Word: flora
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Simonetta Vespucci, the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, died of tuberculosis at 23, but it is said Botticelli used her lissome and rhythmical curves as the model for Venus on her half-shell and Flora in La Primavera. Vespucci may have looked like that, or she may not. Maybe she was a blond pudge like Pamela Anderson. Getting tumbled in a wave of neo-Platonic fantasizing about how outer shape mirrors inner essence--"For Soule is Forme, and doth the Bodie make," wrote the poet Spenser in 1596--may be great for the figure and complexion when court painters like...
...distant past, memes were largely confined to their localized niches determined by the geographical location of their hosts, and the local memetic flora and fauna (read: culture). But in the last 200 years, we have fully opened the global communication routes linking the developed world, and many previously balkanized memetic environments have merged into one global marketplace of ideas. A full-on war for the space in the human brain is commencing, with capitalism, democracy and liberalism out in front...
...trying to catch up with him. Vitousek's studies of the Hawaiian Islands--the world's most remote archipelago and a place humans discovered only 1,500 years ago--have yielded some intriguing findings. While the arrival of new species has had the greatest impact on Hawaii's unique flora and fauna, what amazed Vitousek was how the world reaches out to touch even the most remote spots. In one celebrated study, he and his colleagues analyzed soil and rock chemistry at volcanic sites ranging from 300 years to 4.1 million years old. Plants at the youngest sites drew nutrients...
...Translated by Flora Drew...
...only trouble with this theory is that it's wrong. The earliest humans, it turns out, didn't live in grasslands. Dry climate or not, a companion paper published last week in Nature shows on the basis of the other fossilized flora and fauna, as well as the chemistry of the ancient soil, that Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba lived in a well-forested environment. That's also the case with other extremely ancient hominids found during the past several years, including Ardipithecus ramidus ramidus and a species called Orrorin tugenensis, announced last December by French and Kenyan researchers. And while...