The Carthusian Order called the Order of Saint Bruno, is a Catholic religious order of enclosed monastics. The order includes both monks and nuns; the order has its own Rule, called the Statutes, rather than the Rule of Saint Benedict, combines eremitical and cenobitic monasticism. The motto of the Carthusians is Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, Latin for "The Cross is steady while the world is turning." The name Carthusian is derived from the Chartreuse Mountains in the French Alps: Saint Bruno built his first hermitage in a valley of these mountains. These names were adapted to the English charterhouse. Today, there are 18 for monks and 5 for nuns; the alcoholic cordial Chartreuse has been produced by the monks of Grande Chartreuse since 1737, which gave rise to the name of the colour. In 1084 Bishop Hugh of Grenoble offered Bruno, the former Chancellor of the Diocese of Reims, a solitary site in the mountains of his diocese, in the valley of Chartreuse. There Bruno and six companions built a hermitage, consisting of a few log cabins opening towards a gallery that allowed them access to the communal areas, the church and chapter room without having to suffer too much from inclement conditions.

Six years Bruno's former pupil, Pope Urban II requested his services. He would only live in Rome for a few short months however, before leaving to establish a new hermitage in the forests of Calabria, in the south of Italy, with a few new companions, he died there on 6 October 1101. In 1132, an avalanche destroyed the first hermitage; the fifth prior of Chartreuse, rebuilt the hermitage. There were ten Carthusian monasteries in the British Isles before the Reformation, with one in Scotland and nine in England; the first was founded by Henry II of England in 1181 at Witham Friary, Somerset as penance for the murder of St. Thomas Becket. St. Hugh of Lincoln was its first prior; the third Charterhouse built in Britain was Beauvale Priory, remains of which can still be seen in Beauvale, Nottinghamshire. The Carthusians, as with all Catholic religious orders, were variously persecuted and banned during the Reformation; the abolition of their priories, which were sources of charity in England reduced their numbers.

This was followed by the French Revolution. A few fragments remain of the Charterhouse in Coventry dating from the 15th century, consisting of a sandstone building, the prior's house; the area, about a mile from the centre of the city, is a conservation area, but the buildings are in use as part of a local college. Inside the building is a medieval wall painting, alongside many carvings and wooden beams. Nearby is the river Sherbourne that runs underneath the centre of the city; the best preserved remains of a medieval Charterhouse in the UK are at Mount Grace Priory near Osmotherley, North Yorkshire. One of the cells has been reconstructed to illustrate how different the lay-out is from monasteries of most other Christian orders, which are designed with communal living in mind; the London Charterhouse gave its name to Charterhouse Square and several streets in the City of London, as well as to the Charterhouse School which used part of its site before moving out to Godalming, Surrey. Nothing remains at Hull or Sheen, although Hull Charterhouse is an alms house which shared the site of the monastery.

Axholme and Witham have slight remains. Perth Charterhouse, the single Carthusian Priory founded in Scotland during the Middle Ages, was located in Perth, it was founded by James I in the early 15th century. James I and Joan Beaufort, Queen of Scots were both buried in the priory church, as was Queen Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV of Scotland; the Priory, said to have been a building of'wondrous cost and greatness' was sacked during the Scottish Reformation in 1559, swiftly fell into decay. No remains survive above ground; the Perth names Charterhouse Lane and Pomarium Flats recall its existence. St Hugh's Charterhouse, West Sussex has cells around a square cloister 400 m on a side, making it the largest cloister in Europe, it was built to accommodate two communities. The monastery is a small community of hermits based on the model of the 4th century Lauras of Palestine. A Carthusian monastery consists of a number of individual cells built around a cloister; the individual cells are organised.

The focus of Carthusian life is contemplation. To this end there is an emphasis on silence. Carthusians do not have abbots — instead, each charterhouse is headed by a prior and is populated by two types of monks: the choir monks, referred to as hermits, the lay brothers; this reflects a division of labor in providing for the material needs of the monastery and the monks. For the most part, the number of brothers in the Order has remained the same for centuries, as it is now: seven or eight brothers for every ten fathers. Humility is a characteristic of Carthusian spirituality; the Carthusian identity is one of shared solitude. Each hermit, a monk, or who will be a priest, has his own living space, called a cell consisting of a small dwelling. Traditionally there is a one-room lower floor for the storage of wood for a stove and a workshop as all monks engage in some manual labour. A second floor consists of a small entryway with an image of the Virgin Mary as a place o

