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Cloning

Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical genomes, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction; this reproduction of an organism by itself without a mate is known as parthenogenesis. In the field of biotechnology, cloning is the process of creating cloned organisms of cells and of DNA fragments.

The artificial cloning of organisms, sometimes known as reproductive cloning, is often accomplished via somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a cloning method in which a viable embryo is created from a somatic cell and an egg cell. In 1996, Dolly the sheep achieved notoriety for being the first mammal cloned from a somatic cell. Another example of artificial cloning is molecular cloning, a technique in molecular biology in which a single living cell is used to clone a large population of cells that contain identical DNA molecules.

In bioethics, there are a variety of ethical positions regarding the practice and possibilities of cloning. The use of embryonic stem cells, which can be produced through SCNT, in some stem cell research has attracted controversy. Cloning has been proposed as a means of reviving extinct species. In popular culture, the concept of cloning—particularly human cloning—is often depicted in science fiction; depictions commonly involve themes related to identity, the recreation of historical figures or extinct species, or cloning for exploitation (e.g. cloning soldiers for warfare).

Etymology
Coined by Herbert J. Webber, the term clone derives from the Ancient Greek word κλών, twig, which is the process whereby a new plant is created from a twig. In botany, the term lusus was used. In horticulture, the spelling clon was used until the early twentieth century; the final e came into use to indicate the vowel is a "long o" instead of a "short o". Since the term entered the popular lexicon in a more general context, the spelling clone has been used exclusively.

Natural cloning
Natural cloning is the production of clones without the involvement of genetic engineering techniques. It may occur accidentally in the case of identical twins, which are formed when a fertilized egg splits, creating two or more embryos that carry almost identical DNA. It may also be part of asexual reproduction, which is a process where a single parent organism produces genetically identical offspring by itself.

Cloning is a natural form of reproduction that has allowed life forms to spread for hundreds of millions of years. It is a reproduction method used by plants, fungi, and bacteria, and is also the way that clonal colonies reproduce themselves. Examples of these organisms include blueberry plants, Hazel trees, the Pando trees, the Kentucky coffeetree, Myrica, and the American sweetgum.

If artificial cloning and natural cloning both lead to the same result, which is the formation of a clone, that is, an organism with identical or nearly identical genes to another organism, then the plight of This creation is very different between the two creatures. The main difference between the two is that natural cloning does not involve any human intervention, whereas artificial cloning is a genetic engineering technique. Natural cloning occurs through a variety of natural mechanisms, from single-celled organisms to complex multicellular organisms. Some of the mechanisms are explored and used into plants and animals as binary fission, Budding, Fragmentation, parthenogenesis.

Molecular cloning
Molecular cloning refers to the process of making multiple molecules. Cloning is commonly used to amplify DNA fragments containing whole genes, but it can also be used to amplify any DNA sequence such as promoters, non-coding sequences and randomly fragmented DNA. It is used in a wide array of biological experiments and practical applications ranging from genetic fingerprinting to large scale protein production. Occasionally, the term cloning is misleadingly used to refer to the identification of the chromosomal location of a gene associated with a particular phenotype of interest, such as in positional cloning. In practice, localization of the gene to a chromosome or genomic region does not necessarily enable one to isolate or amplify the relevant genomic sequence. To amplify any DNA sequence in a living organism, that sequence must be linked to an origin of replication, which is a sequence of DNA capable of directing the propagation of itself and any linked sequence. However, a number of other features are needed, and a variety of specialised cloning vectors (small piece of DNA into which a foreign DNA fragment can be inserted) exist that allow protein production, affinity tagging, single-stranded RNA or DNA production and a host of other molecular biology tools.

Cloning of any DNA fragment essentially involves four steps
 * 1) fragmentation - breaking apart a strand of DNA
 * 2) ligation – gluing together pieces of DNA in a desired sequence
 * 3) transfection – inserting the newly formed pieces of DNA into cells
 * 4) screening/selection – selecting out the cells that were successfully transfected with the new DNA

Although these steps are invariable among cloning procedures a number of alternative routes can be selected; these are summarized as a cloning strategy.

Initially, the DNA of interest needs to be isolated to provide a DNA segment of suitable size. Subsequently, a ligation procedure is used where the amplified fragment is inserted into a vector (piece of DNA). The vector (which is frequently circular) is linearised using restriction enzymes, and incubated with the fragment of interest under appropriate conditions with an enzyme called DNA ligase. Following ligation, the vector with the insert of interest is transfected into cells. A number of alternative techniques are available, such as chemical sensitisation of cells, electroporation, optical injection and biolistics. Finally, the transfected cells are cultured. As the aforementioned procedures are of particularly low efficiency, there is a need to identify the cells that have been successfully transfected with the vector construct containing the desired insertion sequence in the required orientation. Modern cloning vectors include selectable antibiotic resistance markers, which allow only cells in which the vector has been transfected, to grow. Additionally, the cloning vectors may contain colour selection markers, which provide blue/white screening (alpha-factor complementation) on X-gal medium. Nevertheless, these selection steps do not absolutely guarantee that the DNA insert is present in the cells obtained. Further investigation of the resulting colonies must be required to confirm that cloning was successful. This may be accomplished by means of PCR, restriction fragment analysis and/or DNA sequencing.

Cloning unicellular organisms
Cloning a cell means to derive a population of cells from a single cell. In the case of unicellular organisms such as bacteria and yeast, this process is remarkably simple and essentially only requires the inoculation of the appropriate medium. However, in the case of cell cultures from multi-cellular organisms, cell cloning is an arduous task as these cells will not readily grow in standard media.

A useful tissue culture technique used to clone distinct lineages of cell lines involves the use of cloning rings (cylinders). In this technique a single-cell suspension of cells that have been exposed to a mutagenic agent or drug used to drive selection is plated at high dilution to create isolated colonies, each arising from a single and potentially clonal distinct cell. At an early growth stage when colonies consist of only a few cells, sterile polystyrene rings (cloning rings), which have been dipped in grease, are placed over an individual colony and a small amount of trypsin is added. Cloned cells are collected from inside the ring and transferred to a new vessel for further growth.

Cloning stem cells
Somatic-cell nuclear transfer, popularly known as SCNT, can also be used to create embryos for research or therapeutic purposes. The most likely purpose for this is to produce embryos for use in stem cell research. This process is also called "research cloning" or "therapeutic cloning". The goal is not to create cloned human beings (called "reproductive cloning"), but rather to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to potentially treat disease. While a clonal human blastocyst has been created, stem cell lines are yet to be isolated from a clonal source.

Therapeutic cloning is achieved by creating embryonic stem cells in the hopes of treating diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer's. The process begins by removing the nucleus (containing the DNA) from an egg cell and inserting a nucleus from the adult cell to be cloned. In the case of someone with Alzheimer's disease, the nucleus from a skin cell of that patient is placed into an empty egg. The reprogrammed cell begins to develop into an embryo because the egg reacts with the transferred nucleus. The embryo will become genetically identical to the patient. The embryo will then form a blastocyst which has the potential to form/become any cell in the body.

The reason why SCNT is used for cloning is because somatic cells can be easily acquired and cultured in the lab. This process can either add or delete specific genomes of farm animals. A key point to remember is that cloning is achieved when the oocyte maintains its normal functions and instead of using sperm and egg genomes to replicate, the donor's somatic cell nucleus is inserted into the oocyte. The oocyte will react to the somatic cell nucleus, the same way it would to a sperm cell's nucleus.

The process of cloning a particular farm animal using SCNT is relatively the same for all animals. The first step is to collect the somatic cells from the animal that will be cloned. The somatic cells could be used immediately or stored in the laboratory for later use. The hardest part of SCNT is removing maternal DNA from an oocyte at metaphase II. Once this has been done, the somatic nucleus can be inserted into an egg cytoplasm. This creates a one-cell embryo. The grouped somatic cell and egg cytoplasm are then introduced to an electrical current. This energy will hopefully allow the cloned embryo to begin development. The successfully developed embryos are then placed in surrogate recipients, such as a cow or sheep in the case of farm animals.

SCNT is seen as a good method for producing agriculture animals for food consumption. It successfully cloned sheep, cattle, goats, and pigs. Another benefit is SCNT is seen as a solution to clone endangered species that are on the verge of going extinct. However, stresses placed on both the egg cell and the introduced nucleus can be enormous, which led to a high loss in resulting cells in early research. For example, the cloned sheep Dolly was born after 277 eggs were used for SCNT, which created 29 viable embryos. Only three of these embryos survived until birth, and only one survived to adulthood. As the procedure could not be automated, and had to be performed manually under a microscope, SCNT was very resource intensive. The biochemistry involved in reprogramming the differentiated somatic cell nucleus and activating the recipient egg was also far from being well understood. However, by 2014 researchers were reporting cloning success rates of seven to eight out of ten and in 2016, a Korean Company Sooam Biotech was reported to be producing 500 cloned embryos per day.

In SCNT, not all of the donor cell's genetic information is transferred, as the donor cell's mitochondria that contain their own mitochondrial DNA are left behind. The resulting hybrid cells retain those mitochondrial structures which originally belonged to the egg. As a consequence, clones such as Dolly that are born from SCNT are not perfect copies of the donor of the nucleus.

Organism cloning
Organism cloning (also called reproductive cloning) refers to the procedure of creating a new multicellular organism, genetically identical to another. In essence this form of cloning is an asexual method of reproduction, where fertilization or inter-gamete contact does not take place. Asexual reproduction is a naturally occurring phenomenon in many species, including most plants and some insects. Scientists have made some major achievements with cloning, including the asexual reproduction of sheep and cows. There is a lot of ethical debate over whether or not cloning should be used. However, cloning, or asexual propagation, has been common practice in the horticultural world for hundreds of years.

Horticultural
The term clone is used in horticulture to refer to descendants of a single plant which were produced by vegetative reproduction or apomixis. Many horticultural plant cultivars are clones, having been derived from a single individual, multiplied by some process other than sexual reproduction. As an example, some European cultivars of grapes represent clones that have been propagated for over two millennia. Other examples are potato and banana.

