Austria
Austria the Republic of Austria, is a country in Central Europe comprising 9 federated states. Its capital, largest city and one of nine states is Vienna. Austria has an area of 83,879 km2, a population of nearly 9 million people and a nominal GDP of $477 billion, it is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north and Slovakia to the east and Italy to the south, Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The terrain is mountainous, lying within the Alps; the majority of the population speaks local Bavarian dialects as their native language, German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other regional languages are Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian, Slovene. Austria played a central role in European History from the late 18th to the early 20th century, it emerged as a margraviate around 976 and developed into a duchy and archduchy. In the 16th century, Austria started serving as the heart of the Habsburg Monarchy and the junior branch of the House of Habsburg – one of the most influential royal houses in history.
As archduchy, it was a major component and administrative centre of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the Holy Roman Empire's dissolution, Austria founded its own empire in the 19th century, which became a great power and the leading force of the German Confederation. Subsequent to the Austro-Prussian War and the establishment of a union with Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was created. Austria was involved in both world wars. Austria is a parliamentary representative democracy with a President as head of state and a Chancellor as head of government. Major urban areas of Austria include Graz, Linz and Innsbruck. Austria is ranked as one of the richest countries in the world by per capita GDP terms; the country has developed a high standard of living and in 2018 was ranked 20th in the world for its Human Development Index. The republic declared its perpetual neutrality in foreign political affairs in 1955. Austria has been a member of the United Nations since 1955 and joined the European Union in 1995.
It is a founding member of the OECD and Interpol. Austria signed the Schengen Agreement in 1995, adopted the euro currency in 1999; the German name for Austria, Österreich, derives from the Old High German Ostarrîchi, which meant "eastern realm" and which first appeared in the "Ostarrîchi document" of 996. This word is a translation of Medieval Latin Marchia orientalis into a local dialect. Another theory says that this name comes from the local name of the mountain whose original Slovenian name is "Ostravica" - because it is steep on both sides. Austria was a prefecture of Bavaria created in 976; the word "Austria" was first recorded in the 12th century. At the time, the Danube basin of Austria was the easternmost extent of Bavaria; the Central European land, now Austria was settled in pre-Roman times by various Celtic tribes. The Celtic kingdom of Noricum was claimed by the Roman Empire and made a province. Present-day Petronell-Carnuntum in eastern Austria was an important army camp turned capital city in what became known as the Upper Pannonia province.
Carnuntum was home for 50,000 people for nearly 400 years. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the area was invaded by Bavarians and Avars. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, conquered the area in AD 788, encouraged colonization, introduced Christianity; as part of Eastern Francia, the core areas that now encompass Austria were bequeathed to the house of Babenberg. The area was known as the marchia Orientalis and was given to Leopold of Babenberg in 976; the first record showing the name Austria is from 996, where it is written as Ostarrîchi, referring to the territory of the Babenberg March. In 1156, the Privilegium Minus elevated Austria to the status of a duchy. In 1192, the Babenbergs acquired the Duchy of Styria. With the death of Frederick II in 1246, the line of the Babenbergs was extinguished; as a result, Ottokar II of Bohemia assumed control of the duchies of Austria and Carinthia. His reign came to an end with his defeat at Dürnkrut at the hands of Rudolph I of Germany in 1278. Thereafter, until World War I, Austria's history was that of its ruling dynasty, the Habsburgs.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Habsburgs began to accumulate other provinces in the vicinity of the Duchy of Austria. In 1438, Duke Albert V of Austria was chosen as the successor to his father-in-law, Emperor Sigismund. Although Albert himself only reigned for a year, henceforth every emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was a Habsburg, with only one exception; the Habsburgs began to accumulate territory far from the hereditary lands. In 1477, Archduke Maximilian, only son of Emperor Frederick III, married the heiress Maria of Burgundy, thus acquiring most of the Netherlands for the family. In 1496, his son Philip the Fair married Joanna the Mad, the heiress of Castile and Aragon, thus acquiring Spain and its Italian and New World appendages for the Habsburgs. In 1526, following the Battle of Mohács, Bohemia and the part of Hungary not occupied by the Ottomans came under Austrian rule. Ottoman expansion into Hungary led to frequent conflicts between the two empires evident in the Long War of 1593 to 1606.
