Cat
The cat is a small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and referred to as the domestic cat to distinguish it from wild members of the family; the cat is either a house cat, kept as a pet, or a feral cat ranging and avoiding human contact. A house cat is valued for its ability to hunt rodents. About 60 cat breeds are recognized by various cat registries. Cats are similar in anatomy to the other felid species, with a strong flexible body, quick reflexes, sharp teeth and retractable claws adapted to killing small prey, they are predators who are most active at dusk. Cats can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by mice and other small animals. Compared to humans, they see better in the dark and have a better sense of smell, but poorer color vision. Cats, despite being solitary hunters, are a social species. Cat communication includes the use of vocalizations including mewing, trilling, hissing and grunting as well as cat-specific body language.
Cats communicate by secreting and perceiving pheromones. Female domestic cats can have kittens from spring to late autumn, with litter sizes ranging from two to five kittens. Domestic cats can be shown as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. Failure to control the breeding of pet cats by spaying and neutering, as well as abandonment of pets, has resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of entire bird species, evoking population control, it was long thought that cat domestication was initiated in Egypt, because cats in ancient Egypt were venerated since around 3100 BC. However, the earliest indication for the taming of an African wildcat was found in Cyprus, where a cat skeleton was excavated close by a human Neolithic grave dating to around 7500 BC. African wildcats were first domesticated in the Near East; the leopard cat was tamed independently in China around 5500 BC, though this line of domesticated cats leaves no trace in the domestic cat populations of today.
As of 2017, the domestic cat was the second-most popular pet in the U. S. by number of pets owned, with 95 million cats owned. As of 2017, it was ranked the third-most popular pet in the UK, after fish and dogs, with around 8 million being owned; the number of cats in the UK has nearly doubled since 1965. The origin of the English word cat and its counterparts in other Germanic languages, descended from Proto-Germanic *kattōn-, is controversial, it has traditionally thought to be a borrowing from Late Latin cattus,'domestic cat', from catta, compare Byzantine Greek κάττα, Portuguese and Spanish gato, French chat, Maltese qattus, Lithuanian katė, Old Church Slavonic kotъ, among others. The Late Latin word is thought to originate from an Afro-Asiatic language, but every proposed source word has presented problems. Many references refer to "Berber" kaddîska,'wildcat', Nubian kadīs as possible sources or cognates, but M. Lionel Bender suggests the Nubian term is a loan from Arabic قِطَّة qiṭṭa. Jean-Paul Savignac suggests the Latin word is from an Ancient Egyptian precursor of Coptic ϣⲁⲩ šau,'tomcat', or its feminine form suffixed with -t, but John Huehnergard says "the source was not Egyptian itself, where no analogous form is attested."
Huehnergard opines it is "equally that the forms might derive from an ancient Germanic word, imported into Latin and thence to Greek and to Syriac and Arabic". Guus Kroonen considers the word to be native to Germanic and Northern Europe, suggests that it might be borrowed from Uralic, cf. Northern Sami gáđfi,'female stoat', Hungarian hölgy,'stoat'. In any case, cat is a classic example of a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures: a Wanderwort. An alternative word is English puss. Attested only from the 16th century, it may have been introduced from Dutch poes or from Low German puuskatte, related to Swedish kattepus, or Norwegian pus, pusekatt. Similar forms exist in Irish puisín or puiscín; the etymology of this word is unknown, but it may have arisen from a sound used to attract a cat. A group of cats can be referred to a glaring. A male cat is called a tom or tomcat An unspayed female is called a queen in a cat-breeding context. A juvenile cat is referred to as a kitten.
In Early Modern English, the word kitten was interchangeable with the now-obsolete word catling. The male progenitor of a cat a pedigreed cat, is its sire and its mother is its dam. A pedigreed cat is one. A purebred cat is one. Many pedigreed and purebred cats are exhibited as show cats. Cats of unrecorded, mixed ancestry are referred to as domestic short-haired or domestic long-haired cats, or as random-bred, moggies, or mongrels or mutt-cats; the semi-feral cat, a outdoor cat, is not owned by any one individual, but is friendly to people and may be fed by several households. Feral cats are associated with human habitation areas, foraging for food and sometimes intermittently fed by people, but are wary of human interaction. Domesti
Felinology
Felinology is the study of cats. The term comes from the Latin word felinus and the Greek - logos. Felinology is concerned with studying the anatomy, genetics and breeding of domestic and wild cats. "The wonders of felinology" Feline Research Center National Federation of Felinology
Burmese cat
The Burmese cat is a breed of domestic cat, originating in Thailand, believed to have its roots near the present Thai-Burma border and developed in the United States and Britain. Most modern Burmese are descendants of one female cat called Wong Mau, brought from Burma to America in 1930 and bred with American Siamese. From there and British breeders developed distinctly different Burmese breed standards, unusual among pedigreed domestic cats. Most modern cat registries do not formally recognize the two as separate breeds, but those that do refer to the British type as the European Burmese. All Burmese cats were dark brown, but are now available in a wide variety of colours. Both versions of the breed are known for their uniquely social and playful temperament and persistent vocalisation. In 1871, Harrison Weir organised a cat show at the Crystal Palace. A pair of Siamese cats were on display that resembled modern American Burmese cats in build, thus similar to the modern Tonkinese breed; the first attempt to deliberately develop the Burmese in the late 19th century in Britain resulted in what were known as Chocolate Siamese rather than a breed in their own right.
