or attached to the endoplasmic reticulum  Their main function is to convert genetic code into an amino acid sequence and to build protein polymers from amino acid monomers 
Ribosomes act as catalysts in two extremely important biological processes called peptidyl transfer and peptidyl hydrolysis  The "PT center is responsible for producing protein bonds during protein elongation" In summary, ribosomes have two main functions: Decoding the message, and the formation of peptide bonds  These two functions reside in the ribosomal subunits  Each subunit is made of one or more rRNAs and many r-proteins  The small subunit (30S in bacteria and archaea, 40S in eukaryotes) has the decoding function, whereas the large subunit (50S in bacteria and archaea, 60S in eukaryotes) catalyzes the formation of peptide bonds, referred to as the peptidyl-transferase activity  The bacterial (and archaeal) small subunit contains the 16S rRNA and 21 r-proteins (Escherichia coli), whereas the eukaryotic small subunit contains the 18S rRNA and 32 r-proteins (Saccharomyces cerevisiae; although the numbers vary between species)  The bacterial large subunit contains the 5S and 23S rRNAs and 34 r-proteins (E  coli), with the eukaryotic large subunit containing the 5S, 5 8S, and 25S / 28S rRNAs and 46 r-proteins (S  cerevisiae; again, the exact numbers vary between species) 

Translation
Ribosomes are the workplaces of protein biosynthesis, the process of translating mRNA into protein  The mRNA comprises a series of codons which are decoded by the ribosome so as to make the protein  Using the mRNA as a template, the ribosome traverses each codon (3 nucleotides) of the mRNA, pairing it with the appropriate amino acid provided by an aminoacyl-tRNA  Aminoacyl-tRNA contains a complementary anticodon on one end and the appropriate amino acid on the other  For fast and accurate recognition of the appropriate tRNA, the ribosome utilizes large conformational changes (conformational proofreading)  The small ribosomal subunit, typically bound to an aminoacyl-tRNA containing the first amino acid methionine, binds to an AUG codon on the mRNA and recruits the large ribosomal subunit  The ribosome contains three RNA binding sites, designated A, P, and E  The A-site binds an aminoacyl-tRNA or termination release factors; the P-site binds a peptidyl-tRNA (a tRNA bound to the poly-peptide chain); and the E-site (exit) binds a free tRNA  Protein synthesis begins at a start codon AUG near the 5' end of the mRNA  mRNA binds to the P site of the ribosome first  The ribosome recognizes the start codon by using the Shine-Dalgarno sequence of the mRNA in prokaryotes and Kozak box in eukaryotes 
Although catalysis of the peptide bond involves the C2 hydroxyl of RNA's P-site adenosine in a proton shuttle mechanism, other steps in protein synthesis (such as translocation) are caused by changes in protein conformations  Since their catalytic core is made of RNA, ribosomes are classified as "ribozymes," and it is thought that they might be remnants of the RNA world 
In Figure 5, both ribosomal subunits (small and large) assemble at the start codon (towards the 5' end of the mRNA)  The ribosome uses tRNA that matches the current codon (triplet) on the mRNA to append an amino acid to the polypeptide chain  This is done for each triplet on the mRNA, while the ribosome moves towards the 3' end of the mRNA  Usually in bacterial cells, several ribosomes are working parallel on a single mRNA, forming what is called a polyribosome or polysome 

Cotranslational folding
The ribosome is known to actively participate in the protein folding  The structures obtained in this way are usually identical to the ones obtained during protein chemical refolding; however, the pathways leading to the final product may be different  In some cases, the ribosome is crucial in obtaining the functional protein form  For example, one of the possible mechanisms of folding of the deeply knotted proteins relies on the ribosome pushing the chain through the attached loop 

Addition of translation-independent amino acids
Presence of a ribosome quality control protein Rqc2 is associated with mRNA-independent protein elongation  This elongation is a result of ribosomal addition (via tRNAs brought by Rqc2) of CAT tails: ribosomes extend the C-terminus of a stalled protein with random, translation-independent sequences of alanines and threonines 

Ribosome locations
Ribosomes are classified as being either "free" or "membrane-bound" 

Free and membrane-bound ribosomes differ only in their spatial distribution; they are identical in structure  Whether the ribosome exists in a free or membrane-bound state depends on the presence of an ER-targeting signal sequence on the protein being synthesized, so an individual ribosome might be membrane-bound when it is making one protein, but free in the cytosol when it makes another protein 
Ribosomes are sometimes referred to as organelles, but the use of the term organelle is often restricted to describing sub-cellular components that include a phospholipid membrane, which ribosomes, being entirely particulate, do not  For this reason, ribosomes may sometimes be described as "non-membranous organelles" 

Free ribosomes
Free ribosomes can move about anywhere in the cytosol, but are excluded from the cell nucleus and other organelles  Proteins that are formed from free ribosomes are released into the cytosol and used within the cell  Since the cytosol contains high concentrations of glutathione and is, therefore, a reducing environment, proteins containing disulfide bonds, which are formed from oxidized cysteine residues, cannot be produced within it 

Membrane-bound ribosomes
When a ribosome begins to synthesize proteins that are needed in some organelles, the ribosome making this protein can become "membrane-bound"  In eukaryotic cells this happens in a region of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) called the "rough ER"  The newly produced polypeptide chains are inserted directly into the ER by the ribosome undertaking vectorial synthesis and are then transported to their destinations, through the secretory pathway  Bound ribosomes usually produce proteins that are used within the plasma membrane or are expelled from the cell via exocytosis 

Biogenesis
In bacterial cells, ribosomes are synthesized in the cytoplasm through the transcription of multiple ribosome gene operons  In eukaryotes, the process takes place both in the cell cytoplasm and in the nucleolus, which is a region within the cell nucleus  The assembly process involves the coordinated function of over 200 proteins in the synthesis and processing of the four rRNAs, as well as assembly of those rRNAs with the ribosomal proteins 

Origin
The ribosome may have first originated as a protoribosome, possibly containing a peptidyl transferase centre (PTC), in an RNA world, appearing as a self-replicating complex that only later evolved the ability to synthesize proteins when amino acids began to appear  Studies suggest that ancient ribosomes constructed solely of rRNA could have developed the ability to synthesize peptide bonds  In addition, evidence strongly points to ancient ribosomes as self-replicating complexes, where the rRNA in the ribosomes had informational, structural, and catalytic purposes because it could have coded for tRNAs and proteins needed for ribosomal self-replication  Hypothetical cellular organisms with self-replicating RNA but without DNA are called ribocytes (or ribocells) As amino acids gradually appeared in the RNA world under prebiotic conditions, their interactions with catalytic RNA would increase both the range and efficiency of function of catalytic RNA molecules  Thus, the driving force for the evolution of the ribosome from an ancient self-replicating machine into its current form as a translational machine may have been the selective pressure to incorporate proteins into the ribosome's self-replicating mechanisms, so as to increase its capacity for self-replication 

