Nepenthe

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. Race 'ironed out' But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims. Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will ...

" BLOOD DIAMOND ," Ed Zwick's film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou and Jennifer Connelly, doesn't open until Dec. 15, but it's already getting more free publicity than Warner Bros. could have dreamed of. Set in the late '90s when rebel militias seized control of Sierra Leone's diamond mines, selling rough gems to buy weapons they used to slaughter and mutilate many thousands of innocent people, "Blood Diamond" tells a fictional tale of two South Africans, a white mercenary and a black fisherman, who find a rare pink diamond. But even two months before its release the film has spurred talk that it could turn consumers off to buying diamonds for fear their money would be supporting murderers. De Beers, the international diamond cartel that controls the majority of the world's diamonds, has gone on the offensive to try to distance the industry from the history depicted in the film. But according to Ken Sunshine, Leonardo DiCaprio'...

... Mel Gibson Spoke earlier with Dad, who has been the usual tower of strength, but is pretty down on my TV interview apologising to the Jews for suggesting they are responsible for every war in the world. "How come they never have to apologise for inventing the Holocaust?" he yelled. Like I always say, he's never lied to me. But I have a new movie to promote, and to adapt Dorothy's words to Toto: I don't think we're in Australia any more, Dad. Unfortunately. As I keep trying to explain, it was the alcohol talking. But, like the coward that it is, the alcohol's nowhere to be seen when the time for apologies comes round, so it has fallen to me to make amends on its behalf. But I just now stumbled on a quote by an English guy named Ronald Atkinson. You know what he said? "I think I've over-apologised enough." And the very second I read that, I thought to myself: aye, apologise some more and I'll probably get to make Lethal Weapon 5. But dy...

... an amazing children's book, called Tree of Life: The Incredible Biodiversity of Life on Earth . It's an excellent resource for kids and adults, which introduces the reader to all the very diverse species on Earth, and how all life is interconnected, and so dependent on each other for survival. Near the end of the book, the last species to be discussed is of course, us, those darn humans. Rochelle writes: Humans are 1 of the 1,750,000 species on the Tree of Life. We are but one leaf on the Tree. Yet, with a population of over six billion, humans have the greatest impact on the Tree of Life. ... beautifully illustrated by the very talented artist Margot Thompson. Rochelle will have a new book coming out early next year. This book will be all about the rich life under water. As seen in Booklust :)

I translated this one :) The past, it seems, has never been more pressing. With the film of Alan Bennett's The History Boys opening tomorrow, David Starkey has seized the opportunity to attack the way the subject is taught in schools. A curriculum that sticks to the Greatest Hits – Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Henry VIII and, endlessly, the Nazis – may be more grabby than the wearisome trundle through time (from 1066) of my youth, but it leaves even A-level students with what Starkey calls detached "gobbets" of information that seem to bear no relation to one another. Certainly, my children seem to view the past as a few atolls of interest in an ocean of dullness and, to make matters worse, they don't take much in. Only late in the day have I discovered the solution: the Horrible Histories. How these books – there are 50 of them – passed me by until now is a mystery to rank alongside the cause of Napoleon's death. At times in their 13-year history, they have occupie...

Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is a strange work. Written in just over two weeks, the 55 poems appear to have been less composed than dictated to the German poet - as if they had been sitting around elsewhere, waiting for someone to channel them into speech. In an earlier time, we would have had no trouble in describing the Sonnets - in their oracularity and their visionary power - as a prophetic work. Translating a complex, visionary poem leaves you with two choices. Either you translate something you don't understand in German into something you understand even less in English, or you make a single reading of it, knowing that this denies many others. In translating Rilke's Sonnets , I took the latter course, which is to say I made a travesty of sorts - as any single interpretation must be. The one thing a poet must avoid, however, is pretending that both the meaning and the music of the original poem can be carried into the new language. Because a poem wo...

A superb new book focusing on the formative years of the Floyd is being published at the end of October this year. "Pink Floyd: The Early Years" has been written by Barry Miles, which will be a familiar name to many Floyd fans, having penned "The Visual Documentary" - a book which for many years was a standard reference to the group. Miles saw the band play when they were still called "The Pink Floyd Sound" and he wrote the first ever article about them for a New York underground newspaper in 1966. He also knew the band members socially, witnessed the rapid decline of Syd Barrett and became actively involved in setting up some of Floyd's major gigs. In the publicity for the book, the reader is promised an "authentic and compelling story of the group that gave alternative London its first real soundtrack and launched on the rock world a radical combination of music, light shows and pyrotechnic stage effects, a revealing diary of Pink Floyd'...

W hether it's an anniversary or the birth of a nuclear bomb, when tyrants celebrate, they do it with a goose step. And lately, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il seems to be celebrating a lot. Ignoring the starved populace, the looming threat of annihilation and one of the world's most stagnant economies, North Korean airwaves are rife with images of goose-stepping armies. Hips locked. Back straight. Kick from the hip. Think of it as a Rockette's kick in a laugh-at-us-and-die kind of way. If recent reports are accurate, the country is goose-stepping its way into the nuclear club, testing weapons of mass destruction and jangling nerves around the world. Of course, all that perceived might stands in stark contrast to the reality of a nation long-suffering under international sanctions. North Korea isn't sending us a postcard of prosperity, but a message of menace. "(The goose-stepping) says that here we can train all these men to do something that is comp...

