By 2050, a completely new type of human evolve as a result of extremely new technology, behavior, and natural selection. This is according to Cadell Last, a researcher at the Global Brain Institute, who claims mankind is undergoing a major “evolutionary transition”.

    In less than four decades, Mr. Last claims we will live longer, have children in old age and rely on artificial intelligence to do ordinary and boring tasks. This shift is so significant, he claims, it is comparable to the change from monkeys to apes, and apes to humans. “Your 80 or 100 is going to be so radically different than your grandparents,” Mr. Last says, who believes we will spend much of our time living in virtual reality. Some evolutionary scientists believe this age could be as high as 120 by 2050.

    Mr. Last claims humans will also demonstrate delayed sexual maturation, according to a report by Christina Sterbenz in Business Insider. This refers to something known as life history theory which attempts to explain how natural selection shapes key events in a creature's life, such as reproduction. It suggests that as brain sizes increase, organisms need more energy and time to reach their full potential, and so reproduce less.

    Instead of living fast and dying younger, Mr. Last believes humans will live slow and die old. “Global society at the moment is a complete mess,” he told MailOnline. “But in crisis there is opportunity, and in apocalypse (启示) there can be transformation. So I think the next system humanity creates will be far more sophisticated, fair, and abundant than our current civilization.”

    “I think our next system will be as different from the modern world, as our contemporary world is from the medieval (中世纪的) world. The biological clock isn't going to be around forever,” he added, and said that people could pause it for some time using future technology.

    The change is already happening. Today, the average age at which a woman in Britain has her first baby has been rising steadily stands at 29. 8. In the US, just one percent of first children were born to women over the age of 35 in 1970. By 2012, that figure rose to 15 percent.

    “As countries become socio-economically advanced, more and more people, especially women have the option to engage in cultural reproduction,” Mr. Last added. And as well as having more child-free years to enjoy leisure time, he believes artificial intelligence will make up the need for low-skill jobs. We may also spend a large amount of time living in virtual reality. “I'm not quite sure most people have really absorbed the implications of this possibility,” Mr. Last said.

    His views are detailed in a paper, titled “Human Evolution, Life History Theory, and the End of Biological Reproduction" published Current Aging Science.

Evolution.

In 1978, I was 18 and was working as a nurse in a small town about 270 km away from Sydney, Australia. I was looking forward to having five fays off from duty. Unfortunately, the only one train a day back to my home in Sydney had already left. So I thought I'd hitch a ride (搭便车).

I waited by the side of the highway for three hours but no one stopped for me. Finally, a man walked over and introduced himself as Gordon. He said that although he couldn't give me a lift, I should come back to his house for lunch. He noticed me standing for hours in the November heat and thought I must be hungry. I was doubtful as a young girl but he assured (使……放心)me I was safe, and he also offered to help me find a lift home afterwards. When we arrived at his house, he made us sandwiches. After lunch, he helped me find a lift home.

Twenty-five years later, in 2003, while I was driving to a nearby town one day, I saw an elderly man standing in the glaring heat, trying to hitch a ride. I thought it was another chance to repay someone for the favour I'd been given decades earlier. I pulled over and picked him up. I made him comfortable on the back seat and offered him some water.

After a few moments of small talk, the man said to me, “You haven't changed a bit, even your red hair is still the same.” I couldn't remember where I'd met him. He then told me he was the man who had given me lunch and helped me find a lift all those years ago. It was Gordon.

    Light travels at a speed which is about a million times faster than the speed of sound. In one second, light travels about 300,000 km, but sound travels only 344m. You can get some idea of this difference by watching the start of a race. If you stand some distance away from the Starter, you can see smoke come from his gun before the sound reaches your ears.
     This great speed of light produces some strange facts. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach us. If you look at the light of the moon tonight, remember that the light rays (光线) left the moon 1.3 seconds before they reached you. The nearest star is so far away that the light which you can see from it tonight started to travel towards you four years ago at a speed of nearly 2 million km per minute. In some cases the light from one of tonight's stars started on its journey to you before you were born.

    Thus, if we want to be honest, we cannot say “The stars are shinning tonight.” We have to say, “The stars look pretty. They were shining four years ago but their light has only just reached Earth.”