Grafting can be regarded as cloning, since all the shoots and branches coming from the graft are genetically a clone of a single individual, but this particular kind of cloning has not come under ethical scrutiny and is generally treated as an entirely different kind of operation.

Many trees, shrubs, vines, ferns and other herbaceous perennials form clonal colonies naturally. Parts of an individual plant may become detached by fragmentation and grow on to become separate clonal individuals. A common example is in the vegetative reproduction of moss and liverwort gametophyte clones by means of gemmae. Some vascular plants e.g. dandelion and certain viviparous grasses also form seeds asexually, termed apomixis, resulting in clonal populations of genetically identical individuals.

Parthenogenesis
Clonal derivation exists in nature in some animal species and is referred to as parthenogenesis (reproduction of an organism by itself without a mate). This is an asexual form of reproduction that is only found in females of some insects, crustaceans, nematodes, fish (for example the hammerhead shark ), Cape honeybees, and lizards including the Komodo dragon and several whiptails. The growth and development occurs without fertilization by a male. In plants, parthenogenesis means the development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg cell, and is a component process of apomixis. In species that use the XY sex-determination system, the offspring will always be female. An example is the little fire ant (Wasmannia auropunctata), which is native to Central and South America but has spread throughout many tropical environments.

Artificial cloning of organisms
Artificial cloning of organisms may also be called reproductive cloning.

First steps
Hans Spemann, a German embryologist was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1935 for his discovery of the effect now known as embryonic induction, exercised by various parts of the embryo, that directs the development of groups of cells into particular tissues and organs. In 1924 he and his student, Hilde Mangold, were the first to perform somatic-cell nuclear transfer using amphibian embryos – one of the first steps towards cloning.

Methods
Reproductive cloning generally uses "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT) to create animals that are genetically identical. This process entails the transfer of a nucleus from a donor adult cell (somatic cell) to an egg from which the nucleus has been removed, or to a cell from a blastocyst from which the nucleus has been removed. If the egg begins to divide normally it is transferred into the uterus of the surrogate mother. Such clones are not strictly identical since the somatic cells may contain mutations in their nuclear DNA. Additionally, the mitochondria in the cytoplasm also contains DNA and during SCNT this mitochondrial DNA is wholly from the cytoplasmic donor's egg, thus the mitochondrial genome is not the same as that of the nucleus donor cell from which it was produced. This may have important implications for cross-species nuclear transfer in which nuclear-mitochondrial incompatibilities may lead to death.

Artificial embryo splitting or embryo twinning, a technique that creates monozygotic twins from a single embryo, is not considered in the same fashion as other methods of cloning. During that procedure, a donor embryo is split in two distinct embryos, that can then be transferred via embryo transfer. It is optimally performed at the 6- to 8-cell stage, where it can be used as an expansion of IVF to increase the number of available embryos. If both embryos are successful, it gives rise to monozygotic (identical) twins.

Dolly the sheep

Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe, was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell. Dolly was formed by taking a cell from the udder of her 6-year-old biological mother. Dolly's embryo was created by taking the cell and inserting it into a sheep ovum. It took 435 attempts before an embryo was successful. The embryo was then placed inside a female sheep that went through a normal pregnancy. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland by British scientists Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell and lived there from her birth in 1996 until her death in 2003 when she was six. She was born on 5 July 1996 but not announced to the world until 22 February 1997. Her stuffed remains were placed at Edinburgh's Royal Museum, part of the National Museums of Scotland.

Dolly was publicly significant because the effort showed that genetic material from a specific adult cell, designed to express only a distinct subset of its genes, can be redesigned to grow an entirely new organism. Before this demonstration, it had been shown by John Gurdon that nuclei from differentiated cells could give rise to an entire organism after transplantation into an enucleated egg. However, this concept was not yet demonstrated in a mammalian system.

The first mammalian cloning (resulting in Dolly) had a success rate of 29 embryos per 277 fertilized eggs, which produced three lambs at birth, one of which lived. In a bovine experiment involving 70 cloned calves, one-third of the calves died quite young. The first successfully cloned horse, Prometea, took 814 attempts. Notably, although the first clones were frogs, no adult cloned frog has yet been produced from a somatic adult nucleus donor cell.

There were early claims that Dolly had pathologies resembling accelerated aging. Scientists speculated that Dolly's death in 2003 was related to the shortening of telomeres, DNA-protein complexes that protect the end of linear chromosomes. However, other researchers, including Ian Wilmut who led the team that successfully cloned Dolly, argue that Dolly's early death due to respiratory infection was unrelated to problems with the cloning process. This idea that the nuclei have not irreversibly aged was shown in 2013 to be true for mice.

Dolly was named after performer Dolly Parton because the cells cloned to make her were from a mammary gland cell, and Parton is known for her ample cleavage.

Species cloned and applications
The modern cloning techniques involving nuclear transfer have been successfully performed on several species. Notable experiments include:
 * Tadpole: (1952) Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King successfully cloned northern leopard frogs: thirty-five complete embryos and twenty-seven tadpoles from one-hundred and four successful nuclear transfers.
 * Carp: (1963) In China, embryologist Tong Dizhou produced the world's first cloned fish by inserting the DNA from a cell of a male carp into an egg from a female carp. He published the findings in a Chinese science journal.
 * Zebrafish: (1981) George Streisinger produced the first cloned vertebrate.
 * Sheep: (1984) Steen Willadsen produced the first cloned mammal from early embryonic cells.
 * In June 1995, the Roslin Institute cloned Megan and Morag from differentiated embryonic cells.
 * In July 1996, PPL Therapeutics and the Roslin Institute cloned Dolly the sheep from a somatic cell.
 * Mouse: (1986) A mouse was successfully cloned from an early embryonic cell. In 1987, Soviet scientists Levon Chaylakhyan, Veprencev, Sviridova, and Nikitin cloned Masha, a mouse.
 * Rhesus monkey: (October 1999) The Oregon National Primate Research Center cloned Tetra from embryo splitting and not nuclear transfer: a process more akin to artificial formation of twins.
 * Pig: (March 2000) PPL Therapeutics cloned five piglets. By 2014, BGI in China was producing 500 cloned pigs a year to test new medicines.
 * Gaur: (2001) was the first endangered species cloned.
 * Cattle:
 * Alpha and Beta (males, 2001) and (2005), Brazil
 * In 2023, Chinese scientists reported the cloning of three supercows with a milk productivity "nearly 1.7 times the amount of milk an average cow in the United States produced in 2021" and a plan for 1,000 of such super cows in the near-term. According to a news report "[i]n many countries, including the United States, farmers breed clones with conventional animals to add desirable traits, such as high milk production or disease resistance, into the gene pool".
 * Cat: CopyCat "CC" (female, late 2001), Little Nicky, 2004, was the first cat cloned for commercial reasons
 * Rat: Ralph, the first cloned rat (2003)
 * Mule: Idaho Gem, a john mule born 4 May 2003, was the first horse-family clone.
 * Horse: Prometea, a Haflinger female born 28 May 2003, was the first horse clone.
 * Przewalksi's Horse: An ongoing cloning program by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and Revive & Restore attempts to reintroduce genetic diversity to this endangered species.
 * Kurt, the first cloned Przewalski's horse, was born in 2020. He was cloned from the skin tissue of a stallion which was preserved in 1980.
 * "Trey" was born in 2023. He was cloned from the same stallion's tissue as Kurt.
 * Dog:
 * Snuppy, a male Afghan hound was the first cloned dog (2005). In 2017, the world's first gene-editing clone dog, Apple, was created by Sinogene Biotechnology. Sooam Biotech, South Korea, was reported in 2015 to have cloned 700 dogs to date for their owners, including two Yakutian Laika hunting dogs, which are seriously endangered due to crossbreeding.
 * Cloning of super sniffer dogs was reported in 2011, four years afterwards when the dogs started working. Cloning of a successful rescue dog was also reported in 2009 and of a similar police dog in 2019. Cancer-sniffing dogs have also been cloned. A review concluded that "qualified elite working dogs can be produced by cloning a working dog that exhibits both an appropriate temperament and good health."
 * Wolf: Snuwolf and Snuwolffy, the first two cloned female wolves (2005).
 * Water buffalo: Samrupa was the first cloned water buffalo. It was born on 6 February 2009, at India's Karnal National Diary Research Institute but died five days later due to lung infection.
 * Pyrenean ibex: (2009) was the first extinct animal to be cloned back to life; the clone lived for seven minutes before dying of lung defects. The extinct Pyrenean ibex is a sub-species of the still-thriving Spanish ibex.
 * Camel: (2009) Injaz, was the first cloned camel.
 * Pashmina goat: (2012) Noori, is the first cloned pashmina goat. Scientists at the faculty of veterinary sciences and animal husbandry of Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir successfully cloned the first Pashmina goat (Noori) using the advanced reproductive techniques under the leadership of Riaz Ahmad Shah.
 * Goat: (2001) Scientists of Northwest A&F University successfully cloned the first goat which use the adult female cell.
 * Gastric brooding frog: (2013) The gastric brooding frog, Rheobatrachus silus, thought to have been extinct since 1983 was cloned in Australia, although the embryos died after a few days.
 * Macaque monkey: (2017) First successful cloning of a primate species using nuclear transfer, with the birth of two live clones named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. Conducted in China in 2017, and reported in January 2018.   In January 2019, scientists in China reported the creation of five identical cloned gene-edited monkeys, using the same cloning technique that was used with Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua and Dolly the sheep, and the gene-editing Crispr-Cas9 technique allegedly used by He Jiankui in creating the first ever gene-modified human babies Lulu and Nana. The monkey clones were made to study several medical diseases.
 * Black-footed ferret: (2020) A team of scientists cloned a female named Willa, who died in the mid-1980s and left no living descendants. Her clone, a female named Elizabeth Ann, was born on 10 December. Scientists hope that the contribution of this individual will alleviate the effects of inbreeding and help black-footed ferrets better cope with plague. Experts estimate that this female's genome contains three times as much genetic diversity as any of the modern black-footed ferrets.
 * First artificial parthenogenesis in mammals: (2022) Viable mice offspring was born from unfertilized eggs via targeted DNA methylation editing of seven imprinting control regions.