The European wildcat is a wildcat species native to continental Europe, Scotland and the Caucasus. It inhabits forests from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Eastern Europe to the Caucasus, it has been extirpated in Wales. In France and Italy, the European wildcat is predominantly nocturnal, but active in the daytime when undisturbed by human activities. Felis silvestris was the scientific name proposed in 1778 by Johann von Schreber when he described a wild cat based on texts from the early 18th century and before. In the 19th and 20th centuries, several wildcat type specimens were described and proposed as subspecies, including: Felis silvestris caucasica proposed by Konstantin Satunin in 1905 was a skin of a female cat collected near Borjomi in Georgia. Felis grampia proposed by Gerrit Smith Miller in 1907 was a skin and a skull of a male wildcat from Invermoriston in Scotland. Miller revised his classification in 1912, proposing Felis silvestris grampia after reviewing more wildcat skins from Scotland.

Felis tartessia proposed by Miller in 1907 was a skin and a skull of a male wildcat from Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain. Two forms are identified in the Iberian Peninsula: the common European form, north of the Douro and Ebro Rivers, a "giant" Iberian form, sometimes considered a different subspecies F. s. tartessia, in the rest of the region. The palaeontologist Björn Kurtén noted that the disputed "Tartessian" subspecies has uniquely kept the same size and proportions as the form, found throughout mainland Europe during the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene; the habitat of both forms is different: the northern, typical population lives in deciduous Quercus robur forests and the southern, large type in Mediterranean evergreen Quercus ilex forests. Zoological specimens of cats that originated on Mediterranean islands are not considered native but introduced, including: Felis lybica var sarda proposed in 1885 by Fernand Lataste was a skin and a skull of a male cat from Sarrabus in Sardinia.

Felis reyi proposed in 1929 by Louis Lavauden who described a skin and a skull of a specimen from Biguglia. F. s. cretensis proposed in 1953 by Theodor Haltenorth who described two cat skins that were purchased in a bazaar in Chania. The European wildcat's fur varies in colour from brownish to grey with paler contour hairs, it has five stripes on the forehead. A dark stripe behind the shoulders expands into a spinal stripe running up to the base of the tail. On the sides, it has irregular dark stripes, which break up on the hind legs, thus forming a blotched pattern, its tail is rounded at the black tip. The top of the head and the forehead bear four well-developed dark bands that split into small spots. Two short and narrow stripes are present in the shoulder region, in front of the dorsal band; some individuals have a few light spots on the throat, between the forelegs, or in the inguinal region. The dorsal surface of the neck and head are the same colour as that of the trunk, but is lighter grey around the eyes, lips and chin.

A slight ochreous shade is visible on the undersides of the flanks. A black and narrow dorsal band starts on the shoulders, runs along the back up to the base of the tail. In some animals, the summer coat is ashen coloured; the patterns on the head and neck are as well-developed as those on the tail, though the patterns on the flanks are imperceptible. Guard hairs measure 7 cm, the tip hairs 5.5–6 cm, the underfur 4.5–5.5 in. Corresponding measurements in the summer are 5–6.7 cm, 4.5–6 cm, 5.3 cm. Large males in Spain reach 65 cm in length, with a 34.5 cm long tail, weigh up to 7.5 kg. They have a less diffuse stripe pattern, proportionally larger teeth, feed more on rabbits than the wildcats north of the Douro-Ebro, which are more dependent on small rodents; the European wildcat is on average bigger and stouter than the domestic cat, has longer fur and a shorter non-tapering bushy tail. It has striped a dark dorsal band. Males average a weight of 5 kg up to 8 kg, females 3.5 kg. Their weight fluctuates seasonally up to 2.5 kg.

European wildcats have proportionately shorter cheek tooth rows with smaller teeth, but a broader muzzle than African wildcats. Since European wildcats and domestic cats interbreed, it is difficult to distinguish wildcats and striped hybrids on the basis of only morphological characteristics; the European wildcat lives in broad-leaved and mixed forests. It avoids intensively cultivated settlements; the northernmost population lives in eastern Scotland. There are two disconnected populations in France; the one in the Ardennes in the country's north-east extends to Luxembourg and Belgium. The other in southern France may be connected via the Pyrenees to populations in Portugal. In the Netherlands, European wildcats were recorded in 1999 near Nijmegen and in 2004 in North Brabant. In Germany, the Rhine is a major barrier between the population in Eifel and Hunsrück mountains west of the river and populations east of the river, where a six-lane highway hampers dispersal. In Switzerland, European wildcats are present in the Jura Mountains.

