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Ricin

Ricin is a lectin (a carbohydrate-binding protein) and a highly potent toxin produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant, Ricinus communis. The median lethal dose (LD50) of ricin for mice is around 22 micrograms per kilogram of body weight via intraperitoneal injection. Oral exposure to ricin is far less toxic. An estimated lethal oral dose in humans is approximately one milligram per kilogram of body weight.

Ricin is a toxalbumin and was first described by Peter Hermann Stillmark, the founder of lectinology. Ricin is chemically similar to robin.

Biochemistry
Ricin is classified as a type 2 ribosome-inactivating protein (RIP). Whereas type 1 RIPs are composed of a single protein chain that possesses catalytic activity, type 2 RIPs, also known as holotoxins, are composed of two different protein chains that form a heterodimeric complex. Type 2 RIPs consist of an A chain that is functionally equivalent to a type 1 RIP, covalently connected by a single disulfide bond to a B chain that is catalytically inactive, but serves to mediate transport of the A-B protein complex from the cell surface, via vesicle carriers, to the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Both type 1 and type 2 RIPs are functionally active against ribosomes in vitro; however, only type 2 RIPs display cytotoxicity due to the lectin-like properties of the B chain. To display its ribosome-inactivating function, the ricin disulfide bond must be reductively cleaved.

Biosynthesis
Ricin is synthesized in the endosperm of castor oil plant seeds. The ricin precursor protein is 576 amino acid residues in length and contains a signal peptide (residues 1–35), the ricin A chain (36–302), a linker peptide (303–314), and the ricin B chain (315–576). The N-terminal signal sequence delivers the prepropolypeptide to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and then the signal peptide is cleaved off. Within the lumen of the ER the propolypeptide is glycosylated and a protein disulfide isomerase catalyzes disulfide bond formation between cysteines 294 and 318. The propolypeptide is further glycosylated within the Golgi apparatus and transported to protein storage bodies. The propolypeptide is cleaved within protein bodies by an endopeptidase to produce the mature ricin protein that is composed of a 267 residue A chain and a 262 residue B chain that are covalently linked by a single disulfide bond.

Structure
In terms of structure, ricin closely resembles abrin-a, an isomer of abrin. The quaternary structure of ricin is a globular, glycosylated heterodimer of approximately 60–65 kDa. Ricin toxin A chain and ricin toxin B chain are of similar molecular weights, approximately 32 kDa and 34 kDa, respectively. While other plants contain the protein chains found in ricin, both protein chains must be present to produce toxic effects. For example, plants that contain only protein chain A, such as barley, are not toxic because without the link to protein chain B, protein chain A cannot enter the cell and do damage to ribosomes.
 * Ricin toxin A chain (RTA) is an N-glycoside hydrolase composed of 267 amino acids. It has three structural domains with approximately 50% of the polypeptide arranged into alpha-helices and beta-sheets. The three domains form a pronounced cleft that is the active site of RTA.
 * Ricin toxin B chain (RTB) is a lectin composed of 262 amino acids that is able to bind terminal galactose residues on cell surfaces. RTB forms a bilobal, barbell-like structure lacking alpha-helices or beta-sheets where individual lobes contain three subdomains. At least one of these three subdomains in each homologous lobe possesses a sugar-binding pocket that gives RTB its functional character.

Entry into the cytoplasm
Ricin B chain binds complex carbohydrates on the surface of eukaryotic cells containing either terminal N-acetylgalactosamine or beta-1,4-linked galactose residues. In addition, the mannose-type glycans of ricin are able to bind to cells that express mannose receptors. RTB has been shown to bind to the cell surface on the order of 106–108 ricin molecules per cell surface.

The profuse binding of ricin to surface membranes allows internalization with all types of membrane invaginations. The holotoxin can be taken up by clathrin-coated pits, as well as by clathrin-independent pathways including caveolae and macropinocytosis. Intracellular vesicles shuttle ricin to endosomes that are delivered to the Golgi apparatus. The active acidification of endosomes is thought to have little effect on the functional properties of ricin. Because ricin is stable over a wide pH range, degradation in endosomes or lysosomes offers little or no protection against ricin. Ricin molecules are thought to follow retrograde transport via early endosomes, the trans-Golgi network, and the Golgi to enter the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER).

For ricin to function cytotoxically, RTA must be reductively cleaved from RTB to release a steric block of the RTA active site. This process is catalysed by the protein PDI (protein disulphide isomerase) that resides in the lumen of the ER. Free RTA in the ER lumen then partially unfolds and partially buries into the ER membrane, where it is thought to mimic a misfolded membrane-associated protein. Roles for the ER chaperones GRP94, EDEM and BiP have been proposed prior to the 'dislocation' of RTA from the ER lumen to the cytosol in a manner that uses components of the endoplasmic reticulum-associated protein degradation (ERAD) pathway. ERAD normally removes misfolded ER proteins to the cytosol for their destruction by cytosolic proteasomes. Dislocation of RTA requires ER membrane-integral E3 ubiquitin ligase complexes, but RTA avoids the ubiquitination that usually occurs with ERAD substrates because of its low content of lysine residues, which are the usual attachment sites for ubiquitin. Thus, RTA avoids the usual fate of dislocated proteins (destruction that is mediated by targeting ubiquitinylated proteins to the cytosolic proteasomes). In the mammalian cell cytosol, RTA then undergoes triage by the cytosolic molecular chaperones Hsc70 and Hsp90 and their co-chaperones, as well as by one subunit (RPT5) of the proteasome itself, that results in its folding to a catalytic conformation, which de-purinates ribosomes, thus halting protein synthesis.

Ribosome inactivation
RTA has rRNA N-glycosylase activity that is responsible for the cleavage of a glycosidic bond within the large rRNA of the 60S subunit of eukaryotic ribosomes. RTA specifically and irreversibly hydrolyses the N-glycosidic bond of the adenine residue at position 4324 (A4324) within the 28S rRNA, but leaves the phosphodiester backbone of the RNA intact. The ricin targets A4324 that is contained in a highly conserved sequence of 12 nucleotides universally found in eukaryotic ribosomes. The sequence, 5'-AGUACGAGAGGA-3', termed the sarcin-ricin loop, is important in binding elongation factors during protein synthesis. The depurination event rapidly and completely inactivates the ribosome, resulting in toxicity from inhibited protein synthesis. A single RTA molecule in the cytosol is capable of depurinating approximately 1500 ribosomes per minute.

Depurination reaction
Within the active site of RTA, there exist several invariant amino acid residues involved in the depurination of ribosomal RNA. Although the exact mechanism of the event is unknown, key amino acid residues identified include tyrosine at positions 80 and 123, glutamic acid at position 177, and arginine at position 180. In particular, Arg180 and Glu177 have been shown to be involved in the catalytic mechanism, and not substrate binding, with enzyme kinetic studies involving RTA mutants. The model proposed by Mozingo and Robertus, based on X-ray structures, is as follows:
 * 1) Sarcin-ricin loop substrate binds RTA active site with target adenine stacking against tyr80 and tyr123.
 * 2) Arg180 is positioned such that it can protonate N-3 of adenine and break the bond between N-9 of the adenine ring and C-1' of the ribose.
 * 3) Bond cleavage results in an oxycarbonium ion on the ribose, stabilized by Glu177.
 * 4) N-3 protonation of adenine by Arg180 allows deprotonation of a nearby water molecule.
 * 5) Resulting hydroxyl attacks ribose carbonium ion.
 * 6) Depurination of adenine results in a neutral ribose on an intact phosphodiester RNA backbone.

Toxicity

Ricin is very toxic if inhaled, injected, or ingested. It can also be toxic if dust contacts the eyes or if it is absorbed through damaged skin. It acts as a toxin by inhibiting protein synthesis. It prevents cells from assembling various amino acids into proteins according to the messages it receives from messenger RNA in a process conducted by the cell's ribosome (the protein-making machinery) – that is, the most basic level of cell metabolism, essential to all living cells and thus to life itself. Ricin is resistant, but not impervious, to digestion by peptidases. By ingestion, the pathology of ricin is largely restricted to the gastrointestinal tract, where it may cause mucosal injuries. With appropriate treatment, most patients will make a good recovery.

Symptoms
Because the symptoms are caused by failure to make protein, they may take anywhere from hours to days to appear, depending on the route of exposure and the dose. When ingested, gastrointestinal symptoms can manifest within six hours; these symptoms do not always become apparent. Within two to five days of exposure to ricin, its effects on the central nervous system, adrenal glands, kidneys, and liver appear.

Ingestion of ricin causes pain, inflammation, and hemorrhage in the mucosal membranes of the gastrointestinal system. Gastrointestinal symptoms quickly progress to severe nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and difficulty swallowing (dysphagia). Haemorrhage causes bloody feces (melena) and vomiting blood (hematemesis). The low blood volume (hypovolemia) caused by gastrointestinal fluid loss can lead to organ failure in the pancreas, kidney, liver, and GI tract and progress to shock. Shock and organ failure are indicated by disorientation, stupor, weakness, drowsiness, excessive thirst (polydipsia), low urine production (oliguria), and bloody urine (hematuria).

Symptoms of ricin inhalation are different from those caused by ingestion. Early symptoms include a cough and fever.

When skin or inhalation exposure occur, ricin can cause an allergy to develop. This is indicated by swelling (edema) of the eyes and lips; asthma; bronchial irritation; dry, sore throat; congestion; skin redness (erythema); skin blisters (vesication); wheezing; itchy, watery eyes; chest tightness; and skin irritation.