Human cloning
Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning, which is the reproduction of human cells and tissues. It does not refer to the natural conception and delivery of identical twins. The possibility of human cloning has raised controversies. These ethical concerns have prompted several nations to pass legislation regarding human cloning and its legality. As of right now, scientists have no intention of trying to clone people and they believe their results should spark a wider discussion about the laws and regulations the world needs to regulate cloning.

Two commonly discussed types of theoretical human cloning are therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning would involve cloning cells from a human for use in medicine and transplants, and is an active area of research, but is not in medical practice anywhere in the world,. Two common methods of therapeutic cloning that are being researched are somatic-cell nuclear transfer and, more recently, pluripotent stem cell induction. Reproductive cloning would involve making an entire cloned human, instead of just specific cells or tissues.

Ethical issues of cloning
There are a variety of ethical positions regarding the possibilities of cloning, especially human cloning. While many of these views are religious in origin, the questions raised by cloning are faced by secular perspectives as well. Perspectives on human cloning are theoretical, as human therapeutic and reproductive cloning are not commercially used; animals are currently cloned in laboratories and in livestock production.

Advocates support development of therapeutic cloning to generate tissues and whole organs to treat patients who otherwise cannot obtain transplants, to avoid the need for immunosuppressive drugs, and to stave off the effects of aging. Advocates for reproductive cloning believe that parents who cannot otherwise procreate should have access to the technology.

Opponents of cloning have concerns that technology is not yet developed enough to be safe and that it could be prone to abuse (leading to the generation of humans from whom organs and tissues would be harvested), as well as concerns about how cloned individuals could integrate with families and with society at large. Cloning humans could lead to serious violations of human rights.

Religious groups are divided, with some opposing the technology as usurping "God's place" and, to the extent embryos are used, destroying a human life; others support therapeutic cloning's potential life-saving benefits. There is at least one religion, Raëlism, in which cloning plays a major role.

Contemporary work on this topic is concerned with the ethics, adequate regulation and issues of any cloning carried out by humans, not potentially by extraterrestrials (including in the future), and largely also not replication – also described as mind cloning   – of potential whole brain emulations.

Cloning of animals is opposed by animal-groups due to the number of cloned animals that suffer from malformations before they die, and while food from cloned animals has been approved as safe by the US FDA, its use is opposed by groups concerned about food safety.

In practical terms, the inclusion of "licensing requirements for embryo research projects and fertility clinics, restrictions on the commodification of eggs and sperm, and measures to prevent proprietary interests from monopolizing access to stem cell lines" in international cloning regulations has been proposed, albeit e.g. effective oversight mechanisms or cloning requirements have not been described.

Cloning extinct and endangered species
Cloning, or more precisely, the reconstruction of functional DNA from extinct species has, for decades, been a dream. Possible implications of this were dramatized in the 1984 novel Carnosaur and the 1990 novel Jurassic Park. The best current cloning techniques have an average success rate of 9.4 percent (and as high as 25 percent ) when working with familiar species such as mice, while cloning wild animals is usually less than 1 percent successful.

Conservation cloning
Several tissue banks have come into existence, including the "Frozen zoo" at the San Diego Zoo, to store frozen tissue from the world's rarest and most endangered species. This is also referred to as "Conservation cloning".

Engineers have proposed a "lunar ark" in 2021 – storing millions of seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from Earth's contemporary species in a network of lava tubes on the Moon as a genetic backup. Similar proposals have been made since at least 2008. These also include sending human customer DNA, and a proposal for "a lunar backup record of humanity" that includes genetic information by Avi Loeb et al.

Scientists at the University of Newcastle and University of New South Wales announced in March 2013 that the very recently extinct gastric-brooding frog would be the subject of a cloning attempt to resurrect the species.

Many such "De-extinction" projects are being championed by the non-profit Revive & Restore.

De-extinction
One of the most anticipated targets for cloning was once the woolly mammoth, but attempts to extract DNA from frozen mammoths have been unsuccessful, though a joint Russo-Japanese team is currently working toward this goal. In January 2011, it was reported by Yomiuri Shimbun that a team of scientists headed by Akira Iritani of Kyoto University had built upon research by Dr. Wakayama, saying that they will extract DNA from a mammoth carcass that had been preserved in a Russian laboratory and insert it into the egg cells of an Asian elephant in hopes of producing a mammoth embryo. The researchers said they hoped to produce a baby mammoth within six years. It was noted, however that the result, if possible, would be an elephant-mammoth hybrid rather than a true mammoth. Another problem is the survival of the reconstructed mammoth: ruminants rely on a symbiosis with specific microbiota in their stomachs for digestion.

In 2022, scientists showed major limitations and the scale of challenge of genetic-editing-based de-extinction, suggesting resources spent on more comprehensive de-extinction projects such as of the woolly mammoth may currently not be well allocated and substantially limited. Their analyses "show that even when the extremely high-quality Norway brown rat (R. norvegicus) is used as a reference, nearly 5% of the genome sequence is unrecoverable, with 1,661 genes recovered at lower than 90% completeness, and 26 completely absent", complicated further by that "distribution of regions affected is not random, but for example, if 90% completeness is used as the cutoff, genes related to immune response and olfaction are excessively affected" due to which "a reconstructed Christmas Island rat would lack attributes likely critical to surviving in its natural or natural-like environment".

In a 2021 online session of the Russian Geographical Society, Russia's defense minister Sergei Shoigu mentioned using the DNA of 3,000-year-old Scythian warriors to potentially bring them back to life. The idea was described as absurd at least at this point in news reports and it was noted that Scythians likely weren't skilled warriors by default.

The idea of cloning Neanderthals or bringing them back to life in general is controversial but some scientists have stated that it may be possible in the future and have outlined several issues or problems with such as well as broad rationales for doing so.

Unsuccessful attempts
In 2001, a cow named Bessie gave birth to a cloned Asian gaur, an endangered species, but the calf died after two days. In 2003, a banteng was successfully cloned, followed by three African wildcats from a thawed frozen embryo. These successes provided hope that similar techniques (using surrogate mothers of another species) might be used to clone extinct species. Anticipating this possibility, tissue samples from the last bucardo (Pyrenean ibex) were frozen in liquid nitrogen immediately after it died in 2000. Researchers are also considering cloning endangered species such as the Giant panda and Cheetah.

In 2002, geneticists at the Australian Museum announced that they had replicated DNA of the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), at the time extinct for about 65 years, using polymerase chain reaction. However, on 15 February 2005 the museum announced that it was stopping the project after tests showed the specimens' DNA had been too badly degraded by the (ethanol) preservative. On 15 May 2005 it was announced that the thylacine project would be revived, with new participation from researchers in New South Wales and Victoria.

In 2003, for the first time, an extinct animal, the Pyrenean ibex mentioned above was cloned, at the Centre of Food Technology and Research of Aragon, using the preserved frozen cell nucleus of the skin samples from 2001 and domestic goat egg-cells. The ibex died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs.

Lifespan
After an eight-year project involving the use of a pioneering cloning technique, Japanese researchers created 25 generations of healthy cloned mice with normal lifespans, demonstrating that clones are not intrinsically shorter-lived than naturally born animals. Other sources have noted that the offspring of clones tend to be healthier than the original clones and indistinguishable from animals produced naturally.

Some posited that Dolly the sheep may have aged more quickly than naturally born animals, as she died relatively early for a sheep at the age of six. Ultimately, her death was attributed to a respiratory illness, and the "advanced aging" theory is disputed.

A detailed study released in 2016 and less detailed studies by others suggest that once cloned animals get past the first month or two of life they are generally healthy. However, early pregnancy loss and neonatal losses are still greater with cloning than natural conception or assisted reproduction (IVF). Current research is attempting to overcome these problems.

In popular culture
Discussion of cloning in the popular media often presents the subject negatively. In an article in the 8 November 1993 article of Time, cloning was portrayed in a negative way, modifying Michelangelo's Creation of Adam to depict Adam with five identical hands. Newsweek 10 March 1997 issue also critiqued the ethics of human cloning, and included a graphic depicting identical babies in beakers.

The concept of cloning, particularly human cloning, has featured a wide variety of science fiction works. An early fictional depiction of cloning is Bokanovsky's Process which features in Aldous Huxley's 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World. The process is applied to fertilized human eggs in vitro, causing them to split into identical genetic copies of the original. Following renewed interest in cloning in the 1950s, the subject was explored further in works such as Poul Anderson's 1953 story UN-Man, which describes a technology called "exogenesis", and Gordon Rattray Taylor's book The Biological Time Bomb, which popularised the term "cloning" in 1963.

Cloning is a recurring theme in a number of contemporary science fiction films, ranging from action films such as Anna to the Infinite Power, The Boys from Brazil, Jurassic Park (1993), Alien Resurrection (1997), The 6th Day (2000), Resident Evil (2002), Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), The Island (2005), Tales of the Abyss (2006), and Moon (2009) to comedies such as Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper.

The process of cloning is represented variously in fiction. Many works depict the artificial creation of humans by a method of growing cells from a tissue or DNA sample; the replication may be instantaneous, or take place through slow growth of human embryos in artificial wombs. In the long-running British television series Doctor Who, the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela were cloned in a matter of seconds from DNA samples ("The Invisible Enemy", 1977) and then – in an apparent homage to the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage – shrunk to microscopic size to enter the Doctor's body to combat an alien virus. The clones in this story are short-lived, and can only survive a matter of minutes before they expire. Science fiction films such as The Matrix and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones have featured scenes of human foetuses being cultured on an industrial scale in mechanical tanks.