The breed thus died out in Britain. Dr. Joseph Cheesman Thompson imported Wong Mau, a brown female cat, into San Francisco in 1930. Dr Thompson considered the cat's build to be sufficiently different from the Siamese to still have potential as a separate breed. Wong Mau was bred with Tai Mau, a sealpoint Siamese, bred with her son to produce dark brown kittens that became the foundation of a new, distinctive strain of Burmese. In 1936, the Cat Fanciers' Association granted the breed formal recognition. However, due to continued extensive outcrossing with Siamese cats to increase the population, the original type was overwhelmed, the CFA suspended breed recognition a decade later. Attempts by various American breeders to refine the unique Burmese standard persisted, in 1954, the CFA lifted the suspension permanently. In 1958, the United Burmese Cat Fanciers compiled an American judging standard which has remained unchanged since its adoption. Meanwhile, in the UK, interest in the breed was reviving.
The cats which composed the new British breeding program were of a variety of builds, including some imported from America. By 1952, three true generations had been produced in Britain and the breed was recognized by the United Kingdom's Governing Council of the Cat Fancy. From the 1950s onwards, countries in the Commonwealth and Europe started importing British Burmese; the two versions of the breed were kept distinct genetically. British Burmese were declassed as a breed by the CFA in the 1980s; the GCCF banned the registration of all Burmese imported from America in order to preserve the "traditional" bloodlines. Most modern cat registries do not formally recognize these dual standards as representing separate breeds, but those that do refer to the British type as the European Burmese; the International Cat Association and CFA clubs have started using the American breed standard at select shows in Europe. During the early period of breed development, it became clear that Wong Mau herself was genetically a crossbreed between a Siamese and Burmese type.
This early crossbreed type was developed as a separate breed, known today as the Tonkinese. Burmese cats have been instrumental in the development of the Bombay and the Burmilla, among others; the two standards differ in head and body shape. The British or traditional ideal tends toward a more slender, long-bodied cat with a wedge-shaped head, large pointed ears, long tapering muzzle and moderately almond-shaped eyes; the legs should be long, with neat oval paws. The tail tapers to medium length; the American Burmese is a noticeably stockier cat, with a much broader head, round eyes and distinctively shorter, flattened muzzle. Legs and tail should be proportionate to the body, medium-length, the paws rounded. In either case, Burmese are a small to medium size breed, tending to be about 4–6 kg, but are substantially-built, muscular cats and should feel heavy for their size when held -- "brick wrapped in silk". In either standard, the coat should be short and glossy, with a satin-like finish. Color is solid and must be uniform over the body, only shading to lighter underparts.
Faint colorpoint markings may be visible. The eyes are gold depending on coat color; the breed's original standard color is a distinctively rich dark brown, variously known as sable, brown or seal. It is the result of part of the albino series; this gene causes a reduction in the amount of pigment produced, converting black into brown and rendering all other colours paler than their usual expression. The action of the gene produces the modified colorpoint effect, more noticeable in young kittens; the first blue Burmese was born in 1955 in Britain, followed by red and tortoiseshell over the next decades. Champagne first appeared in America. Platinum, the last major variant to appear, was developed in America
Cat genetics
Cat genetics describes the study of inheritance as it occurs in domestic cats. In feline husbandry it can predict established traits of the offspring of particular crosses. In medical genetics, cat models are used to discover the function of homologous human disease genes; the domesticated cat and its closest wild ancestor are both diploid organisms that possess 38 chromosomes and 20,000 genes. About 250 heritable genetic disorders have been identified in cats, many similar to human inborn errors; the high level of similarity among the metabolisms of mammals allows many of these feline diseases to be diagnosed using genetic tests that were developed for use in humans, as well as the use of cats in the study of the human diseases. An example of a mutation, shared among all felines, including the big cats, is a mutant chemosensor in their taste buds that prevents them from tasting sweetness, which may explain their indifference to fruits and other sugary foods. In some breeds of cats congenital deafness is common, with most white cats being affected if they have blue eyes.