Treatment
An antidote has been developed by the UK military, although as of 2006 it has not yet been tested on humans. As of 2005 another antidote developed by the US military has been shown to be safe and effective in lab mice injected with antibody-rich blood mixed with ricin, and has had some human testing. Monoclonal antibodies are under scientific investigation as a possible treatment for ricin poisoning.

Symptomatic and supportive treatments are available for ricin poisoning. Existing treatments emphasize minimizing the effects of the poison. Possible treatments include intravenous fluids or electrolytes, airway management, assisted ventilation, or giving medications to remedy seizures and low blood pressure. If the ricin has been ingested recently, the stomach can be flushed by ingesting activated charcoal or by performing gastric lavage. Survivors often develop long-term organ damage. Ricin causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, and victims can die of circulatory shock or organ failure; inhaled ricin can cause fatal pulmonary edema or respiratory failure. Death typically occurs within 3–5 days of exposure.

Prevention
Vaccination is possible by injecting an inactive form of protein chain A. This vaccination is effective for several months due to the body's production of antibodies to the foreign protein. In 1978 Bulgarian defector Vladimir Kostov survived a ricin attack similar to the one on Georgi Markov, probably due to his body's production of antibodies. When a ricin-laced pellet was removed from the small of his back it was found that some of the original wax coating was still attached. For this reason only small amounts of ricin had leaked out of the pellet, producing some symptoms but allowing his body to develop immunity to further poisoning.

Therapeutic applications
Although no approved therapeutics are currently based on ricin, it does have the potential to be used in the treatment of tumors, as a "magic bullet" to destroy targeted cells. Because ricin is a protein, it can be linked to a monoclonal antibody to target cancerous cells recognized by the antibody. The major problem with ricin is that its native internalization sequences are distributed throughout the protein. If any of these native internalization sequences are present in a therapeutic agent, the drug will be internalized by, and kill, untargeted non-tumorous cells as well as targeted cancerous cells.

Modifying ricin may sufficiently lessen the likelihood that the ricin component of these immunotoxins will cause the wrong cells to internalize it, while still retaining its cell-killing activity when it is internalized by the targeted cells. However, bacterial toxins, such as diphtheria toxin, which is used in denileukin diftitox, an FDA-approved treatment for leukemia and lymphoma, have proven to be more practical. A promising approach for ricin is to use the non-toxic B subunit (a lectin) as a vehicle for delivering antigens into cells, thus greatly increasing their immunogenicity. Use of ricin as an adjuvant has potential implications for developing mucosal vaccines.

Regulation
In the US, ricin appears on the select agents list of the Department of Health and Human Services, and scientists must register with HHS to use ricin in their research. However, investigators under the control of less than 1000 mg are exempt from regulation.

Ricin is classified as an extremely hazardous substance in the United States as defined in Section 302 of the US Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (42 U.S.C. 11002), and is subject to strict reporting requirements by facilities that produce, store, or use it in significant quantities.

History
The United States investigated ricin for its military potential during World War I. At that time it was being considered for use either as a toxic dust or as a coating for bullets and shrapnel. The dust cloud concept could not be adequately developed, and the coated bullet/shrapnel concept would violate the Hague Convention of 1899 (adopted in U.S. law at 32 Stat. 1903), specifically Annex §2, Ch.1, Article 23, stating "... it is especially prohibited ... [t]o employ poison or poisoned arms".

During World War II the United States and Canada studied ricin in cluster bombs. Though there were plans for mass production and several field trials with different bomblet concepts, the end conclusion was that it was no more economical than using phosgene. This conclusion was based on comparison of the final weapons, rather than ricin's toxicity (LCt50 ~10 mg/min·m3). Ricin was given the military symbol W or later WA. Interest in it continued for a short period after World War II, but soon subsided when the US Army Chemical Corps began a program to weaponize sarin.

The Soviet Union possessed weaponized ricin. The KGB developed weapons using ricin which were used outside the Soviet bloc, most famously in the Markov assassination.

Control
In spite of ricin's extreme toxicity and utility as an agent of chemical/biological warfare, production of the toxin is difficult to limit. The castor bean plant from which ricin is derived is a common ornamental and can be grown at home without any special care.

Under both the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, ricin is listed as a schedule 1 controlled substance. Despite this, more than 1 e6MT of castor beans are processed each year, and approximately 5% of the total is rendered into a waste containing negligible concentrations of undenatured ricin toxin.

Ricin is several orders of magnitude less toxic than botulinum or tetanus toxin, but the latter are harder to come by. Compared to botulinum or anthrax as biological weapons or chemical weapons, the quantity of ricin required to achieve LD50 over a large geographic area is significantly more than an agent such as anthrax (tons of ricin vs. only kilogram quantities of anthrax). Ricin is easy to produce, but is not as practical or likely to cause as many casualties as other agents. Ricin is easily denatured by temperatures over 80 C meaning many methods of deploying ricin would generate enough heat to denature it. Once deployed, an area contaminated with ricin remains dangerous until the bonds between chain A or B have been broken, a process that takes two or three days. In contrast, anthrax spores may remain lethal for decades. Jan van Aken, a German expert on biological weapons, explained in a report for The Sunshine Project that Al Qaeda's experiments with ricin suggest their inability to produce botulinum or anthrax.

Developments
A biopharmaceutical company called Soligenix, Inc. licensed an anti-ricin vaccine called RiVax from Vitetta et al. at UT Southwestern. The vaccine was found safe and immunogenic in mice, rabbits, and humans. Two successful clinical trials were completed. Soligenix was issued a US patent for Rivax. The ricin vaccine candidate was granted orphan drug status in the US and the EEC and, as of 2019, was in clinical trials in the US. Grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US Food and Drug Administration supported development of the vaccine candidate.

Synthesis
The first isolation of ricin is attributed to the Baltic-German microbiologist Peter Hermann Stillmark (1860–1923) in 1888.

Terrorist use
Ricin has been involved in a number of actual or planned attacks on individuals. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by Bulgarian secret police who surreptitiously shot him on a London street with what was later found to have been a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet containing ricin into his leg. He died in a hospital a few days later; his body was passed to a special poison branch of the British Ministry of Defence that discovered the pellet during an autopsy. The prime suspects were the Bulgarian secret police: Georgi Markov had defected from Bulgaria some years previously and had subsequently written books and made radio broadcasts that were highly critical of the Bulgarian communist regime. However, it was believed at the time that Bulgaria would not have been able to produce the pellet, and it was also believed that the KGB had supplied it. The KGB denied any involvement, although high-profile KGB defectors Oleg Kalugin and Oleg Gordievsky later confirmed the KGB's involvement. Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had (but survived) ricin-like symptoms after an encounter in 1971 with KGB agents.

Ten days before the attack on Georgi Markov another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, survived a similar attack. Kostov was standing on an escalator of the Paris metro when he felt a sting in his lower back above the belt of his trousers. He developed a fever, but recovered. After Markov's death the wound on Kostov's back was examined and a ricin-laced pellet identical to the one used against Markov was removed.

Several terrorist individuals and groups have experimented with ricin or planned to use it. There have been incidents of the poison being mailed to US politicians. For example, on 29 May 2013 two anonymous letters sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg contained traces of it. Another was sent to the offices of Mayors Against Illegal Guns in Washington, D.C. A letter containing ricin was also reported to have been sent to American President Barack Obama at the same time. Shannon Richardson, an actress, was later charged with the crime, and pleaded guilty that December; she was sentenced to 18 years in prison plus a restitution fine of US$367,000. On 2 October 2018, two letters suspected of containing ricin were sent to The Pentagon, one addressed to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and the other to Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson. A letter was received on 23 July 2019 at Pelican Bay State Prison in California which claimed to contain a suspicious substance. Authorities later confirmed it contained ricin; no detrimental exposures were identified.

In 2020, some media in the Czech Republic reported, based on intelligence information, that a person carrying a Russian diplomatic passport and ricin had arrived in Prague with the intention of assassinating three politicians. Russian president Vladimir Putin denied the reports. The targets were said to have been Zdeněk Hřib, the mayor of Prague (capital of the Czech Republic), who was involved in renaming a square in Prague, "Pod Kaštany", where the Russian embassy is situated, to the Square of Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician assassinated in the Kremlin in 2015; Ondřej Kolář, the mayor of Prague 6 municipal district, who was involved in removing the controversial statue to the Soviet-era Marshal Konev; and Pavel Novotný, the mayor of Prague's southwestern Řeporyje district. They all received police protection. Czech president Miloš Zeman later described the police protection of Zdeněk Hřib as an attempt by an insignificant politician to gain attention. Zeman also confused ricin with non-poisonous laxative castor oil.

In 2018 and 2023 German police thwarted attempted ricin attacks, after tip-offs believed to have come from the US FBI.

In popular culture
Ricin has been used as a plot device, such as in the television series Breaking Bad.

The popularity of Breaking Bad inspired several real-life criminal cases involving ricin or similar substances. Kuntal Patel from London attempted to poison her mother with abrin after the latter interfered with her marriage plans. Daniel Milzman, a 19-year-old former Georgetown University student, was charged with manufacturing ricin in his dorm room, as well as the intent of "[using] the ricin on another undergraduate student with whom he had a relationship". Mohammed Ali from Liverpool, England, was convicted after attempting to purchase 500 mg of ricin over the dark web from an undercover FBI agent. He was sentenced on 18 September 2015 to eight years imprisonment.

In Agatha Christie's novel Partners in Crime, ricin was used as a plot device.