Cloning humans from body parts is also a common theme in science fiction. Cloning features strongly among the science fiction conventions parodied in Woody Allen's Sleeper, the plot of which centres around an attempt to clone an assassinated dictator from his disembodied nose. In the 2008 Doctor Who story "Journey's End", a duplicate version of the Tenth Doctor spontaneously grows from his severed hand, which had been cut off in a sword fight during an earlier episode.

After the death of her beloved 14-year-old Coton de Tulear named Samantha in late 2017, Barbra Streisand announced that she had cloned the dog, and was now "waiting for [the two cloned pups] to get older so [she] can see if they have [Samantha's] brown eyes and her seriousness". The operation cost $50,000 through the pet cloning company ViaGen.

In films such as Roger Spottiswoode's 2000 The 6th Day, which makes use of the trope of a "vast clandestine laboratory ... filled with row upon row of 'blank' human bodies kept floating in tanks of nutrient liquid or in suspended animation", clearly fear is to be incited. In Clark's view, the biotechnology is typically "given fantastic but visually arresting forms" while the science is either relegated to the background or fictionalised to suit a young audience. Genetic engineering methods are weakly represented in film; Michael Clark, writing for The Wellcome Trust, calls the portrayal of genetic engineering and biotechnology "seriously distorted"

Cloning and identity
Science fiction has used cloning, most commonly and specifically human cloning, to raise the controversial questions of identity. A Number is a 2002 play by English playwright Caryl Churchill which addresses the subject of human cloning and identity, especially nature and nurture. The story, set in the near future, is structured around the conflict between a father (Salter) and his sons (Bernard 1, Bernard 2, and Michael Black) – two of whom are clones of the first one. A Number was adapted by Caryl Churchill for television, in a co-production between the BBC and HBO Films.

In 2012, a Japanese television series named "Bunshin" was created. The story's main character, Mariko, is a woman studying child welfare in Hokkaido. She grew up always doubtful about the love from her mother, who looked nothing like her and who died nine years before. One day, she finds some of her mother's belongings at a relative's house, and heads to Tokyo to seek out the truth behind her birth. She later discovered that she was a clone.

In the 2013 television series Orphan Black, cloning is used as a scientific study on the behavioral adaptation of the clones. In a similar vein, the book The Double by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago explores the emotional experience of a man who discovers that he is a clone.

Cloning as resurrection
Cloning has been used in fiction as a way of recreating historical figures. In the 1976 Ira Levin novel The Boys from Brazil and its 1978 film adaptation, Josef Mengele uses cloning to create copies of Adolf Hitler.

In Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, which spawned a series of Jurassic Park feature films, the bioengineering company InGen develops a technique to resurrect extinct species of dinosaurs by creating cloned creatures using DNA extracted from fossils. The cloned dinosaurs are used to populate the Jurassic Park wildlife park for the entertainment of visitors. The scheme goes disastrously wrong when the dinosaurs escape their enclosures. Despite being selectively cloned as females to prevent them from breeding, the dinosaurs develop the ability to reproduce through parthenogenesis.

Cloning for warfare
The use of cloning for military purposes has also been explored in several fictional works. In Doctor Who, an alien race of armour-clad, warlike beings called Sontarans was introduced in the 1973 serial "The Time Warrior". Sontarans are depicted as squat, bald creatures who have been genetically engineered for combat. Their weak spot is a "probic vent", a small socket at the back of their neck which is associated with the cloning process. The concept of cloned soldiers being bred for combat was revisited in "The Doctor's Daughter" (2008), when the Doctor's DNA is used to create a female warrior called Jenny.

The 1977 film Star Wars was set against the backdrop of a historical conflict called the Clone Wars. The events of this war were not fully explored until the prequel films Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005), which depict a space war waged by a massive army of heavily armoured clone troopers that leads to the foundation of the Galactic Empire. Cloned soldiers are "manufactured" on an industrial scale, genetically conditioned for obedience and combat effectiveness. It is also revealed that the popular character Boba Fett originated as a clone of Jango Fett, a mercenary who served as the genetic template for the clone troopers.

Cloning for exploitation
A recurring sub-theme of cloning fiction is the use of clones as a supply of organs for transplantation. The 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go and the 2010 film adaption are set in an alternate history in which cloned humans are created for the sole purpose of providing organ donations to naturally born humans, despite the fact that they are fully sentient and self-aware. The 2005 film The Island revolves around a similar plot, with the exception that the clones are unaware of the reason for their existence.

The exploitation of human clones for dangerous and undesirable work was examined in the 2009 British science fiction film Moon. In the futuristic novel Cloud Atlas and subsequent film, one of the story lines focuses on a genetically engineered fabricant clone named Sonmi~451, one of millions raised in an artificial "wombtank", destined to serve from birth. She is one of thousands created for manual and emotional labor; Sonmi herself works as a server in a restaurant. She later discovers that the sole source of food for clones, called 'Soap', is manufactured from the clones themselves.

In the film Us, at some point prior to the 1980s, the US Government creates clones of every citizen of the United States with the intention of using them to control their original counterparts, akin to voodoo dolls. This fails, as they were able to copy bodies, but unable to copy the souls of those they cloned. The project is abandoned and the clones are trapped exactly mirroring their above-ground counterparts' actions for generations. In the present day, the clones launch a surprise attack and manage to complete a mass-genocide of their unaware counterparts.

title: Cloning


text:
Cellulose

Cellulose is an organic compound with the formula, a polysaccharide consisting of a linear chain of several hundred to many thousands of β(1→4) linked D -glucose units. Cellulose is an important structural component of the primary cell wall of green plants, many forms of algae and the oomycetes. Some species of bacteria secrete it to form biofilms. Cellulose is the most abundant organic polymer on Earth. The cellulose content of cotton fiber is 90%, that of wood is 40–50%, and that of dried hemp is approximately 57%.

Cellulose is mainly used to produce paperboard and paper. Smaller quantities are converted into a wide variety of derivative products such as cellophane and rayon. Conversion of cellulose from energy crops into biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol is under development as a renewable fuel source. Cellulose for industrial use is mainly obtained from wood pulp and cotton. Cellulose is also greatly affected by direct interaction with several organic liquids.

Some animals, particularly ruminants and termites, can digest cellulose with the help of symbiotic micro-organisms that live in their guts, such as Trichonympha. In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.

History
Cellulose was discovered in 1838 by the French chemist Anselme Payen, who isolated it from plant matter and determined its chemical formula. Cellulose was used to produce the first successful thermoplastic polymer, celluloid, by Hyatt Manufacturing Company in 1870. Production of rayon ("artificial silk") from cellulose began in the 1890s and cellophane was invented in 1912. Hermann Staudinger determined the polymer structure of cellulose in 1920. The compound was first chemically synthesized (without the use of any biologically derived enzymes) in 1992, by Kobayashi and Shoda.

Structure and properties
Cellulose has no taste, is odorless, is hydrophilic with the contact angle of 20–30 degrees, is insoluble in water and most organic solvents, is chiral and is biodegradable. It was shown to melt at 467 °C in pulse tests made by Dauenhauer et al. (2016). It can be broken down chemically into its glucose units by treating it with concentrated mineral acids at high temperature.

Cellulose is derived from D -glucose units, which condense through β(1→4)-glycosidic bonds. This linkage motif contrasts with that for α(1→4)-glycosidic bonds present in starch and glycogen. Cellulose is a straight chain polymer. Unlike starch, no coiling or branching occurs and the molecule adopts an extended and rather stiff rod-like conformation, aided by the equatorial conformation of the glucose residues. The multiple hydroxyl groups on the glucose from one chain form hydrogen bonds with oxygen atoms on the same or on a neighbor chain, holding the chains firmly together side-by-side and forming microfibrils with high tensile strength. This confers tensile strength in cell walls where cellulose microfibrils are meshed into a polysaccharide matrix. The high tensile strength of plant stems and of the tree wood also arises from the arrangement of cellulose fibers intimately distributed into the lignin matrix. The mechanical role of cellulose fibers in the wood matrix responsible for its strong structural resistance, can somewhat be compared to that of the reinforcement bars in concrete, lignin playing here the role of the hardened cement paste acting as the "glue" in between the cellulose fibers. Mechanical properties of cellulose in primary plant cell wall are correlated with growth and expansion of plant cells. Live fluorescence microscopy techniques are promising in investigation of the role of cellulose in growing plant cells.

Compared to starch, cellulose is also much more crystalline. Whereas starch undergoes a crystalline to amorphous transition when heated beyond 60–70 °C in water (as in cooking), cellulose requires a temperature of 320 °C and pressure of 25 MPa to become amorphous in water.

Several types of cellulose are known. These forms are distinguished according to the location of hydrogen bonds between and within strands. Natural cellulose is cellulose I, with structures Iα and Iβ. Cellulose produced by bacteria and algae is enriched in Iα while cellulose of higher plants consists mainly of Iβ. Cellulose in regenerated cellulose fibers is cellulose II. The conversion of cellulose I to cellulose II is irreversible, suggesting that cellulose I is metastable and cellulose II is stable. With various chemical treatments it is possible to produce the structures cellulose III and cellulose IV.

Many properties of cellulose depend on its chain length or degree of polymerization, the number of glucose units that make up one polymer molecule. Cellulose from wood pulp has typical chain lengths between 300 and 1700 units; cotton and other plant fibers as well as bacterial cellulose have chain lengths ranging from 800 to 10,000 units. Molecules with very small chain length resulting from the breakdown of cellulose are known as cellodextrins; in contrast to long-chain cellulose, cellodextrins are typically soluble in water and organic solvents.

The chemical formula of cellulose is (C6H10O5)n where n is the degree of polymerization and represents the number of glucose groups.

Plant-derived cellulose is usually found in a mixture with hemicellulose, lignin, pectin and other substances, while bacterial cellulose is quite pure, has a much higher water content and higher tensile strength due to higher chain lengths.