The genes responsible for this defect are unknown, but the disease is studied in the hope that it may shed light on the causes of hereditary deafness in humans. Since a large variety of coat patterns exist within the various cat breeds, the cat is an excellent animal to study the coat genetics of hair growth and coloration. Several genes interact to produce cats' hair coat patterns. Different combinations of these genes give different phenotypes. For example, the enzyme tyrosinase is needed to produce the dark pigment melanin and Burmese cats have a mutant form, only active at low temperatures, resulting in color appearing only on the cooler ears and paws. A inactive gene for tyrosinase is found in albino cats, which therefore lack all pigment. Hair length is determined by the gene for fibroblast growth factor 5, with inactive copies of this gene causing long hair; the Cat Genome Project, sponsored by the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the U. S. National Cancer Institute Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center in Frederick, aims to help the development of the cat as an animal model for human hereditary and infectious diseases, as well as contributing to the understanding of the evolution of mammals.
This effort led to the publication in 2007 of an initial draft of the genome of an Abyssinian cat called Cinnamon. The existence of a draft genome has led to the discovery of several cat disease genes, allowed the development of cat genetic fingerprinting for use in forensics. Cat#Genetics Cat coat genetics Cat body type genetic mutations
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Cinema of Sweden
Swedish cinema is known for including many acclaimed movies. This is due to the popularity and prominence of directors Victor Sjöström and Ingmar Bergman. Swedish filmmaking rose to international prominence when Svenska Biografteatern moved from Kristianstad to Lidingö in 1911. During the next decade the company's two star-directors, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, produced many outstanding silent films, some of the best of them adaptations of stories by the Nobel-prizewinning novelist Selma Lagerlöf. Sjöström's most respected films made poetic use of the Swedish landscape and developed moving studies of character and emotion. Stiller fostered the early popularity of Greta Garbo through the Gösta Berlings saga. Many of the films made at the Biografteatern had a significant impact on German directors of the silent and early sound eras because Germany remained cut off from French and American influences through World War I. In the mid-twenties both of these directors and Garbo moved to the United States to work for MGM, bringing Swedish influence to Hollywood.
The departure left a vacuum in Swedish cinema. Both directors returned to Sweden, but Stiller died soon after his return while Sjöström returned to theatre work for most of the remainder of his career; the advent of the talking movie at the beginning of the 1930s brought about a financial stabilization for Swedish cinema, but the industry sacrificed artistic and international ambitions for this financial success. Some provincial comedies emerged. During World War II Swedish cinema gained artistically due to the directors Gustaf Molander, Alf Sjöberg, Hasse Ekman, Anders Henrikson and Hampe Faustman. Cinema had to perform the task of psychological defence during the war; the famous and influential Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, rose to prominence in the fifties. He began making films in the mid-forties, in 1955, he made Smiles of a Summer Night, which brought him international attention. A year he made one of his most famous films, The Seventh Seal. In the 1960s, Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for two consecutive years, with The Virgin Spring in 1960 and Through a Glass Darkly in 1961.
He won the award for the early twentieth-century family drama Fanny and Alexander. Bergman has been nominated for the Best Picture award once, with the 1973 Cries and Whispers, the story of two sisters watching over their third sister's deathbed, both afraid she might die, but hoping she does; the film lost to The Sting, oddly enough, it was not nominated in the Foreign Language Film category. It gave Bergman the first of three nominations for Best Director. Ingmar Bergman won four Golden Globe Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Working with Bergman, cinematographer Sven Nykvist can be said to have had a major impact on the visual aspect of Swedish cinema. Twice the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, for Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander, Nykvist is considered by many to be one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, he directed The Ox, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1992. Starting his career working with Bergman, Vilgot Sjöman debuted in 1962 with The Mistress, but attracted far wider attention in Sweden when his film 491 was banned by the Swedish censors due to its explicit sexual content.
After some cutting, it was released in 1964. Sjöman went on to cause wider controversy, depicting sexual intercourse in his 1967 film I Am Curious. In the United States the film was considered pornography and seized by the customs and banned until 1969; when the film was released, the publicity gained from the legal fight and the revolutionary graphic content drew huge crowds, making the film the most successful Swedish film export and the most successful foreign film in the US up to this point. Most it was instrumental in establishing a view of Swedish cinema – and even Swedes in general – as having a liberal attitude towards sexuality. Another Swedish postwar filmmaker of note is Bo Widerberg, his 1963 film Raven's End and The Man on the Roof are regarded as Swedish film classics. His works include The Man from Majorca, The Serpent's Way and All Things Fair. Widerberg got as many as three Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign-Language Film, for Raven's End, Ådalen 31 and All Things Fair, but never won the award.
