Nepenthe

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A Nuthatch is relected in a pool of still water at a private woodland in Hanbury, Worcestershire. Photographer Mark Hancox waited for a month in a specially built hide just yards from the pool for the opportunity to get the perfect shot. Telegraph

Official website Some 4,000 baby bottles are placed on the Swiss federal square in Bern to mark World Water Day, during an action by relief organisation Helvetas

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives — they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, AS Byatt, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Dubravka Ugresic, Salley Vickers and Jeanette Winterson. The series launched on 21st October 2005. These are the ones I still don't have ;)

Philip Pullman is well-accustomed to disapproval from the Christian community: he's been on the US's most "challenged" books list for the last two years for his bestselling Northern Lights trilogy, which portrays God as a senile old man and the church as an oppressive tyrant. So it's unsurprising that he remains sanguine in the face of letters condemning him to "eternal hell" for his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The book, out at the end of this month, will argue that the version of Jesus's life in the New Testament was actually transformed by the apostle Paul. Despite the fact that The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is not yet published, the author told the Sunday Times yesterday that he had received "scores" of letters accusing him of blasphemy and condemning him to "damnation by fire" and "eternal hell". "Many refer to the title itself, for which there is clearly ...

After 83 years, Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic "Metropolis" has returned to Berlin in its full glory. On Friday night 2,000 fans braved the snowy weather to watch the restored classic at the Brandenburg Gate. It took restorers a year to repair the damage to the newly discovered scenes. They say the original film was much more complex and interesting than just a sci-fi cult classic. For over eight decades it was just a tantalizing El Dorado for film historians, but on Friday night a restored version of "Metropolis," Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece, returned to Berlin. Over 2,000 people turned up on a snowy night in Berlin to watch the film projected onto a screen in front of the Brandenburg Gate, with an orchestra performing the original score in a simultaneous broadcast at a theater across town. The event was the highlight of this year's Berlin Film Festival, marking the return of one of Germany's most influential films to the city where...

[and my previous post about the movie Agora , with the infallible Rachel Weisz] One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C., the city of Alexandria quickly grew into a center of culture and learning for the ancient world. At its heart was the museum, a type of university, whose collection of more tha...

Thanx to Sangue Fresco ;[

For turophobics, it is a new and rather pongy circle of hell. In fact, even for those without the (admittedly rare) fear of cheese, the smorgasbord of nearly 100 fromages, sourced in Lyon and shipped weekly, is the stuff of nightmares. The inebriating whiff of Roquefort draws one to the door of L'Art Du Fromage, the first speciality cheese restaurant in Britain. The menu is built around cheese-based dishes: there are fondues, raclettes, a glorified version of cheese on toast and even cheese ice cream. One of the few dishes not to arrive with cheese are the snails. Because that would just be wrong. Step inside and Julien Ledogar clutches a wedge of Le Marechal to the light, for inspection. "This is the first cheese that I fell in love with!" declares the co-proprietor. Mr Ledogar and his business partner Jean-Charles Madenspacher, who are both 24, have left their village outside Strasbourg, Alsace, to move to the UK. Their mission: to banish the Britis...

Guardian alert ;) The 137-year-old magazine has put all its back numbers online, including articles by Darwin, Pasteur – and predictions of orbiting space-hotels. It has a list of authors that would make a publisher's eyes water and includes Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison. They are all great scientists, and all writers who have put their names to articles that have appeared not in dry academic journals such as Nature but in Popular Science , a mass-market American guide to science, new inventions and wacky gadgets. This strange mixture has been newly revealed to British readers, because every issue of the 137-year old monthly magazine (now published in 30 languages in more than 40 countries) has just been made available through Google Books . Thus you can now log on and peer into the past and note not just the occasional article by distinguished scientists, or frequent features on the fledgling subject of personal computers, but obse...

It's 4.15 in the morning and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still closed, so all I see is gauzy darkness. For a brief moment, I manage to convince myself that my wakefulness is a mistake, and that I can safely go back to sleep. But then I roll over and see my zippered suitcase. I let out a sleepy groan: I'm going to the airport. The taxi is late. There should be an adjective (a synonym of sober, only worse) to describe the state of mind that comes from waiting in the orange glare of a streetlight before drinking a cup of coffee. And then the taxi gets lost. And then I get nervous, because my flight leaves in an hour. And then we're here, and I'm hurtled into the harsh incandescence of Terminal B, running with a suitcase so I can wait in a long security line. My belt buckle sets off the metal detector, my 120ml stick of deodorant is confiscated, and my left sock has a gaping hole. And then I...

Lately, with the Mayan 2012 Apocalypse scheduled to rip humanity a new asshole in less than 3 years now, the idea of clairvoyance has been hotter than 2 Tabasco-smothered lesbians making out on the surface of the Sun. Is it at all possible to foresee the future? It would seem that… yes, it is. Throughout history there have been at least five people who’ve successfully predicted some of the most important events of the 20th century. They are: William Gibson Predicted : The Internet, in 1984 The notion of a bunch of telecommunication outposts connected in one worldwide web was hardly Gibson’s idea and has in fact existed for decades in various shapes and sizes, from the telegram cables right till the early ARPANET. Still, those networks were basically only good for sending out one-sided communications and emoticon penises. Similar, but not really THE internet. However, in Gibson’s 1984 novel “Neuromancer”, the author first presented his vision of an entire global com...

Obesity: The killer combination of salt, fat and sugar  For years I wondered why I was fat. I lost weight, gained it back, and lost it again – over and over and over. I owned suits in every size. As a former commissioner of the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration), surely I should have the answer to my problems. Yet food held remarkable sway over my behaviour. The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body's "thermostat" was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point. But this theory didn't explain why so many people, in the US and UK in particular, were getting significantly fatter. For thousands of years, human body weight had stayed remarkably stable. Millions of calories passed through our bodies, yet with rare exceptions our weight neither rose nor fell. A perfect biological system seemed to be at work. Then, in the ...

A Telegraph Gallery

Não sabemos se é das traduções à letra ou mal feitas, se é por estarem fora do contexto, o certo é que não conseguimos deixar de rir com algumas citações de book reviews da imprensa estrangeira, colocadas nas contracapas e badanas de alguns livros editados em Portugal. Para além das traduções descuidadas, das muitas incongruências, encontramos também por diversas vezes a mesma frase, com a mesma origem, em livros completamente diferentes. Sinceramente, não percebemos bem se elas são um elogio ao livro ou o seu contrário Deixamo-vos um aperitivo. Se quiserem mais, é só entrar numa livraria e deslocarem-se à secção de novidades. 1- «Um livro que atrai um leitor como o aroma de uma caçarola ao lume.» Financial Times 2 - «Profundo, elegante e poderoso… Tão memorável como a sua própria personagem.» The Washington Post 3- «Não parece fácil mas, com as dicas certas, pode ser mais simples do que imagina conseguir devorá-lo.» The Wall Stret Journal 4 - «Um delicios...

Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn't exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can frequently be heard muttering, "Girls are boring. I want to do boys' things." I can see her point. Her brother's life is full of Star Wars, pirates, football and other action-packed phenomena. Vera gets Hello Kitty. She clearly finds this unsatisfying, and the situation is coming to a head. "I am not a girl, Mummy, I am a boy," she told me recently. "My name is Peter." But it's good to be a girl, I tell her. Being a girl is fun. There are women's successes to be celebrated. There is joy in the female condition. How can I prove this though? In our home city, London , there is just not that much physical evidence of women's greatness. The Alison Lapper statue in Trafalgar Square was taken down in 2007. There are nine male statues in Parliament Square – an...