Mountain
A mountain is a large landform that rises above the surrounding land in a limited area in the form of a peak. A mountain is steeper than a hill. Mountains are formed through tectonic forces or volcanism; these forces can locally raise the surface of the earth. Mountains erode through the action of rivers, weather conditions, glaciers. A few mountains are isolated summits. High elevations on mountains produce colder climates than at sea level; these colder climates affect the ecosystems of mountains: different elevations have different plants and animals. Because of the less hospitable terrain and climate, mountains tend to be used less for agriculture and more for resource extraction and recreation, such as mountain climbing; the highest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest in the Himalayas of Asia, whose summit is 8,850 m above mean sea level. The highest known mountain on any planet in the Solar System is Olympus Mons on Mars at 21,171 m. There is no universally accepted definition of a mountain.
Elevation, relief, steepness and continuity have been used as criteria for defining a mountain. In the Oxford English Dictionary a mountain is defined as "a natural elevation of the earth surface rising more or less abruptly from the surrounding level and attaining an altitude which to the adjacent elevation, is impressive or notable."Whether a landform is called a mountain may depend on local usage. Mount Scott outside Lawton, Oklahoma, USA, is only 251 m from its base to its highest point. Whittow's Dictionary of Physical Geography states "Some authorities regard eminences above 600 metres as mountains, those below being referred to as hills." In the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, a mountain is defined as any summit at least 2,000 feet high, whilst the official UK government's definition of a mountain, for the purposes of access, is a summit of 600 metres or higher. In addition, some definitions include a topographical prominence requirement 100 or 500 feet. At one time the U.
S. Board on Geographic Names defined a mountain as being 1,000 feet or taller, but has abandoned the definition since the 1970s. Any similar landform lower. However, the United States Geological Survey concludes that these terms do not have technical definitions in the US; the UN Environmental Programme's definition of "mountainous environment" includes any of the following: Elevation of at least 2,500 m. Using these definitions, mountains cover 33% of Eurasia, 19% of South America, 24% of North America, 14% of Africa; as a whole, 24% of the Earth's land mass is mountainous. There are three main types of mountains: volcanic and block. All three types are formed from plate tectonics: when portions of the Earth's crust move and dive. Compressional forces, isostatic uplift and intrusion of igneous matter forces surface rock upward, creating a landform higher than the surrounding features; the height of the feature makes it either a hill or, if steeper, a mountain. Major mountains tend to occur in long linear arcs, indicating tectonic plate boundaries and activity.
Volcanoes are formed when a plate is pushed at a mid-ocean ridge or hotspot. At a depth of around 100 km, melting occurs in rock above the slab, forms magma that reaches the surface; when the magma reaches the surface, it builds a volcanic mountain, such as a shield volcano or a stratovolcano. Examples of volcanoes include Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines; the magma does not have to reach the surface in order to create a mountain: magma that solidifies below ground can still form dome mountains, such as Navajo Mountain in the US. Fold mountains occur when two plates collide: shortening occurs along thrust faults and the crust is overthickened. Since the less dense continental crust "floats" on the denser mantle rocks beneath, the weight of any crustal material forced upward to form hills, plateaus or mountains must be balanced by the buoyancy force of a much greater volume forced downward into the mantle, thus the continental crust is much thicker under mountains, compared to lower lying areas.
Rock can fold either asymmetrically. The upfolds are anticlines and the downfolds are synclines: in asymmetric folding there may be recumbent and overturned folds; the Balkan Mountains and the Jura Mountains are examples of fold mountains. Block mountains are caused by faults in the crust: a plane; when rocks on one side of a fault rise relative to the other, it can form a mountain. The uplifted blocks are block horsts; the intervening dropped blocks are termed graben: these can be small or form extensive rift valley systems. This form of landscape can be seen in East Africa, the Vosges, the Basin and Range Province of Western North America and the Rhine valley; these areas occur when the regional stress is extensional and the crust is thinned. During and following uplift, mountains are subjected to the agents of erosion which wear the uplifted area down. Erosion causes the surface of mountains to be younger than the rocks that form the mountains themselves. Glacial processes produce characteristic landforms, such as pyramidal peaks, knife-edge arêtes, bowl-shaped cirques that can contai
Benedictines
The Benedictines the Order of Saint Benedict, are a monastic Catholic religious order of monks and nuns that follow the Rule of Saint Benedict. They are sometimes called the Black Monks, in reference to the colour of the members' religious habits. Despite being called an order, the Benedictines do not operate under a single hierarchy but are instead organised as a collection of independent monastic communities, with each community within the order maintaining its own autonomy. Unlike other religious orders, the Benedictines do not have a superior general or motherhouse with universal jurisdiction. Instead, the order is represented internationally by the Benedictine Confederation, an organisation, set up in 1893 to represent the order's shared interests; the monastery at Subiaco in Italy, established by Saint Benedict of Nursia c. 529, was the first of the dozen monasteries he founded. He founded the Abbey of Monte Cassino. There is no evidence, that he intended to found an order and the Rule of Saint Benedict presupposes the autonomy of each community.