Cellulose consists of fibrils with crystalline and amorphous regions. These cellulose fibrils may be individualized by mechanical treatment of cellulose pulp, often assisted by chemical oxidation or enzymatic treatment, yielding semi-flexible cellulose nanofibrils generally 200 nm to 1 μm in length depending on the treatment intensity. Cellulose pulp may also be treated with strong acid to hydrolyze the amorphous fibril regions, thereby producing short rigid cellulose nanocrystals a few 100 nm in length. These nanocelluloses are of high technological interest due to their self-assembly into cholesteric liquid crystals, production of hydrogels or aerogels, use in nanocomposites with superior thermal and mechanical properties, and use as Pickering stabilizers for emulsions.

Biosynthesis
In plants cellulose is synthesized at the plasma membrane by rosette terminal complexes (RTCs). The RTCs are hexameric protein structures, approximately 25 nm in diameter, that contain the cellulose synthase enzymes that synthesise the individual cellulose chains. Each RTC floats in the cell's plasma membrane and "spins" a microfibril into the cell wall.

RTCs contain at least three different cellulose synthases, encoded by CesA (Ces is short for "cellulose synthase") genes, in an unknown stoichiometry. Separate sets of CesA genes are involved in primary and secondary cell wall biosynthesis. There are known to be about seven subfamilies in the plant CesA superfamily, some of which include the more cryptic, tentatively-named Csl (cellulose synthase-like) enzymes. These cellulose syntheses use UDP-glucose to form the β(1→4)-linked cellulose.

Bacterial cellulose is produced using the same family of proteins, although the gene is called BcsA for "bacterial cellulose synthase" or CelA for "cellulose" in many instances. In fact, plants acquired CesA from the endosymbiosis event that produced the chloroplast. All cellulose synthases known belongs to glucosyltransferase family 2 (GT2).

Cellulose synthesis requires chain initiation and elongation, and the two processes are separate. Cellulose synthase (CesA) initiates cellulose polymerization using a steroid primer, sitosterol-beta-glucoside, and UDP-glucose. It then utilizes UDP-D-glucose precursors to elongate the growing cellulose chain. A cellulase may function to cleave the primer from the mature chain.

Cellulose is also synthesised by tunicate animals, particularly in the tests of ascidians (where the cellulose was historically termed "tunicine" (tunicin)).

Breakdown (cellulolysis)
Cellulolysis is the process of breaking down cellulose into smaller polysaccharides called cellodextrins or completely into glucose units; this is a hydrolysis reaction. Because cellulose molecules bind strongly to each other, cellulolysis is relatively difficult compared to the breakdown of other polysaccharides. However, this process can be significantly intensified in a proper solvent, e.g. in an ionic liquid.

Most mammals have limited ability to digest dietary fiber such as cellulose. Some ruminants like cows and sheep contain certain symbiotic anaerobic bacteria (such as Cellulomonas and Ruminococcus spp.) in the flora of the rumen, and these bacteria produce enzymes called cellulases that hydrolyze cellulose. The breakdown products are then used by the bacteria for proliferation. The bacterial mass is later digested by the ruminant in its digestive system (stomach and small intestine). Horses use cellulose in their diet by fermentation in their hindgut. Some termites contain in their hindguts certain flagellate protozoa producing such enzymes, whereas others contain bacteria or may produce cellulase.

The enzymes used to cleave the glycosidic linkage in cellulose are glycoside hydrolases including endo-acting cellulases and exo-acting glucosidases. Such enzymes are usually secreted as part of multienzyme complexes that may include dockerins and carbohydrate-binding modules.

Breakdown (thermolysis)
At temperatures above 350 °C, cellulose undergoes thermolysis (also called 'pyrolysis'), decomposing into solid char, vapors, aerosols, and gases such as carbon dioxide. Maximum yield of vapors which condense to a liquid called bio-oil is obtained at 500 °C.

Semi-crystalline cellulose polymers react at pyrolysis temperatures (350–600 °C) in a few seconds; this transformation has been shown to occur via a solid-to-liquid-to-vapor transition, with the liquid (called intermediate liquid cellulose or molten cellulose) existing for only a fraction of a second. Glycosidic bond cleavage produces short cellulose chains of two-to-seven monomers comprising the melt. Vapor bubbling of intermediate liquid cellulose produces aerosols, which consist of short chain anhydro-oligomers derived from the melt.

Continuing decomposition of molten cellulose produces volatile compounds including levoglucosan, furans, pyrans, light oxygenates, and gases via primary reactions. Within thick cellulose samples, volatile compounds such as levoglucosan undergo 'secondary reactions' to volatile products including pyrans and light oxygenates such as glycolaldehyde.

Hemicellulose
Hemicelluloses are polysaccharides related to cellulose that comprises about 20% of the biomass of land plants. In contrast to cellulose, hemicelluloses are derived from several sugars in addition to glucose, especially xylose but also including mannose, galactose, rhamnose, and arabinose. Hemicelluloses consist of shorter chains – between 500 and 3000 sugar units. Furthermore, hemicelluloses are branched, whereas cellulose is unbranched.

Regenerated cellulose
Cellulose is soluble in several kinds of media, several of which are the basis of commercial technologies. These dissolution processes are reversible and are used in the production of regenerated celluloses (such as viscose and cellophane) from dissolving pulp.

The most important solubilizing agent is carbon disulfide in the presence of alkali. Other agents include Schweizer's reagent, N-methylmorpholine N-oxide, and lithium chloride in dimethylacetamide. In general, these agents modify the cellulose, rendering it soluble. The agents are then removed concomitant with the formation of fibers. Cellulose is also soluble in many kinds of ionic liquids.

The history of regenerated cellulose is often cited as beginning with George Audemars, who first manufactured regenerated nitrocellulose fibers in 1855. Although these fibers were soft and strong -resembling silk- they had the drawback of being highly flammable. Hilaire de Chardonnet perfected production of nitrocellulose fibers, but manufacturing of these fibers by his process was relatively uneconomical. In 1890, L.H. Despeissis invented the cuprammonium process – which uses a cuprammonium solution to solubilize cellulose – a method still used today for production of artificial silk. In 1891, it was discovered that treatment of cellulose with alkali and carbon disulfide generated a soluble cellulose derivative known as viscose. This process, patented by the founders of the Viscose Development Company, is the most widely used method for manufacturing regenerated cellulose products. Courtaulds purchased the patents for this process in 1904, leading to significant growth of viscose fiber production. By 1931, expiration of patents for the viscose process led to its adoption worldwide. Global production of regenerated cellulose fiber peaked in 1973 at 3,856,000 tons.

Regenerated cellulose can be used to manufacture a wide variety of products. While the first application of regenerated cellulose was as a clothing textile, this class of materials is also used in the production of disposable medical devices as well as fabrication of artificial membranes.

Cellulose esters and ethers
The hydroxyl groups (−OH) of cellulose can be partially or fully reacted with various reagents to afford derivatives with useful properties like mainly cellulose esters and cellulose ethers (−OR). In principle, although not always in current industrial practice, cellulosic polymers are renewable resources.

Ester derivatives include:

Cellulose acetate and cellulose triacetate are film- and fiber-forming materials that find a variety of uses. Nitrocellulose was initially used as an explosive and was an early film forming material. When plasticized with camphor, nitrocellulose gives celluloid.

Cellulose Ether derivatives include:

The sodium carboxymethyl cellulose can be cross-linked to give the croscarmellose sodium (E468) for use as a disintegrant in pharmaceutical formulations. Furthermore, by the covalent attachment of thiol groups to cellulose ethers such as sodium carboxymethyl cellulose, ethyl cellulose or hydroxyethyl cellulose mucoadhesive and permeation enhancing properties can be introduced. Thiolated cellulose derivatives (see thiomers) exhibit also high binding properties for metal ions.

Commercial applications

Cellulose for industrial use is mainly obtained from wood pulp and from cotton.

 * Paper products: Cellulose is the major constituent of paper, paperboard, and card stock. Electrical insulation paper: Cellulose is used in diverse forms as insulation in transformers, cables, and other electrical equipment.
 * Fibers: Cellulose is the main ingredient of textiles. Cotton and synthetics (nylons) each have about 40% market by volume. Other plant fibers (jute, sisal, hemp) represent about 20% of the market. Rayon, cellophane and other "regenerated cellulose fibers" are a small portion (5%).
 * Consumables: Microcrystalline cellulose (E460i) and powdered cellulose (E460ii) are used as inactive fillers in drug tablets and a wide range of soluble cellulose derivatives, E numbers E461 to E469, are used as emulsifiers, thickeners and stabilizers in processed foods. Cellulose powder is, for example, used in processed cheese to prevent caking inside the package. Cellulose occurs naturally in some foods and is an additive in manufactured foods, contributing an indigestible component used for texture and bulk, potentially aiding in defecation.
 * Building material: Hydroxyl bonding of cellulose in water produces a sprayable, moldable material as an alternative to the use of plastics and resins. The recyclable material can be made water- and fire-resistant. It provides sufficient strength for use as a building material. Cellulose insulation made from recycled paper is becoming popular as an environmentally preferable material for building insulation. It can be treated with boric acid as a fire retardant.
 * Miscellaneous: Cellulose can be converted into cellophane, a thin transparent film. It is the base material for the celluloid that was used for photographic and movie films until the mid-1930s. Cellulose is used to make water-soluble adhesives and binders such as methyl cellulose and carboxymethyl cellulose which are used in wallpaper paste. Cellulose is further used to make hydrophilic and highly absorbent sponges. Cellulose is the raw material in the manufacture of nitrocellulose (cellulose nitrate) which is used in smokeless gunpowder.
 * Pharmaceuticals: Cellulose derivatives, such as microcrystalline cellulose (MCC), have the advantages of retaining water, being a stabilizer and thickening agent, and in reinforcement of drug tablets.