The Turks made incursions into Styria nearly 20 times, of which some are c
Carl Correns
Carl Erich Correns was a German botanist and geneticist, notable for his independent discovery of the principles of heredity, for his rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's earlier paper on that subject, which he achieved but independently of the botanists Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and Hugo de Vries, the agronomist William Jasper Spillman. Correns was a student of Karl Nägeli, a renowned botanist with whom Mendel corresponded about his work with peas, but who failed to understand how significant Mendel's work was. Carl Correns was born September 1864 in Munich. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by an aunt in Switzerland, he entered the University of Munich in 1885. While there, he was encouraged to study botany by Karl Nägeli, a botanist whom Mendel corresponded with on the subject of his pea plant experiments. After completing his thesis, Correns became a tutor at the University of Tübingen and in 1913 he became the first director of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem.
Carl Correns conducted much of the foundational work for the field of genetics at the turn of the 20th century. He rediscovered and independently verified the work of Mendel in a separate model organism, he discovered cytoplasmic inheritance, an important extension of Mendel's theories, which demonstrated the existence of extra-chromosomal factors on phenotype. Most of Correns' work went unpublished however, was destroyed in the Berlin bombings of 1945. In 1892, while at the University of Tübingen, Correns began to experiment with trait inheritance in plants, he focused on the hawkweed plant experiments that Mendel carried out, not being aware of the pea plant results. Correns published his first paper on 25 January 1900, which cited both Charles Darwin and Mendel, though without recognising the relevance of genetics to Darwin's ideas. In Correns' paper, "G. Mendel's Law Concerning the Behavior of the Progeny of Racial Hybrids", he restated Mendel's results and his law of segregation and law of independent assortement.
After rediscovering Mendel's laws of heredity, which apply to chromosomal inheritance, he undertook experiments with the four o'clock to investigate apparent counterexamples to Mendel's laws in the heredity of variegated leaf color. Correns found that, while Mendelian traits behave independently of the sex of the source parent, leaf color depended on which parent had which trait. For instance, pollinating an ovule from a white branch with pollen from another white area resulted in white progeny, the predicted result for a recessive gene. Green pollen used on a green stigma resulted in all green progeny, the expected result for a dominant gene. However, if green pollen fertilized a white stigma, the progeny were white, but if the sexes of the donors were reversed, the progeny were green; this non-mendelian inheritance pattern was traced to a gene named iojap which codes for a small protein required for proper assembly of the chloroplast ribosome. Though iojap assorts according to Mendel's rules, if the mother is homozygous recessive the protein is not produced, the chloroplast ribosomes fail to form, the plasmid becomes non-functional because the ribosomes cannot be imported into the organelle.
The progeny could have functional copies of iojap, but since the chloroplasts come from the mother in most angiosperms, they would have been inactivated in the previous generation, so will give white plants. Conversely, if a white father is paired with a green mother with functional chloroplasts, the progeny will only inherit functional chloroplasts, will thus be green. In his 1909 paper, he established variegated leaf color as the first conclusive example of cytoplasmic inheritance. Article relating the work of Gregor Mendel
Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg
The Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg referred to as MLU, is a public, research-oriented university in the cities of Halle and Wittenberg in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. MLU offers German and international courses leading to academic degrees such as BA, BSc, MA, MSc, doctoral degrees and Habilitation; the university was created in 1817 through the merger of the University of Wittenberg and the University of Halle. The university is named after the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, a professor in Wittenberg. Today, the university itself is located in Halle, while the Leucorea Foundation in Wittenberg serves as MLU's convention centre for seminars as well as for academic and political conferences. Both Halle and Wittenberg are about one hour from Berlin via the Berlin–Halle railway, which offers Intercity-Express trains; the University of Wittenberg was founded in 1502 by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, as the Renaissance was becoming more and more popular. The foundation of the university was criticized when the Ninety-five Theses reached Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz.