Jan Troell started his career as Widerberg's director of photography, but could soon debut with his own film Here's Your Life. He went on to direct its sequel The New Land the following year; the films are based on Vilhelm Moberg's epic novels about the Swedish emigration to America in the 19th century, books well known in Sweden. The Emigrants was nominated including Best Director and Best Picture. After that Troell went to Hollywood, where he directed Zandy's Bride, starring Gene Hackman, Hurricane, he returned to Sweden to make The Flight of the Eagle, a film about the Swedish explorer Andrée's disastrous 1897 polar expedition. The film gained an Academy Awards nomination for best foreign language film. Works include
Zygosity
Zygosity is the degree of similarity of the alleles for a trait in an organism. Most eukaryotes have two matching sets of chromosomes. Diploid organisms have the same loci on each of their two sets of homologous chromosomes except that the sequences at these loci may differ between the two chromosomes in a matching pair and that a few chromosomes may be mismatched as part of a chromosomal sex-determination system. If both alleles of a diploid organism are the same, the organism is homozygous at that locus. If they are different, the organism is heterozygous at that locus. If one allele is missing, it is hemizygous; the DNA sequence of a gene varies from one individual to another. Those variations are called alleles. While some genes have only one allele because there is low variation, others have only one allele because deviation from that allele can be harmful or fatal, but most genes have two or more alleles. The frequency of different alleles varies throughout the population; some genes may have two alleles with equal distribution.
For other genes, one allele may be common, another allele may be rare. Sometimes, one allele is a disease-causing variation. Sometimes, the different variations in the alleles make no difference at all in the function of the organism. In diploid organisms, one allele is inherited from one from the female parent. Zygosity is a description of whether those two alleles have different DNA sequences. In some cases the term "zygosity" is used in the context of a single chromosome; the words homozygous and hemizygous are used to describe the genotype of a diploid organism at a single locus on the DNA. Homozygous describes a genotype consisting of two identical alleles at a given locus, heterozygous describes a genotype consisting of two different alleles at a locus, hemizygous describes a genotype consisting of only a single copy of a particular gene in an otherwise diploid organism, nullizygous refers to an otherwise-diploid organism in which both copies of the gene are missing. A cell is said to be homozygous for a particular gene when identical alleles of the gene are present on both homologous chromosomes.
The cell or organism in question is called a homozygote. True breeding organisms are always homozygous for the traits. An individual, homozygous-dominant for a particular trait carries two copies of the allele that codes for the dominant trait; this allele called the "dominant allele", is represented by a capital letter. When an organism is homozygous-dominant for a particular trait, the genotype is represented by a doubling of the symbol for that trait, such as "PP". An individual, homozygous-recessive for a particular trait carries two copies of the allele that codes for the recessive trait; this allele called the "recessive allele", is represented by the lowercase form of the letter used for the corresponding dominant trait. The genotype of an organism, homozygous-recessive for a particular trait is represented by a doubling of the appropriate letter, such as "pp". A diploid organism is heterozygous at a gene locus when its cells contain two different alleles of a gene; the cell or organism is called a heterozygote for the allele in question, therefore, heterozygosity refers to a specific genotype.
Heterozygous genotypes are represented by a capital letter and a lowercase letter, such as "Rr" or "Ss". Alternatively, a heterozygote for gene "R" is assumed to be "Rr"; the capital letter is written first. If the trait in question is determined by simple dominance, a heterozygote will express only the trait coded by the dominant allele, the trait coded by the recessive allele will not be present. In more complex dominance schemes the results of heterozygosity can be more complex. A heterozygous genotype can have a higher relative fitness than either the homozygous dominant or homozygous recessive genotype - this is called a heterozygote advantage. A chromosome in a diploid organism is hemizygous; the cell or organism is called a hemizygote. Hemizygosity is observed when one copy of a gene is deleted, or, in the heterogametic sex, when a gene is located on a sex chromosome. Hemizygosity must not be confused with haploinsufficiency, which describes a mechanism for producing a phenotype. For organisms in which the male is heterogametic, such as humans all X-linked genes are hemizygous in males with normal chromosomes, because they have only one X chromosome and few of the same genes are on the Y chromosome.
Transgenic mice generated through exogenous DNA microinjection of an embryo's pronucleus are considered to be hemizygous, because the introduced allele is expected to be incorporated into only one copy of any locus. A transgenic individual can be bred to homozygosity and maintained as an inbred line to reduce the need to confirm the genotype of each individual. In cultured mammalian cells, such as the Chinese hamster ovary cell line, a number of genetic loci are present in a functional hemizygous state, due to mutations or deletions in the other alleles. A nullizygous organism carries two mutant alleles for the same gene; the mutant alleles are both complete loss-of-function or'null' alleles, so homozygous null and n