In the final season of Walker, Texas Ranger, ricin was used by Emil Lavocat to murder the titular Texas Ranger's best friend, mentor and former partner, C.D. Parker, out of revenge against them and all the Rangers in their company for busting up his organized crime ring and imprisoning his lieutenants. Though it was under the guise of a heart attack near the end of the episode "The Avenging Angel", the truth about C.D.'s death comes out in the series finale, "The Final Show/Down", when Walker and Trivette have his body exhumed and autopsied.

In the 2013 movie The Good Mother, a mother injects and feeds her daughters with ricin in a case of Munchausen by proxy; she is caught after a daughter dies.

In the 2014 movie The Interview, a transdermal strip carrying ricin is used in a CIA plot to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un via handshake.

title: Ricin


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Yarrow Water

The Yarrow Water is a river in the Borders in the south east of Scotland. It is a tributary of the Ettrick Water (itself a tributary of the Tweed) and renowned for its high quality trout and salmon fishing. The name "Yarrow" may derive from the Celtic word garw meaning "rough" or possibly share a derivation with the English name "Jarrow".

The valley was the birthplace of Mungo Park and has inspired several well-known songs and poems. Its traditions and folk tales were well documented by Walter Scott, who spent part of his childhood nearby, and in adult life returned to live in the vicinity at Abbotsford House, near Melrose.

Geography and history
Its source is St. Mary's Loch and from there the Yarrow Water flows 20 km in an easterly direction with a fall of 123.5 m passing the settlements of Yarrow Feus, Yarrow and Yarrowford before joining the Ettrick near to the site of the 1645 Battle of Philiphaugh just west of Selkirk. This confluence, which occurs at the eastern edge of the Duke of Buccleuch's Bowhill Estate, is known as the Meetings Pool. The valley is traversed by the A708 that runs from Selkirk to Moffat.

The explorer Mungo Park was born at Foulshiels on the left bank of the river in 1771. In May 1804 Walter Scott came upon Park throwing stones into a deep pool in the river and remarked that "This appears but an idle amusement for one who has seen so much adventure". Park replied that this was "Not so idle perhaps, as you suppose. This was the way I used to ascertain the depth of a river in Africa". Although he had not yet told anyone, Park was considering his second and fateful expedition at the time. At about the same time, James Hogg ("The Ettrick Shepherd") had come to the attention of Scott whilst the former was working at Blackhouse Farm in the Yarrow valley.

The impressive ruins of Newark Castle, held by the Earls of Douglas in the 15th century, lie on the right bank of the river opposite Foulshiels.

The Dowie Dens
The folk song "The Dowie Dens o Yarrow" (English: "the dismal, narrow wooded valleys of Yarrow") refers to an ambush and murder that takes place in the locality. According to Walter Scott the song is based on a real incident that took place in the seventeenth century, although some modern scholars are sceptical about this story as one of the origins of the song. These include a poem by William Hamilton of Bangour called "The Braes of Yarrow" first published in Edinburgh in 1724 and said to be "written in imitation of an old Scottish ballad on a similar subject".

Outlaw Murray
"The Sang of the Outlaw Murray" is a lay that may have been composed in the reign of James V and which was collected by Walter Scott. Local tradition held that the events took place in the vicinity of Newark Castle, although Scott himself believed that the old tower at Hangingshaw, a seat of the Philiphaugh family near Yarrowford, was the correct location. He was assured by "the late excellent antiquarian Mr. Plummer, sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire... that he remembered the insignia of the unicorns, &c. so often mentioned in the ballad, in existence" there.

William Wordsworth
In his 1803 publication "Yarrow Unvisited" William Wordsworth wrote:
 * "What's Yarrow but a river bare,
 * That glides the dark hills under?
 * There are a thousand such elsewhere
 * As worthy of your wonder.''

although this deprecation did not deter a further visit to the area when he journeyed down the length of the Yarrow in the company of James Hogg and the subsequent publication of "Yarrow Visited" in 1814 and "Yarrow Revisited" in 1838.

Wordsworth's 1835 "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg" includes the lines:
 * "The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,
 * 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;
 * And death upon the braes of Yarrow,
 * Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes."

Tam Lin
The wood of Carterhaugh near the confluence of the Yarrow and Ettrick, is the setting for the ballad "Tam Lin". This song, collected in 1729, tells the story of a maiden and her relationship to the faery world. It begins:
 * "O I forbid you, maidens a',
 * That wear gowd on your hair,
 * To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
 * For young Tam Lin is there.

 * There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh
 * But they leave him a wad,
 * Either their rings, or green mantles,
 * Or else their maidenhead."

It is possible that this tale is derived from the 13th century ballad, "Thomas the Rhymer", that concerns Thomas Learmonth of nearby Erceldoune.

Folk tales
The subject matter of Tam Lin is referred to in various other local traditions. Scott recorded that: The peasants point out upon the plain [of Caterhaugh], those electrical rings which vulgar credulity supposes to be traces of the Fairy revels. Here, they say, were placed the stands of milk, and of water, in which Tamlane was dipped in order to effect the disenchantment; and upon these spots, according to their mode of expressing themselves, the grass will never grow.

He went on to complain that "in no part of Scotland, indeed, has the belief in Fairies maintained its ground with more pertinacity than in Selkirkshire" and describes a story "implicitly believed by all" said to have occurred in the seventeenth century on Peat Law, to the east of Foulshiels Hill: The victim of elfin sport was a poor man, who, being employed in pulling heather upon Peatlaw, a hill not far from Carterhaugh, had tired of his labour and laid him down to sleep upon a Fairy ring. When he awakened he was amazed to find himself in the midst of a populous city, to which, as well as to the means of his transportation, he was an utter stranger. His coat was left upon the Peatlaw; and his bonnet, which had fallen off in the course of his aerial journey, was afterwards found hanging upon the steeple of the church of Lanark.

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

title: Yarrow Water


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Fermi (disambiguation)

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) was an Italian physicist who created the world's first nuclear reactor.

Fermi or Enrico Fermi may also refer to:
 * Fermi (crater), a large lunar impact crater
 * Fermi (microarchitecture), a microarchitecture developed by Nvidia
 * Fermi (supercomputer), located at CINECA in Italy
 * Fermi (Turin Metro), a rapid transit station in Italy
 * Fermi (unit), a unit of length in nuclear physics equivalent to the femtometre
 * RA-1 Enrico Fermi, a research reactor in Argentina
 * Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
 * Enrico Fermi Institute, Chicago, Illinois, US
 * Fermi Linux, distributions produced by Fermilab
 * FERMI, a free-electron laser at the ELETTRA research centre

People with the surname

 * Laura Fermi (1907–1977), Enrico Fermi's wife

title: Fermi (disambiguation)


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Dirac (video compression format)

Dirac (and Dirac Pro, a subset standardised as SMPTE VC-2) is an open and royalty-free video compression format, specification and software video codec developed by BBC Research & Development. Dirac aimed to provide high-quality video compression for Ultra HDTV and competed with existing formats such as H.264.

The specification was finalised in January 2008, and further developments were only bug fixes and constraints. In September of that year, version 1.0.0 of an I-frame only subset known as Dirac Pro was released and was standardised by the SMPTE as VC-2. Version 2.2.3 of the full Dirac specification, including motion compensation and inter-frame coding, was issued a few days later. Dirac Pro was used internally by the BBC to transmit HDTV pictures at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Two open source and royalty-free video codec software implementations, libschrodinger and dirac-research, were developed. The format implementations were named in honour of the theoretical physicists Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger, who shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics.

Technology
Dirac supports resolutions of HDTV (1920×1080) and greater, and is claimed to provide significant savings in data rate and improvements in quality over video compression formats such as MPEG-2 Part 2, MPEG-4 Part 2 and its competitors such as Theora and WMV. Dirac's implementers made a preliminary claim of "a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video", which makes it comparable to VC-1 and simpler profiles of H.264.

Dirac supports both constant bit rate and variable bit rate operation. When the low delay syntax is used, the bit rate will be constant for each area (Dirac slice) in a picture to ensure constant latency. Dirac supports lossy and lossless compression modes.

Dirac employs wavelet compression, like the JPEG 2000 and PGF image formats and the Cineform professional video codec, instead of the discrete cosine transforms used in MPEG compression formats. Two of the specific wavelets Dirac can use are nearly identical to JPEG 2000's (known as the 5/3 and 9/7 wavelets), as well as two more derived from them.

Dirac can be used in Ogg and Matroska container formats and is also registered for use in the ISO base media (MP4) file format and MPEG transport streams.

Patents
The BBC does not own any patents on Dirac. They previously had some patent applications with plans to irrevocably grant a royalty-free licence for their Dirac-related patents to everyone, but they let the applications lapse. In addition, the developers have said they will try to ensure that Dirac does not infringe on any third party patents, enabling the public to use Dirac for any purpose.

VC-2
Dirac Pro, an I-frame only subset of the Dirac specification, was proposed to the SMPTE for standardisation. Dirac Pro is designed for professional and studio use of high definition video in high bitrate applications. In 2010, the SMPTE standardised Dirac Pro as VC-2.