Heterogeneous ribosomes
Ribosomes are compositionally heterogeneous between species and even within the same cell, as evidenced by the existence of cytoplasmic and mitochondria ribosomes within the same eukaryotic cells  Certain researchers have suggested that heterogeneity in the composition of ribosomal proteins in mammals is important for gene regulation, i e , the specialized ribosome hypothesis  However, this hypothesis is controversial and the topic of ongoing research Heterogeneity in ribosome composition was first proposed to be involved in translational control of protein synthesis by Vince Mauro and Gerald Edelman  They proposed the ribosome filter hypothesis to explain the regulatory functions of ribosomes  Evidence has suggested that specialized ribosomes specific to different cell populations may affect how genes are translated  Some ribosomal proteins exchange from the assembled complex with cytosolic copies suggesting that the structure of the in vivo ribosome can be modified without synthesizing an entire new ribosome 
Certain ribosomal proteins are absolutely critical for cellular life while others are not  In budding yeast, 14/78 ribosomal proteins are non-essential for growth, while in humans this depends on the cell of study  Other forms of heterogeneity include post-translational modifications to ribosomal proteins such as acetylation, methylation, and phosphorylation  Arabidopsis, Viral internal ribosome entry sites (IRESs) may mediate translations by compositionally distinct ribosomes  For example, 40S ribosomal units without eS25 in yeast and mammalian cells are unable to recruit the CrPV IGR IRES Heterogeneity of ribosomal RNA modifications plays a significant role in structural maintenance and/or function and most mRNA modifications are found in highly conserved regions  The most common rRNA modifications are pseudouridylation and 2’-O methylation of ribose 

See also
Context 3: Passage 1:
Regional Planning Association of America
The Regional Planning Association of America ("RPAA"), formed by Clarence Stein was an urban reform association developed in 1923   The association was a diverse group of people all with their own talents and skills   The goal of this group was to “connect a diverse group of friends in a critical examination of the city, in the collaborative development and dissemination of ideas, in political action and in city building projects”   Throughout the ten-year span in which the association lasted, five leading members contributed to this goal   Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Charles Harris Whitaker, Alexander Bing, and Henry Wright were the essential backbone of the RPAA  Originally an idea of Clarence Stein’s, through a series of introductions and acquaintances in Washington DC in 1918, the Regional Planning Association began to form 

Founders
Clarence Stein
Clarence Stein attended the Ethical Culture Society’s Workingman’s School, which influenced his interest in the city life and social responsibility through its teaching  Stein was closely influenced by the founder of Ethical Culture, Felix Adler, and teacher, John Lovejoy Elliott, in involvement with movements and committees, such as the Hudson Guild Settlement House and the Progressive Reform movement in New York City at the turn-of-the-century   Therefore, Stein’s enrollment at Workingman’s School proved to be of strong influence on his later interests and achievements   The very principle of the Ethical Culture Society being “that an individual’s growth toward excellence comes from furthering the unlike excellence of others”, exemplifies the basis of Stein’s life achievements through the RPAA 
Stein first met future fellow RPAA members, Henry Wright and Alexander Bing, in Washington (in 1918) through a friend, Charles Whitaker (editor of the JAIA)   In 1920, Stein became the Associate Editor for Community Planning with the Journal of the American Institute of Architects and soon later discovered the idea to create the RPAA including his friends at the JAIA office, including Lewis Mumford, as well as many others  The group included members in various fields of study from architects to union leaders, city officials to writers, and engineers to sociologists  And so, on April 18, 1923, the first official meeting of the Regional Planning Association of America was held   The association began with only a total of eight people present at its first official meeting but it soon grew 

Benton MacKaye
The first major project of the RPAA was that of fellow RPAA member, Benton MacKaye; the Appalachian Trail, a trail which we would refer to today as a greenway, of which he wrote an article in the JAIA two years earlier (“An Appalachian Trail – A Project in Regional Planning”)   The trail was planned to connect a footpath from Maine to Georgia in an attempt to “lead civilization to the wilderness”   The project was not directly implemented by the RPAA, however, their part was successful in introducing their idea to others and helping the various groups of Mountain Clubs come together to create the final project   The majority of the trail was completed by the mid-1930s   From this project came another main goal of the RPAA which was to create “the preservation of large areas of the natural environment, including parts of the wilderness, as a green matrix for shaping a “regional city” and for serving its various-sized, spatially well defined, specialized communities” 

Lewis Mumford
The success in publicizing this project as well as others was in large part due to Lewis Mumford   Mumford was the RPAA’s leading journalist and spokesperson   Having published his first book in 1922, The Story of Utopia, and well on his way with another, Mumford was extremely useful to the association  He worked on not only books and articles related to the RPAA but also wrote/edited policy documents   Mumford also contributed to the group by sharing his interest of Patrick Geddes’ ideas on regional development and planning   Mumford contributed concepts of “a dispersed yet concentrated urban culture integrated with nature” which were integrated along with MacKaye’s concepts into the RPAA’s later projects 

Sunnyside and Radburn
The leading community building experiments conceptualized and implemented by the RPAA were Sunnyside Gardens, Queens and Radburn, New Jersey   Sunnyside started as a small-scale housing development experiment in Queens, New York   The goal was “to produce good homes at as low a price as possible, to make the company’s investment safe, and to use the work of building and selling houses as a laboratory to work out better house and block plans and better methods of building”   Radburn, New Jersey, would be the new and improved built community utilizing the analysis from the Sunnyside community experiment 

through not only his own real estate company and wealth but through his outstanding real estate and business skills   Bing, president of the RPAA, found the funds through outside contributions and personal contribution (more so than any other member) to support the projects of the association   For the Sunnyside community project Bing founded the City Housing Corporation through which he would establish the funding and opportunity to complete the project 

Henry Wright
Henry Wright, known as the analyst due to his never-ending questioning and analysis on projects, worked alongside Stein in site designs and development on such projects as Sunnyside, New York   Studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania along with work as a landscape architect and site planner, Wright shared many interests with Stein   Close work in 1923 on the Sunnyside Homes development with Stein led to a trip to England in 1924 to study the designs of Unwin and Parker as well as that of Ebeneezer Howard   Though close at the beginning of the association’s organization, Wright went on to establish “The Housing Study Guild” along with several RPAA members which Stein viewed to work more independently than directly with the RPAA’s projects   This slight dispute would be the beginning point of the division and end of the Regional Planning Association of America   In 1933, many members began to move away and/or join various other movements or committees which quickly led to the association's end 

Legacy
The Regional Planning Association of America, led by Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Alexander Bing, Henry Wright, as well as many others started simply as a group of people with similar interests wanting to make a difference in the American towns and cities  Through the collaboration of these five, Clarence Stein – the organizer and manager, Benton MacKaye – the conservationist, Lewis Mumford – the writer, Alexander Bing – the developer-builder, and Henry Wright – the analyst, as well as the many other members, the RPAA conceptualized, experimented, and changed our view of American towns, cities, architecture, and planning in America 
Passage 2:
Lewis Mumford House
The Lewis Mumford House is located on Leedsville Road (Dutchess County Route 2) in the Town of Amenia, New York, United States  It is a white Federal style building dating to the 1830s 
Social philosopher, historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford and his wife bought the house in the late 1920s, originally using it as a summer house  By the mid-1930s, they decided to make it their permanent residence for a few years  That period extended to more than half a century, the rest of Mumford's life  His experience of living in a rural area informed some of Mumford's thinking about cities and how they should be shaped  In 1999, a few years after his death, the property was  listed on the National Register of Historic Places 

Buildings and grounds
The property listed on the Register consists of two adjoining parcels: a 1 9-acre (7,700 m2) lot with the house and carriage house and a larger 11 7-acre (4 7 ha) open field stretching back to Webutuck Creek  Both are located on the west side of Leedsville Road, a street of large semi-wooded residential lots, most formerly part of larger farms, in the eastern section of Amenia  There is a similar 19th-century farmhouse just across the street  The Mumford property is a half-mile (1 km) south of state highway NY 343 and a similar distance west of the Connecticut state line  The house, carriage house and landscaping on the property are all considered contributing resources to the listing 