When Monte Cassino was sacked by the Lombards about the year 580, the monks fled to Rome, it seems probable that this constituted an important factor in the diffusion of a knowledge of Benedictine monasticism. It was from the monastery of St. Andrew in Rome that Augustine, the prior, his forty companions set forth in 595 on their mission for the evangelization of England. At various stopping places during the journey, the monks left behind them traditions concerning their rule and form of life, also some copies of the Rule. Lérins Abbey, for instance, founded by Honoratus in 375 received its first knowledge of the Benedictine Rule from the visit of St. Augustine and his companions in 596. Gregory of Tours says that at Ainay Abbey, in the sixth century, the monks "followed the rules of Basil, Cassian and other fathers and using whatever seemed proper to the conditions of time and place", doubtless the same liberty was taken with the Benedictine Rule when it reached them. In Gaul and Switzerland, it supplemented the much stricter Irish or Celtic Rule introduced by Columbanus and others.
In many monasteries it entirely displaced the earlier codes. By the ninth century, the Benedictine had become the standard form of monastic life throughout the whole of Western Europe, excepting Scotland and Ireland, where the Celtic observance still prevailed for another century or two. Through the work of Benedict of Aniane, it became the rule of choice for monasteries throughout the Carolingian empire. Monastic scriptoria flourished from the ninth through the twelfth centuries. Sacred Scripture was always at the heart of every monastic scriptorium; as a general rule those of the monks who possessed skill as writers made this their chief, if not their sole active work. An anonymous writer of the ninth or tenth century speaks of six hours a day as the usual task of a scribe, which would absorb all the time available for active work in the day of a medieval monk. In the Middle Ages monasteries were founded by the nobility. Cluny Abbey was founded by William I, Duke of Aquitaine in 910; the abbey was noted for its strict adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict.
The abbot of Cluny was the superior of all the daughter houses, through appointed priors. One of the earliest reforms of Benedictine practice was that initiated in 980 by Romuald, who founded the Camaldolese community; the dominance of the Benedictine monastic way of life began to decline towards the end of the twelfth century, which saw the rise of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Benedictines took a fourth vow of "stability". Not being bound by location, the mendicants were better able to respond to an "urban" environment; this decline was further exacerbated by the practice of appointing a commendatory abbot, a lay person, appointed by a noble to oversee and to protect the goods of the monastery. Oftentimes, this resulted in the appropriation of the assets of monasteries at the expense of the community which they were intended to support; the English Benedictine Congregation is the oldest of the nineteen Benedictine congregations. Augustine of Canterbury and his monks established the first English Benedictine monastery at Canterbury soon after their arrival in 597.
Other foundations followed. Through the influence of Wilfrid, Benedict Biscop, Dunstan, the Benedictine Rule spread with extraordinary rapidity, in the North it was adopted in most of the monasteries, founded by the Celtic missionaries from Iona. Many of the episcopal sees of England were founded and governed by the Benedictines, no fewer than nine of the old cathedrals were served by the black monks of the priories attached to them. Monasteries served as places of refuge for the weak and homeless; the monks studied the healing properties of plants and minerals to alleviate the sufferings of the sick. Germany was evangelized by English Benedictines. Willibrord and Boniface preached there in the seventh and eighth centuries and founded several abbeys. In the English Reformation, all monasteries were dissolved and their lands confiscated by the Crown, forcing their Catholic members to flee into exile on the Continent. During the 19th century they were able to return to England, including to Selby Abbey in Yorkshire, one of the few great monastic churches to survive the Dissolution.