Although work on the original Dirac codec has largely stopped, the VC-2 codec has continued to be adapted and updated for HD and UHD post-production environments. The SMPTE standards (ST) and recommended practices (RP) are as follows:

 * SMPTE ST 2042-1:2022 – VC-2 Video Compression
 * SMPTE ST 2042-2:2017 – VC-2 Level Definitions
 * SMPTE RP 2042-3:2022 – VC-2 Conformance Specification
 * SMPTE ST 2042-4:2018 — Mapping a VC-2 Stream into the MXF Generic Container
 * SMPTE RP 2047-1:2023 – VC-2 Mezzanine Level Compression of 1080P High Definition Video Sources
 * SMPTE ST 2047-2:2010 — Carriage of VC-2 Compressed Video over HD-SDI
 * SMPTE RP 2047-3:2023 — VC-2 Level 65 Compression of High Definition Video Sources for Use with a Standard Definition Infrastructure
 * SMPTE ST 2047-4:2011 — Carriage of Level 65 VC-2 Compressed Video Over the SDTV SDI
 * SMPTE RP 2047-5:2022 — VC-2 Level 66 Compression of Ultra-High Definition Video Sources for Use with a High Definition Infrastructure
 * IETF — RTP Payload Format for VC-2 High Quality (HQ) Profile

Software implementations
Two software implementations were initially developed. The BBC's reference implementation, initially called Dirac but renamed dirac-research to avoid confusion, was written in C++ and released under the Mozilla Public License, GNU GPL 2 and GNU LGPL free software licenses. Version 1.0.0 of this implementation was released on 17 September 2008 and defines the Dirac bitstream format.

A second implementation called Schrödinger was funded by the BBC and aimed to provide a high-performance, portable version of the codec whilst remaining 100% bitstream compatible. Schrödinger was written in ANSI C and released under the same licenses as dirac-research, as well as the highly-permissive MIT License. GStreamer plugins were included to enable the library to be used with that framework. On 22 February 2008, Schrödinger 1.0.0 was released, and was able to decode HD720/25p in real-time on a Core Duo laptop.

By the March 2010 release of Schrödinger version 1.0.9, it was outperforming dirac-research "in most encoding situations, both in terms of encoding speed and visual quality". With that release, most of the encoding tools in dirac-research were ported over to Schrödinger, giving Schrödinger the same as or better compression efficiency than dirac-research. Development of Schrödinger ceased after the 1.0.11 release in 2012.

After the standardisation of Dirac Pro as SMPTE VC-2, development began on an open source reference VC-2 encoder. The code is provided in a git repository by the BBC and is available on GitHub.

An encoder quality testing system has been put in place at BBC to check how well new encoding tools work and to make sure bugs that affect quality are quickly fixed.

Desktop playback and encoding
Dirac video playback is supported by VLC media player since version 0.9.2 (2008), and by applications using the GStreamer framework. Support has also been added to FFmpeg. Applications which can encode to Dirac include FFmpeg, MediaCoder, LiVES and OggConvert.

Performance
The algorithms in the original Dirac specification were intended to provide compression performance comparable to mainstream video compression standards of the time. A 2009 comparison of the Dirac and H.264 codecs, which used implementations from the second quarter of 2008, showed x264 scoring slightly higher than Dirac. Another 2009 comparison found similar results for standard definition content, but did not compare high definition (HD) video content. These studies show that Dirac compression performance is close to that of MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP, popularised as DivX). While also approaching low complexity H.264 encodes, a High Profile H.264 encoded video will have better compression for the same perceived quality.

Since 2010, royalty-free, open source video codecs such as VP8, VP9, and AV1 have been developed with better compression performance and more widespread adoption, including dominant streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix.

title: Dirac (video compression format)


text:
Born

Born may refer to:

 * Childbirth
 * Born (surname), a surname (see also for a list of people with the name)
 * Born (comics), a comic book limited series

Places

 * Born, Belgium, a village in the German-speaking Community of Belgium
 * Born, Luxembourg, a village in Luxembourg
 * Born auf dem Darß, a municipality in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany
 * Born, Netherlands, a town in the Netherlands
 * Born, Saxony-Anhalt, a municipality in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
 * Born (crater), a small lunar impact crater located near the eastern edge of the Moon, to the northeast of the prominent crater Langrenus

Music

 * Born (Bond album), 2001
 * Born (Boom Crash Opera album), 1995
 * Born (EP), a 2004 EP by D'espairsRay
 * "Born" (song), a 1970 song by Barry Gibb
 * "Born", a song by the metal band Nevermore from This Godless Endeavor
 * "Born", a song by the pop-rock band OneRepublic from Oh My My
 * "Born", a song by the Ohio-based band Over the Rhine from Drunkard's Prayer

Other uses

 * Born rule probability density function by Max Born
 * Battle Organization of Russian Nationalists, a Russian neo-Nazi group
 * Cupra Born, a hatchback
 * Born Electric, an electric SUV sub brand of Mahindra

title: Born


text:
Derwent Reservoir (Derbyshire)

Derwent Reservoir is the middle of three reservoirs in the Upper Derwent Valley in the north of Derbyshire, England. It lies approximately 10 mi from Glossop and 10 mi from Sheffield. The River Derwent flows first through Howden Reservoir, then Derwent Reservoir and finally through Ladybower Reservoir. Between them they provide practically all of Derbyshire's water, as well as to a large part of South Yorkshire and as far afield as Nottingham and Leicester.

Derwent Reservoir is around 1.5 mi in length, running broadly north–south, with Howden Dam at the northern end and Derwent Dam at the south. A small island lies near the Howden Dam. The Abbey Brook flows into the reservoir from the east.

At its full capacity the reservoir covers an area of 70.8 ha and at its deepest point is 34.7 m deep.

History
The Industrial Revolution and urbanisation of the 19th century created huge demand for water in the industrial cities of the East Midlands and South Yorkshire. The proximity of Sheffield and its neighbours to the Upper Derwent valley were thus factors in the decision to dam the valley to create the Howden and Derwent reservoirs.

Construction of the neo-Gothic solid masonry dam began in 1902, a year after the building of Howden commenced, and proved a mammoth task. The chief engineer was Edward Sandeman. He was also in charge of building nearby Howden dam and he was awarded the Telford Medal in 1918 for his work ‘Derwent Valley Waterworks’. The huge stones that formed the walls of the dam were carried along a specially created railway from the quarries at Bole Hill near Grindleford. Over 1,000 workers lived in a specially constructed self-contained town called Birchinlee or "Tin Town". One of the metal huts was preserved and moved to the village of Hope, where it is now a hairdressing salon. The workers who died during the building of the dam were buried in Bamford Church.

The filling of the reservoir began in November 1914, and overflowed for the first time in January 1916, with the water almost immediately passing into supply. The dam can support a total of 9.64 e6m3 of water.

Only two years after the dam's completion in 1916, it was decided that the flow from the reservoir was insufficient to support the surrounding population. As a result, between 1920 and 1931 the rivers Alport and Ashop were also diverted from the Ashop valley into the reservoir using tunnels and a Venturi flume.

The diversion helped hold back water during the construction of the Ladybower Reservoir to the south, which was constructed between 1935 and 1945.

Bamford and Howden Railway
Between 1901 and 1903 a standard-gauge railway of over 7 mi was built from the village of Bamford to the south of the reservoir to Howden, to carry the thousands of tons of stone required for the construction of the two dams. Near the southern end lay the newly opened quarry at Bole Hill near Grindleford.

Remains of the railway can still be seen alongside Derwent Reservoir as well as at the western end of the Ladybower dam where over 1.5 mi of cutting and trackway remain, and are known locally as 'The Route'. Between the Howden and Derwent dams the present road was built over the top of the railway.

After supplying well over a million tons of stone the Bole Hill quarry was closed in September 1914, with the end of the railway following soon after. The section between the mainline railway at Hope and Yorkshire Bridge was relaid in 1935 to aid the construction of the Ladybower dam, but closed again in 1946.

Countryside
The majority of the land around the reservoir is owned by Severn Trent Water, and of that around half is woodland. The woods consist predominantly of larch, pine, and spruce conifers, with the remaining third mainly sycamore, beech and oak.

The hills of the Peak District are given over to the pasture of sheep, leased to local farmers. The moorlands and gritstone edges are criss-crossed by footpaths open year-round other than during selected shooting periods.

A stone memorial to Tip, a sheepdog, stands on the bank of the reservoir. Tip remained with the body of local shepherd, Joseph Tagg, for 105 days after he died on Howden Moor in the winter of 1953-54. Tip was awarded the Bronze Medal of the Canine Defence League.

Dambusters
During the Second World War, the reservoir was used by pilots of the 617 Squadron for practising the low-level flights needed for Operation Chastise (commonly known as the "Dam Busters" raids), due to its similarity to the German dams. Today there is a commemorative plaque to 617 Squadron on the dam, and one of the towers on the dam housed the Derwent Valley Museum. The exhibition now closed, was owned and run by the late Vic Hallam, and covered stories of 617 Squadron and its training for Operation Chastise. It also had a display on the history of the Derwent valley and the lost villages of Derwent and Ashopton.

Occasional flypasts of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at the reservoir are also staged to commemorate the events during the war. In September 2014, a unique flypast took place with the two remaining airworthy Lancasters, one from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, and one from Canada, flying three passes in formation.

title: Derwent Reservoir (Derbyshire)


text:
Howden Reservoir

The Howden Reservoir is a Y-shaped reservoir, the uppermost of the three in the Upper Derwent Valley, England. The western half of the reservoir lies in Derbyshire and the eastern half is in Sheffield, South Yorkshire; the county border runs through the middle of the reservoir, following the original path of the River Derwent. The longest arm is around 1+1/4 mi in length. The reservoir is bounded at the southern end by Howden Dam; below this, the Derwent flows immediately into Derwent Reservoir and subsequently the Ladybower Reservoir. Other tributaries include the River Westend, Howden Clough and Linch Clough.