House
The main house's east (front) section is a three-bay two-story frame structure on a stone foundation sided in clapboard  It is topped with a side-gabled roof shingled in asphalt, pierced by two brick chimneys at either end  A perpendicular rear wing, similarly sided, is one and a half stories in height, with side entrances and a single-story sunroom added to the rear A single-bay porch with arched pediment and two round columns shelters the main entrance at the northern end of the front facade  All windows have solid wooden shutters  Semicircular windows at the attic level on either side elevation have been boarded in Federal-style crown moldings, pilasters and fielded side panels surround the main entrance  It opens to a small main hall that gives onto a living room with exposed ceiling beams  A study, kitchen and pantry, bathroom and the sunroom complete the first floor  The flooring is wide pine boards  The brick kitchen fireplace has a large mantel and bake oven Two staircases lead up to the second floor  The front one has been opened up to provide more light to the upstairs  The kitchen stair is narrow and steep  The basement has a dirt floor and the original, unfinished stone walls 

Carriage house and landscaping
To the rear of the house, at the end of the driveway, is the former carriage house, modified for use as an automotive garage  It is a single-story post and beam wood pegged structure sided in clapboard with an asphalt-shingled roof  It has a low loft inside, a northern addition to accommodate a car, and three windows on the south side Stone paths lead from the driveway south to the house  They are complemented in the landscaping by mature plantings including ornamental shrubs around the house and curvilinear flower beds in the rear yard  Intersecting paths lead through the woods to the open field in the rear 

History
There is some uncertainty about the age of the house  In his 1982 autobiography Sketches of Life, Mumford gives its construction date as 1837  Research done by New York's State Historic Preservation Office in preparation for the Register nomination found that it might be as much as a decade older Mumford, a mostly self-taught New York City native, and his wife Sophia had lived in Greenwich Village and Sunnyside Gardens in Queens following their 1921 marriage  After the success of Sticks and Stones, his 1924 history of American architecture, critic Joel Elias Spingarn invited him up to his Amenia estate, Troutbeck  The Mumfords spent the summer of 1926 there, and returned in the following years By 1929 they had decided to purchase a property of their own for their summers, and found the house just down the road from Troutbeck  For $2,500 ($43,000 in contemporary dollars), they bought the house and what Mumford later called its "weedy acre"  After seven more summers, the family decided to settle there year-round in 1936, and began adding additional acreage and upgrading the house with electricity and heating to make it livable in wintertime It was a considerable adjustment for the Mumfords, both of whom had up to that point been city dwellers  "There," wrote one scholar three decades later, "the rural life that previously he had only glimpsed became real to him " He took up gardening in earnest, and the Mumfords began landscaping the property, eventually adding paths that opened up vistas across the Webutuck valley to Oblong Mountain on the west  They bought a used 1932 Chevrolet, their first car  Mumford left it to his wife to drive after he nearly crashed it into the maple trees in front of the house on one attempt to learn, and swore never to get behind the wheel again The Mumfords primarily socialized with the Spingarns up the road  They nevertheless appreciated their neighbors' help in lending them tools and garden equipment and watching the house when they were away from it; one large family nearby was extremely helpful with the Mumford children  The experience reinforced Mumford's belief that livable city neighborhoods needed to have "something of the village" in them They told their friends in New York that they initially meant to stay in Amenia for only a few years  But Lewis gradually found the quiet rural environment a good place to write, and it was in the downstairs study that he turned out many of his later major works on the role of cities in civilization and the roots of industrialization  In the early 1940s, after his son Geddes was killed in action during World War II, Mumford recalled his son's childhood in and around the house in Green Memories "We gradually fell in love with our shabby house as a young man might fall in love with a homely girl whose voice and smile were irresistible", Mumford later recalled  "In no sense was this the house of dreams  But over our lifetime it has slowly turned into something better, the house of our realities     [T]his dear house has enfolded and remodeled our family character—exposing our limitations as well as our virtues "Over the rest of their lives, the Mumfords sometimes took residence elsewhere for Lewis's teaching or research positions, up to a year at a time  They always returned to what they called the "Great Good Place"  Mumford's biographer Donald Miller wrote:

In the act of living in this house and making it over it became like a person to them; and like a good friend they grew more fond of it with closer and deeper acquaintance  Every patch garden and lawn, every vista and view, carried the imprint of some of the best hours of their lives 
They made some changes to it, siding the first story in shingles and removing the south chimney  Inside they put bookcases on almost every wall In the 1980s, when Lewis could no longer write due to his advanced age, he retreated to the house  He died there in his bed in 1990, at the age of 94  Sophia followed him seven years later After her death, the house was sold to a local carpenter who decided to restore it to its original appearance and resell it  He removed all the bookcases and the nine layers of linoleum the Mumfords had added to the kitchen floor every time one wore out  Later renovations restored the original siding and chimney In 1999, after being listed on the National Register, the house was again put up for sale with a list price of $375,000  The restorations made it more difficult to sell despite the historic provenance, since it still lacked many amenities sought by contemporary buyers of country houses  It eventually did, and is now an occupied residence again 

See also
National Register of Historic Places listings in Dutchess County, New York
Passage 3:
The City in History
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects is a 1961 National Book Award winner by American historian Lewis Mumford 
It was first published by Harcourt, Brace & World (New York) 

Synopsis
Mumford argues for a world not in which technology rules, but rather in which it achieves a balance with nature  His ideal vision is what can be described as an "organic city," where culture is not usurped by technological innovation but rather thrives with it  Mumford contrasts these cities with those constructed around wars, tyrants, poverty, etc  However, the book is not an attack on the city, but rather an evaluation of its growth, how it came to be, and where it is heading, as evidenced by the final chapter "Retrospect and Prospect "
Mumford notes apologetically in his preface that his "method demands personal experience and observation," and that therefore he has "confined [him]self as far as possible to cities and regions [he is] acquainted with at first hand "

Style
Mumford's florid writing style is also "organic" compared to the cold, mechanical style of many history texts   Stylistically, his works are full of metaphors and similes, as well as quotations from famous novelists, giving his prose shades of poetry   He refers to such texts as Great Expectations and Hard Times, sometimes using citations to illustrate to the reader what life was like during the industrial era and the city in which Dickens lived 
Articles have been written on Mumford's use of metaphors and how his works can often be read as "fiction," in the sense that they have narrative flow   That is evident in this book, in which, instead of a human protagonist on which the story centers, we have the city and its growth in a quasi-bildungsroman fashion 

Editions
Hardcover, MJF Books (August 1997) ISBN 978-1-56731-211-9
Paperback, Harvest Books (October 1968) ISBN 978-0-15-618035-1
Passage 4:
Megalopolis
A megalopolis () or a supercity, also called a megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on  They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities  The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth 

Etymology and earlier definitions
The term has specific geographic definitions dating from 1832, when its meaning was "a metropolis," that is, "a very large, heavily populated urban complex" 
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jean Gottmann, a professor of political science at the University of Paris and member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, directed "A Study of Megalopolis" for The Twentieth Century Fund, wherein he described a megalopolis as a "world of ideas"  Gottmann, in his extensive studies, applied the term megalopolis to an analysis of the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the U S , in particular from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D C 