Kremlin: Putin foi «mal traduzido» em comentários sobre Katsav O Kremlin minimizou hoje a polémica envolvendo o presidente russo, que terá elogiado o presidente israelita por alegadamente violar mulheres, afirmando que Vladimir Putin foi «mal traduzido» e que se tratou de «uma piada». Segundo jornais russos que cobriam um encontro entre Putin e o primeiro-ministro israelita, Putin terá dito a Ehud Olmert: «Transmita as minhas saudações ao seu presidente. Vai, garanhão! Violar 10 mulheres! Não esperava isso dele. Surpreendeu todo a gente. Todos nós estamos com inveja». Em declarações à BBC, Dmitryi Peskov, um porta-voz do Governo russo, afirmou que Putin foi mal-interpretado pelos jornalistas e que de modo algum teria apoiado a prática da violação. «Foi só uma piada do presidente com o primeiro-ministro israelita. Não era para ser ouvida por um jornalista. O presidente não estava, de modo algum, a sugerir que a prática da violação é aceitável», disse Pes...

The entire works of Charles Darwin have been made available online . It includes scanned works that were owned by his family — many of which were signed by the author. The University of Cambridge hopes to have this completed by 2009 and is only estimated to be about half way done. If you have any love for books whatsoever, I suggest you take a look at how they present the user with each book. Take the very first edition of On the Origin of Species , for example, where they use frames to display the text on the left with the original image on the right. From the Reuters article : 'Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.

Pangong Tso is a lake in the Himalayas situated at a height of about 4500 m (14850 ft). It is 134 km long and extends from India to Tibet. Two thirds of the length of this lake lies in the People's Republic of China. It is only 8 km wide at its broadest point. In winter, the lake freezes completely despite being salt water. [was enraptured by the pic, me apologies]

You've checked out your lover's zodiac sign, and you know what her sleep number is. Before taking the next step, though, you might want to have a close look at her fingers. A new study in a British medical journal finds a link between the relative length of a woman's index and ring fingers and her athletic prowess. The research takes its place among dozens of other studies tying that ratio -- known in finger-measurement circles as 2D:4D (the relationship between the length of the second digit, 2D, and the fourth) -- to all manner of physical and psychological traits, from breast cancer risk to schizophrenia. Digit ratio, as the measurement is called, has been found to relate to left-handedness and autism, to hyperactivity and bullying in children, eating disorders in women and depression in men. You're staring at your own fingers this very minute, right? Well, before you put too much stock in what you see there, read on. It has long been known that men's ring finge...

El cineasta manchego Pedro Almodóvar y el escritor estadounidense Paul Auster, que hoy recibirán los premios Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes y de las Letras, respectivamente, se profesaron anoche admiración mutua y descubrieron que ambos han sido niños imaginativos con una necesidad imperiosa de contar historias como un impulso vital. Almodóvar y Auster encontraron más de una coincidencia en su vida al contar anécdotas y revelar algunos secretos de sus obras durante un coloquio celebrado en el Teatro Jovellanos de Gijón ante un millar de espectadores que llenaron el aforo de la sala. Una escenografía austera pero vistosa, con un telón de fondo color rojo, una alfombra de tono pastel, una mesilla, sillones de orejas, libros, latas de cintas de cine y una máquina de escribir desparramados por el suelo, fue el marco en el que los artistas se fueron 'desnudando' intelectualmente ante un público que les tributó afecto y aplausos . Moderado por Jorge Herralde , responsable de la...

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet. Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, a...

The only book bought - but a most precious one - a picture of my devotion, and a bookmark commemorating one of its many events.

What is one to do? The whole post: Lil' Seal Pants Julia in Seattle, self-described amateur Cuteologist, sent in this little seal dude. He's like a lima bean shape. Anywho, so, I go to name the photo, and the computer tells me I've chosen the name 'seal puppage' befo'. Could things get any more redonk? How many people have multiple 'seal puppage's on their desktop? What are the chances? ;) LOL! Nice submishe, Julia K., from the Australia GeoScience Education site. Posted by Meg at 09:51 AM | Permalink

The world's cultural heritage is in trouble. The bestsellers list is full of poorly researched books about fairytales purporting to be real – when they are less historically accurate than Blackadder and not nearly as well written. Architecture no longer offers up impressive stone monuments to their fabled designers but, instead, punctures city skylines with glorified greenhouses or grey, rectangular eyesores prone to being hit by stray aeroplanes. Save the wit and insight of Bertrand Russell, the vivacity of Hunter S. Thompson and the pop sensibilities of The Beatles, the last fifty years or so has been a forgettable cultural experience. When people come to look back on the work of our generation, and those immediately preceding it, they will see enormous technological progress. They will see massive advancements in medicine and an unbridled spread of information via the Internet. They will see the communication revolution but they will spot very little of the timeless quality that...

Eu conheço um país que tem uma das mais baixas taxas de mortalidade de recém-nascidos do mundo, melhor que a média da União Europeia. Eu conheço um país onde tem sede uma empresa que é líder mundial de tecnologia de transformadores. Mas onde outra é líder mundial na produção de feltros para chapéus. Eu conheço um país que tem uma empresa que inventa jogos para telemóveis e os vende para mais de meia centena de mercados. E que tem também outra empresa que concebeu um sistema através do qual você pode escolher, pelo seu telemóvel, a sala de cinema onde quer ir, o filme que quer ver e a cadeira onde se quer sentar. Eu conheço um país que inventou um sistema biométrico de pagamentos nas bombas de gasolina e uma bilha de gás muito leve que já ganhou vários prémios internacionais. E que tem um dos melhores sistemas de Multibanco a nível mundial, onde se fazem operações que não é possível fazer na Alemanha, Inglaterra ou Estados Unidos. Que fez mesmo uma revolução no sistema financeiro e tem ...