Industry

An industry is generally any grouping of businesses that share a common method of generating profits, such as the music industry, the automobile industry, or the cattle industry. It is also used specifically to refer to an area of economic production focused on manufacturing which involves large amounts of capital investment before any profit can be realized, also called "heavy industry.As-of 2004, Financial services is the largest industry or category of industries in the world in terms of earnings.

Industry in the second sense became a key sector of production in European and North American countries during the Industrial Revolution, which upset previous mercantile and feudal economies through many successive rapid advances in technology, such as the development of steam engines, power looms, and advances in large scale steel and coal production. Industrial countries then assumed a capitalist economic policy.

Railroads and steam-powered ships began speedily integrating previously impossibly-distant world markets, enabling private companies to develop to then-unheard of size and wealth. Manufacturing is a wealth-producing sector of an economy. Other sectors such as the service sector tend to be wealth consuming sectors. Following the Industrial Revolution, perhaps a third of the world's economic output is derived from manufacturing industries—more than agriculture's share.

Molecular biology

Molecular biology is the study of biology at a molecular level. The field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry. Molecular biology chiefly concerns itself with understanding the interactions between the various systems of a cell, including the interrelationship of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis and learning how these interactions are regulated.

One of the most basic techniques of molecular biology to study protein function is expression cloning. In this technique, DNA coding for a protein of interest is cloned using PCR and/or restriction enzymes into a plasmid known as an expression vector. This plasmid may have special promoter elements to drive production of the protein of interest, and may also have antibiotic resistance markers to help follow the plasmid.

This plasmid can be inserted into either bacterial or animal cells. Introducing DNA into bacterial cells is called transformation, and can be completed with several methods, including electroporation, microinjection, passive uptake and conjugation. Introducing DNA into eukaryotic cells, such as animal cells, is called transfection. Several different transfection techniques are available, including calcium phosphate transfection, liposome transfection, and proprietary transfection reagents such as Fugene. DNA can also be introduced into cells using viruses or pathenogenic bacteria as carriers. In such cases, the technique is called viral/bacterial transduction, and the cells are said to be transduced.

Naturalization

In law, naturalization is the act whereby a person voluntarily and actively acquires a nationality which is not his or her nationality at birth. Naturalization is most associated with economic migrants or refugees who have immigrated to a country and resided there as an alien, and who have voluntarily chosen to become a citizen of that country after meeting specific requirements. Denaturalization is the reverse of naturalization, when a state deprives one of its citizens of his or her citizenship. After World War I, many European countries, including democracies, passed denaturalization laws, of which the 1935 Nuremberg Laws remained the most famous.

In general, basic requirements for naturalization are that the applicant hold a legal status as a full-time resident for a minimum period of time and that the applicant promise to obey and uphold that country's laws, to which an oath or pledge of allegiance is sometimes added. Some countries also require that a naturalized national must renounce any other nationalities that he currently holds, forbidding dual citizenship, but whether this renunciation actually causes loss of the person's original nationalities will again depend on the laws of the countries involved.
Nationality is traditionally either based on jus soli or on jus sanguinis, although it now usually mixes both. Whatever the case, the massive increase in population flux due to globalization and the sharp increase in the numbers of refugees following World War I has created an important class of non-citizens, sometimes called denizens. In some rare cases, procedures of mass naturalization were passed.

Immunology

Immunology is a broad branch of biomedical science that covers the study of all aspects of the immune system in all organisms. It deals with, among other things, the physiological functioning of the immune system in states of both health and disease; malfunctions of the immune system in immunological disorders autoimmune diseases, hypersensitivities, immune deficiency, allograft rejection; the physical, chemical and physiological characteristics of the components of the immune system in vitro, in situ, and in vivo. Immunology has various applications in several disciplines of science, and as such is further divided.

Classical immunology ties in with the fields of epidemiology and medicine. It studies the relationship between the body systems, pathogens, and immunity. The earliest written mention of immunity can be traced back to the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. Thucydides noted that people who had recovered from a previous bout of the disease could nurse the sick without contracting the illness a second time. Many other ancient societies have references to this phenomenon, but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries before the concept developed into scientific theory.

The study of the molecular and cellular components that comprise the immune system, including their function and interaction, is the central science of immunology. The immune system has been divided into a more primitive innate immune system, and acquired or adaptive immune system of vertebrates, the latter of which is further divided into humoral and cellular components.