Aspirational
Energy crops: The major combustible component of non-food energy crops is cellulose, with lignin second. Non-food energy crops produce more usable energy than edible energy crops (which have a large starch component), but still compete with food crops for agricultural land and water resources. Typical non-food energy crops include industrial hemp, switchgrass, Miscanthus, Salix (willow), and Populus (poplar) species. A strain of Clostridium bacteria found in zebra dung, can convert nearly any form of cellulose into butanol fuel.

Another possible application is as Insect repellents.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Cellulose


text:
Cortez

 Cortez may refer to:

United States

 * Cortez, California, an unincorporated community in Merced County
 * Cortez, Colorado, a city and county seat of Montezuma County
 * Cortez, Florida, a census-designated place
 * Cortez, Nevada, ghost town
 * Cortez, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated community

Elsewhere

 * Sea of Cortez or Gulf of California, in Mexico

Other uses

 * Cortez, an 1823 play by James Planché
 * Cortez Motor Home, a Class-A motor coach made in the U.S. from 1963 to 1979
 * Agnelli & Nelson or Cortez, trance music duo
 * Cortez, a character from The Longest Journey and Dreamfall
 * Cortez the Killer, a song by Neil Young
 * Nike Cortez, a type of running shoe from Nike

Surname

 * Adrian T. Cortez (1978–2016), American trans woman and performer with the stage name Brittany CoxXx
 * Alberto Cortez (1940–2019), Argentine singer and songwriter
 * Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born 1989), American politician and educator
 * Amado Cortez (1928–2003), Filipino actor and diplomat
 * Antawn Cortez Jamison (born 1976), American basketball player
 * Bella Cortez (born 1944), Cuban actress and dancer
 * Carlos Cortez (1923–2005), American poet, artist and political activist
 * Chris Cortez (born 1988), American soccer player
 * Dave "Baby" Cortez (born 1938), American pop music and R&B musician
 * Edgar Cortez (born 1989), Nicaraguan runner
 * Erwin Cortez, born name is Erwin Sutodihardjo (born 1983), Indonesian actor and model
 * Fernando Cortez (born 1981), American basketball player
 * Gregorio Cortez (1875–1916), Mexican folk hero
 * Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), the Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire
 * Heidi Cortez (born 1981), American actress, model and writer
 * Jayne Cortez (1934–2012), American poet
 * Jenny Cortez, born name is Nurjaenih (born 1986), Indonesian actress, model and disc jockey
 * Jhay Cortez (born 1993), Puerto Rican singer and rapper
 * Joana Cortez (born 1979), Brazilian tennis player
 * Jody Cortez (born c. 1960), American drummer
 * Joe Cortez (born 1945), Puerto Rican boxing referee
 * Jorge Cortez (born 1972), Panamanian baseball player
 * José Cortez (born 1975), American football player
 * José Luis Cortez (born 1979), Ecuadorian footballer
 * Luís Cortez (born 1994), Portuguese footballer
 * Manuel Cortez (born 1979), German–Portuguese actor
 * Mike Cortez (born 1980), American basketball player
 * Page Cortez (born 1961), American politician
 * Paul E. Cortez, American soldier and war criminal
 * Philip Cortez (born 1978), American politician
 * Rafael Cortez (born 1976), Brazilian journalist, actor and comedian
 * Raul Cortez (1932–2006), Brazilian actor
 * Ricardo Cortez (1899–1977), American silent film actor
 * Stanley Cortez (1908–1997), American cinematographer
 * Viorica Cortez (born 1935), Romanian-born French mezzo-soprano

Given name

 * Cortez Broughton (born 1996), American football player
 * Cortez Gray (1916–1996), American basketball player
 * Cortez Kennedy (1968–2017), American football player

Fictional

 * Fabian Cortez, a Marvel Comics supervillain
 * Sergeant Cortez, protagonist of the TimeSplitters video game series
 * Ian Cortez, a Cuban intelligence agent working for the Colombian Cartel in the novel/film Clear and Present Danger
 * Henry Cortez, a character in the Millennium series of novels by Stieg Larsson
 * Hotel Cortez, the setting of American Horror Story: Hotel
 * Juni and Carmen Cortez, main protagonists in the Spy Kids franchise
 * Olivia Cortez, a character from the American thriller television series Mr. Robot

title: Cortez


text:
Talk:Cortes

February 2002
This article's text should be under Hernan Fernando Cortes, I'd say, and "Cortes" should be rejiggered to talk about the Spanish and Portuguese parliaments (since that's what the term means). I'm going to the dentist right now, or I'd do it myself. I will do it if it's still like this when I get back, numb lips or not :) --Paul Drye

- About the remark above.

"Cortés" (meaning polite) is different from "Cortes" (meaning parliament, among many other things). So, the spanish words "Cortés" and "Cortes" are not the same, at all; and the correct spelling is "Hernan Cortés". I hope this help.--Threshold

Latin America? Which countries? Am I right about Spain's comunidades autónomas? Isn't the full name (in Spain) "Cortes Generales", and shouldn't that be specified? User:Hajor 15:11, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC) - In Latin America, the name for all legistive assemblies national and regional (many are bicameral) is either Congreso (Federal, Nacional o de la Nacion, etc.) o Asamblea (Federal, Nacional o de la Nacion, etc.). This is because in Latin America, corte (plural cortes) means law courts of any class. Cortes is used only in Spain. In Portugal it is Asamblea de la República. Jorge GG 03:02, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC).
 * Yes, I was running through the list of LatAm countries in my mind and I couldn't think of any where the parliament was called 'Cortes'. No idea about Portugal. Modifications made to the article per your comments; a ver qué opinas. –User:Hajor 03:38, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Todo bien, gracias Jorge GG 15:45, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC). -

Tribunals
In American Spanish, corte also means legal court. Don't know if it is worth a mention.

About the origin of the Cortés surname
An anonymous editor keeps editing this line: Cortés is a surname of Spanish origin from the Aragon region . I'll keep deleting that mention to the surname's origin because:
 * The origin of a surname is irrelevant for a disambiguation page.
 * Most sources about surname origin are simply not reliable. If they describe the coat of arms of every single surname, they are even less reliable.
 * I've met several Spaniards with the Cortés surname, and not one of them were Aragonese. It's a common surname in many parts of Spain, and particularly common among gypsies. --Jotamar (talk) 16:01, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Two points
--Deskford (talk) 17:03, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) The article currently states: "Cortés or Cortês, surnames of Portuguese and Spanish origin, respectively". I'm no expert in either language, but isn't this the wrong way round?
 * 2) This is a disambiguation page, but refers to several non-existent pages. Should these be removed?

 * The red links could be due to some typo, so it should be researched a bit. Also, there are pages which should be mentioned here but currently have no link, and that is more important than removing red links. --Jotamar (talk) 03:00, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Hernán Cortés
I went to this page looking for information about the explorer, Cortes. I didn't know that his name had a diacritic in it, and as this is the English page, my keyboard can't be expected to have accented "e"s available, so "Cortes" would be the most appropriate place to look. When I didn't find the information I needed, I doubted my spelling and tried "Cortez" on a hunch, and on that page, guess what I found? "Hernán Cortés (or Hernando Cortés) (1485–1547), Spanish conquistador" - So why is it appropriate to put the Spanish spelling of "Cortes" on the "z" page, but not on the "s" page? I think it should be here, if anywhere, and not there, if duplicates are discouraged. The requirement of the exact Spanish spelling should only be upheld on the Spanish version of the page where that would be reasonable. 66.43.98.162 (talk) 21:51, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The page begins with a link to Cortes (surname), which is where people with this name, including Hernán Cortés, are listed. This page only lists things other than people that share the name. The two lists were separated in December 2010. If you think it would be more appropriate for everything to be listed in the one place you could propose merging the lists again per WP:MERGE.  --Deskford (talk) 22:34, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Merge, August 2013
Could someone tell me why Corte, Cortes and Cortez should be in the same damb page? And why not Cortes (surname)? Thanks. Jotamar (talk) 18:44, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

"Cortes (disambiguation page)" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Cortes (disambiguation page). Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 13:35, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Merge surnames
Propose to merge all of Cortes (surname) into this Cortes disambig page. I got here lost trying to quickly get to Hernán Cortés on a U.S. keyboard, and from this Talk page I'm not the first. Compare other disambigs: Columbus, Washington, ... Smith? None split their surnames, and also they have a "commonly refers to" subset at the top. SamuelRiv (talk) 03:19, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

 * Notifying involved editors of proposed merger of Cortes surnames. SamuelRiv (talk) 03:36, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

 * I have no objection. —DocWatson42 (talk) 03:40, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

 * Oppose - I think we have to look at how long the DAB and name pages are. Washington and Smith did split off people (Washington (name), Smith (given name), List of people with surname Smith) and the only names remaining on the DAB pages are people known by the mononym. I assume that this was done because these DAB pages are very long. For Columbus, both the list of people and the overall length of the DAB page is much shorter and easier to scan. I did a quick search and found many Cortes' not included on Cortes (surname) (I stopped counting at 20). Perhaps it would be better to put a hatnote at the top of Cortes directing readers to Cortes (surname), or make Cortes (surname) the first entry on the list. Leschnei (talk) 12:15, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Could you explain how it is better for the end user who searches "Name", to scroll down, see under People: "Name (surname)", process that they have to navigate there, do so, wait for the page to load, then find their result? Also, wouldn't this preclude having a "commonly refers to" list at the top of the main disambig page, since surnames are on another page? SamuelRiv (talk) 13:54, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking of all of the readers who visit Cortes, not just the ones looking for a person. Since there are at least 30 articles on people who have the surname (despite what is currently listed at Cortes (surname)), including them no Cortes would make the page more difficult to scan for everybody. It is not unusual for one entry to be listed at the top if it is likely to be the page that readers are looking for. One example is School (disambiguation). Personally, I prefer that to including a long list of people on the the DAB page. Leschnei (talk) 00:20, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I assume when a page loads for you it also puts you at the top of the page? So if the DABs were merged and the category "People" were at the bottom, then readers not looking for the surname would never have to scroll that far, and those looking for the surname have to scroll a little further. If they stay split, those not looking for the surname scroll an identical amount as before, while those looking for the surname scroll, then navigate to a new page, then scroll some more. Also, I looked at some of the crap on the Wikiprojects, and they say to consider splitting at 12 names. There's 19 entries here, and 9 surnames. This is no contest even if you're taking a vague Wikiproject suggestion as written law. SamuelRiv (talk) 02:28, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * You make a good point about people listed at the bottom of the page. I still think that having a separate surname page is reasonable for Cortes since there will be at least 30 people on the surname page when someone gets around to adding them, and the surname information and references on Cortes (surname) don't belong on a dAB page. Leschnei (talk) 11:26, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