Ecclesiastically speaking, the Electorate of Saxony was subordinate to Albert. He criticized the elector for Luther's theses, viewing the founded university as a breeding ground for heretical ideas. Under the influence of Philipp Melanchthon, building on the works of Martin Luther, the university became a centre of the Protestant Reformation incorporating, at one point in time, Luther's house in Wittenberg, the Lutherhaus, as part of the campus. Notable alumni include George Müller, Georg Joachim Rheticus and – in fiction – William Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet and Horatio and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; the University of Halle was founded in 1694 by Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg, who became Frederick I, King in Prussia, in 1701. In the late 17th century and early 18th century, Halle became a centre for Pietism within Prussia. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the universities were centers of the German Enlightenment. Christian Wolff was an important proponent of rationalism, he influenced many German scholars, such as Immanuel Kant.
Christian Thomasius was at the same time the first philosopher in Germany to hold his lectures not in Latin, but German. He contributed to a rational programme in philosophy but tried to establish a more common-sense point of view, aimed against the unquestioned superiority of aristocracy and theology; the institutionalisation of the local language as the language of instruction, the prioritisation of rationalism over religious orthodoxy, new modes of teaching, the ceding of control over their work to the professors themselves, were among various innovations which characterised the University of Halle, have led to its being referred to as the first "modern" university, whose liberalism was adopted by the University of Göttingen about a generation and subsequently by other German and most North American universities. The University of Wittenberg was closed in 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars; the town of Wittenberg was granted to Prussia in the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the university was merged with the Prussian University of Halle in 1817.
It took its present name on 10 November 1933. More than a dozen professors were expelled. Others were shifted to Halle-Wittenberg from universities regarded as "better" at the time, which led to the university being called an academic Vorkuta – after the largest center of the Gulag camps in European Russia). Following the continental European academic tradition, MLU has 9 faculties, regrouping academic staff and students according to their field of studies: Faculty of Theology Faculty of Law and Economics Faculty of Medicine Faculty of Philosophy I Faculty of Philosophy II Faculty of Philosophy III Faculty of Natural Sciences I Faculty of Natural Sciences II Faculty of Natural Sciences III The Botanical Garden of Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, founded in 1698. MLU's historical observatory, built in 1788 by Carl Gotthard Langhans. MLU is enclosed by a variety of research institutions, which have either institutional or personal links with the university or cooperate in their respective fields of studies: The German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina The Halle Institute for Economic Research The Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials The Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe The Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry The Max Planck Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology The Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research Even though MLU is an academic, research oriented institution, not an academy of music or conservatory, the university has an academic orchestra, founded in 1779, a rather prestigious choir, founded in 1950, which together constitute the so-called Collegium musicum.
Members are gifted students of all faculties, but academic staff and alumni. The university choir performs at the international Handel Festival in George Frideric Handel’s birthplace, Halle. MLU has many international partner universities, including: Argentina: National University of La Plata Australia: University of Queensland Austria: Johannes Kepler University Linz Canada: University of Ottawa Colombi
Hybrid (biology)
In biology, a hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different breeds, species or genera through sexual reproduction. Hybrids are not always intermediates between their parents, but can show hybrid vigour, sometimes growing larger or taller than either parent; the concept of a hybrid is interpreted differently in animal and plant breeding, where there is interest in the individual parentage. In genetics, attention is focused on the numbers of chromosomes. In taxonomy, a key question is how related the parent species are. Species are reproductively isolated by strong barriers to hybridisation, which include morphological differences, differing times of fertility, mating behaviors and cues, physiological rejection of sperm cells or the developing embryo; some act before fertilization and others after it. Similar barriers exist in plants, with differences in flowering times, pollen vectors, inhibition of pollen tube growth, somatoplastic sterility, cytoplasmic-genic male sterility and the structure of the chromosomes.
A few animal species and many plant species, are the result of hybrid speciation, including important crop plants such as wheat, where the number of chromosomes has been doubled. Human impact on the environment has resulted in an increase in the interbreeding between regional species, the proliferation of introduced species worldwide has resulted in an increase in hybridisation; this genetic mixing may threaten many species with extinction, while genetic erosion in crop plants may be damaging the gene pools of many species for future breeding. A form of intentional human-mediated hybridisation is the crossing of wild and domesticated species; this is common in modern agriculture. One such flower, Oenothera lamarckiana, was central to early genetics research into mutationism and polyploidy, it is more done in the livestock and pet trades. Human selective breeding of domesticated animals and plants has resulted is the development of distinct breeds. Hybrid humans existed in prehistory. For example and anatomically modern humans are thought to have interbred as as 40,000 years ago.
