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.

    Once a group of 17-year-old schoolboys decided to break the world basketball marathon record ( 马拉松记录). They wanted to play for ninety hours and add six hours to the record. Each team had nine players, with five at a time. The boys decided each person would play 21.5 hours and then rest for 2 hours. Then it started between both of the sides at 6 o'clock in the evening.

    The first night was very hard for the players. When it was their turn to rest, they were too exited(兴奋的) to fall asleep at once. After sleeping for a short time, they had to play again.

    On the second night, they fell asleep as soon as they stopped. Some of them had trouble with their feet and hands, but the only serious problem was a psychological one. Each boy was thinking: Why am I doing this? How can I play any longer?

    After the third night, the players knew they could finish the ninety hours. The basketball on the fourth night was very slow. But in the final hours, the players got better. For the last few minutes, the players looked as fresh as when they started. How happy everyone was!

Hi Judy!

    You often complain to me that you always buy goods unreasonably on sale promotion（促销）and feel it shameful after going back to your school dormitory with new things not needed, considering all the money you spend is your parents' income.

    In fact, this is a common phenomenon, called impulsive buying, a buying unplanned and hard to control. It usually happens when a store offers discounts（打折）or sales promotion—a special way used by stores to get more customers, which means you may fall into its traps even without notice. ,

    Stores, with a good knowledge of customers' psychology（心理）, make use of it to drive business. Avoiding all the impulsive buying is a hard thing. However, knowing our psychology behind it and reducing the times when influenced by sales promotion may be useful. So you should keep calm when facing the sales promotion by keeping in mind what you really need.

    Find out the conditions where you are likely to buy things blindly. When seeing a dress advertised at 20% off, do not concentrate on the discount, but warn yourself against falling into the trap of “saving money''.

    Besides, do not forget the long-term effects of your choice when meeting a sales promotion. Short-term benefits, like excited feeling just after buying items encourage impulsive buying. But the long-term costs such as waste of money and the sense of shame really annoy you. When seeing the advertisements, remember what you really want to buy originally and warn yourself of that terrible feeling. Only in this way can you save money for really needed things.

Yours,

Rachel

    Charlie is a teacher and his wife, Maria is an artist. The night before last, just before the longest day of the year, Charlie was sitting in a deckchair enjoying the warm summer air when Maria touched his shoulder and he could tell immediately she was a little worried about something. He asked her what the matter was and she replied that there was a strange thing on the jacket that was hanging in the bedroom. They had both lived in the West Indies (西印度群岛) and had seen a lot of strange creatures in their house before. But now they were living in England and so Charlie just laughed and said he would have a look at the "thing".

    He walked to the bedroom. He saw a jacket hanging in the bedroom and went up to it to have a closer look at the "thing". The moment he touched it, the thing sprang into life. Now Charlie experiences fear like the rest of us but when this creature opened its wings, he jumped out of his skin and ran screaming from the room like a small child doing about 100 miles an hour.

    For a moment the next-door neighbours thought that Charlie was murdering his wife because of the noise they could hear. In fact, it was a bat that frightened Charlie.

    Eventually Charlie managed to trap the bat in a box and took it to the garden to let the bat fly. Maria, who had been playing the guitar while Charlie was upstairs, asked Charlie if he had found out what the thing was. "Oh, nothing to worry about", he said casually hoping that the terror could not be seen in his eyes, "it was just a bat."

    Throughout much of human history, man has been the measure of many, if not all, things. Lengths were divided up into feet and smaller units from the human hand. Other measures were equally characteristic. Mediterranean traders for centuries used the weight of grains of wheat to define (定义) their units of mass. The Romans used libra, forerunner of the pound, by referring to the weight of a carob (角豆树) seed.

    The sizes of similarly named units could also differ. The king's foot, used in France for nearly

    1,000 years after its introduction by Charlemagne in around 790 AD, was, at 32.5cm,around a centimeter shorter than the Belgic foot, used in England until 1300.Greek,Egyptian and Babylonian versions of water in a fixed container varied from one another by a few kilos, Nor was there agreement on such things within countries. In France, where there was no unified (统一的) measurement system at the national level, the situation was particularly terrible. The lieue (former measure of distance), for example, varied from just over 3 km in the north to nearly 6 km in the south.

    Although John Wilkins, an Englishman, first put forward a decimal system (十进制) of measurement in 1668,it was the French who in 1799 made it law. The Système International d'Unités (SI, or the metric system, as it is better known) developed from it and became the official measurement in all countries except Myanmar, Liberia and the United States. Now the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris is set to give the metric system its biggest shake-up yet.

    At a meeting in Versailles, France, on November 16th,2018,the world's measurement bodies are almost certain to approve a decision that will mean four out of the seven base SI units, including the kilogram, will follow the other three, including the metre, in being redefined in terms of the values of physical constants (物理常数).Each of the chosen constants has been measured incredibly precisely, which would mean that from May 20^th 2019 the constants will themselves be fixed at their current values for ever. Any laboratory in the world will then be able to measure, for example, the mass of an object as precisely as the accuracy of their equipment will allow.

For Adam Johnson, a potter from Brighton, the interest stirs (萌动) each spring. "It grabs a hold of me," he said. "I just get the desire to dig." Together with his shovel (铲), he is part of a larger movement. Around the world people are discovering the joys of an ancient practice: the digging of holes. TikTok videos of people digging purely for fun have been viewed millions of times. Instagram accounts devoted to the pastime have many followings.

Charlie Mone, a student at St Andrews University, was changed while digging on the beach in Gran Canaria last year. When he returned home, he founded the university's first hole-digging society. "I didn't think it would go anywhere," he said. Dozens of diggers regularly attend its events on East Sands Beach on the east coast of Scotland and the society's Facebook page has more than 300 followers.

Mone believes that that much of the appeal lies in the friendship working on a shared project in the sea air. "It's struck a chord (共鸣) with people," he said. "There's something therapeutic to just switching your brain off and digging a hole." At the end of each 1 session, the holes are filled in to prevent accidents.

Back in Brighton, Johnson, 38, is more of a lonely digger. "I have often started digging without an actual plan," he said. "Once I took out an unruly bramble (荆棘) and found some rock so I dug that out, then carried on a bit until I was in a good general digging rhythm. A few hours later my partner asked if I was coming in for dinner-the bramble had come out at breakfast and I found myself in a six-foot hole. The hole would become a sunken hot tub, but the digging would have been worthwhile anyway, he suggests. "There's something basic about it. And you find all kinds of buried treasure from people who had the garden before you. There's something magical about digging."