 * Notes - I placed a notice of this discussion at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation to encourage opinions from more editors. Leschnei (talk) 11:31, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

 * I think you should add the mononymously known Cortes to the disambiguation page, together with a link to the anthroponymy article, in a People section that should be more prominently listed near the top. Hernan Cortes should qualify for an entry as it seems like a common search term. It should also be noted that there's recently been an interesting template created, transclude list, which can resolve this kind of an issue when there are smaller numbers involved, but in this case we probably just want Hernan? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 16:35, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * In fact, I just did that now, see if you like it. If it needs to be said, I oppose the squashing of anthroponymy articles into disambiguation pages wholesale, that doesn't make sense. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 16:38, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Placing Hernán Cortés near the top is helpful. It's similar to what has been done in the examples Columbus and Washington. I oppose the merge.--Jahalive (talk) 07:46, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I vastly underestimated the number of people to be added to Cortes (surname). I've expanded the page - it's currently one long list, but I'll split it up into sections. Leschnei (talk) 14:24, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Cortes


text:
Colony

A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule. Though dominated by the foreign colonizers, the rule remains separate to the original country of the colonizers, the metropolitan state (or "mother country"), which together have often been organized as colonial empires, particularly with the development of modern imperialism and its colonialism. This coloniality and possibly colonial administrative separation, while often blurred, makes colonies neither annexed or integrated territories nor client states. Colonies contemporarily are identified and organized as not sufficiently self-governed dependent territories. Other past colonies have become either sufficiently incorporated and self-governed, or independent, with some to a varying degree dominated by remaining colonial settler societies or neocolonialism.

The term colony originates from the ancient Roman colonia, a type of Roman settlement. Derived from colonus (farmer, cultivator, planter, or settler), it carries with it the sense of 'farm' and 'landed estate'. Furthermore the term was used to refer to the older Greek apoikia (ἀποικία), which were overseas settlements by ancient Greek city-states. The city that founded such a settlement became known as its metropolis ("mother-city"). Since early-modern times, historians, administrators, and political scientists have generally used the term "colony" to refer mainly to the many different overseas territories of particularly European states between the 15th and 20th centuries CE, with colonialism and decolonization as corresponding phenomena.

While colonies often developed from trading outposts or territorial claims, such areas do not need to be a product of colonization, nor become colonially organized territories. Territories furthermore do not need to have been militarily conquered and occupied to come under colonial rule and to be considered de-facto colonies, instead neocolonial exploitation of dependency or imperialist use of power to intervene to force policy, might make a territory be considered a colony, which broadens the concept, including indirect rule or puppet states (contrasted by more independent types of client states such as vassal states). Subsequently some historians have used the term informal colony to refer to a country under a de facto control of another state. Though the broadening of the concept is often contentious.

Etymology
The word "colony" comes from the Latin word colōnia, used for ancient Roman outposts and eventually for cities. This in turn derives from the word colōnus, which referred to a Roman tenant farmer.

Settlements that began as Roman coloniae include cities from Cologne (which retains this history in its name) to Belgrade to York. A telltale sign of a settlement within the Roman sphere of influence once being a Roman colony is a city centre with a grid pattern.

Ancient examples

 * Carthage formed as a Phoenician colony
 * Cadiz formed as a Phoenician colony
 * Cyrene was a colony of the Greeks of Thera
 * Sicily was a part Greek, part Phoenician colony
 * Sardinia was a Phoenician colony
 * Marseille formed as a Greek colony
 * Malta was a Phoenician colony
 * Cologne formed as a Roman colony and its modern name refer to the Latin term "Colonia".
 * Kandahar formed as a Greek colony during the Hellenistic era by Alexander the Great in 330 BC.

More modern historical examples

 * L'Anse aux Meadows: a Norse colony which existed c. 1025 AD.
 * 🇦🇴 Angola: a colony of Portugal from the 16th century to its independence in 1975.
 * 🇦🇺 Australia was formed as a British Dominion in 1901 from a federation of six distinct British colonies which were founded between 1788 and 1829.
 * 🇧🇧 Barbados: was a colony of Great Britain important in the Atlantic slave trade. It gained its independence in 1966.
 * 🇧🇷 Brazil: a colony of Portugal since the 16th century. Independent since 1822.
 * 🇨🇦 Canada: was colonized first by France as New France (1534–1763) and England (in Newfoundland, 1582) then under British rule (1763–1867), before achieving Dominion status and losing "colony" designation.
 *  Democratic Republic of the Congo: a colony of Belgium from 1908 to 1960; previously under private ownership of King Leopold II.
 *  French Indochina was formed in October 1887 from Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina (which together form modern Vietnam) and the Kingdom of Cambodia; Laos was added after the Franco-Siamese conflict of 1893. The federation lasted until 1954. In the four protectorates, the French formally left the local rulers in power, who were the Emperors of Vietnam, Kings of Cambodia, and Kings of Luang Prabang, but gathered all powers in their hands, the local rulers acting only as figureheads.
 * 🇬🇭 Ghana: Contact between Europe and Ghana (known as the Gold Coast) began in the 15th century with the arrival of the Portuguese. This soon led to the establishment of several colonies by European powers: Portuguese Gold Coast (1482–1642), Dutch Gold Coast (1598–1872), Swedish Gold Coast (1650–1663), Danish Gold Coast (1658–1850), Brandenburger and Prussian Gold Coast (1685–1721) and British Gold Coast (1821–1957). In 1957, Ghana was the first African colony south of the Sahara to become independent.
 * 🇬🇱 Greenland was a colony of Denmark-Norway from 1721 and was a colony of Denmark from 1814 to 1953. In 1953 Greenland was made an equal part of the Danish Kingdom. Home rule was granted in 1979 and extended to self-rule in 2009. See also Danish colonization of the Americas.
 * 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau: a colony of Portugal since the 15th century. Independent since 1974.
 *  undefined was a British colony (from 1983 British Dependent Territory) from 1841 to 1997. Is now a Special Administrative Region of China.
 *  undefined was an imperial political entity comprising present-day India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan with regions under the direct control of the British Government of the United Kingdom from 1858 to 1947. From the 15th century until 1961, Portuguese India (Goa) was a colony of Portugal. Pondicherry and Chandernagore were part of French India from 1759 to 1954. Small Danish colonies of Tharangambadi, Serampore and the Nicobar Islands) from 1620 to 1869 were known as Danish India.
 * 🇮🇩 Indonesia was a colony of the Netherlands gained full independence in 1949.
 * 🇯🇲 Jamaica was part of the Spanish West Indies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It became an English colony in 1655 and; independence in 1962.
 * 🇱🇷 Liberia a colony set up in 1821 by American private citizens for the migration of African American freedmen. Liberian Declaration of Independence from the American Colonization Society on 26 July 1847. It is the second oldest black republic in the world after Haiti.
 *  Macau was a Portuguese colony (from 1976 a "Chinese territory under Portuguese administration") from 1557 to 1999. In 1999, two years after Hong Kong, it became a Special Administrative Region of China.
 * 🇲🇾 Malaysia was initially colonized by the Portuguese Empire in 1511 after capturing Malacca. After 1511, Britain established colonies and trading ports on the Malay Peninsula; Penang was leased to the British East India Company. The Dutch Empire encountered Malaysia when it was looking for spices to trade with.
 * 🇲🇹 Malta was a British protectorate and later a colony from the French Revolutionary Wars in 1800 to independence in 1964.
 * 🇲🇿 Mozambique: a colony of Portugal since the 15th century. Independent since 1975.
 * 🇵🇭 Philippines, previously a colony of Spain from c. 1565 to 1898 as part of the Spanish East Indies, was a colony of the United States from 1898 to 1946. Achieved self-governing Commonwealth status in 1935; independent in 1946.
 * 🇵🇷 Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain from 1493 to 1898, when it passed to be a colonial possession of the United States,  classified by the United States as "an unincorporated territory". In 1914, the Puerto Rican House of Delegates voted unanimously in favor of independence from the United States, but this was rejected by the U.S. Congress as "unconstitutional" and in violation of the U.S. 1900 Foraker Act. In 1952, after the US Congress approved Puerto Rico's constitution, its formal name became "Commonwealth of Puerto Rico", but its new name "did not change Puerto Rico's political, social, and economic relationship to the United States."  That year, the United States advised the United Nations (UN) that the island was a self-governing territory.  The United States has been "unwilling to play in public the imperial role... it has no appetite for acknowledging in a public way the contradictions implicit in frankly colonial rule."  The island has been called a colony by many, including US Federal judges, US Congresspeople,  the Chief Justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court, and numerous scholars.
 * 🇿🇦 South Africa consisted of territories and colonies by various African and European powers, including the Dutch and the British, and the Nguni. The territory consisting of the modern nation was ruled directly by the British from 1806 to 1910; became a self-governing dominion of Union of South Africa in 1910.
 * 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka: a British colony from 1815 to 1948. Known as Ceylon. Was a British Dominion until 1972. Also a Portuguese colony in the 16th–17th centuries, and a Dutch colony in the 17th–18th centuries.
 *  Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. North and South Korea were established in 1948.
 * 🇹🇼 Taiwan has a complex history of colonial rule under various powers, including the Dutch (1624–1662), Spanish (1626–1642), Chinese (1683–1895) and Japanese (1895–1945). The precolonial (pre-1624) inhabitants of Taiwan are the ethno-linguistically Austronesian Taiwanese indigenous peoples, rather than the vast majority of present-day Taiwanese people, who are mostly ethno-linguistically Han Chinese. Twice throughout history, Taiwan has served as a quasi rump state for Chinese governments, the first instance being the Ming-loyalist Kingdom of Tungning (1662–1683) and the second instance being the present-day Republic of China (ROC), which officially claims continuity or succession from the Republic of China (1912–1949), having retreated from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949 during the final years of the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). The ROC, whose de facto territory consists almost entirely of the island of Taiwan and its minor satellite islands, continues to rule Taiwan as if it were a separate country from the People's Republic of China (consisting of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau).
 * The 🇺🇸 United States was formed from a union of thirteen British colonies. The Colony of Virginia was the first of the thirteen colonies. All thirteen declared independence in July 1776 and expelled the British governors.