Modern definitions
A megalopolis may also be called a megaregion  "Megalopolis" and other similar terms have been used by different scholars and countries to describe similar spatial forms 
A megalopolis, following the work of Gottmann, refers to two or more roughly adjacent metropolitan areas that, through a commonality of systems—e g , of transport, economy, resources, and ecologies—experience a blurring of the boundaries between the population centers, such that while some degree of separation may remain, their perception as a continuous urban area is of value, e g , "to coordinate policy at this expanded scale"  Simply put, a megalopolis (or a megaregion) is a clustered network of big cities  Gottmann defined its population as 25 million, while Doxiadis defined a small megalopolis a similar cluster with a population of about 10 million  America 2050, a program of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), lists 11 megaregions in the United States and Canada 
Megaregions of the United States were explored in a July 2005 report by Robert E  Lang and Dawn Dhavale of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech  A later 2007 article by Lang and Nelson uses 20 "megapolitan" areas grouped into 10 megaregions  The concept is based on the original "Megalopolis model" Modern interlinked ground transportation corridors, such as rail and highway, often aid in the development of megalopolises  Using these commuter passageways to travel throughout the megalopolis is informally called megaloping, a term coined by Davide Gadren and Stefan Berteau In Brazil, the term megarregião has a legal meaning, different from the English word megaregion: mesoregions of Brazil (mesorregião) and microregions of Brazil (microrregião) 
In China, the official term corresponding to the meaning of "megalopolis" is '城市群' (chéngshì qún), which, in Chinese, was originally coined by Yao Shimou and literally means "city cluster"  A "city cluster" is defined as "[a]n area in which cities are relatively densely distributed in a certain region"  In an older standard, the term was mistranslated as "agglomeration"  In 2019, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)  published guidelines and made a distinction from a similar concept "metropolitan area" (都市圈), which is of a smaller scale than a city cluster  In the latest standard terminologies of both economics and urban planning, 城市群 is translated as "city cluster", replacing "agglomeration" 

List of megalopolises
In popular culture
Metropolis
Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang  Written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, it stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm  Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studios for Universum Film A G  (Ufa)  The silent film is regarded as a pioneering science-fiction movie, being among the first feature-length movies of that genre  Filming took place over 17 months in 1925–26 at a cost of over five million Reichsmarks 

Judge Dredd
In the Judge Dredd (1977) comic book series and its spinoff series, Mega-City One is a huge fictional megalopolis-size city-state covering much of what is now the Eastern United States and some of Canada  The exact geography of the city depends on which writer and artist has done which story, but from its first appearance it has been associated with New York City's urban sprawl; originally it was presented as a future New York, which was retconned as the centre of a "Mega-City One" in the very next story  The Architects' Journal placed it at No  1 in their list of "comic book cities" 

Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a 1982 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos  It is a loose adaptation of Philip K  Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)  The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off-world colonies  When a fugitive group of replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down 

Sprawl trilogy
In William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, "the Sprawl" is a colloquial name for the "Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis" (BAMA), an urban sprawl environment on a massive scale, and a fictional extension of the real Northeast megalopolis   The Sprawl is a visualization of a future where virtually the entire East Coast of the United States, from Boston to Atlanta, has melded into a single mass of urban sprawl  It has been enclosed in several geodesic domes and merged into one megacity  The city has become a separate world with its own climate, no real night/day cycle, and an artificial sky that is always grey 

Further reading
Hagler, Yoav (November 2009)  "Defining U S  Megaregions" (PDF)  America 2050  Retrieved February 19, 2022 – via RPA org  This work, while dated, is from Associate Planner Yoav Hagler of America 2050, and while not used as a source in this article, is one of the most focused articles available on the American aspects of the title subject  It includes history, methodology, and statistical and other criteria sections, and identifies the U S  megaregions as of its publication date America 2050 Staff (February 19, 2022)  "Megaregions"  America 2050  Archived from the original (homepage) on May 16, 2017  Retrieved February 19, 2022 – via RPA org  Starting point for access to articles from the America 2050 effort, while it was active  Note, an earlier cited article by Matt Taylor, on urban transit issues, appears among the works linked at this home page 

See also
Passage 5:
Critical Mass (book)
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, a non-fiction book by English chemist and physicist Philip Ball originally published in 2004, discusses the concept of a "physics of society"  Ball discusses thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Lewis Mumford, Emyr Hughes, and Gottfried Achenwall who have attempted to apply (or argue against the use of) physics, chemistry, or mathematics in the study of mass social phenomena  He also discusses how the concept relates to recent research, including his own 

Physics of society
The outlines of Ball's Critical Mass, the most popular of his many noted books, beginning in various circa 2001 lectures, talks, and articles focused on what he calls a 'physics of society', similar to the social physics in the Auguste Comte sense, a subject Ball approaches using statistical mechanics viewing people as atoms or molecules that show characteristic behaviours in bulk  The following is an excerpt of his 2003 talk on the physical modeling of society:
"There seem to be 'laws' [of] social systems that have at least something of the character of natural physical laws, in that they do not yield easily to planned and arbitrary interventions  Over the past several decades, social, economic and political scientists have begun a dialogue with physical and biological scientists to try to discover whether there is truly a 'physics of society', and if so, what its laws and principles are  In particular, they have begun to regard complex modes of human activity as collections of many interacting 'agents' - somewhat analogous to a fluid of interacting atoms or molecules, but within which there is scope for decision-making, learning and adaptation "In his 2004 book, Ball summarizes this to the effect that "to develop a physics of society, we must take a bold step that some might regard as a leap of faith and others as preposterous idealization: particles become people " Nearly as soon as he gives this definition, however, Ball falls back on the two biggest hurdles to this perspective: that of the theories of being alive and of free will, both of which seem to contradict the physics viewpoint 

Other topics
Other topics discussed in the book include the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma  The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena 

Awards
Critical Mass was the winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books and the 2005 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 

See also
Critical mass (sociodynamics)
Psychohistory
Historical materialism
Network economics
Passage 6:
Technics and Civilization
Technics and Civilization is a 1934 book by American philosopher and historian of technology Lewis Mumford   The book presents the history of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped by civilizations   According to Mumford, modern technology has its roots in the Middle Ages rather than in the Industrial Revolution  It is the moral, economic, and political choices we make, not the machines we use, Mumford argues, that have produced a capitalist industrialized machine-oriented economy, whose imperfect fruits serve the majority so imperfectly 

Background
Apart from its significance as a monumental work of scholarship in several disciplines, Mumford explicitly positioned the book as a call-to-action for the human race to consider its options in the face of the threats to its survival posed by possible ecological catastrophe or industrialised warfare  Technics and Civilization is the first book in Mumford's four-volume Renewal of Life series, followed by The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), and The Conduct of Life (1951) 

Synopsis
Mumford divides the development of technology into three overlapping phases: eotechnic (Greek, eos meaning "dawn"), paleotechnic and neotechnic The first phase  of technically civilized life (AD 1000 to 1800) begins with the clock, to Mumford the most important basis for the development of capitalism because time thereby becomes fungible (thus transferable)   The clock is the most important prototype for all other machines   He contrasts the development and use of glass, wood, wind and water with the inhumanly horrific work that goes into mining and smelting metal   The use of all of these materials, and the development of science during the eotechnic phase, is based on the abstraction from life of the elements that could be measured   He approves those people, cities and cultures who strove for a harmonious balance between the senses and the freedom from labor provided by science 

