Diseases, both real and fictional, play a significant role in fiction, with certain diseases like Huntington's disease and tuberculosis appearing in many books and films. Pandemic plagues threatening all human life, such as The Andromeda Strain, are among the many fictional diseases described in literature and film. Genuine plagues have formed the central elements of books from Giovanni Boccaccio's c. 1353 The Decameron onwards. Boccaccio tells the tales of ten people of Florence; the book inspired Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales, which tells the stories of people on pilgrimage in a time of plague. Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal is set in Denmark during the Black Death, features a game of chess with Death personified as a monk-like figure. Tuberculosis was a common disease in the 19th century, it appeared in several major works of Russian literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky used the theme of the consumptive nihilist with Katerina Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment. Turgenev did the same with Bazarov in Sons.

In English literature of the Victorian era, major tuberculosis novels include Charles Dickens's 1848 Dombey and Son, Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 North and South, Mrs. Humphry Ward's 1900 Eleanor. Albert Camus's 1947 The Plague based on cholera in 19th-century France, was seen both as fable about the need for people to help each other in the meaningless world seen by existentialism, as alluding to the German invasion of France, fresh in Camus's mind. Huntington's disease appears in many novels, such as Ian McEwan's 2005 Saturday, it was criticised as prejudiced in the medical journal The Lancet for its negative portrayal of the protagonist with the disease. Diseases if infectious, have long been popular themes and plot devices in fiction. Daniel Defoe's pioneering 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year is a fictional diary of a man's life during the plague year of 1665 in England. Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man created the genre of "post-apocalyptic pandemic thriller" with her story of a plague, spreading across Europe towards her protagonists in Britain.

Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 "The Masque of the Red Death" is a gothic tale of a plague symbolising the hubris of the wealthy, their nemesis. More Michael Crichton's 1969 The Andromeda Strain is a science fiction thriller about a world-threatening microbe that a military satellite brings down to Earth and wipes out a town in Arizona. White-coated scientists do their best to contain the outbreak. Biology in fiction Medical fiction Parasites in fiction Tirard, Nestor Disease in Fiction, its place in current literature. Rothfield, Lawrence Vital Signs Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Krémer, René "Les malades imaginés: Diseases in fiction". Acta Cardiologica. Westfahl, Gary. ISBN 0-313-31707-0 Christensen, Allen Conrad Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion. ISBN 0-415-36048-X VanderMeer, Jeff. ISBN 0-553-38339-6

The C&C 44 and the C&C 44 Custom are a series of Canadian sailboats, that were designed by Robert W. Ball and first built in 1985; the C&C 44 design prototype was built by C&C Yachts in Canada and production was undertaken in the United States at C&C's Middletown, Rhode Island plant, starting in 1985 and ending in 1991. The C&C 44 Custom was built by the Custom Division of C&C; the design is now out of production. The C&C 44 was produced in Grand Prix and Custom. A small amount of pre-preg fibreglass laminates were used for the hull and a spar from Hall Spars with four-spreaders; the boats have full-height and full-length longitudinal stiffeners, honeycomb panels with carbon fiber reinforced polymer skins. Nomex honeycomb was used for the deck. Once the laminate was laid up and vacuum-bagged in the mold, heat was employed for the final cure; the prototype for the boat was known as Silver Shadow, was requested by Jim Plaxton. Momentum was the first Custom model; the C&C 44 is a recreational keelboat, built predominantly of fiberglass, with wood trim.

The hull is made with triaxial fibreglass cloth, laid on each side of a 3/4" end-grain balsawood core, to form a sandwich. It has a masthead sloop rig, a raked stem, a raised reverse transom, an internally-mounted spade-type rudder controlled by a wheel and a fixed fin keel, it carries 9,850 lb of ballast. The C&C 44s built were customized and used many different ballast and keel combinations, as well as different rigs. A centreboard was a factory option; the design was available as the "C&C 44 Custom", which used the same hull molds, but was more race-oriented. The Custom version incorporates more use of exotic construction materials, has a different coachhouse roof and deck, a simpler interior and a keel, longer, it is that fewer than four of the Custom model were completed in total. The keel-equipped version of the boat has a draft of 8.25 ft, while the centreboard-equipped version has a draft of 8.50 ft with the centreboard extended and 5.5 ft with it retracted. The Custom version has a draft of 8.42 ft.