Work commenced on the dam's construction on 16 July 1901 and completed in July 1912. The chief engineer was Edward Sandeman. He was also in charge of building nearby Derwent dam and was awarded the Telford Medal in 1918 for his work "Derwent Valley Waterworks". The works involved constructing a temporary village at Birchinlee, or "Tin Town", for the workers, a temporary railway line from the main line at Bamford, construction of a link aqueduct to the Derwent Dam. The dam is of solid masonry construction, and 117 ft tall, 1080 ft long, and impounds 1,900,000 impgal of water, from a catchment area of 5155 acre. The workers who died during the construction of the dam were buried in St John the Baptist's Church, Bamford.

To the east of the reservoir stands Featherbed Moss, one of the highest tops in the area at 545 m, and one of several tops of that name in the area. This is not to be confused with the more well-known Featherbed Moss on the Pennine Way between Kinder Scout and Bleaklow.

title: Howden Reservoir


text:
User:Anilkumar

Hello everyone,
 * My name is Gurram Anilkumar.I will be very happy to share my knowledge and vital information with others here. If anyone wats to communicate with me can paste their name on my discuss page.

title: User:Anilkumar


text:
Blaise Cendrars

Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.

Early years and education
He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, rue de la Paix 27, into a bourgeois francophone family, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother. They sent young Frédéric to a German boarding school, but he ran away. At the Realschule in Basel in 1902 he met his lifelong friend the sculptor August Suter. Next they enrolled him in a school in Neuchâtel, but he had little enthusiasm for his studies. Finally, in 1904, he left school due to poor performance and began an apprenticeship with a Swiss watchmaker in Russia.

While living in St. Petersburg, he began to write, thanks to the encouragement of R.R., a librarian at the National Library of Russia. There he wrote the poem, "La Légende de Novgorode", which R.R. translated into Russian. Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime. In 1995, the Bulgarian poet Kiril Kadiiski claimed to have found one of the Russian translations in Sofia, but the authenticity of the document remains contested on the grounds of factual, typographic, orthographic, and stylistic analysis.

In 1907, Sauser returned to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the University of Berne. During this period, he wrote his first verified poems, Séquences, influenced by Remy de Gourmont's Le Latin mystique.

Literary career
Cendrars was an early exponent of Modernism in European poetry with his works: The Legend of Novgorode (1907), Les Pâques à New York (1912), La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne de France  (1913), Séquences (1913), La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916), Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918), J'ai tué (1918), and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques  (1919).

In many ways, he was a direct heir of Rimbaud, a visionary rather than what the French call un homme de lettres ("a man of letters"), a term that for him was predicated on a separation of intellect and life. Like Rimbaud, who writes in "The Alchemy of the Word" in A Season in Hell, "I liked absurd paintings over door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings," Cendrars similarly says of himself in Der Sturm (1913), "I like legends, dialects, mistakes of language, detective novels, the flesh of girls, the sun, the Eiffel Tower."

Spontaneity, boundless curiosity, a craving for travel, and immersion in actualities were his hallmarks both in life and art. He was drawn to this same immersion in Balzac's flood of novels on 19th-century French society and in Casanova's travels and adventures through 18th-century Europe, which he set down in dozens of volumes of memoirs that Cendrars considered "the true Encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, filled with life as they are, unlike Diderot's, and the work of a single man, who was neither an ideologue nor a theoretician". Cendrars regarded the early modernist movement from roughly 1910 to the mid-1920s as a period of genuine discovery in the arts and in 1919 contrasted "theoretical cubism" with "the group's three antitheoreticians," Picasso, Braque, and Léger, whom he described as "three strongly personal painters who represent the three successive phases of cubism." After a short stay in Paris, he traveled to New York, arriving on 11 December 1911. Between 6–8 April 1912, he wrote his long poem, Les Pâques à New York (Easter in New York), his first important contribution to modern literature. He signed it for the first time with the name Blaise Cendrars.

In the summer of 1912, Cendrars returned to Paris, convinced that poetry was his vocation. With Emil Szittya, an anarchist writer, he started the journal Les hommes nouveaux, also the name of the press where he published Les Pâques à New York and Séquences. He became acquainted with the international array of artists and writers in Paris, such as Chagall, Léger, Survage, Suter, Modigliani, Csaky, Archipenko, Jean Hugo and Robert Delaunay.

Most notably, he encountered Guillaume Apollinaire. The two poets influenced each other's work. Cendrars' poem Les Pâques à New York influenced Apollinaire's poem Zone. Cendrars' style was based on photographic impressions, cinematic effects of montage and rapid changes of imagery, and scenes of great emotional force, often with the power of a hallucination. These qualities, which also inform his prose, are already evident in Easter in New York and in his best known and even longer poem The Transsiberian, with its scenes of revolution and the Far East in flames in the Russo-Japanese war ("The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion / tortured by a sadic hand / In the rips in the sky insane locomotives / Take flight / In the gaps / Whirling wheels mouths voices / And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels"). The published work was printed within washes of color by the painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk as a fold-out two meters in length, together with her design of brilliant colors down the left-hand side, a small map of the Transsiberian railway in the upper right corner, and a painted silhouette in orange of the Eiffel Tower in the lower left. Cendrars called the work the first "simultaneous poem". Soon after, it was exhibited as a work of art in its own right and continues to be shown at exhibitions to this day.

This intertwining of poetry and painting was related to Robert Delaunay's and other artists' experiments in proto-expressionism. At the same time Gertrude Stein was beginning to write prose in the manner of Pablo Picasso's paintings. Cendrars liked to claim that his poem's first printing of one hundred fifty copies would, when unfolded, reach the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Cendrars' relationship with painters such as Chagall and Léger led him to write a series of revolutionary abstract short poems, published in a collection in 1919 under the title Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems). Some were tributes to his fellow artists. In 1954, a collaboration between Cendrars and Léger resulted in Paris, ma ville (Paris, My City), in which the poet and illustrator together expressed their love of the French capital. As Léger died in 1955, the book was not published until 1987.

The Left-Handed Poet
His writing career was interrupted by World War I. When it began, he and the Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army. He joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the line at Frise (La Grenouillère and Bois de la Vache). He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée (The severed hand) and J'ai tué (I have killed), and it is the subject of his poem "Orion" in Travel Notes: "It is my star / It is in the shape of a hand / It is my hand gone up to the sky . . ." It was during the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the army.

Jean Cocteau introduced him to Eugenia Errázuriz, who proved a supportive, if at times possessive, patron. Around 1918 he visited her house and was so taken with the simplicity of the décor that he was inspired to write the poems published as De Outremer à indigo (From ultramarine to indigo). He stayed with Eugenia in her house in Biarritz, in a room decorated with murals by Picasso. At this time, he drove an old Alfa Romeo which had been colour-coordinated by Georges Braque.

Cendrars became an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse; his writings were considered a literary epic of the modern adventurer. He was a friend of the American writer Henry Miller, who called him his "great idol", a man he "really venerated as a writer". He knew many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. In 1918, his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait. He was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who mentions having seen him "with his broken boxer's nose and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand", at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris. He was also befriended by John Dos Passos, who was his closest American counterpart both as a world traveler (even more than Hemingway) and in his adaptation of Cendrars' cinematic uses of montage in writing, most notably in his great trilogy of the 1930s, U.S.A. One of the most gifted observers of the times, Dos Passos brought Cendrars to American readers in the 1920s and 30s by translating Cendrars' major long poems The Transsiberian and Panama and in his 1926 prose-poetic essay "Homer of the Transsiberian," which was reprinted from The Saturday Review one year later in Orient Express.

After the war, Cendrars became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Cendrars' departure from poetry in the 1920s roughly coincided with his break from the world of the French intellectuals, summed up in his Farewell to Painters (1926) and the last section of L'homme foudroyé (1944), after which he began to make numerous trips to South America ("while others were going to Moscow", as he writes in that chapter). It was during this second half of his career that he began to concentrate on novels, short stories, and, near the end and just after World War II, on his magnificent poetic-autobiographical tetralogy, beginning with L'homme foudroyé.

Later years
Cendrars continued to be active in the Paris artistic community, encouraging younger artists and writing about them. For instance, he described the Hungarian photographer Ervin Marton as an "ace of white and black photography" in a preface to his exhibition catalogue. He was with the British Expeditionary Force in northern France at the beginning of the German invasion in 1940, and his book that immediately followed, Chez l'armée anglaise (With the English Army), was seized before publication by the Gestapo, which sought him out and sacked his library in his country home, while he fled into hiding in Aix-en-Provence. He comments on the trampling of his library and temporary "extinction of my personality" at the beginning of L'homme foudroyé (in the double sense of "the man who was blown away"). In Occupied France, the Gestapo listed Cendrars as a Jewish writer of "French expression", but he managed to survive. His youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco. Details of his time with the BEF and last meeting with his son appear in his work of 1949 Le lotissement du ciel (translated simply as Sky).

In 1950, Cendrars settled down in the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the La Santé Prison. There he collaborated frequently with Radiodiffusion Française. He finally published again in 1956. The novel, Emmène-moi au bout du monde !…, was his last work before he suffered a stroke in 1957. He died in 1961. His ashes are held at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre.

Personal life
In New York in 1911, Cendrars married his first wife, Féla Poznańska, who was Jewish and of Russo-Polish extraction. They had three children: Rémy (an airman killed in WW2), Odilon and Miriam Gilou-Cendrars who was active with the Free French in London during World War II. She was her father's first biographer and helped set up the Cendrars Archive in Berne. Cendrars converted to Catholicism on May 1, 1959, and married Raymone Duchâteau, a French actress.