    Many experts say that Billy Wilder changed the history of American movies. He is often called the best movie maker Hollywood has ever had. He was known for making movies that offered sharp social comment. Wilder was one of the first directors to do this.

    Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Billy Wilder started law school in Vienna, Austria. However, he began reporting for a Vienna newspaper after graduation. By the 1920s, he was writing movies in Germany. However, the Nazis had risen to power in the nation. Wider was Jewish, and he recognized that he had no future in Nazi Germany. In 1933, he went to Paris. There he directed a movie for the first time. It was called “The Bad Seed”. Then he received word that producers in the United States had accepted one of his scripts. Billy Wilder left Europe for America.

    In America he formed a writing team with Charles Brackett. The two writers created many films together. Wilder and Brackett wrote several successful movies. One was the nineteen thirty-nine movie, “Ninotchka”, starring Greta Garbo. Ernst Lubitsch directed the film. Wilder always praised this man as a friend and teacher whose humor and expert direction greatly influenced his works.

    In 1954, Billy Wilder became an independent producer. The nest year, Wilder's first movie as an independent filmmaker was a huge success. It was “The Seven Year Itch”. In 1959, Wilder made a funny movie that was very popular. I.A.L. Diamond joined Wilder in writing “Some Like It Hot”.

    By the 1980s, Wilder no longer was considered the most unusual, creative movie-maker in Hollywood. In recent years, however, Billy Wilder received many more awards and honors. Critics praised his gifts to movie making. In 1987, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. It is the highest award a producer can receive.

    A Chinese scientist's attempt to produce the world's first gene-edited babies who are immune to HIV has caused floods concern.

    In an online video posted on Monday, He Jiankui, a biological researcher, announced that a pair of twin baby girls, Lulu and Nana, was born healthy a few weeks ago with genetic editing technology that can prevent them from being infected with HIV.

    He, who was believed to be in Hong Kong on Monday to attend the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, could not be reached for comment. But his announcement sparked a heated argument concarning medical ethics（伦理）and effectiveness.

    The Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission said on Monday evening that it had not received any ethical assessment application for the study, which is required as a prior condition for such experiments.

    More than 120 scholars from universities and institutes with high status from China and abroad,such as Tsinghua University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),strongly condemned the research in a signed statement, saying the “research” lacks effective ethics inspection, and it amounts to human experimentation,which is “crazy”.

    In the statement, published on Sina Weibo, the scientists said any attempt to make changes to human embryos with genetic editing and give birth to such babies involves high risk as an inevitable part, due to inaccuracies in existing genetic editing technologies.

    “Scientists all over the world dare not make such attempts due to the huge risks and more importantly, ethics. The government must make quick legal moves to strictly supervise（监督）such research. The Pandora's Box has been opened, and we may still have a chance of closing it before it is too late,”the statement said.

    Tsui Lap-chee, president of the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong, said a lot of issues may occur in gene editing. If one gene is edited, it will affect others that interact with it. And the whole genome, a collection of genes, may also be affected.

    One of my wonderful memories is about a Christmas gift. Unlike other gifts, it came without wrap(包装).

    On September 11^th, 1958. Mum gave birth to Richard. After she brought him home from hospital, she put him in my lap, saying. "I promised you a gift, and here it is." What an honor! I turned four a month earlier and none of my friends had such a baby doll of their own. I played with it day and night. I sang to it. I told it stories. 1 told it over and over how much I loved it!

    One morning, however, I found its bed empty. My doll was gone! I cried for it. Mum wept and told me that the poor little thing had been sent to a hospital. It had a fever. For several days, I heard Mum and Dad whispering such words as "hopeless", "pitiful", and "dying", which sounded ominous.

    Christmas was coming. "Don't expect any presents this year." Dad said, pointing at the socks I hung in the living room. "If your baby brother lives, that'll be Christmas enough." As he spoke, his eyes filled with tears. I'd never seen him cry before.

    The phone rang early on Christmas morning. Dad jumped out of bed to answer it. From my bedroom I heard him say. "What? He's all right?" He hung up and shouted upstairs. "The hospital said we can bring Richard home!" "Thank God." I heard Mum cry.

    From the upstairs window, I watched my parents rush out to the car. I had never seen them happy. And I was also full of joy. What a wonderful day! My baby doll would be home. I downstairs. My sacks still hung there flat. But I knew they were not empty; they were filled with love!