The boat is fitted with a Japanese Yanmar 4JHE diesel engine of 44 hp. The fuel tank holds 40 U. S. gallons and the fresh water tank has a capacity of 100 U. S. gallons. The fixed keel-equipped C&C 44 has a PHRF racing average handicap of 66, while the centreboard version has a PHRF average handicap of 57 with a high of 66 and low of 48. All versions have a hull speed of 7.96 kn. In a July 1988 review, Lloyd Hircock wrote in Canadian Yachting magazine, "The C&C 44 is a splendid sea boat—dry, kindly and seaworthy... I rate the C&C 44 up there with the best of them, it is an impressive yacht to sail. It is strong and capable, well designed for safe offshore passages for comfortable lake cruising. At the drop of a flag this design is ready to take to the race course." He did find fault with the inadequate cabin ventilation, the uncomfortable helm seat, as well as the aft genoa sheet track location and the location of the mainsheet traveller in the middle of the cockpit, which reduces cockpit seating space.

List of sailing boat typesSimilar sailboats Gulfstar 43 Hunter 44 Original Factory Brochure - C&C 44, 2 page, colour Original Factory Brochure - C&C 44, 8 page, colour Original Factory Standard Equipment List - C&C 44, 4 page, B&W

Acclimatization or acclimatisation is the process in which an individual organism adjusts to a change in its environment, allowing it to maintain performance across a range of environmental conditions. Acclimatization occurs in a short period of time, within the organism's lifetime; this may be a discrete occurrence or may instead represent part of a periodic cycle, such as a mammal shedding heavy winter fur in favor of a lighter summer coat. Organisms can adjust their morphological, physical, and/or biochemical traits in response to changes in their environment. While the capacity to acclimate to novel environments has been well documented in thousands of species, researchers still know little about how and why organisms acclimate the way that they do; the nouns acclimatization and acclimation are regarded as synonymous, both in general vocabulary and in medical vocabulary. It has sometimes been asserted that they should be differentiated by reserving acclimatization for a wild/natural process and reserving acclimation for changes occurring in response to an artificial or controlled situation, such as changes in temperature imposed in an experiment.

This assertion is not known or followed, so writers who intend it must explicitly state that it applies within their usage if they expect their intended meaning to be received by their audience. The synonym acclimatation is less encountered, fewer dictionaries enter it. In order to maintain performance across a range of environmental conditions, there are several strategies organisms use to acclimate. In response to changes in temperature, organisms can change the biochemistry of cell membranes making them more fluid in cold temperatures and less fluid in warm temperatures by increasing the number of membrane proteins. Organisms may express specific proteins called heat shock proteins that may act as molecular chaperones and help the cell maintain function under periods of extreme stress, it has been shown that organisms which are acclimated to high or low temperatures display high resting levels of heat shock proteins so that when they are exposed to more extreme temperatures the proteins are available.

Expression of heat shock proteins and regulation of membrane fluidity are just two of many biochemical methods organisms use to acclimate to novel environments. Organisms are able to change several characteristics relating to their morphology in order to maintain performance in novel environments. For example, birds increase their organ size to increase their metabolism; this can take the form of an increase in the mass of nutritional organs or heat-producing organs, like the pectorals. The Theory While the capacity for acclimatization on has been documented in thousands of species, researchers still know little about how and why organisms acclimate in the way that they do. Since researchers first began to study acclimation, the overwhelming hypothesis has been that all acclimation serves to enhance the performance of the organism; this idea has come to be known as the beneficial acclimation hypothesis. Despite such widespread support for the beneficial acclimation hypothesis, not all studies show that acclimation always serves to enhance performance.