Legacy and honors

 * In 1960, André Malraux, the Minister of Culture, awarded him the title of Commander of the Légion d'honneur for his wartime service.
 * 1961, Cendrars was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for literature.
 * His literary estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.
 * The Centre d'Études Blaise Cendrars (CEBC) has been established at the University of Berne in his honor and for the study of his work.
 * The French-language Association internationale Blaise Cendrars was established to study and preserve his works.
 * The Lycée Blaise-Cendrars in La Chaux-de-Fonds and the Collège Blaise Cendrars in Boissy-Saint-Léger were named in his honor.

Works
Name of the work, year of first edition, publisher (in Paris if not otherwise noted) / kind of work / Known translations (year of first edition in that language)

 * Les Pâques à New York (1912, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975)
 * La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne de France (1913, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975); Bengali (1981, Bish Sataker Pharasi Kabita, Alliance Française de Calcutta; 1997)
 * Selected Poems Blaise Cendrars (1979, Penguin Modern European Poets, /English tr. Pete Hoida)
 * Séquences (1913, Editions des Hommes Nouveaux)
 * Rimsky-Korsakov et la nouvelle musique russe (1913)
 * La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916, D. Niestlé, editor) / Poem / Spanish (1975)
 * Profond aujourd'hui (1917, A la Belle Édition)
 * Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918, Éditions de la Sirène) / Poem / English (1931); Spanish (1975); Bengali (2009)
 * J'ai tué (1918, La Belle Édition) / Poetic essay / English (1992)
 * Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques - (1919, Au Sans Pareil) / Poems / Spanish (1975)
 * La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange Notre-Dame - (1919, Éditions de la Sirène) / English (1992)
 * Anthologie nègre - (1921, Éditions de la Sirène) / African Folk Tales / Spanish (1930); English (1972)
 * Documentaires - (1924, with the title "Kodak", Librairie Stock) / Poems / Spanish (1975)
 * Feuilles de route - (1924, Au Sans Pareil) / Spanish (1975)
 * L'Or (1925, Grasset) / Novel / English (Sutter's Gold, 1926, Harper & Bros.) / Spanish (1931)
 * Moravagine (1926, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1935); English (1968); Danish (2016, Basilisk)
 * L'ABC du cinéma (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / English (1992)
 * L'Eubage (1926, Au Sans Pareil) / English (1992)
 * Éloge de la vie dangereuse (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / Poetic essay / English (1992); Spanish (1994)
 * Le Plan de l'Aiguille (1927, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1931); English (1987)
 * Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs (1928, Éditions de Portiques) / Portuguese (1989)
 * Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1930); English (1990)
 * Une nuit dans la forêt (1929, Lausanne, Éditions du Verseau) / Autobiographical essay
 * Comment les Blancs sont d'anciens Noirs - (1929, Au Sans Pareil)
 * Rhum—L'aventure de Jean Galmot (1930, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1937)
 * Aujourd'hui (1931, Grasset)
 * Vol à voile (1932, Lausanne, Librairie Payot)
 * Panorama de la pègre (1935, Grenoble, Arthaud) / Journalism
 * Hollywood, La Mecque du cinéma (1936, Grasset) / Journalism
 * Histoires vraies (1937, Grasset) / Stories / Spanish (1938)
 * La Vie dangereuse (1938, Grasset) / Stories
 * D'Oultremer à Indigo (1940, Grasset)
 * Chez l'armée Anglaise (1940, Corrêa) / Journalism
 * Poésie complète (1944, Denoël), Complete poetic works / English (Complete Poems, tr. by Ron Padgett, Univ. of California Press, 1992)
 * L'Homme foudroyé (1945, Denoël) / Novel / English (1970); Spanish (1983)
 * La Main coupée (1946, Denoël) / Novel / (in French) / English (Lice, 1973 / The Bloody Hand, 2014 ), Spanish (1980)
 * Bourlinguer (1948, Denoël) / Novel / English (1972); Spanish (2004)
 * Le Lotissement du ciel (1949, Denoël) / Novel / English (1992)
 * La Banlieue de Paris (1949, Lausanne, La Guilde du Livre) / Essay with photos by Robert Doisneau
 * Blaise Cendrars, vous parle... (1952, Denoël) / Interviews by Michel Manoll
 * Le Brésil, des Hommes sont venus (1952, Monaco, Les Documents d'Art)
 * Noël aux 4 coins du monde (1953, Robert Cayla) / Stories emitted by radio in 1951 / English (1994)
 * Emmène-moi au bout du monde!... (1956, Denoël) / Novel / Spanish (1982), English (To the End of the World, 1966, tr. by Alan Brown, Grove Press)
 * Du monde entier au cœur du monde (1957, Denoël) /
 * Trop c'est trop (1957, Denoël)
 * Films sans images (1959, Denoël)
 * Amours (1961)
 * Dites-nous Monsieur Blaise Cendrars (1969)
 * Paris ma ville. Illustrations de Fernand Léger. (1987, Bibliothèque des Arts)

title: Blaise Cendrars


text:
Ladybower Reservoir

Ladybower Reservoir is a large Y-shaped, artificial reservoir, the lowest of three in the Upper Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, England. The River Ashop flows into the reservoir from the west; the River Derwent flows south, initially through Howden Reservoir, then Derwent Reservoir, and finally through Ladybower Reservoir. The reservoir is owned by Severn Trent.

The area is now a tourist attraction, with the Fairholmes visitors' centre located at the northern tip of Ladybower. The east arm of the reservoir, fed by the Ladybower Brook, is overlooked by Hordron Edge stone circle.

Design and construction
Ladybower was built between 1935 and 1943 by the Derwent Valley Water Board to supplement the other two reservoirs in supplying the water needs of the East Midlands. It took a further two years to fill, which was done by 1945. The dam differs from the Howden Reservoir and Derwent Reservoir in that it is a clay-cored earth embankment and not a solid masonry dam. Below the dam is a cut-off trench 180 ft deep and 6 ft wide filled with concrete, stretching 500 ft into the hills each side, to stop water leaking around the dam. The dam wall was built by Richard Baillie and Sons, a Scottish company. The two viaducts, Ashopton and Ladybower, needed to carry the trunk roads over the reservoir, were built by the London firm of Holloways, using a steel frame clad in concrete. The project was delayed when the Second World War broke out in 1939, making labour and raw materials scarce, but construction was continued due to the strategic importance of maintaining supplies. King George VI, accompanied by his wife, Queen Elizabeth, formally opened the reservoir on 25 September 1945.

During the 1990s, the wall was raised and strengthened to reduce the risk of over-topping in a major flood. The original dam wall contains 100,000 tons of concrete, over one million tons of earth, and 100,000 tons of clay for the core. The upstream face is stone-faced. Materials were brought to the site on the Derwent Valley Water Board's own branch line and their sidings off the mainline in the Hope Valley. The dam's design is unusual in having two totally enclosed bellmouth spillway overflows (locally named the "plugholes") at the side of the wall. These are stone and of 78 ft diameter with a drop of 66 ft. The plugholes regulate water levels in the reservoir by draining away excess water when they overflow. The water is then carried to the River Derwent through tunnels. The overflows originally had walkways around them, but they were dismantled many years ago. The plugholes typically overflow in winter months if there has been wet or snowy weather in the nearby hills. According to Severn Trent, the reservoir’s operating company, the overflowing plug holes attract many visitors each year.

Water usage
The water is used for river control and to compensate for the water retained by all three dams, along with supply into the drinking water system and hydroelectricity generation. Drinking water must be pumped to treatment works rather than using gravity flow as in the other two reservoirs, increasing costs. The drinking water is treated at Bamford water treatment works by Severn Trent Water. Treated water flows south down the 28 mi long Derwent Valley Aqueduct to a covered service reservoir at Ambergate to supply clean water to the cities of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester in the East Midlands of England. The aqueduct passes through the park of Chatsworth House. The path of the aqueduct is marked by a series of valve houses built of stone and domed steel access chambers. A tunnel carries some of the water from the Derwent Valley eastwards through the hill and into the lower of the two Rivelin Dams to supply Sheffield.

Flooded villages
The building of the reservoir resulted in the submergence of the villages of Ashopton and Derwent, including Derwent Woodlands church and Derwent Hall. Ashopton stood roughly where the road to the Snake Pass met the Snake valley. The buildings in Ashopton were demolished before the reservoir was filled, but much of the structure of Derwent village was still visible during a dry summer some 14 years later. Derwent Bridge, a narrow stone packhorse bridge, over the Derwent was removed and rebuilt at the head of the Howden reservoir. The clock tower of the church had been left standing and the upper part of it was visible above the water level until 1947, when it was seen as a hazard and demolished with explosives on 15 December.

In 1976, 1995, 2018, and 2022 dry conditions caused the water level to drop and the village of Derwent to once again be exposed.In 2018, this caused unprecedented crowds to visit the rarely visible site. On 3 November 2018, a man had to be rescued by a mountain rescue team after getting stuck in extremely thick mud around the ruins of the village. On 17 November 2018 it was reported that the site had been vandalised by some of those visiting, with park rangers forced to stop visitors removing items from the site and with graffiti scrawled on some buildings.

Potential expansion
In Autumn 2022 Severn Trent Water announced that it was considering expanding the Ladybower, Howden, and Derwent reservoirs, or building a new reservoir in the area. There was immediate opposition to these plans, due to the potential for environmental damage to the landscape, including the loss of ancient forests.