Mythological hybrids appear in human culture in forms as diverse as the Minotaur, blends of animals and mythical beasts such as centaurs and sphinxes, the Nephilim of the Biblical apocrypha described as the wicked sons of fallen angels and attractive women. The term hybrid is derived from Latin hybrida, used for crosses such as of a tame sow and a wild boar; the term came into popular use in English in the 19th century, though examples of its use have been found from the early 17th century. Conspicuous hybrids are popularly named with portmanteau words, starting in the 1920s with the breeding of tiger–lion hybrids. From the point of view of animal and plant breeders, there are several kinds of hybrid formed from crosses within a species, such as between different breeds. Single cross hybrids result from the cross between two true-breeding organisms which produces an F1 hybrid; the cross between two different homozygous lines produces an F1 hybrid, heterozygous. The F1 generation is phenotypically homogeneous, producing offspring that are all similar to each other.
Double cross hybrids result from the cross between two different F1 hybrids. Three-way cross hybrids result from the cross between an inbred line. Triple cross hybrids result from the crossing of two different three-way cross hybrids. Top cross hybrids result from the crossing of a top quality or pure-bred male and a lower quality female, intended to improve the quality of the offspring, on average. Population hybrids result from the crossing of plants or animals in one population with those of another population; these crosses between different breeds. In horticulture, the term stable hybrid is used to describe an annual plant that, if grown and bred in a small monoculture free of external pollen produces offspring that are "true to type" with respect to phenotype. Hybridisation can occur in the hybrid zones where the geographical ranges of species, subspecies, or distinct genetic lineages overlap. For example, the butterfly Limenitis arthemis has two major subspecies in North America, L. a. arthemis and L. a. astyanax.
The white admiral has a bright, white band on its wings, while the red-spotted purple has cooler blue-green shades. Hybridisation occurs between a narrow area across New England, southern Ontario, the Great Lakes, the "suture region", it is at these regions. Other hybrid zones have formed between described species of animals. From the point of view of genetics, several different kinds of hybrid can be distinguished. A genetic hybrid carries two different alleles of the same gene, where for instance one allele may code for a lighter coat colour than the other. A structural hybrid results from the fusion of gametes that have differing structure in at least one chromosome, as a result of structural abnormalities. A numerical hybrid results from the fusion of gamet
Eduard Fenzl
Eduard Fenzl was an Austrian botanist. An obituary notes "e was Professor of Botany and Director of the Imperial Botanical Cabinet, a member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, Vice-President of the Vienna Horticultural Society."Fenzl made contributions towards Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius's Flora Brasiliensis and to Stephan Endlicher's Enumeratio plantarum quas in Novae Hollandiae, etc. He was the author of Pugillus plantarum novarum Tauri occidentalis primus; the plant genus. Dissertatio inauguralis medico-botanica sistens extensionem et distributionem geographicam Alsinearum familiae naturalis per terras arcticas partemque zonae temperatae orbis antiqui Sertum Cabulicum. Enumeratio Plantarum Quas in Itinere Inter Dera-Ghazee-Khan Et Cabul, Mensibus Majo Et Junio 1833 Collegit Dr Martin Honigberger. Accedunt Novarum Vel Minus Cognitarum Stirpium Icones Et Descriptiones Part 1 Novarum stirpium decas I-X Pugillus Plantarum novarum Syriae et Tauri occidentalis primus Illustrationes et descriptiones plantarum novarum Syriae et Tauri occidentalis Über die Stellung der Gattung Oxera im natürlichen Systeme Über die Blütezeit der Paulownia imperialis … Differential-Charaktere der Arten der Gattung Cyperus Bildliche Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenreiches in Umrissen nach seinen wichtigsten Ordnungen Theodor Kotschy.
Abbildungen und Beschreibungen neuer und seltener Thiere Franz Xaver Freiherr von Wulfen. Flora Norica Phanerogama H. W. Reichardt. "Eduard Fenzl". In: Österreichische Botanische Zeitschrift, 12:1, 1862 Illustration of Fenzl
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC