MOVIE OF THE MONTH: MAY 2016

Director:  Drake Doremus
Screenplay: Nathan Parker
Story: Drake Doremus
Camera:  John Guleserian
Running: 101 minutes
Country: United States

A futuristic love story set in a society where emotions have been eradicated. Equals tells the story of Silas (Hoult) who lives in a future society called The Collective. The inhabitants of this modern world are a new breed of humans called Equals. Equals are peaceful, calm, fair and polite. Life in The Collective is perfect; there is no greed, no poverty, no violence and no emotion but a new disease is threatening everyone. SOS or Switched On Syndrome is activating in it's victims everything they thought they had escaped: depression, sensitivity, fear & love. Once a person is overtaken with SOS they are sent away to The Den and never seen again. 

When Silas is infected, he becomes an outcast but he notices one person who seems to understand what he's going through. Nia (Stewart) has feelings, but she seems to be able to hide them. When he confronts her, they discover a connection that quickly takes over everything. They feel love and intimacy for the first time in their lives but the only way for them to insure their survival is to escape.
 
The film had its world premiere in the international competition section at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival.The film had its North American premiere in the Special Presentations programme at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The film is scheduled to be released on May 26, 2016, through DirecTV Cinema prior to opening in a limited release on July 15, 2016, by A24.

In a futuristic utopian society, human emotions have been eradicated and everyone lives in peace but when a new disease surfaces, everything changes for illustrator Silas (Hoult). He becomes an outcast once infected and is drawn to his writer co-worker Nia (Stewart), who is also infected but hiding her condition. In order to survive, they have to escape together. On July 29, 2015, it was announced that "Equals" was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival and had its world premiere on September 5. On August 18, 2015, it was announced the film was selected to have its North American premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

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BOOK OF THE MONTH: MAY 2016

Title: Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities 
Author: Amy Stewart
Pages: 236
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565126831

A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. In Wicked Plants, Stewart takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations. It’s an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.
You’ll learn which plants to avoid (like exploding shrubs), which plants make themselves exceedingly unwelcome (like the vine that ate the South), and which ones have been killing for centuries (like the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother).

Menacing botanical illustrations and splendidly ghastly drawings create a fascinating portrait of the evildoers that may be lurking in your own backyard. Drawing on history, medicine, science, and legend, this compendium of bloodcurdling botany will entertain, alarm, and enlighten even the most intrepid gardeners and nature lovers.

Leave it to Amy Stewart and her bestselling horticultural quasi-thriller, Wicked Plants, to introduce us to some of the plant world’s nefarious inhabitants. With her signature style of wry humor and botanical knowledge, she has created an immensely readable reference book on fearsome flora, the potentially dangerous world of plants, be they ornamental, edible, land-based, or aquatic.
She combines horticultural facts with bits of history, drama, intrigue, and humor, readily communicating the gruesome attributes of a wide range of plants, from well-known house and garden plants to more rare tropical jewels.

The book is arranged alphabetically by common plant name, interspersed with discussions of groups of plants in chapters with diabolical titles like The Devil’s Bartender, Weeds of Mass Destruction, Deadly Dinner, and More Than One Way to Skin a Cat. Plants are categorized by the type of wickedness possessed: from the merely offensive (the social misfits, stinkers, or just disgusting), to the intoxicating or illegal, dangerous, destructive, painful, and the downright deadly. 

The book’s unique cover, one of 2009’s ten top-rated covers by Amazon.com, gives the small volume the look of a handsomely aged, hand-me-down diary of loathsome botanical scoundrels, replete with antique-looking etchings and bewitching illustrations.
From the potentially deadly little berries of garden lantana (Lantana camara) to the creepy, noxious, invasive “killer alga” (Caulerpa taxifolia) that covers over thirty-two thousand acres of the world’s oceans, to mind-bending peyote (Lophophora williamsii) buttons, the book provides information on plant family, habitat, origin, and common names, the hazardous portion of the plant, and its effects on humans. It is an engaging way to learn about the risks that lurk in our midst; while not encyclopedic, it covers a broad enough spectrum of plants to create an entertaining yet educational resource.

SPECIES OF THE MONTH: MAY 2016

An article published in Plant Biosystems formally proposes the existence of a new subgenus of plants, Jamesbondia, an infrageneric group of the Neotropical flowering genus known as Alternanthera. It has officially been called Jamesbondia after the notable American ornithologist James Bond, whose name Ian Fleming is known to have used for his eponymous spy series.

The four Jamesbondia plant species are mostly found in Central America and the Caribbean Islands. Authors I. Sánchez-del Pino and D. Iamonico have built on the research of J.M. Mears, who identified a group of Caribbean plant species as "Jamesbondia" from 1980 to 1982 in unpublished annotations on Alternanthera specimens. Molecular phylogenetic analyses and observations of the flower morphology justify the official separate naming of this group.

The name Jamesbondia has never previously been validly published. Respecting the annotations of Mears, the authors named the subgenus in honour of the American ornithologist. Sánchez-del Pino and Iamonico suspect that Mears' choice of name relates to the geographic distribution of the species: "'Jamesbondia is clearly dedicated to the ornithologist James Bond (1900-1989), who focused his research on birds in the same Caribbean areas that are the primary home of the four putative species of subgenus Jamesbondia."

Ian Fleming, a keen bird watcher, adopted the name for his series of spy novels about a fictional British Secret Service and is quoted as saying, ''It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born."

Link to Original Paper: http://www.tandfonline.com

EVENT OF THE MONTH: MAY 2016

25 years ago on 18 May 1991, Dr Helen Patricia Sharman became the first British citizen to go into space, spending 7 days on Russia’s Mir space station. Dr Sharman is a British chemist who worked as a research and development technologist for GEC in London and later as a chemist for Mars Incorporated dealing with flavourant properties of chocolate. After responding to a radio advertisement asking for applicants to be the first British astronaut, Sharman was selected for the mission live on ITV, on 25 November 1989, ahead of nearly 13,000 other applicants.

The Soyuz TM-12 mission, which included Soviet cosmonauts Anatoly Artsebarsky and Sergei Krikalev, launched on 18 May 1991 and lasted eight days, most of that time spent at the Mir space station.  Sharman's tasks included medical and agricultural tests, photographing the British Isles, and participating in an unlicensed amateur radio hookup with British schoolchildren. She landed aboard Soyuz TM-11 on 26 May 1991, along with Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov.

Sharman was just 27 years and 11 months old when she went into space, making her (as of 2015) the sixth youngest of the 545 individuals who have flown in space. The second youngest, Valentina Tereshkova, became the first woman in space in 1963 at the age of 26 years and 3 months. Sharman has not returned to space, although she was one of three British candidates in the 1992 European Space Agency astronaut selection process and was on the shortlist of 25 applicants in 1998.

Link: http://www.helensharman.com