St. Mildred's Priory, on the Isle of Thanet, was built in 1027 on the site of an abbey founded in 670 by the daughter of the first Christian King of Kent; the priory is home to a community of Benedictine nuns. Five of
Coffee
Coffee is a brewed drink prepared from roasted coffee beans, the seeds of berries from certain Coffea species. The genus Coffea is native to tropical Africa and Madagascar, the Comoros, Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Coffee plants are now cultivated in over 70 countries in the equatorial regions of the Americas, Southeast Asia, Indian subcontinent, Africa; the two most grown are C. arabica and C. robusta. Once ripe, coffee berries are picked and dried. Dried coffee seeds are roasted to varying degrees, depending on the desired flavor. Roasted beans are ground and brewed with near-boiling water to produce the beverage known as coffee. Coffee is darkly colored, bitter acidic and has a stimulating effect in humans due to its caffeine content, it is one of the most popular drinks in the world, it can be prepared and presented in a variety of ways. It is served hot, although iced coffee is a popular alternative. Clinical studies indicate that moderate coffee consumption is benign or mildly beneficial in healthy adults, with continuing research on whether long-term consumption lowers the risk of some diseases, although those long-term studies are of poor quality.
The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking appears in modern-day Yemen in southern Arabia in the middle of the 15th century in Sufi shrines. It was here in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a similar way to how it is now prepared, but the coffee seeds had to be first exported from East Africa to Yemen, as the Coffea arabica plant is thought to have been indigenous to the former. The Yemenis began to cultivate the seed. By the 16th century, the drink had reached Persia and North Africa. From there, it spread to the rest of the world; as of 2016, Brazil was the leading grower of producing one-third of the world total. Coffee is a major export commodity, it is one of the most valuable commodities exported by developing countries. Green, unroasted coffee is one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world; some controversy has been associated with coffee cultivation and the way developed countries trade with developing nations, as well as the impact on the environment with regards to the clearing of land for coffee-growing and water use.
The markets for fair trade and organic coffee are expanding, notably in the USA. The word coffee appears to have derived from the name of the region where coffee beans were first used by a herder in the 6th or 9th century: kaffa derived from Kaffa Province, the name of the region in ancient Abyssinia; the word "coffee" entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, borrowed from the Ottoman Turkish kahve, borrowed in turn from the Arabic qahwah. The Arabic word qahwah was traditionally held to refer to a type of wine whose etymology is given by Arab lexicographers as deriving from the verb qahiya, "to lack hunger", in reference to the drink's reputation as an appetite suppressant, it has been proposed that the source may be the Proto-Central Semitic root q-h-h meaning "dark". The term "coffee pot" dates from 1705; the expression "coffee break" was first attested in 1952. According to legend, ancestors of today's Oromo people in a region of Kaffa in Ethiopia were believed to have been the first to recognize the energizing effect of the coffee plant.
However, there is no direct evidence, found earlier than the 15th century indicating where in Africa coffee first grew or who among the native populations might have used it as a stimulant. The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goatherd who discovered coffee when he noticed how excited his goats became after eating the beans from a coffee plant, did not appear in writing until 1671 and is apocryphal. Other accounts attribute the discovery of coffee to Sheikh Omar. According to an ancient chronicle, known for his ability to cure the sick through prayer, was once exiled from Mocha in Yemen to a desert cave near Ousab. Starving, Omar found them to be bitter, he tried roasting the seeds to improve the flavor. He tried boiling them to soften the seed, which resulted in a fragrant brown liquid. Upon drinking the liquid Omar was sustained for days; as stories of this "miracle drug" reached Mocha, Omar was made a saint. The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar in Yemen.