In June 2023, the water company announced that the potential expansion would not be going ahead. They said that in response to consultation feedback the Upper Derwent Valley Reservoir Expansion scheme had been removed from their preferred plan. The scheme would be replaced by a 'combination of leakage, customer demand management and accelerated supply options'.

title: Ladybower Reservoir


text:
Talk:Lexington

Comments
There is no article, not even a rambot entry, on the most important Lexington, Lexington, Massachusetts. Ortolan88 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ortolan88 (talk • contribs) 18:31, 7 January 2003 (UTC)

Arranging the entries
I moved the Kentucky entry up into the primary list, because it would probably be sought more often than some of the other entries there. If the Mass. city would be too, it should be moved up as well, instead of moving the Kentucky entry down. -- JHunterJ 16:24, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Certainly the MA Lexington ("the shot heard 'round the world") is as prominent as KY. I think textual blurbs are more effective to draw attention these than positioning them out of alpha order. Without any obvious reason expressed, it is unclear why that one or two entries are sorted separately from the rest of the places. older ≠ wiser 16:41, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

 * IMO, the main article should redirect to Lexington, Kentucky, and this be moved to Lexington (disambiguation). That seems to be the norm when one stands out and it is only a mid-sized city. CrazyC83 23:47, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Closed per WP:SNOW. It's early, but there is no support for moving the page and it seems obvious the consensus will remain against moving it.  Hot Stop   06:24, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Lexington → Lexington (disambiguation) – Lexington should re-direct to Lexington, Kentucky. This is the Lexington that most people are familiar with. Georgia guy (talk) 14:54, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose, at least absent evidence. Lexington, Massachusetts has great historical importance. --BDD (talk) 18:40, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Is this historical importance recent enough for some of today's people to believe that this city is a more important meaning than Lexington, Kentucky?? (The city in Kentucky has been a city since 1831.) Georgia guy (talk) 18:50, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Moreover, there's no city in Massachusetts called Lexington; the area in Massachusetts called Lexington is not a city, but a town. Georgia guy (talk) 19:04, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Who said anything about cities? We're not discussing Lexington (city). You're making a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC claim; you should provide evidence for your position. --BDD (talk) 21:06, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Cities should always be more important meanings of geographical names than towns. Towns are generally small and obscure; cities are more well-known. Georgia guy (talk) 22:52, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I couldn't disagree more, mostly because jurisdictions can have wildly different definitions of cities and towns. For example, Virginia has an idiosyncratic definition of a city, defined by the type of local government rather than (necessarily) size. Idaho calls just about any organized settlement a city, so you get places like Genesee, Idaho, with fewer than a thousand people. As often, New Jersey just has its own thing going on. Again, please focus on our criteria of WP:PRIMARYTOPIC rather than subjective judgments about one place being better than another. --BDD (talk) 23:20, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Lexington, Kentucky is the largest city named Lexington, and I'm sure it's the meaning most people today think of when they think of this name. Any pros of the Massachusetts town being more important in some ways?? Georgia guy (talk) 23:22, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The argument that the Massachusetts town is more notable than the Kentucky city needn't be addressed here. There is no proposal to redirect "Lexington" to that town.  But if it is to redirect to the Kentucky city, proponents should show (per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC) that "it is highly likely—much more likely than any other topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term." (my emphasis) —  AjaxSmack   23:29, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm talking about the argument that the Massachusetts town is more notable to some people's points of view, not the argument that it is to all people. Have you done research to see how frequently each meaning is searched?? Georgia guy (talk) 23:45, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, I checked January page view stats before commenting. The two aircraft carriers and Lexington, Massachusetts together had more views than the Kentucky city.  If you add in a few of the other cities, you can almost double that. —  AjaxSmack   01:00, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Oppose. Let's see...a very notable battle, a score of other towns and cities (several of which have populations well over 10,000), a handful of very important ships, a car marque, a famous racehorse, and sundry other entities versus one mid-sized city.  No case for a primary topic yet.  —  AjaxSmack   21:58, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose - I'm from the UK; I'd never heard of Lexington, Kentucky. The only Lexington I'd heard of is the one where the battle was, and I only just learned that it is in Massachusetts (I presumed it was the only Lexington in the USA...). So I would say leave it as it is. There are far too many Lexingtons to have a clear primary topic, and any move may not recognise the world view. --Rushton2010 (talk) 02:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose the Lady Lex USS Lexington is primary if anything. -- 70.50.151.11 (talk) 05:51, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

title: Talk:Lexington


text:
User talk:Anilkumar

Hope to read your articles soon!!

Welcome!! There is no need to apologize for only being in Grade 10. Sometimes people old enough to be your grandparents can make amazingly stupid contributions. Eclecticology

Invitation
I fraternally invite you to add your name, to join the new community Wikipedians/Quebec. Thanks and welcome! Je vous invite fraternellement à ajouter votre nom, à vous joindre à la nouvelle communauté Wikipedians/Quebec. Merci et bienvenue! --Liberlogos 04:27, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

User Categorisation
You were listed on the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Canada#Québec page as living in or being associated with Québec. As part of the User categorisation project, these lists are being replaced with user categories. If you would like to add yourself to the category that is replacing the page, please visit Category:Wikipedians in Quebec for instructions.--Rmky87 03:17, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Anilkumar


text:
Ons Heemecht

"Ons Heemecht" (formerly "Ons Hémecht";, lit. 'Our Homeland') is the national anthem of Luxembourg. Written by Michel Lentz in 1859 and set to music by Jean Antoine Zinnen in 1864, it is performed at national celebrations, while the royal anthem, or, more accurately, the grand ducal anthem, "De Wilhelmus", is performed at entrances or exits of members of the Grand Ducal Family.

History
Luxembourgish poet Michel Lentz wrote the poem Ons Heemecht in 1859, and it was set to music by Luxembourgish composer Jean Antoine Zinnen in 1864. The song was first performed in public in Ettelbruck, a town at the confluence of the Alzette and Sauer rivers (both of which are mentioned in the song), on 5 June 1864.

"Ons Heemecht" competed for a while with, a song based on another poem by Lentz, for the status of the national anthem. The last line of the chorus of "De Feierwon" became the origin of Luxembourg's national motto.

The first and last stanzas of "Ons Heemecht" were adopted as Luxembourg's national anthem on 17 June 1993, when it was added as one of the official national emblems, alongside the national flag, the national coat of arms and the Grand Duke's Official Birthday.

Lyrics
The official version is only composed of the first and last stanzas.

title: Ons Heemecht


text:
User:Nixdorf

My full name is Jörgen Nixdorf, born 1948 (like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne, go figure). I only do Wikipedia on my computer, you can think of this as my homepage. I used to work more on Susning.nu, then, following its closing on the Swedish Wikipedia but the large community and high quality focus of the English Wikipedia drew me here, so this is where I spend most of my time. I've been editing English Wikipedia articles since November 2002.

I am a Swedish catholic christian, though one of very troubled religious nature, that's why you will find me working a lot on pages like Gnosticism. Further I consider myself a liberal. Apart from that I'm a retired programmer, I used to spend a lot of time programming COBOL. Though I believe most people think of me as a rigid, narrow-minded, middle-class intellectual dry old engineer, I have been known to have a sense of humour.

I only use Linux though out of convenience, I know many people like Microsoft Windows but the Redmond product is too hard for me to understand. Linux is quite easy. I'm too old.

Wikipedia problems

 * Verifiability is a big problem, i.e. know that the facts stated in articles are correct. There has been a lot of discussions on this issue, no real good solution in sight. Perhaps to freeze professionally peer-reviewed content so one knows that atleast that version is fairly accurate. Very hard.
 * Authors of "real" encyclopedias like to use pompous language: "the finest thinker of his time", "the best ..." and such value-charged authoritative statements. Wikipedia tries to avoid it, but that makes for quite boring reading without any commonplace opinions on the facts presented. The problem is: how do you define a commonplace opinion? Certainly, this used to be the opinion of people writing encyclopedias. It is definately not a democratic value: the idea of the populace is not founded in fact and often influenced by myth. So how do you avoid academic elitism, and flat prose produced using a lowest common denominator of value-free statements at the same time when writing articles? Very very hard.

Places of interest

 * My enemies: zealots, cranks, apologetes, proselytism, meatpuppets...
 * Gebrochene Grotesk should really be translated to the English wikipedia.
 * No original research
 * Neutral point of view
 * Verifiability
 * Manual of Style
 * Image markup
 * Style and How-to Directory
 * Naming conventions
 * Categorization
 * Image pages
 * Wikipedia talk:Swedish Wikipedians' notice board

Interesting stuff

 * Technology:
 * Linux
 * Universal Serial Bus
 * Tuple space
 * Blackboard system
 * Culture and religion:
 * Ergodic literature - like Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon
 * Laudate Dominum
 * Emerald Tablet
 * Popular culture:
 * Amen break
 * Wilhelm scream
 * History and Archeaology:
 * Gnosticism
 * Twelve Tables
 * Göbekli Tepe - world's oldest archaeological site
 * Psychology:
 * Fundamental attribution error
 * Gell-Mann amnesia effect
 * Negativity bias vs Optimism bias
 * Locus of control
 * Halo effect
 * Rosy retrospection
 * Dunbar's number

Interesting people

 * Giovanni Battista Piranesi
 * Igor Panarin

Interesting hypotheses

 * Linguistic relativity
 * Dunning–Kruger effect

Funny stuff

 * Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
 * Erdős–Bacon number
 * Voynich manuscript
 * Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir
 * Did you notice that parts of Teresa Brewers Music! Music! Music! is suspiciously similar to a passage of Franz Liszts Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2?