The second phase, the paleotechnic (roughly 1700 to 1900), is "an upthrust into barbarism, aided by the very forces and interests which originally had been directed toward the conquest of the environment and the perfection of human nature "  Inventions of the paleotechnic are made by men trying to solve specific problems rather than hunting for general scientific principles; in fact, scientific learning is devalued by men of business   The invention of coal-fired steam powered factories and the installation of capital-intensive machinery leads to a necessarily gigantic round-the-clock scale of production supported by unskilled machine tenders  Labour becomes a commodity, rather than an inalienable set of skills, the labourer who tended machines, lived in slums, and was paid starvation wages, became physically stunted and socially and spiritually stultified   Mumford notes that the death rate of urban slums compares unfavorably to the agricultural worker of the same time period, and furthermore that life in the nineteenth century compares unfavorably to cleanliness and standards of living available to workers in thirteenth century cities   He also identifies iron as the primary building material of the paleotechnic, and skyscrapers, bridges and steamships as première accomplishments of the age   War and mass sport he saw as social releases from mechanized life, and the hysteric duties of wartime production (or even the hysteria of a baseball team's victory) is a natural outgrowth of the tensions and structures of such paleotechnic life 
In describing the neotechnic age (from about 1900 to Mumford's present, 1930), he focuses on the invention of electricity, freeing the factory production line from the restrictions of coal through the addition of small electric motors to individual machines, and freeing the laborer to create small but competitive factories   Mumford presciently notes that a small producer can deliver what is needed when it is needed more efficiently than paleotechnic assembly lines  The neotechnic phase he saw was dominated by men of science, rather than mechanically apt machinists  Rather than pursuing accomplishments on the scale of the trains, it is concerned with the invisible, the rare, the atomic level of change and innovation   Compact and lightweight aluminum is the metal of the neotechnic,  and communication and information—even inflated amounts—he claimed was the coin 


== Notes ==
Passage 7:
Jack Hillmer
Jack Hillmer (1918–2007) was an American architect based in San Francisco, California   An exponent of what Lewis Mumford called the "Bay Region style," Hillmer is known for his meticulously hand-crafted modernist homes built from redwood   Jack Hillmer's most notable projects include the Ludekens house on Belvedere island, the Munger house in Napa, and the Cagliostro house in Berkeley   Architectural writer Alan Hess called Jack Hillmer "one of the most original architects produced by California "

Early life
Hillmer was born and raised in Texas   As a 15-year-old boy, he travelled to Chicago with his mother, a cousin and a friend to visit the 1933 World's Fair   It was there, in the California exhibit, that he encountered the redwood boards that would become a key feature of his later architectural practice:  four-foot by twenty-foot planks displayed under spotlights to highlight one of that state's key products   Several years later Hillmer received a scholarship to the University of Texas, where he enrolled in architecture   After college, Hillmer joined the air force, and was stationed in San Diego   Hillmer used his time-off during the war to explore the new modernist buildings that were being built in southern California, including renting a room in the Pueblo Rivera Apartments by R  M  Schindler, and living for a time at the La Jolla Art Center by Irving Gill   Toward the end of the war, Hillmer visited Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen West in Scottsdale, Arizona   Hillmer was invited by Wright to join his Taliesen Fellowship, but Hillmer declined despite his appreciation for Wright's work Hillmer first visited the San Francisco Bay Area in 1945, when he flew up the coast to Hamilton Air Force Base to deliver a new bomber on which he had worked as a draftsman   Hillmer was transferred to Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, California toward the end of the war   After he was discharged, Hillmer decided to remain in the Bay Area, where he opened an architectural office with his friend Warren Callister at 425 Bush Street in San Francisco 

Career
Hillmer and Callister's first commission was the Haines and Betty Hall house in 1947, a house with an abstract geometry built from redwood boards that were reclaimed from a dismantled barn on the property   The house would later be published in Life magazine Shortly after the Hall house was published, Callister and Hillmer dissolved their partnership and set up individual practices   Hillmer's first commission on his own came in 1948 from Fred Ludekens, a successful graphic artist who had purchased a lot on Belvedere Island with views across the Bay to San Francisco   Arguably Hillmer's most successful design, the Ludekens house featured rough redwood walls and airplane wing-like ceilings that soared above the walls of the building, seemingly supported only by glass   Shortly after its completion in 1951, the Ludekens House would be featured in Architectural Forum In the early 1950s, Hillmer was invited to teach as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley by the dean of the architecture school, William Wurster, and again in the 1960s by Charles Moore   Several significant commissions followed over the next three decades, including the Milton Munger house in Napa (1950), the Owen Stebbins house in Kent Woodlands (1960), the John and Patti Wright house in Inverness (1962), and the Dominic Cagliostro house in Berkeley (1977) 

Style
Jack Hillmer's style is most closely identified with the Second Bay Tradition period of architecture in the California Bay Area   Hillmer's work is characterized by "bold exterior fascias and interior cornice lines [that] turn the structure into its own ornament   He hones unnecessary details to a minimum; window frames are typically absent; the glass is often embedded directly into the wood structure   This approach is thoroughly Modern   Beauty is drawn from the inherent structure itself rather than from applied carving "Architect Pierluigi Serraino described Hillmer's architecture as "assertive, but it's always benevolent   It's always very delicate in the way it fits onto the site   It's not architecture that wants to scream, but it has its own monumentality "In Hillmer's own words:  "My approach to architecture was as an art   The approach of most other architects is as a business   I never really thought about how much money I was getting "
Passage 8:
Henry Roth
Henry Roth (February 8, 1906 – October 13, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964 

Biography
Roth was born in Tysmenitz near Stanislawow, Galicia, Austro-Hungary (now known as Tysmenytsia, near Ivano-Frankivsk, Galicia, Ukraine)



ground_truth: Ribosomes

prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Henry Roth and Lewis Mumford are both this nationality?

The following are given passages.
Context 3:  Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he and his mother landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1908  The family briefly lived in Brooklyn, and then on the Lower East Side, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep is set  In 1914, they moved to Harlem  Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village 
With Walton's support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930, completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934, to mostly good reviews  Yet the New York Herald Tribune's book critic Lewis Gannett foresaw that the book would not prove popular with its bleak depiction of New York's Lower East Side, but wrote readers would "remember it and talk about it and watch excitedly" for Roth's next book  Call It Sleep sold slowly and poorly, and after it was out-of-print, critics writing in magazines such as Commentary and Partisan Review kept praising it, and asking for it to be reprinted  After being republished in hardback in 1960 and paperback in 1964, with more than 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration  Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature 
After the book's 1934 publication, Roth began a second novel that was contracted with editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner's  But Roth's growing ideological frustration and personal confusion contributed to a profound writer's block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream (although material written much earlier than 1979 was also incorporated into this later work)  In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artists' colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; much of this period is depicted in Roth's final work, An American Type  Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family  With the onset of World War II, he became a tool-and-gauge maker  The couple moved first to Boston with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then, in 1946, to Maine  There, Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor 
Arthur Hertzberg credited editor Harold U  Ribalow with "rediscovering" Roth  Ribelow found him on a farm in Maine, persuaded him to permit a new edition of the novel, and wrote an introduction to the new edition, which was published by Pageant Books in 1960   Many years later, after Ribalow had died and Roth was awarded the Ribalow Prize, he wrote to Ribalow's son, Meir Z  Ribalow, "Thanks for the encomia  Things like that keep me alive, I'm sure: what little is left me capable of feeling swells with pride like the staves of an old barrel when filled  Harold, to whom I owe so much, would have been happy to witness the occasion "In fact, Roth did not initially welcome the success of the 1964 reprint of Call It Sleep, valuing his privacy instead  But his writing block slowly began to break  In 1968, after Muriel's retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to a trailer home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, closer to where Roth had stayed as writer-in-residence at the D  H  Lawrence ranch outside of Taos  Muriel began composing music again, while Roth collaborated with his friend and Italian translator Mario Materassi to put out a collection of essays called Shifting Landscape, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1987  After Muriel's death, in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, Mercy of a Rude Stream  It has been alleged that the incestuous relationships between the protagonist, a sister, and a cousin in Mercy of a Rude Stream are autobiographical  Roth's sister, however, has denied that such events occurred 
Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because after the publication of Call It Sleep he failed to produce another novel for 60 years  He attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems, such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusionment with Communism  At other times, he cited his early break with Judaism and his obsessive sexual preoccupations as probable causes  Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1995 
The character E  I  Lonoff in Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels (The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost in this case), is a composite of Roth, Bernard Malamud and fictional elements 

Works and writing
Call It Sleep
Published in 1934, Call It Sleep centers on the turbulent experiences of a young boy, David Schearl, growing up in the Jewish immigrant slum of New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century 

Mercy of a Rude Stream
Mercy of a Rude Stream is a monumental epic published in four volumes  It follows protagonist Ira Stigman from his family's arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem in 1914 to the night before Thanksgiving in 1927, when Ira decides to leave the family tenement and move in with Edith Welles   According to critic David Mehegan, Roth's Mercy represents a "landmark of the American literary century" The first volume, A Star Shines over Mt  Morris Park was published in 1994 by St  Martin's Press and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared from St  Martin's in 1995   In A Diving Rock on the Hudson, "Roth writes graphically about the sexual relationship between the protagonist, Ira Stigman, and Stigman's sister, Minnie, as teen-agers  Roth also describes an incestuous relationship between Stigman and his cousin, Stella " Roth's sister "chastise[d] Roth for writing about the 'revelation'" and "threaten[ed] to sue him and St  Martin's Press     Roth and his sister entered into a contract in which he agreed to pay his sister $10,000 in exchange for immunity from legal action  The contract     also stipulated that future volumes of Roth's novel would no longer portray Minnie Stigman 'as having any further sexual relationship with her brother, Ira Stigman '"From Bondage, which appeared in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously  Requiem for Harlem, the fourth and final volume, appeared in 1998   Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 with the help of his assistant, Felicia Steele, shortly before his death 
Before his death, Roth commented numerous times that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes   In fact, Roth did write six separate books  He called the first four "Batch One," and the last two, "Batch Two "  Roth's editor at St  Martin's, Robert Weil, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roth's agent, Roslyn Targ, found the epic would be best served in four volumes, as the four books of "Batch One" contained a stylistic and thematic unity inconsistent with the remaining two books 
Explaining the difference between Mercy of a Rude Stream and Call It Sleep, critic Mario Materassi, Roth's longtime friend, argues that "Call It Sleep can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self   Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life's confusion:  Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a 'continuum,' can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life" Fran Lebowitz, writer and public intellectual, in her Netflix special "Pretend It's a City" speaks about how you can still appreciate the art of an individual separate from his actions 

An American Type
Roth's final novel, An American Type, emerged from "Batch 2," which Roth wrote during the late 1980s and early 1990s  With his assistant's help, Roth produced 1,900 typed pages of scenes beginning where Mercy left off and continuing through 1990   The manuscript of "Batch 2" remained untouched for over a decade until Weil sent it to The New Yorker, which published two excerpts from "Batch 2" in the summer of 2006 under the titles "God the Novelist" and "Freight " At The New Yorker the book came into the hands of Willing Davidson, then a young assistant in the magazine's fiction department  At the suggestion of Weil and Roth's literary executor, Lawrence Fox, Davidson edited "Batch 2" into An American Type, which was published by W W  Norton in 2010 Both a love story and a lamentation, the novel opens in 1938, and reintroduces us to Ira Stigman of the Mercy cycle, a thirty-two-year-old "slum-born Yiddle" eager to assimilate but traumatized by his impoverished immigrant past  Restless with his lover and literary mentor, English professor Edith Welles, Ira journeys to Yaddo, where he meets M (who only appeared in the old man's reveries in the Mercy series), a blond, aristocratic pianist whose "calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance" engages him 
The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon his paramour's Greenwich Village apartment and set out with an illiterate, boorish Communist on a quest for the promise of the American West  But feeling like a total failure in LA, Ira begins an epic journey home, thumbing rides from truckers and riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl  Ira only knows that he must return to M, the woman he truly loves 
Sixty-five pages of excerpts from Batch Two consisting of short journal entries appeared in the journal, Fiction, Number 57, in 2011  The majority of these pages are about Roth's move to Maine, afraid that his associations with the Communist Party would haunt him at his factory job in Massachusetts  Purchasing a small farm, and surrounded by Yankee neighbors, Roth questions his identity as a Jew and struggles to wrest a living out of a Maine countryside where the soil is so hard that he has to dynamite in order to lay pipe deep enough to avoid the winter freezes  The extreme cold that he and his family endured, his work logging, bargaining over antiques and livestock with neighbors, and the world of backwoods and village America form the principal and unlikely drama of these pages  There is also return to the tense, incestuous world of the Roth family in Henry's childhood in the last of these extracts 

Themes
Henry Roth's writing centers on immigrant experience, particularly a Jewish-American experience in Depression-era America  He has also been hailed as a chronicler of New York City life 
Roth's work reveals an obsession with cultural depravity: the internal dislocation of the intellectual and of society at large that features so prominently in the work of the greatest Modernist writers  Indeed, Roth often fixates on human depravity in a multitude of forms  Sexually abhorrent acts such as incest, infidelity, and predation, for instance, inform much of his work, as does a more general climate of violence or abuse, often inflicted on others and masochistically turned inwards 
Throughout his life, Roth simultaneously embraced and rejected the notion of a forgiving God, and this ambivalence is also registered in his writing  Mario Materassi suggests, in "Shifting Urbanscape: Roth's 'Private' New York," that Roth "has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs "While Roth's works are generally tragic, and often relentlessly so, his later work holds out for the possibility of redemption, or of mercy in a rude stream  This notion is especially evident in An American Type where the love between Ira and M becomes a means of transcendence 

Awards and honors
Roth received two honorary doctorates, one from the University of New Mexico and one from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion  He won the 1987 International Nonino Prize in Italy  Posthumously, he was honored in 1995 with the Hadassah Harold Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the City of New York with Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger having named February 29, 1996, as "Henry Roth Day" in New York City  From Bondage was cited by the National Book Critics Circle as being a finalist for its Fiction Prize in 1997, and it was in that same year that Henry Roth won the first Isaac Bashevis Singer Prize in Literature for From Bondage, an award put out by The Forward Foundation  In 2005, ten years after Roth's death, the first full biography of his life, the prize-winning Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, by literary scholar Steven G  Kellman, was published, followed in 2006 by Henry Roth's centenary, which was marked by a literary tribute at the New York Public Library, sponsored by CCNY and organized by Lawrence I  Fox, Roth's literary executor 

Bibliography
Call It Sleep (1934)
"Where My Sympathy Lies," The New Masses, vol  22, no  10 (March 2, 1937), pg  9 —extols and justifies the Moscow Trials 
Nature's First Green (1979)
Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925–1987 (1987)
Mercy of a Rude Stream Vol  1: A Star Shines Over Mt  Morris Park (1994)
Mercy of a Rude Stream Vol  2: A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995)
Mercy of a Rude Stream Vol  3: From Bondage (1996)
Mercy of a Rude Stream Vol  4: Requiem for Harlem (1998)
An American Type (2010)
Passage 9:
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford (19 October 1895 – 26 January 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic  Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer  He made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology He was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford  
Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N  Bacon, and Vannevar Bush 

Life
Early life and education
Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912  He studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree  In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio electrician  He was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal  He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues 

First book
Mumford's earliest books in the field of literary criticism have had a lasting influence on contemporary American literary criticism  In The Golden Day (1926), he argued for a mid-19th-century American literary canon comprising Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, all of whom he argued reflected an antebellum American culture of the period that would be destroyed by the late-19th-century social changes wrought by the American Civil War and industrialization of the United States  Herman Melville (1929), which combined an account of Melville's life with an interpretive discussion of his work, was an important part of the Melville revival 

Correspondence
Mumford was a close friend of the psychologist Henry Murray, with whom he corresponded extensively from 1928 until the 1960s on topics including Herman Melville, psychology, American values and culture, and the nature of the self 

Urban planning
In his early writings on life in an urban area, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote, that the human race would use electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind  
Mumford would later take a more pessimistic stance on the sweeping technological improvements brought by the second industrial revolution  His early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright 

Honours
Mumford was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1947  In 1963, Mumford received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association  Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964  In 1975 Mumford was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE)  In 1976, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca  In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts 

Further publications
He served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years  His 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award 

Retirement
Lewis Mumford died at the age of 94 at his home in Amenia, New York, on January 26, 1990  Nine years later the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places  His wife Sophia died in 1997, at age 97 

Ideas
In his book The Condition of Man, published in 1944, Mumford characterized his orientation toward the study of humanity as "organic humanism "  The term is an important one because it sets limits on human possibilities, limits that are aligned with the nature of the human body  Mumford never forgot the importance of air quality, of food availability, of the quality of water, or the comfort of spaces, because all these elements had to be respected if people were to thrive  Technology and progress could never become a runaway train in his reasoning, so long as organic humanism was there to act as a brake  Indeed, Mumford considered the human brain from this perspective, characterizing it as hyperactive, a good thing in that it allowed humanity to conquer many of nature's threats, but potentially a bad thing if it were not occupied in ways that stimulated it meaningfully  Mumford's respect for human "nature", that is to say, the natural characteristics of being human, provided him with a platform from which to assess technologies, and technics in general  Thus his criticism and counsel with respect to the city and with respect to the implementation of technology was fundamentally organized around the organic humanism to which he ascribed  It was from the perspective of organic humanism that Mumford eventually launched a critical assessment of Marshall McLuhan, who argued that the technology, not the natural environment, would ultimately shape the nature of humankind, a possibility that Mumford recognized, but only as a nightmare scenario 
Mumford believed that what defined humanity, what set human beings apart from other animals, was not primarily our use of tools (technology) but our use of language (symbols)  He was convinced that the sharing of information and ideas amongst participants of primitive societies was completely natural to early humanity, and had obviously been the foundation of society as it became more sophisticated and complex   He had hopes for a continuation of this process of information "pooling" in the world as humanity moved into the future Mumford's choice of the word "technics" throughout his work was deliberate  For Mumford, technology is one part of technics  Using the broader definition of the Greek tekhne, which means not only technology but also art, skill, and dexterity, technics refers to the interplay of social milieu and technological innovation—the "wishes, habits, ideas, goals" as well as "industrial processes" of a society  As Mumford writes at the beginning of Technics and Civilization, "other civilizations reached a high degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly influenced by the methods and aims of technics "

Megatechnics
In The Myth of the Machine Vol II: The Pentagon of Power (Chapter 12) (1970), Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement  He contends that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction  Modern technology, which he called "megatechnics," fails to produce lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, planned obsolescence, and frequent superficial "fashion" changes  "Without constant enticement by advertising," he writes, "production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand  Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year "
He uses his own refrigerator as an example, reporting that it "has been in service for nineteen years, with only a single minor repair: an admirable job  Both automatic refrigerators for daily use and deepfreeze preservation are inventions of permanent value      [O]ne can hardly doubt that if biotechnic criteria were heeded, rather than those of market analysts and fashion experts, an equally good product might come forth from Detroit, with an equally long prospect of continued use "

Biotechnics
Mumford was deeply concerned with the relationship between technics and bioviability   The latter term, not used by Mumford, characterizes an area's capability to support life up through its levels of complexity   Before the advent of technology, most areas of the planet were bioviable at some level or other; however, where certain forms of technology advance rapidly, bioviability decreases dramatically   Slag heaps, poisoned waters, parking lots, and concrete cities, for example, are extremely limited in terms of their bioviability  Non-bioviable regions are common in cinema in the form of dystopias (e g , Blade Runner)  Mumford did not believe it was necessary for bioviability to collapse as technics advanced, however, because he held it was possible to create technologies that functioned in an ecologically responsible manner, and he called that sort of technology biotechnics  Mumford believed that biotechnic consciousness (and possibly even community) was emerging as a later stage in the evolution of Darwinian thinking about the nature of human life  He believed this was the sort of technics needed to shake off the suicidal drive of "megatechnics " While Mumford recognized an ecological consciousness that traces back to the earliest communities, he regarded emerging biotechnics as a product of neo-Darwinian consciousness, as a post-industrial form of thinking, one that refuses to look away from the mutually-influencing relationship between the state of the living organism and the state of its environment  In Mumford's mind, the society organized around biotechnics would restrain its technology for the sake of that integral relationship 
In Mumford's understanding, the various technologies that arose in the megatechnic context have brought unintended and harmful side effects along with the obvious benefits they have bequeathed to us  He points out, for example, that the development of money (as a technology) created, as a side effect, a context for irrational accumulation of excess because it eliminated the burdensome aspects of object-wealth by making wealth abstract  In those eras when wealth was not abstract, plenitude had functioned as the organizing principle around its acquisition (i e , wealth, measured in grains, lands, animals, to the point that one is satisfied, but not saddled with it)  Money, which allows wealth to be conceived as pure quantity instead of quality, is an example of megatechnics, one which can spiral out of control  If Mumford is right in this conceptualization, historians and economists should be able to trace a relationship between the still-increasing abstraction of wealth and radical transformations with respect to wealth's distribution and role  And, indeed, it does appear that, alongside its many benefits, the movement toward electronic money has stimulated forms of economic stress and exploitation not yet fully understood and not yet come to their conclusion  A technology for distributing resources that was less given to abstract hoarding would be more suitable to a biotechnic conception of living 
Thus Mumford argued that the biotechnic society would not hold to the megatechnic delusion that technology must expand unceasingly, magnifying its own power and would shatter that delusion in order to create and preserve "livability " Rather than the megatechnic pursuit of power, the biotechnic society would pursue what Mumford calls "plenitude"; that is, a homeostatic relationship between resources and needs  This notion of plenitude becomes clearer if we suggest that the biotechnic society would relate to its technology in the manner an animal relates to available food–under circumstances of natural satisfaction, the pursuit of technological advance would not simply continue "for its own sake "
Alongside the limiting effect of satisfaction amidst plenitude, the pursuit of technological advance would also be limited by its potentially negative effects upon the organism  Thus, in a biotechnic society, the quality of air, the quality of food, the quality of water, these would all be significant concerns that could limit any technological ambitions threatening to them  The anticipated negative value of noise, radiation, smog, noxious chemicals, and other technical by-products would significantly constrain the introduction of new technical innovation  In Mumford's words, a biotechnic society would direct itself toward "qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, and freedom from quantitative pressures and crowding  Self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair " The biotechnic society would pursue balance, wholeness, and completeness; and this is what those individuals in pursuit of biotechnics would do as well 
Mumford's critique of the city and his vision of cities that are organized around the nature of human bodies, so essential to all Mumford's work on city life and urban design, is rooted in an incipient notion of biotechnics: "livability," a notion which Mumford got from his mentor, Patrick Geddes 
Mumford used the term biotechnics in the later sections of The Pentagon of Power, written in 1970  The term sits well alongside his early characterization of "organic humanism," in that biotechnics represent the concrete form of technique that appeals to an organic humanist  When Mumford described biotechnics, automotive and industrial pollution had become dominant technological concerns, along with the fear of nuclear annihilation  Mumford recognized, however, that technology had even earlier produced a plethora of hazards, and that it would do so into the future  For Mumford, human hazards are rooted in a power-oriented technology that does not adequately respect and accommodate the essential nature of humanity  Mumford is stating implicitly, as others would later state explicitly, that contemporary human life understood in its ecological sense is out of balance because the technical parts of its ecology (guns, bombs, cars, drugs) have spiraled out of control, driven by forces peculiar to them rather than constrained by the needs of the species that created them  He believed that biotechnics was the emerging answer and the only hope that could be set out against the problem of megatechnics   It was an answer, he believed, that was already beginning to assert itself in his time 
It is true that Mumford's writing privileges the term "biotechnics" more than the "biotechnic society " The reason is clear in the last sentence of The Pentagon of Power where he writes, "for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out " Mumford believed that the biotechnic society was a desideratum—one that should guide his contemporaries as they walked out the doors of their megatechnic confines (he also calls them "coffins")  Thus he ends his narrative, as he well understood, at the beginning of another one: the possible revolution that gives rise to a biotechnic society, a quiet revolution, for Mumford, one that would arise from the biotechnic consciousness and actions of individuals  Mumford was an avid reader of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of the organism 

Polytechnics versus monotechnics
A key idea, introduced in Technics and Civilization (1934) was that technology was twofold:

Polytechnic, which enlists many different modes of technology, providing a complex framework to solve human problems 
Monotechnic, which is technology only for its own sake, which oppresses humanity as it moves along its own trajectory Mumford commonly criticized modern America's transportation networks as being "monotechnic" in their reliance on cars  Automobiles become obstacles for other modes of transportation, such as walking, bicycle and public transit, because the roads they use consume so much space and are such a danger to people  Mumford explains that the thousands of maimed and dead each year as a result of automobile accidents are a ritual sacrifice the American society makes because of its extreme reliance on highway transport 

Three epochs of civilization
Also discussed at length in Technics and Civilization is Mumford's division of human civilization into three distinct epochs (following concepts originated by Patrick Geddes):

Eotechnic (the middle ages)
Paleotechnic (the time of the industrial revolution) and
Neotechnic (later, present-day)

Megamachines
Mumford also refers to large hierarchical organizations as megamachines—a machine using humans as its components  These organizations characterize Mumford's stage theory of civilization  The most recent megamachine manifests itself, according to Mumford, in modern technocratic nuclear powers—Mumford used the examples of the Soviet and United States power complexes represented by the Kremlin and the Pentagon, respectively  The builders of the pyramids, the Roman Empire and the armies of the World Wars are prior examples 
He explains that meticulous attention to accounting and standardization, and elevation of military leaders to divine status, are spontaneous features of megamachines throughout history  He cites such examples as the repetitive nature of Egyptian paintings which feature enlarged pharaohs and public display of enlarged portraits of Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin  He also cites the overwhelming prevalence of quantitative accounting records among surviving historical fragments, from ancient Egypt to Nazi Germany 
Necessary to the construction of these megamachines is an enormous bureaucracy of humans which act as "servo-units", working without ethical involvement  According to Mumford, technological improvements such as the assembly line, or instant, global, wireless, communication and remote control, can easily weaken the perennial psychological barriers to certain types of questionable actions  An example which he uses is that of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized logistics in support of the Holocaust  Mumford collectively refers to people willing to carry out placidly the extreme goals of these megamachines as "Eichmanns" 

The clock as herald of the Industrial Revolution
One of the better-known studies of Mumford is of the way the mechanical clock was developed by monks in the Middle Ages and subsequently adopted by the rest of society  He viewed this device as the key invention of the whole Industrial Revolution, contrary to the common view of the steam engine holding the prime position, writing: "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age      The clock     is a piece of power-machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes     "

Urban civilization
The City in History won the 1962 U S  National Book Award for Nonfiction  In this influential book Mumford explored the development of urban civilizations  Harshly critical of urban sprawl, Mumford argues that the structure of modern cities is partially responsible for many social problems seen in western society  While pessimistic in tone, Mumford argues that urban planning should emphasize an 'organic' relationship between people and their living spaces 
Mumford uses the example of the medieval city as the basis for the "ideal city," and claims that the modern city is too close to the Roman city (the sprawling megalopolis) which ended in collapse; if the modern city carries on in the same vein, Mumford argues, then it will meet the same fate as the Roman city 
Mumford wrote critically of urban culture believing the city is "a product of earth     a fact of nature     man's method of expression " Further, Mumford recognized the crises facing urban culture, distrustful of the growing finance industry, political structures, fearful that a local community culture was not being fostered by these institutions  Mumford feared "metropolitan finance," urbanization, politics, and alienation  Mumford wrote: "The physical design of cities and their economic functions are secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community "

Suburbs
Suburbia did not escape Mumford's criticism either:

In the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper  Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion  Here domesticity could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond  This was not merely a child-centered environment; it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle 

Religion and spirituality
Mumford is also among the first urban planning scholars who paid serious attention to religion in the planning field  In one of his least well-known books, Faith for Living (1940, p  216), Mumford argues that:

The segregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence 

Influence
Mumford's interest in the history of technology and his explanation of  "polytechnics", along with his general philosophical bent, has been an important influence on a number of more recent thinkers concerned that technology serve human beings as broadly and well as possible  Some of these authors—such as Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Richard Gregg, Amory Lovins, J  Baldwin, E  F  Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Murray Bookchin, Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, Colin Ward and Kevin Carson—have been intellectuals and persons directly involved with technological development and decisions about the use of technology 
Mumford also had an influence on the American environmental movement, with thinkers like Barry Commoner and Bookchin being influenced by his ideas on cities, ecology and technology  Ramachandra Guha noted his work contains "some of the earliest and finest thinking on bioregionalism, anti-nuclearism, biodiversity, alternate energy paths, ecological urban planning and appropriate technology "Mumford's influence is also evident in the work of some artists including Berenice Abbott's photographs of New York City in the late 1930s Mumford was an inspiration for Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1943) 

Works



ground_truth: American