It was here in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way to how it is prepared now. Coffee was used by Sufi circles to stay awake for their religious rituals. Accounts differ on the origin of the coffee plant prior to its appearance in Yemen. From Ethiopia, coffee could have been introduced to Yemen via trade across the Red Sea. One account credits Muhammad Ibn Sa'd for bringing the beverage to Aden from the African coast. Other early accounts say Ali ben Omar of the Shadhili Sufi order was the first to introduce coffee to Arabia. According to al Shardi, Ali ben Omar may have encountered coffee during his stay with the Adal king Sadadin's companions in 1401. Famous 16th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Hajar al-Haytami notes in his
Phenotype
The phenotype of an organism is the composite of the organism's observable characteristics or traits, including its morphology or physical form and structure. An organism's phenotype results from two basic factors: the expression of an organism's genetic code, or its genotype, the influence of environmental factors, which may interact, further affecting phenotype; when two or more different phenotypes exist in the same population of a species, the species is called polymorphic. A well-documented polymorphism is Labrador Retriever coloring. Richard Dawkins in 1978 and again in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype suggested that bird nests and other built structures such as caddis fly larvae cases and beaver dams can be considered as "extended phenotypes"; the genotype-phenotype distinction was proposed by Wilhelm Johannsen in 1911 to make clear the difference between an organism's heredity and what that heredity produces. The distinction is similar to that proposed by August Weismann, who distinguished between germ plasm and somatic cells.
The genotype-phenotype distinction should not be confused with Francis Crick's central dogma of molecular biology, a statement about the directionality of molecular sequential information flowing from DNA to protein, not the reverse. The term "phenotype" has sometimes been incorrectly used as a shorthand for phenotypic difference from wild type, bringing the absurd statement that a mutation has no phenotype. Despite its straightforward definition, the concept of the phenotype has hidden subtleties, it may seem that anything dependent on the genotype is a phenotype, including molecules such as RNA and proteins. Most molecules and structures coded by the genetic material are not visible in the appearance of an organism, yet they are observable and are thus part of the phenotype, it may seem that this goes beyond the original intentions of the concept with its focus on the organism in itself. Either way, the term phenotype includes inherent traits or characteristics that are observable or traits that can be made visible by some technical procedure.
A notable extension to this idea is the presence of "organic molecules" or metabolites that are generated by organisms from chemical reactions of enzymes. Another extension adds behavior to the phenotype. Behavioral phenotypes include cognitive and behavioral patterns; some behavioral phenotypes may characterize psychiatric syndromes. Phenotypic variation is a fundamental prerequisite for evolution by natural selection, it is the living organism as a whole that contributes to the next generation, so natural selection affects the genetic structure of a population indirectly via the contribution of phenotypes. Without phenotypic variation, there would be no evolution by natural selection; the interaction between genotype and phenotype has been conceptualized by the following relationship: genotype + environment → phenotype A more nuanced version of the relationship is: genotype + environment + genotype & environment interactions → phenotype Genotypes have much flexibility in the modification and expression of phenotypes.
The plant Hieracium umbellatum is found growing in two different habitats in Sweden. One habitat is rocky, sea-side cliffs, where the plants are bushy with broad leaves and expanded inflorescences; these habitats alternate along the coast of Sweden and the habitat that the seeds of Hieracium umbellatum land in, determine the phenotype that grows. An example of random variation in Drosophila flies is the number of ommatidia, which may vary between left and right eyes in a single individual as much as they do between different genotypes overall, or between clones raised in different environments; the concept of phenotype can be extended to variations below the level of the gene that affect an organism's fitness. For example, silent mutations that do not change the corresponding amino acid sequence of a gene may change the frequency of guanine-cytosine base pairs; these base pairs have a higher thermal stability than adenine-thymine, a property that might convey, among organisms living in high-temperature environments, a selective advantage on variants enriched in GC content.
Richard Dawkins described a phenotype that included all effects that a gene has on its surroundings, including other organisms, as an extended phenotype, arguing that "An animal's behavior tends to maximize the survival of the genes'for' that behavior, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it." For instance, an organism such as a beaver modifies its environment by building a beaver dam. When a bird feeds a brood parasite such as a cuckoo, it is unwittingly extending its phenotype.