Current colonies
The Special Committee on Decolonization maintains the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, which identifies areas the United Nations (though not without controversy) believes are colonies. Given that dependent territories have varying degrees of autonomy and political power in the affairs of the controlling state, there is disagreement over the classification of "colony".

title: Colony


text:
Talk:California

Semi-protected edit request on 20 December 2023
Mexican is the most common ancestry in California, followed by English, German and Irish. Add this to demographics section.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/california-population-ethnicity/#:~:text=Mexicans%20comprise%20the%20largest%20ethnic,of%20Californians%20identifying%20as%20Mexican. 91.192.81.61 (talk) 13:55, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

 * Is Mexican really an ancestry? HiLo48 (talk) 23:07, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, the experts and reliable sources use it. See Heyman, Josiah McC. "US immigration officers of Mexican ancestry as Mexican Americans, citizens, and immigration police." Current Anthropology 43.3 (2002): 479-507. and Duncan, Brian, and Stephen J. Trejo. "Ancestry versus ethnicity: The complexity and selectivity of Mexican identification in the United States." in Ethnicity and labor market outcomes . 2009. 31-66. Rjensen (talk) 23:43, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
 * So what does it mean? HiLo48 (talk) 02:36, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Per WP:SWYGT, the provided source was the SF Chronicle, but the data from the Chronicle comes from elsewhere. Spintendo  20:20, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 December 2023 (2)
The largest Hispanic groups in California are Mexicans (83%), Salvadorans (5%), Guatemalans (3%), South Americans (2%), and Puerto Ricans (1%). Add to the demographics section. Source: https://latino.ucla.edu/research/15-facts-latinos-california/#:~:text=The%20five%20largest%20ancestry%20groups,and%20Puerto%20Ricans%20(1%25). 91.192.81.61 (talk) 13:59, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: The UCLA source does not use the term "Hispanic". Spintendo  20:09, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 December 2023 (3)
Between 80 and 90 Native American languages were spoken in California. Add this to the languages section.

Source: https://cla.berkeley.edu/california-languages.html 91.192.81.61 (talk) 14:03, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: The Berkeley source states that number as being spoken "2 centuries ago" Spintendo  20:07, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 December 2023 (4)
Chinese, Filipino, Indian and Vietnamese are the largest Asian ancestries in California. Add this information to demographics section.

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/california-asian-population-growth/ 91.192.81.61 (talk) 14:07, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Per WP:SWYGT, the provided source was the SF Chronicle, but the data from the Chronicle comes from elsewhere. Spintendo  20:18, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 25 December 2023
California has the largest Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan population. Add to demographics section.

Source: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-dhc-a-hispanic-population.html 91.192.81.61 (talk) 08:31, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Largest as compared to whom? Spintendo  20:11, 27 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Can we get a response from someone who does not have a Nintendo reference on their username? Thanks. Mousefountain (talk) 02:25, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
 * @Spintendo Other US States, as the source linked above, the US Census, states. 64.58.160.98 (talk) 10:50, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

Far-left revisionist fake history promoting "California genocide" BLM propaganda
This article falsely states that "the depopulation of indigenous peoples" constituted a "California genocide." That is Marxist revisionist history promoted by the far-left Democrat media who are trying to degrade the meaning of the word "genocide." Death by smallpox is not a genocide. Real, non-politically-partisan historians know that there was no such thing as a "California genocide." 2603:8000:6400:83B5:71CD:2AA1:2970:EFF8 (talk) 05:17, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

 * You have clearly not read about the campaigns to wipe out indigenous peoples that were undertaken by white settlers. Posses of white men would hunt down and kill Indians to get rid of them entirely. Nobody in California had heard of Marx yet when this was happening. Binksternet (talk) 08:37, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
 * is absolutely right; there is a well documented historiography around the California genocide that has existed far before Marx or BLM. And if you chose to read the California Genocide article, you'd see that it concerns itself with exactly what he describes: posses of white settlers out to exterminate indigenous people and government-sponsored wars against tribes, NOT about small pox or diseases... Cristiano Tomás (talk) 16:10, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
 * 1.) The IP editor claiming that Democrats are Marxists is laughable.
 * 2.) There is still a serious historiographical debate on whether the atrocities were genocide or ethnic cleansing by serious scholars. (As of 2023) So I think we should be non-committal for now.
 * 3.) As you rightfully pointed out: it definitely shouldn't be removed from the article. It's a notable and terrible part of Californian history. KlayCax (talk) 08:20, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Questionable Assertion Written in an Authoritative Way
The section 'Etymology' needs to change. In "the origin of the name California" it is said that no one really knows how the name was picked or the origin. Yet the very next paragraph goes into detail with one theory calling it "the most likely" and spins a strange tale at length. No one knows that this is the "most likely" origin of the name California. This wording is misleading. It is not intellectually honest to put forward one particular theory as the most likely origin of the name California, without admitting the context or considering other theories, if not equally even in passing at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.101.48.113 (talk) 13:58, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Lviv Region (Ukraine) and California to became twin-regions
https://sd03.senate.ca.gov/news/20240425-legislature-approves-sen-dodd%E2%80%99s-ukraine-sister-state-measure I think it's safe to add Lviv Oblast, Ukraine to the twinned regions list. LightNovell (talk) 20:41, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 29 June 2024
Insert hyperlink for the word Hindi, in the demographics(languages) section. Bahavesh (talk) 03:07, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

 * ✅ TheNuggeteer (talk) 06:24, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:California


text:
Rod (optical phenomenon)

In cryptozoology and ufology, "rods" (also known as "skyfish", "air rods", or "solar entities") are elongated visual artifacts appearing in photographic images and video recordings.

Most optical analysis to date have concluded that the images are insects moving across the frame as the photo is being captured.

Optical analysis
Robert Todd Carroll (2003), having consulted an entomologist (Doug Yanega), identified rods as images of flying insects recorded over several cycles of wing-beating on video recording devices. The insect captured on image a number of times, while propelling itself forward, gives the illusion of a single elongated rod-like body, with bulges.

A 2000 report by staff at "The Straight Dope" also explained rods as such phenomena, namely tricks of light which result from how (primarily video) images of flying insects are recorded and played back, adding that investigators have shown the rod-like bodies to be a result of motion blur, if the camera is shooting with relatively long exposure times.

The claims of these being extraordinary creatures, possibly alien, have been advanced by either people with active imaginations, or hoaxers.

In August 2005, China Central Television (CCTV) aired a two-part documentary about flying rods in China. It reported the events from May to June of the same year at Tonghua Zhenguo Pharmaceutical Company in Tonghua City, Jilin Province, which debunked the flying rods. Surveillance cameras in the facility's compound captured video footage of flying rods identical to those shown in Jose Escamilla's video. Getting no satisfactory answer to the phenomenon, curious scientists at the facility decided that they would try to solve the mystery by attempting to catch these airborne creatures. Huge nets were set up and the same surveillance cameras then captured images of rods flying into the trap. When the nets were inspected, the "rods" were no more than regular moths and other ordinary flying insects. Subsequent investigations proved that the appearance of flying rods on video was an optical illusion created by the slower recording speed of the camera.

After attending a lecture by Jose Escamilla, UFO investigator Robert Sheaffer wrote that "some of his 'rods' were obviously insects zipping across the field at a high angular rate" and others appeared to be "appendages" which were birds' wings blurred by the camera exposure.

Paranormal claims
Various paranormal interpretations of this phenomenon appear in popular culture. One of the more outspoken proponents of rods as alien life forms was Jose Escamilla, who claimed to have been the first to film them on March 19, 1994 in Roswell, New Mexico, while attempting to film a UFO. Escamilla later made additional videos and embarked on lecture tours to promote his claims.

In popular culture

 * In the manga and anime series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, the Stone Ocean part features a character named Rikiel with the Stand ability "Sky High" that allows him to control rods, which are described as real unidentified animals, and use them to attack his enemies by absorbing their body heat.
 * In the video game Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, there is a rare enemy type called Sky Fish based on the "rod" phenomenon. Sky Fish resemble rods in appearance and can only be defeated by slowing down time.
 * In the video game Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, if you hang out and give him presents during a Free-Time Event, the character Yasuhiro Hagakure will have dialogue about Skyfish and their appearance in Kamata, Tokyo.
 * The 2010 Super Sentai series Tensou Sentai Goseiger featured the antagonistic cryptid-themed monster group Yuumajuu. One of their members is Zaigo of the Skyfish, who has the secondary theme of stick insect.
 * In the 2015 Kemono Friends mobile game, Skyfish appears as a playable Friend and minor character.
 * Several games in the Legend of Zelda franchise include creatures that resemble the supposed appearance of rods, being insects with long flexible bodies and multiple sets of wings along their length. These include Skytails in Skyward Sword and Deep Fireflies in Tears of the Kingdom.
 * In the 2014 manga series Delicious in Dungeon, Marcille summons a familiar she refers to as "Sky-Fish", which bears a striking resemblance to Rods.

title: Rod (optical phenomenon)