Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American fiction writer best known for his celebrated and prolific output in the adventure and science-fiction genres. Among the most notable of his creations are the jungle hero Tarzan, the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, the fictional landmass within Earth known as Pellucidar. Burroughs' California ranch is now the center of the Tarzana neighborhood in Los Angeles. Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, the fourth son of Major George Tyler Burroughs, a businessman and Civil War veteran, his wife, Mary Evaline Burroughs, his middle name is from Mary Coleman Rice Burroughs. He was of entirely English ancestry, with a family line, in North America since the Colonial era. Through his Rice grandmother, Burroughs was descended from settler Edmund Rice, one of the English Puritans who moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century, he once remarked, "I can trace my ancestry back to Deacon Edmund Rice." The Burroughs side of the family was of English origin and emigrated to Massachusetts around the same time.

Many of his ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Some of his ancestors settled in Virginia during the colonial period, Burroughs emphasized his connection with that side of his family, seeing it as romantic and warlike, and, in fact, could have counted among his close cousins no less than seven signers of the U. S. Declaration of Independence, including his third cousin, four times removed, 2nd President of the United States John Adams. Burroughs was educated at a number of local schools, he attended Phillips Academy, in Andover and the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, failing the entrance exam for the United States Military Academy at West Point, he became an enlisted soldier with the 7th U. S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus ineligible to serve, he was discharged in 1897. After his discharge Burroughs worked a number of different jobs. During the Chicago influenza epidemic of 1891, he spent half a year at his brother's ranch on the Raft River in Idaho, as a cowboy, drifted somewhat afterward worked at his father's Chicago battery factory in 1899, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Emma Hulbert, in January 1900.

In 1903, Burroughs joined his brothers, Yale graduates George and Harry, who were, by prominent Pocatello area ranchers in southern Idaho, partners in the Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company, where he took on managing their ill-fated Snake River gold dredge, a classic bucket-line dredge. The Burroughs brothers were the sixth cousins, once removed, of famed miner Kate Rice, a brilliant and statuesque Maths professor who, in 1914, became the first female prospector in the Canadian North. Journalist and publisher C. Allen Thorndike Rice was his third cousin; when the new mine proved unsuccessful, the brothers secured for Burroughs a position with the Oregon Short Line Railroad in Salt Lake City. Burroughs resigned from the railroad in October 1904. By 1911, after seven years of low wages as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler. By this time, Emma and he had two children and Hulbert. During this period, he began reading pulp-fiction magazines. In 1929, he recalled thinking that...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten.

As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew that I could write stories just as entertaining and a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines. In 1913, Burroughs and Emma had their third and last child, John Coleman Burroughs known for his illustrations of his father's books. In the 1920s, Burroughs became a pilot, purchased a Security Airster S-1, encouraged his family to learn to fly. Daughter Joan married Tarzan film actor, James Pierce, starring with her husband, as the voice of Jane, during 1932-34 for the Tarzan radio series; the pair were wed for more than forty years, until her death, in 1972. Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and, in 1935, married the former actress Florence Gilbert Dearholt, the former wife of his friend, Ashton Dearholt, with whom he had co-founded Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises while filming The New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs adopted the Dearholts' two children, he and Florence divorced in 1942. Burroughs was in his late 60s and was in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite his age, he applied for and received permission to become a war correspondent, becoming one of the oldest U. S. war correspondents during World War II. This period of his life is mentioned in William Brinkley's bestselling novel Don't Go Near the Water. After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, where after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written 80 novels, he is buried at Tarzana, California, US. When he died, he was believed to have been the writer who had made the most from films, earning over $2 million in royalties from 27 Tarzan pictures; the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Burroughs in 2003. Aiming his work at the pulps, Burroughs had his first story, Under the Moons of Mars, serialized by Frank Munsey in the February to July 1912 issues of The All-Story – under the name "Norman Bean" to protect his reputation. Under the Moons of Mars inaugurated the Barsoom series and earned Burroughs US$400, it was first published as a book by A. C.

McClurg

Planet Relief was a proposed BBC television special dealing with the issue of global warming scheduled for broadcast in January 2008. The programme, in development for 18 months, was meant to be similar to previous BBC programmes such as Comic Relief and Sport Relief. However, it was cancelled before it was broadcast because the BBC was concerned that it would be "biased" towards promoting responses based on acceptance of mainstream climate change science; the original idea for Planet Relief was to increase awareness of climate change. The show, unlike previous BBC specials such as Comic Relief, was not planned to be a charity event, but to increase awareness, similar to Live Earth, it was inspired by Live 8, with Planet Relief seen as its climate change counterpart. The programme would have involved an electric power station being shut down for one night, for which the BBC had spent over a year negotiating, urging viewers "to turn off all unnecessary lights and electric gadgets for the evening."

The BBC scrapped the idea for Planet Relief on 5 September 2007. Peter Barron, editor of Newsnight said, "It is not the BBC's job to save the planet." Peter Horrocks, head of BBC television news said, "It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject." There were concerns that the power station shutdown "might overload parts of the network." The BBC did not, say that the show was cancelled due to bias, stating rather that, "The BBC is committed to programmes about climate change but after Live Earth what audiences say is they are looking for programmes of a documentary or factual nature to explain the complex subject."Right wing commentators opposed the idea of Planet Relief, including Keith Waterhouse who said in the Daily Mail before the show was cancelled that, "If the idea is still developing, we can only hope it gets lost in the darkroom. Heaven knows. Can you imagine what Cosmic Relief—in fact, they're toying with calling it Planet Relief, on which note I can only warn readers of a nervous disposition to avoid any enterprise containing the word Planet—is going to be like?"Complaints about the programme came from climate sceptics such as Martin Durkin, who said, "The thing that disturbs me most is that the BBC has such a leviathan position … that if it decides that it is going to adopt climate change as a moral purpose, I have got a lot of trouble with that.

I don't think it is the role of the BBC to spend my money on a moral purpose."For their part, climate change activists attacked the BBC for cancelling the programme. Author Mark Lynas said, "This decision shows a real poverty of understanding among senior BBC executives about the gravity of the situation we face; the only reason why this became an issue is that there is a small but vociferous group of climate'sceptics' lobbying against taking action, so the BBC is behaving like a coward and refusing to take a more consistent stance."Another critic, Friends of the Earth executive director Tony Juniper, said, "This is a disappointing decision considering the huge potential for the BBC in helping us more make the shift toward a low-carbon society. The science of climate change is clear and if approached in the right way taking up this serious issue would not compromise the BBC' impartiality." BBC controversies Criticism of the BBC List of television series cancelled before airing an episode Media bias Denmark plants trees Climate change

Phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase alpha is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the PI4KA gene. This gene encodes a 1-phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase which catalyzes the first committed step in the biosynthesis of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate; the mammalian PI 4-kinases have been classified into two types, II and III, based on their molecular mass, modulation by detergent and adenosine. Two transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been described for this gene; the alpha isoform of PI4KIII plays a role in replication of hepatitis C virus. Furthermore, the PI4KA lipid kinase affects HCV replication by altering phosphorylation of the HCV NS5A protein