Body of water
A body of water or waterbody is any significant accumulation of water on a planet's surface. The term most refers to oceans and lakes, but it includes smaller pools of water such as ponds, wetlands, or more puddles. A body of water contained. Most are occurring geographical features, but some are artificial. There are types. For example, most reservoirs are created by engineering dams, but some natural lakes are used as reservoirs. Most harbors are occurring bays, but some harbors have been created through construction. Bodies of water that are navigable are known as waterways; some bodies of water collect and move water, such as rivers and streams, others hold water, such as lakes and oceans. The term body of water can refer to a reservoir of water held by a plant, technically known as a phytotelma. Bodies of water are affected by gravity, what creates the tidal effects on Earth. Note that there are some geographical features involving water that are not bodies of water, for example waterfalls and rapids.
Arm of the sea – sea arm, used to describe a sea loch. Arroyo – a dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain, or seasonally. See wadi. Artificial lake or artificial pond – see Reservoir. Barachois – a lagoon separated from the ocean by a sand bar. Bay – an area of water bordered by land on three sides, similar to, but smaller than a gulf. Bayou – a slow-moving stream or a marshy lake. Beck – a small stream. Bight – a large and only receding bay, or a bend in any geographical feature. Billabong – an oxbow lake in Australia. Boil – see Seep Brook – a small stream. Burn – a small stream. Canal – an artificial waterway connected to existing lakes, rivers, or oceans. Channel – the physical confine of a river, slough or ocean strait consisting of a bed and banks. See stream bed and strait. Cove – a coastal landform. Earth scientists use the term to describe a circular or round inlet with a narrow entrance, though colloquially the term is sometimes used to describe any sheltered bay.
Creek – a small stream. Creek – an inlet of the sea, narrower than a cove. Delta – the location where a river flows into an ocean, estuary, lake, or reservoir. Distributary or distributary channel – a stream that branches off and flows away from a main stream channel. Drainage basin – a region of land where water from rain or snowmelt drains downhill into another body of water, such as a river, lake, or reservoir. Draw – a dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain, or seasonally. See wadi. Estuary – a semi-enclosed coastal body of water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, with a free connection to the open sea Firth – a regional term of Scotland used to denote various coastal waters, such as large sea bays, estuaries and straits. Fjord – a narrow inlet of the sea between cliffs or steep slopes. Glacier – a large collection of ice or a frozen river that moves down a mountain. Glacial pothole – a kettle Gulf – a part of a lake or ocean that extends so that it is surrounded by land on three sides, similar to, but larger than a bay.
Headland – an area of water bordered by land on three sides. Harbor – an artificial or occurring body of water where ships are stored or may shelter from the ocean's weather and currents. Impoundment – an artificially-created body of water, by damming a source. Used for flood control, as a drinking water supply, ornamentation, or other purpose or combination of purposes. Note that the process of creating an "impoundment" of water is itself called "impoundment." Inlet – a body of water seawater, which has characteristics of one or more of the following: bay, estuary, fjord, sea loch, or sound. Kettle – a shallow, sediment-filled body of water formed by retreating glaciers or draining floodwaters. Kill – used in areas of Dutch influence in New York, New Jersey and other areas of the former New Netherland colony of Dutch America to describe a strait, river, or arm of the sea. Lagoon – a body of comparatively shallow salt or brackish water separated from the deeper sea by a shallow or exposed sandbank, coral reef, or similar feature.
Lake – a body of water freshwater, of large size contained on a body of land. Lick — a small watercourse or an ephemeral stream Loch – a body of water such as a lake, sea inlet, fjord, estuary or bay. Mangrove swamp – Saline coastal habitat of mangrove trees and shrubs. Marsh – a wetland featuring grasses, reeds, typhas and other herbaceous plants in a context of shallow water. See Salt marsh. Mediterranean sea – a enclosed sea that has limited exchange of deep water with outer oceans and where the water circulation is dominated by salinity and temperature differences rather than winds Mere – a lake or body of water, broad in relation to its depth. Mill pond – a reservoir built to provide flowing water to a watermill Moat – a deep, broad trench, either dry or filled with water and protecting a structure, installation, or town. Ocean – a major body of salty water that, in totality, covers about 71% of the Earth's surface. Oxbow lake – a U-shaped lake formed when a wide meander from the mainstem of a riv
Wine
Wine is an alcoholic drink made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol, carbon dioxide, heat. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts produce different styles of wine; these variations result from the complex interactions between the biochemical development of the grape, the reactions involved in fermentation, the terroir, the production process. Many countries enact legal appellations intended to define qualities of wine; these restrict the geographical origin and permitted varieties of grapes, as well as other aspects of wine production. Wines not made from grapes include rice wine and fruit wines such as plum, pomegranate and elderberry. Wine has been produced for thousands of years; the earliest known traces of wine are from Georgia and Sicily although there is evidence of a similar alcoholic drink being consumed earlier in China. The earliest known winery is the 6,100-year-old Areni-1 winery in Armenia. Wine reached the Balkans by 4500 BC and was consumed and celebrated in ancient Greece and Rome.