Intuition
Things intuitive:
 * I belive that the track Blind of Hercules and Love Affair's self-entitled album alludes to the story in the Hymn of the Pearl, as do (more obviously) Astrid Lindgrens Mio, My Son, is this what we could call a Gnostic metanarrative?
 * Hard to tell which of Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Yann Tiersen makes the most depressing piano scores.

Actually getting answers
Wikipedia is good for getting answers if you already know the exact question in very exact and specific terms. If you want to ask the question in a more natural way, Quora is recently a good platform for this. For example I noticed that the question on Quora posed like this:

 * What do you call a person that won't assume any responsibility for things gone wrong in their life?

Yielded an excellent answer referring to locus of control.

Work done
Fun things I've done: one of my friends is a collector of books and owns an original copy of Libri tres de occulta philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in the printing from 1533. I photographed and scanned some images from this book to the entry for pentagram. Very beautiful images.

I also like drawing figures in Dia and adding to Wikipedia entries.

 * Fifth generation computer systems project is being supplied with an image. The webpage states that materials are in the public domain, but still I work to get a clear permission to use it.

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

sv:Användare:Nixdorf

title: User:Nixdorf


text:
Vilnius Airport

Vilnius International Airport (Vilniaus oro uostas) is the airport of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. It is located 5.9 km south of the city center. It is the largest of the three commercial airports in Lithuania by passenger traffic, with one runway and 5 million passengers a year. Vilnius International Airport serves as a base for airBaltic, Ryanair, and Wizz Air. The airport is managed by Joint Stock Company Lithuanian Airports under the Ministry of Transport and Communications. It is the 96th busiest airport in Europe.

Early years
The airport began operations on 17 August 1932 as Wilno–Porubanek, Porubanek was the name of the neighbouring village which today is part of the Kirtimai district of Vilnius. Before World War II, it operated the then-domestic route between Wilno (Vilnius) and Warsaw as well as international route to Riga. Since 15 April 1939, it inaugurated a new route to Kovno (nowadays Kaunas). The airport was used as a military airfield during WWII. The airport resumed its activity as a civil airport as of 17 July 1944.

Recent developments
Lithuanian Airlines (branded later as FlyLAL) was established as the Lithuanian flag carrier following independence in 1991 and inherited the Vilnius-based Aeroflot fleet of Tupolev Tu-134, Yakovlev Yak-40, Yak-42 and Antonov An-24, An-26 aircraft, but rapidly replaced these Soviet-era aircraft types with modern Boeing 737 and Boeing 757 jets and Saab 340, Saab 2000 turboprops. Operations were suspended effective 17 January 2009 as a result of growing financial difficulties. With the collapse of flyLAL, the airport lost its scheduled services to Amsterdam, Budapest, Istanbul, Madrid and Tbilisi. flyLAL used to operate to Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Milan and Paris in competition with Aer Lingus, airBaltic or Lufthansa.

AirBaltic, the national airline of Latvia and under Scandinavian Airlines part-ownership, opened up a second base at Vilnius in 2004 to complement its Riga operation and became the largest carrier at Vilnius, using Boeing 737 jets and Fokker 50 turboprops. At one point, airBaltic operated to 19 destinations from Vilnius but, in 2009, the network covered only three destinations served by two aircraft based at Vilnius.

Vilnius Airport is the main hub for Grand Cru Airlines and a base for Wizz Air. It used to be a main hub for Star1 Airlines until their end of operations in September 2010 and Aurela until Aurela had lost its flight license. It was the hub for Small Planet Airlines and Aviavilsa until both airlines folded. The airport was a secondary hub for airBaltic, Estonian Air and Skyways Express until they closed the bases in Vilnius.

On 30 June 2013, Air Lituanica also began its flights from the Vilnius Airport and established its base there serving several European cities. However, by 22 May 2015, the airline shut down all operations as well.

The airport was closed for 35 days from 14 July 2017 to 17 August 2017 (inclusive) for runway reconstruction work, with all flights diverted to Kaunas Airport.

Terminal
The original terminal was built in 1934-1936 to a design by Józefa Mrówkowa-Ochmańska; Stanisław Połujan was the construction manager. The three-story building was designed in modernist style, and had a restaurant with a terrace, a hotel for passengers, a newspaper kiosk, a customs post, a police station and a post office. The building was criticized for its overly luxurious interior design and size, which was unsuitable for the small, nascent civilian air traffic in Vilnius.

The construction of the current airport building started in 1949 and completed in 1954. It features a standard 1950s Soviet airport terminal design, originally intended for an airport with up to 20 aircraft movements per day. On the outside, it is decorated with sculptures of soldiers, workers and aviators, while inside walls and ceilings feature wreaths, bay leaves and stars, and until the early 1990s, the Soviet hammer and sickle, typical decor for Soviet public buildings of early post-war years.

A new departure terminal, connected with the old building, was built in 1993. Since then, the old building has been used as the arrival terminal only.

In November 2007, the new 1,000 m2 terminal building was opened for operations which improved the capacity and facilities of the airport and complies with the requirements of the Schengen agreement. The passenger throughput of the terminal increased, passenger service quality was improved and more stringent aviation security measures were implemented. The new area of the renovated passenger terminal now reaches 3,462 m2. It is equipped with 6 passenger boarding bridges, modern passenger check-in equipment, new travel value and duty-free shops were opened as well as business lounge and VIP Lounge.

New departure terminal
Construction of a new departure terminal at Vilnius Airport started in January 2023. After the completion of this 14,400 sq. m. terminal, the total area of Vilnius Airport passenger terminals will increase by one third, and passenger throughput will double – from 1,200 passengers per hour to 2,400. Together with the construction of the new terminal, a redevelopment of road infrastructure is planned, including upgrades of engineering networks and a new transport scheme. The terminal is scheduled to open in early 2025 with projected cost of 50.2 million euros.

Passenger
The following airlines operate regular scheduled and charter flights to and from Vilnius:

Train
Direct train services between Vilnius Airport Railway Station (referred to as "Oro uostas" in the schedules) and the central station of Vilnius were started in October 2008. Distance from the Airport to the Vilnius Central Railway Station (LTG Link) is 4.3 km, the journey takes 8 minutes.

Bus
The direct intercity express services operate from the Airport to Klaipėda, Palanga, Minsk and Daugavpils. Also, the Latvian company Flybus.lv operates service from Vilnius airport to Riga (via Panevėžys and Bauska).

Public transportation
City's public buses operate from the airport. Tickets can be bought from: Trafi, M.Ticket. Also, the company Toks transports passengers from the bus station to Vilnius airport and back by microbuses.

Aviation services
Passenger handling, aircraft handling, into-plane fueling and de-icing/anti-icing services are handled by BGS and Litcargus. Pilot training is conducted at Kyviskes Airfield, a non-commercial airport about 25 kilometers from Vilnius Airport.

Incidents and accidents

 * Scandinavian Airlines Flight 2748, operated with Dash-8-400 (LN-RDS) with 48 passengers and 4 crew members, took off from Copenhagen Airport on 12 September 2007. It was heading to Palanga, Lithuania, but was diverted to Vilnius Airport (better suited for an emergency landing) when landing gear problems were discovered before landing. Upon touchdown, the right landing gear collapsed. All passengers and crew were evacuated safely. The local officials at the Vilnius International Airport noted that this was the most serious incident in recent years. This accident, along with the Aalborg accident just days earlier, caused all SAS Dash 8 Q400 planes to be grounded until the beginning of October.

 * On 23 May 2021, Ryanair Flight 4978, operated using a Boeing 737-8AS with 171 passengers on board, traveling in Belarusian airspace en route from Athens to Vilnius, was intercepted by a Belarusian MiG-29 before it could reach Lithuanian airspace. It was then forced to land at Minsk National Airport. Upon landing, the Belarusian KGB arrested two of the passengers, opposition activist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega. The other passengers were allowed to reboard the plane to depart for Vilnius after seven hours.

 * On 21 June 2023, the runway was closed after Brussels Airlines Flight 2372, set to fly to Brussels Airport could not take off as a landing gear tire popped while taxiing.

 * On 3 February 2024, the airport was closed after Avion Express Flight 8242, landing from Milan Bergamo Airport slid off the runway upon touchdown.

title: Vilnius Airport


text:
Talk:Elisabeth in Bavaria

What's the idea behind this page, 65.33.18.90? The whole text is just a copy and paste job from Elisabeth of Austria, with many of the links no longer working. Also, calling the person in question "Elisabeth in Bavaria" is not even historically accurate (maybe when she was a young girl), and I'd say altering the link on the Franz Josef page isn't a good idea either. Please state your reasons. KF 18:47 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)

ELISABETH OF AUSTRIA/HUNGARY
THAT PEOPLE  ARE  STILL  MADE  TO  THINK  THAT  ELISABETH  DIED  IN  AN  ASSASINATION  IS  DISGUSTING. HER FAMILLY  KNOWS  SHE  DIED  IN  TEXAS  OF  OLD  AGE. SHE IS  BURIED  WITH JON VECERA  WHO  WAS  EXILED  10  YEARS  BEFORE  THE  SUPPOSED  ASSASINATION  OF  THE  EMPRESS. MARY VECERA  WAS  THIER  DAUGHTER  AND  SURVIVED  THE  ASSASINATION  ATTEMPT  MADE  ON  HER. POOR RUDOLPH  DID  NOT.

title: Talk:Elisabeth in Bavaria