One of the major objections to the beneficial acclimation hypothesis is that it assumes that there are no costs associated with acclimation. However, there are to be costs associated with acclimation; these include the cost of sensing the environmental conditions and regulating responses, producing structures required for plasticity, genetic costs. Given the shortcomings of the beneficial acclimation hypothesis, researchers are continuing to search for a theory that will be supported by empirical data; the degree to which organisms are able to acclimate is dictated by their phenotypic plasticity or the ability of an organism to change certain traits. Recent research in the study of acclimation capacity has focused more on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity rather than acclimation responses. Scientists believe that when they understand more about how organisms evolved the capacity to acclimate, they will better understand acclimation. Many plants, such as maple trees and tomatoes, can survive freezing temperatures if the temperature drops lower and lower each night over a period of days or weeks.

The same drop might kill them. Studies have shown that tomato plants that were acclimated to higher temperature over several days were more efficient at photosynthesis at high temperatures than were plants that were not allowed to acclimate. In the orchid Phalaenopsis, phenylpropanoid enzymes are enhanced in the process of plant acclimatisation at different levels of photosynthetic photon flux. Animals acclimatize in many ways. Sheep grow thick wool in cold, damp climates. Fish are able to adjust only to changes in water temperature and quality. Tropical fish sold at pet stores are kept in acclimatization bags until this process is complete. Lowe & Vance were a

The West Gate Freeway is a major freeway in Melbourne, the busiest urban freeway and the busiest road in Australia, carrying upwards of 200,000 vehicles per day. It links the Western suburbs to the Melbourne CBD and beyond, it is a link between Melbourne and the west and linking industrial and residential areas west of the Yarra River with the city and port areas. The West Gate Bridge is a part of the freeway, it is a managed freeway with a complete'Freeway Management System', dynamically linked and adaptive to the entire M1 corridor. This includes the 2008 re-design of a substantial section. Overall, the freeway has between 4-6 lanes in each direction, with a maximum of 12 lanes at one point in its width; the original Lower Yarra Freeway was designated in the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan as the F9 Freeway corridor. Construction began on the first section in the late 1960s and was open to traffic by 1971, stretching from the intersection of the Princes Highway and Little Boundary Road in Altona North eastwards to Melbourne/Williamstown Roads just west of the mouth of the Yarra designated with an F-82 shield.

At the time, the only way to cross the Yarra west of the CBD was via a ferry crossing, which saw far heavier demands once the Lower Yarra Freeway was opened. The West Gate Bridge across the Yarra had started construction not too long before the opening of the freeway and, although delayed, when completed in 1978 allowed the freeway to extend over the river and directly into the CBD's south-western corner; the freeway's name was changed to the West Gate Freeway to commemorate its opening, but the freeway attracted tolls from anyone using the bridge between 16 November 1978 and 29 November 1985. The toll plaza was located on the city side of the bridge where the service stations are now located. National Route 1 - designated along Geelong Road and through the CBD via Smithfield and Flemington Roads and King Street - was altered to use the freeway instead and rejoin Kings Way via Rogers and Clarendon Streets. 1971 -'Lower Yarra Freeway'. Original 4 miles opened from Princes Highway to Williamstown Road on 7 April 1971.

3 lanes in each direction. Cost: $A14m. 1978 - West Gate Bridge. Opened 15 November 1978, by the Premier, the Hon. R J Hamer, ED, MP. 1990/1991 – ‘A third lane is being built in both directions on the West Gate Freeway between Princes Highway and Millers Road’. This conflicts with information given in the Country Roads Board's 58th Annual Report, which states that the freeway opened with three lanes in each direction in 1971, whilst omitting that the third lane only existed between Millers Road and Williamstown Road. Due to the extra traffic the West Gate Freeway was attracting—and due to the safety concerns of having excess traffic filter through connector streets in South Melbourne—the freeway was extended to Kings Way above the Grant Street intersection using elevated carriageways in 1987. Expansion of the original two lane freeway on the western side of the bridge to three lanes each way was carried out in 1993, expansion to four lanes followed in 2000. With the subsequent completion of the Western Ring Road joining the West Gate Interchange to the freeway's west and CityLink to the freeway's east, it funnels traffic from northern and western suburbs around Melbourne, acting as a bypass freeway.

