Apes (Hominoidea) are a branch of Old World tailless anthropoid catarrhine primates native to Africa and Southeast Asia. They are distinguished from other primates by a wider degree of freedom of motion at the shoulder joint as evolved by the influence of brachiation. There are two extant branches of the superfamily Hominoidea: the gibbons, or lesser apes; and the hominids, or great apes.
Musca Borealis (Latin for northern fly) was a constellation, now discarded, located between the constellations of Aries and Perseus. It was originally called Apes (plural of Apis, Latin for bee) by Petrus Plancius when he created it in 1612. It was made up of a small group of stars, now called 33 Arietis, 35 Arietis, 39 Arietis, and 41 Arietis, located in the north of the constellation of Aries.
The brightest star is now known as 41 Arietis. At magnitude 3.63, it is a blue-white main sequence star of spectral type B8V around 166 light-years distant. 39 Arietis is an orange giant star of magnitude 4.51 and spectral type K1.5III that is around 171 light-years distant.
The constellation was renamed Vespa by Jakob Bartsch in 1624. The renaming by Bartsch may have been intended to avoid confusion with another constellation, created by Plancius in 1598, that was called Apis by Bayer in 1603. Plancius called this earlier constellation Muia (Greek for fly) in 1612, and it had been called Musca (Latin for fly) by Blaeu in 1602, although Bayer was evidently unaware of this.
Wikia (formerly Wikicities) is an advertisement-supported free wiki hosting service. The site is free of charge, deriving its income from advertising, and publishes most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software, MediaWiki. Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation—and headed by Craig Palmer as CEO.
Wikia was launched on October 18, 2004, under the name "Wikicities" (which invited comparisons to GeoCities), but changed its name to "Wikia" on March 27, 2006. In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding.
By July 2007, it had more than 3,000 wikis in more than 50 languages. Over time Wikia has incorporated formerly independent wikis that joined Wikia, such as LyricWiki, The Vault, Uncyclopedia and WoWWiki.Gil Penchina described Wikia early on as "the rest of the library and magazine rack" to Wikipedia's encyclopaedia. The material has also been described as informal, and often bordering on entertainment, allowing the importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other non-traditional wiki material.