We have 93 guests and no members online
The Craft is an e-novella about Witchcraft in a future setting. It's a prequel to my dystopian novella: The Cloud: set in the last half of the 21st century - after The Great Famine.
Since writing this I have added a preface, concerning witchcraft, that you can read here...
In October 2012 we travelled to Nepal and South India. We had been to North India a couple of years ago and wanted to see more of this fascinating country; that will be the most populous country in the World within the next two decades.
In many ways India is like a federation of several countries; so different is one region from another. For my commentary on our trip to Northern India in 2009 Read here...
For that matter Nepal could well be part of India as it differs less from some regions of India than do some actual regions of India.
These regional differences range from climate and ethnicity to economic wellbeing and religious practice. Although poverty, resulting from inadequate education and over-population is commonplace throughout the sub-continent, it is much worse in some regions than in others.
Regular readers will know that I have an artificial heart valve. Indeed many people have implanted prosthesis, from metal joints or tooth fillings to heart pacemakers and implanted cochlear hearing aides, or just eye glasses or dentures. Some are kept alive by drugs. All of these are ways in which our individual survival has become progressively more dependent on technology. So that should it fail many would suffer. Indeed some today feel bereft without their mobile phone that now substitutes for skills, like simple mathematics, that people once had to have themselves. But while we may be increasingly transformed by tools and implants, the underlying genes, conferred by reproduction, remain human.
The possibility of accelerated genetic evolution through technology was brought nearer last week when, on 28 November 2018, a young scientist, He Jiankui, announced, at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, that he had successfully used the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR to edit a gene in several children.
Most of us already know that an atom is the smallest division of matter that can take part in a chemical reaction; that a molecule is a structure of two or more atoms; and that life on Earth is based on organic molecules: defined as those molecules that contain carbon, often in combination with hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen as well as other elements like sodium, calcium, phosphorous and iron.
Organic molecules can be very large indeed and come in all shapes and sizes. Like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle molecular shape is often important to an organic molecule's ability to bond to another to form elaborate and sometimes unique molecular structures.
All living things on Earth are comprised of cells and all cells are comprised of numerous molecular structures.