Nepenthe

The Astronomy Picture of the Day ;) (click to go directly and enlarge, of course)

The Art of Gert and Uwe Tobias

Read all about it at The Wall Street Journal . In a potential breakthrough that opens a new way to protect against HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, researchers found that a gel applied by women before and after sex cut the chance of acquiring the AIDS virus by 39% and the genital herpes virus by 51%. It is the first time an HIV-prevention method controlled by women, who bear the brunt of the epidemic in Africa, has been shown to work. About a third of women in the study said their partners didn't know they were using the clear, odorless gel. The findings come at a time when donor nations have been balking at continued large increases for funding AIDS treatment, intensifying pressure on finding new ways to prevent people from contracting the virus in the first place. The study was randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled—the gold standard for clinical research—and the results were deemed statistically significant. "It's a really well-done...

On astronaut food: Space food must be both lightweight and dense in calories. Therefore, bacon enters a hydraulic press to become a “Bacon Square” and toast becomes a “Toasted Bread Cube” glossed with a layer of edible fat designed to keep crumbs in check. Because carbonation bubbles won’t rise to the surface without gravity, beer is a no-go in space. Milkshakes work just fine, however, as does grapefruit juice. On relativity: If you tote your bathroom scale onto an elevator and watch the readout at takeoff, you will temporarily gain weight as the elevator’s acceleration adds an additional earthward pull to the earthward pull of gravity. The gain is temporary. On weightlessness: Bed rest, curiously, mimics spaceflight in that “staying off one’s feet causes the same sorts of bodily degradations that weightlessness causes”, including muscle atrophy and the thinning of bones. Because of the similarity, NASA funds bed-rest studies at the University of Texa...

- I finally read Twilight , and after hours of internet research, I’ve found a solution to a major problem I had with the story. I know why the vampire sparkles! Of course, innate body glitter is just the latest thing wrong with vampires at large, so I’ll start with the broader picture and work my way to the answer to that new riddle. First, I assert that vampires must be giant, highly evolved insects. That makes sense because most of the hematophages in the natural world are bugs. Second, like many real bloodsuckers, vampires must feed before they reproduce . However, unlike anything in the natural world, vampires seem to reproduce entirely through horizontal gene transfer . If they don’t kill their victim outright, then vampire genes invade the host and trigger… Metamorphosis . According to Twilight , the process takes days and is excruciatingly painful, which is logical given that the victim undergoes complete hystolysis and histogenesis without the benefit of a pupal ...

I already have something similar to stamp my personal address on envelopes, but that's due to my poor handwriting :|

"The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it's not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear. . ." When he died last month, the man who wrote those words in The Elephant's Journey , José Saramago , was an old man, 87 years old. His preoccupations and politics and passions might seem to belong to a past age: a diehard communist impatient of dictators, subversive of orthodoxies, disrespectful of international corporations, peasant-born in a marginal country and identifying himself always with the powerless, a radical who lived on into an age when even liberals are spoken of as leftist . . . But the still more intransigent radicalism of his art makes it impossible to di...

The Venice International Film Festival announced Monday morning that Julie Taymor’s The Tempest will close the fest, which runs September 1 through 11th. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is the opener. The $20-million indie-funded Miramax pick-up is finally coming out in December via Disney’s Touchstone label, which is fine with Taymor. At Cannes she said that the film wasn’t ready in May (Icon screened it in the Cannes market, though not for press) and would play the fall fest circuit. No matter how commercial Taymor’s latest Shakespeare adaptation turns out to be, with Helen Mirren as Prospera, Ben Whishaw as Ariel and Djiman Hounsou as Caliban, costumes (Oscar-winner Sandy Powell), cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh), production design (Mark Friedberg) and score (Elliot Goldenthal) should be factors in the Oscar mix. L.A. rocker Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker in Taymor’s Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man , stars in The Tempest as young Prince Ferdinand. TOH!

A whole Telegraph Gallery The sun is clouded by smoke from a forest fire raging near the village of Santa Maria da Feira

Check it on BoingBoing :) And yes, the Ghibli zoetrope, in dire need of a decent video on YouTube, Vimeo, anywhere...

In Lisbon, no less :-[ ) "No, it wasn't scary at all," the girl said as she chatted to her friend on her mobile. "The old horror films are so funny." Much of the packed house at Hackney Empire thought the same of Tod Browning's 1931 movie Dracula, screened to a live performance by the Kronos Quartet of Philip Glass 's score. There were no gasps of shock or horror (though one can imagine a 1930s audience recoiling at the more gruesome implications), only knowing chuckles and the occasional laugh out loud. Vampire films, through countless reincarnations right up to the current Twilight craze, have made the conventions of the Dracula legend – crucifixes, mirror tricks and stakes through the heart – all too familiar. But that becomes irrelevant when you experience this Dracula, an early talkie with no music, with Philip Glass's score. The live soundtrack gives the movie, nicely projected on a big screen above the musicians, instant gravit...

Author Tom McCarthy for The Guardian : There's a scene in Don Quixote where the deluded would-be knight is listening to fulling mills. This is not the famous windmill scene: in that one, the machines are clearly visible; this one, by contrast, takes place in pitch-black night. Quixote, struck by the mills' rhythmic metallic clankings, persuades himself that they are the half-articulated groans and snarls of monsters. He's wrong, of course: they're mills. But then again, perhaps, in the way madmen sometimes are, he's right. Just maybe, in the looping chains of broken syllables, the clashing metre of compounded phonemes, he's picking up a message, a weak signal slowly forming in time's static: an announcement, for those astute enough to hear, of a monstrous age of mechanised industry lurking in the night of the future. For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don't be fool...

From the TLS : Sheila Rowbotham’s adventurous dreamers had marvellous names: Voltairine de Cleyre, Elsie Clews Parsons, Storm Jameson, Maggie Lena Walker, and Clementina Black. More familiar to most readers and writers of feminist histories are Frances E. Willard, Jane Addams, Mary Church Terrell, Octavia Hill and Henrietta Barnett. Rowbotham’s contribution is to demonstrate how both prominent and obscure women in the United States and Britain created new ways of being women. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, they challenged prevailing expectations about sexuality, living arrangements, paid work and motherhood. The American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose father named her after the Enlightenment philosopher, was an ardent proponent of free love. One should “never allow love to be vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communication”, she maintained, nor was she keen on children, mocking the maternal instinct and defending the childless. Then there ...