Throughout history, wine has been consumed for its intoxicating effects. Wine has long played an important role in religion. Red wine was associated with blood by the ancient Egyptians and was used by both the Greek cult of Dionysus and the Romans in their Bacchanalia; the earliest archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence for grape wine and viniculture, dating to 6000–5800 BC was found on the territory of modern Georgia. Both archaeological and genetic evidence suggest that the earliest production of wine elsewhere was later having taken place in the Southern Caucasus, or the West Asian region between Eastern Turkey, northern Iran; the earliest evidence of a grape-based fermented drink was found in China, Georgia from 6000 BC, Iran from 5000 BC, Sicily from 4000 BC. The earliest evidence of a wine production facility is the Areni-1 winery in Armenia and is at least 6100 years old. A 2003 report by archaeologists indicates a possibility that grapes were mixed with rice to produce mixed fermented drinks in China in the early years of the seventh millennium BC.
Pottery jars from the Neolithic site of Jiahu, contained traces of tartaric acid and other organic compounds found in wine. However, other fruits indigenous to the region, such as hawthorn, cannot be ruled out. If these drinks, which seem to be the precursors of rice wine, included grapes rather than other fruits, they would have been any of the several dozen indigenous wild species in China, rather than Vitis vinifera, introduced there 6000 years later; the spread of wine culture westwards was most due to the Phoenicians who spread outward from a base of city-states along the Mediterranean coast of what are today Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. The wines of Byblos were exported to Egypt during the Old Kingdom and throughout the Mediterranean. Evidence includes two Phoenician shipwrecks from 750 BC discovered by Robert Ballard, whose cargo of wine was still intact; as the first great traders in wine, the Phoenicians seem to have protected it from oxidation with a layer of olive oil, followed by a seal of pinewood and resin, similar to retsina.
Although the nuragic Sardinians consumed wine before the arrival of the Phoenicians The earliest remains of Apadana Palace in Persepolis dating back to 515 BC include carvings depicting soldiers from Achaemenid Empire subject nations bringing gifts to the Achaemenid king, among them Armenians bringing their famous wine. Literary references to wine are abundant in Homer and others. In ancient Egypt, six of 36 wine amphoras were found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun bearing the name "Kha'y", a royal chief vintner. Five of these amphoras were designated as originating from the king's personal estate, with the sixth from the estate of the royal house of Aten. Traces of wine have been found in central Asian Xinjiang in modern-day China, dating from the second and first millennia BC; the first known mention of grape-based wines in India is from the late 4th-century BC writings of Chanakya, the chief minister of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya. In his writings, Chanakya condemns the use of alcohol while chronicling the emperor and his court's frequent indulgence of a style of wine known as madhu.
The ancient Romans planted vineyards near garrison towns so wine could be produced locally rather than shipped over long distances. Some of these areas are now world-renowned for wine production; the Romans discovered that burning sulfur candles inside empty wine vessels kept them fresh and free from a vinegar smell. In medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church supported wine because the clergy required it for the Mass. Monks in France made wine for years. An old English recipe that survived in various forms until the 19th century calls for refining white wine from bastard—bad or tainted bastardo wine; the English word "wine" comes from the Proto-Germanic *winam, an early borrowing from the Latin vinum, "wine" or " vine", itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European stem *win-o-. The earliest attested terms referring to wine are the Mycenaean Greek me-tu-wo ne-wo, meaning "in" or " of the new wine", wo-no-wa-ti-si, meaning "wine garden", written in Linear B inscriptions. Linear B includes, inter alia, an ideogram for wine
Microbiota
A microbiota is an "ecological community of commensal and pathogenic microorganisms" found in and on all multicellular organisms studied to date from plants to animals. A microbiota includes bacteria, protists and viruses. Microbiota have been found to be crucial for immunologic and metabolic homeostasis of their host; the synonymous term microbiome describes either the collective genomes of the microorganisms that reside in an environmental niche or the microorganisms themselves. The microbiome and host emerged during evolution as a synergistic unit from epigenetics and genetic characteristics, sometimes collectively referred to as a holobiont. All plants and animals, from simple life forms to humans, live in close association with microbial organisms. Several advances have driven the perception of microbiomes, including: the ability to perform genomic and gene expression analyses of single cells and of entire microbial communities in the disciplines of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics databases accessible to researchers across multiple disciplines methods of mathematical analysis suitable for complex data setsBiologists have come to appreciate that microbes make up an important part of an organism's phenotype, far beyond the occasional symbiotic case study.