The entire freeway has been given an M1 designation. It gains the Tourist 2 shield at the Melbourne/Williamstown Road interchange in Spotswood, loses it at the Montague Street interchange in Port Melbourne. Traffic volumes on the West Gate Freeway have grown since opening, carrying up to 180,000 vehicles every day. Congestion occurs at the Montague Street and Bolte Bridge interchanges due to conflicting traffic movements on and off the freeway. On 1 May 2008 the Minister for Roads and Ports Tim Pallas announced design details for the West Gate Freeway improvements, to assist in maintaining growing volume capacity and to reduce congestionThey are: a full freeway management system, made up of Ramp Metering, Lane Use Management Signs, electronic on-road message signs, arterial road message signs, CCTV cameras and a suite of freeway traffic algorithms and software with data stations, thousands of sensors and a core server at the VicRoads TMC. the addition of a new elevated road structure joining the outbound Kings Way on-ramp to the Freeway new traffic ramps over Montague Street an additional dedicated exit ramp from the Bolte Bridge to the Freeway widening of the freeway between Todd Road and Montague Street redesign of the Montague Street interchange.

These works help reduce merging and weaving movements at key points on the freeway, leading to a smoother traffic flow and improved driver safety. As part of the works the Montague Street on-ramp city bound had been closed for 18 months to enable the new one to be built. Early works on the West Gate Freeway, including geo-technical investigations and service proving, commenced in late 2007. In early 2008 construction works started on the freeway widening in the South Melbourne area. New traffic lanes and ramps have been completed and opened in different stages with the total project scheduled for completion in late 2010; the Freeway Upgrade was awarded the 2011 Australian Construction Achievement Award. The West Gate Freeway begins at the West Gate Interchange in Altona North, with four lanes running in each direction; the freeway flows from the Western Ring Road an

The WCWA World Heavyweight Championship was a professional wrestling world heavyweight championship promoted by the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex area-based World Class Wrestling Association. The championship was created in June 1966 but WCWA's predecessor NWA Big Time Wrestling, billed as the local version of the NWA United States Heavyweight Championship before being renamed the NWA American Heavyweight Championship in May 1968. In 1982 Big Time Wrestling rebranded themselves as "World Class Championship Wrestling" and the championship was renamed the WCCW American Heavyweight Championship. In 1986 WCCW withdrew from the National Wrestling Alliance, creating the World Class Wrestling Association, replacing the WCCW American Heavyweight Championship with the WCWA Heavyweight Championship, replacing the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship as the top title recognized by the promotion. In 1989, the WCWA championship was unified with the AWA World Heavyweight Championship to become the USWA Unified World Heavyweight Championship as WCWA merged with the Continental Wrestling Association to become the United States Wrestling Association.

In 1990 WCWA split from the USWA, but the promotion folded without determining a WCWA World Heavyweight Champion. As it is a professional wrestling championship, the WCWA World Heavyweight Chamionship was not won not by actual competition, but by a scripted ending to a match; the first recognized Texas based NWA United States Champion was Fritz Von Erich, introducing the championship to his Southwest Sports promotion as the top championship in his territory. Fritz Von Erich would go on to win the championship a record setting 20 times. At the time it was not unusual for the promoter, if he was an active wrestler to hold the championship multiple times, being that he always be available to work shows and face off against various "outsiders". Fritz' last reign was on June 1982 -- 16 years after his first title victory. Rick Rude was the last WCCW American Heavyweight Champion and announced as the first WCWA World Heavyweight Champion on February 21, 1986. Jerry Lawler was the final champion, winning it on April 14, 1989, followed by the announcement that the championship had been unified with the AWA World Heavyweight Champion in September 1990.

The longest confirmed reign, Fritz Von Erich's fifth reign over all, lasted from March 27, 1967 to April 5, 1986 for a total of 375 days. Von Erich's final reign was the shortest in history, as he vacated moments after winning it in the main event of the Fritz Von Erich Retirement Show. With his last title victory Fritz became the oldest champion, at 52 years of age. Fritz's second youngest son, Mike Von Erich, was the youngest champion at just. At 200 lb, Mike was the lightest champion, while King Kong Bundy, tipping the scale at 450 lb was the heaviest. National Wrestling Alliance World Class Championship Wrestling United States Wrestling Association