Three fragmented populations in Italy comprise one in the country's central and southern part, one in the eastern Alps that may be connected to populations in Slovenia and Croatia. The Sicilian population is the only Mediterranean insular population; the population in the Polish Carpathian Mountains extends to nort

In nanotechnology, carbon nanotube interconnects refer to the proposed use of carbon nanotubes in the interconnects between the elements of an integrated circuit. Carbon nanotubes can be thought of as single atomic layer graphite sheets rolled up to form seamless cylinders. Depending on the direction on which they are rolled, CNTs can be metallic. Metallic carbon nanotubes have been identified as a possible interconnect material for the future technology generations and to replace copper interconnects. Electron transport can go over long nanotube lengths, 1 μm, enabling CNTs to carry high currents with no heating due to nearly one dimensional electronic structure. Despite the current saturation in CNTs at high fields, the mitigation of such effects is possible due to encapsulated nanowires. Carbon nanotubes for interconnects application in Integrated chips have been studied since 2001, however the attractive performances of individual tubes are difficult to reach when they are assembled in large bundles necessary to make real via or lines in integrated chips.

Two proposed approaches to overcome the to date limitations are either to make tiny local connections that will be needed in future advanced chips or to make carbon metal composite structure that will be compatible with existing microelectronic processes. Hybrid interconnects that employ CNT vias in tandem with copper interconnects may offer advantages in reliability and thermal-management. In 2016, the European Union has funded a four million euro project over three years to evaluate manufacturability and performance of composite interconnects employing both CNT and copper interconnects; the project named CONNECT involves the joint efforts of seven European research and industry partners on fabrication techniques and processes to enable reliable Carbon NanoTubes for on-chip interconnects in ULSI microchip production. While smaller dimensions mean better performance for transistors thanks to the decrease of intrinsic transistor gate delay, the situation is quite the opposite for interconnects.

Smaller cross-section areas of interconnect would only lead to performance degradation such as increased interconnect resistance and power consumption. Since the 1990s the circuit performance is no longer limited by the transistors, thus interconnects have become a key issue and are as important as the transistors in determining chip performance; as technology scaling continues, the problem of interconnect performance degradation will only become more significant. Local interconnects that are on the lower levels of the interconnect stack connecting nearby logic gates are aggressively scaled down at each generation to follow the miniaturization of transistors and thus are susceptible to performance degradation. On the local level where interconnects are most densely packed, have pitch sizes close to the minimum feature size, we will need new interconnect materials that suffer much less from sizing effects than copper. Thanks to the measured properties of individual carbon nanotubes, such material has been proposed as future material for interconnects.

Their current carrying capabilities are high around 109 Acm−2 and they exhibit a ballistic length up to micrometers. However, due to the strong electron-phonon interaction in single-walled CNTs, it has been discovered that electronic current undergoes saturation at the voltage bias beyond 0.2 V. CNTs with few nm in diameter are robust compared with metallic nanowires of similar diameter and demonstrate conducting properties superior as compared with copper. To make a connection, CNTs have to be paralleled in order to lower the resistance; the resistance R of one single-walled carbon nanotubes can be expressed by R = R c + R q Where R c is an extrinsic contact resistance, R q is the quantum resistance which comes from the connection of one dimensional material to a three dimensional metal, L is the CNT length and L m f p is the mean free path of the electron. If N tubes are paralleled, this resistance is divided by N thus one of the technological challenge is to maximize N in a given area. If L is small as compared with Lmfp, the case for small vias, the technological parameters to optimize are the contact resistance and the tube density.

Initial works have been focused on CNT vias connecting two metallic lines. Low temperature chemical vapor deposition growth of CNT on titanium nitride catalysed by cobalt particles has been optimized by the Fujitsu group; the catalyst particles obtained by laser ablation of a cobalt target sorted by size allow to grow a CNT density around 1012 CNT cm−2 using a multistep process using plasma and catalyst particles around 4 nm. In spite of these efforts, the electrical resistance of such via is 34 Ω _for a 160 nm diameter. Performances are close to tungsten plugs thus at least one order of magnitude higher than copper. For 60 nm via, a ballistic length of 80 nm has been determined. For processing lines, CNT technology is more difficult because dense forests of CNTs grow perpendicularly to the substrate, where they are known as vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays. Only few reports on horizontal lines have been published and rely on th