Commensalism, a concept developed by Pierre-Joseph van Beneden, a Belgian professor at the University of Louvain during the nineteenth century is central to the microbiome, where microbiota colonize a host in a non-harmful coexistence. The relationship with their host is called mutualistic when organisms perform tasks that are known to be useful for the host, when disadvantageous to the host. Other authors define a situation as mutualistic where both benefit, commensal, where the unaffected host benefits the symbiont. A nutrient exchange may be bidirectional or unidirectional, may be context dependent and may occur in diverse ways. Microbiota that are expected to be present, that under normal circumstances do not cause disease, are deemed normal flora or normal microbiota; the initial acquisition of microbiota in animals from mammalians to marine sponges is at birth, may occur through the germ cell line. In plants, the colonizing process can be initiated below ground in the root zone, around the germinating seed, the spermosphere, or originate from the above ground parts, the phyllosphere and the flower zone or anthosphere.
The stability of the rhizosphere microbiota over generations depends upon the plant type but more on the soil composition, i.e. living and non living environment. Consensus exists among evolutionary biologists that one should not separate an organism's genes from the context of its resident microbes; the human microbiota includes bacteria, fungi and viruses. Micro-animals which live on the human body are excluded; the human microbiome refers to their genomes. Humans are colonized by many microorganisms; the Human Microbiome Project sequenced the genome of the human microbiota, focusing on the microbiota that inhabit the skin, nose, digestive tract, vagina. It reached a milestone in 2012. Amphibians have microbiota on their skin; some species are able to carry a fungus named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which in others can cause a deadly infection Chytridiomycosis depending on their microbiome, resisting pathogen colonization or inhibiting their growth with antimicrobial skin peptides. In mammals, herbivores such as cattle depend on their rumen microbiome to convert cellulose into proteins, short chain fatty acids, gases.
Culture methods cannot provide information on all microorganisms present. Comparative metagenomic studies yielded the surprising result that individual cattle possess markedly different community structures, predicted phenotype, metabolic potentials though they were fed identical diets, were housed together, were functionally identical in their utilization of plant cell wall resources. Mice have become the most studied mammalian regarding their microbiomes; the gut microbiota have been studied in relation to allergic airway disease, gastrointestinal diseases and diabetes. Perinatal shifting of microbiota through low dose antibiotics can have long-lasting effects on future susceptibility to allergic airway disease; the frequency of certain subsets of microbes has been linked to disease severity. The presence of specific microbes early in postnatal life, instruct future immune responses. In gnotobiotic mice certain gut bacteria were found to transmit a particular phenotype to recipient germ-free mice, that promoted accumulation of colonic regulatory T cells, strains that modulated mouse adiposity and cecal metabolite concentrations.
This combinatorial approach enables a systems-level understanding of microbial contributions to human biology. But other mucoide tissues as lung and vagina have been studied in relation to diseases such as asthma and vaginosis. Insects have their own microbiomes. For example, leaf-cutter ants form huge underground colonies harvesting hundreds of kilograms of leaves each year and are unable to digest the cellulose in the leaves directly, they maintain fungus gardens as the colony's primary food source. While the fungus itself does not digest cellulose, a microbial community containing a diversity of bacteria is doing so. Analysis of the microbial population's genome revealed many genes with a role in cellulose digestion; this microbiome's predicted carbohydrate-degrading enzyme profile is similar to that of the bovine rumen, but the species composition is entirely different. Gut
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