TIMES

SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE

OCTOBER 11, 2015

Want to live till 150? Give up sex

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Prezs visit
President Pranab Mukherjee will
be visiting Israel from
Oct 12 to 15 as part of a
six-day visit to West
Asia. The President
will also be travelling
to Jordan and the
Palestinian Authority

Birthday treat
All schools in Maharashtra will
observe a No-Bag day on
Thursday to celebrate the birth
anniversary of late president A P
J Abdul Kalam. Students from
class III-VIII will be
encouraged to
read nonacademic books
on this day in
order to cultivate
a habit of reading

New Apple crop

Friday on, Apples iPhone 6s and
6s Plus will be available
in the Indian market. One of
the key new features of the
latest models of the
luxury brand is 3D
Touch. It allows the
user to read the
contents of a message
by applying pressure
on the screen

Lecture by SRK
Shah Rukh Khan has been
invited to deliver a lecture to
students of the University of
Edinburgh, UK, on Thursday. The
event in
question is a
public lecture
and the
website has
reportedly
sold out all
the tickets to
the same

New innings
Former Indian captain Sourav
Ganguly will be elected as the
chief of the Cricket Association of
Bengal on Thursday.
Ganguly, who was the
CAB joint secretary till
now, will be stepping
into the shoes of late
Jagmohan Dalmiya

It is a distraction that
stops humans living
to their full potential,
claims scientist

Mushroom for
instant orgasm
Jasper Hamill

Jeff Parsons

umans could reach 150

if they gave up sex, says
professor Alex Zhavoronkov, director of a UK
think-tank called the
Biogerontology Research Foundation. In a new book, The Ageless Generation, he states that a life without
intercourse will enable us to live far,
far longer. I have sex occasionally,
but not on a permanent basis and
usually with fellow scientists, said
the 36-year-old professor. Because
otherwise, and Im very sorry for saying it, post-coital interactions can be
quite boring.
Zhavoronkov warns of the energy-sapping distractions that come
in the form of marriage, kids and
material possessions. Delaying marriage and reproduction is a by-product of shifting your life expectancy

horizons, he said.
He recommends instead that we
exercise regularly, including sit-ups
and press-ups and concentrate on eating less. Zhavoronkov himself says
he only consumes between 1,600 and
1,700 calories a day mostly from
fruit, yoghurt and protein bars.
The World Health Organisation
proclaimed last week that we could
soon be living in a world where living
to 100 is normal. Dr Margaret Chan,
director-general of the WHO said, At
a time of unpredictable challenges

for health, one trend is certain: the

ageing of populations is rapidly accelerating worldwide. Most people
can expect to live into their 60s and
beyond. The consequences for health
systems, their workforce and budgets
are profound. A century ago, life
expectancy in the UK was 48 for men
and 56 for women. Living to over 150
isnt unrealistic. Im not planning on
dying at all. You only need to have
lived through the past 30 years to realise anything is possible, concludes
Zhavoronkov. DAILY MIRROR

he magical Dictyophora
mushroom provides women with instant orgasms.
Its powers were first mentioned
in The International Journal of
Medicinal Mushrooms in 2001,
but rumours of its erotic potential have now resurfaced on IFL
Science. It was officially discovered
in 2001 by John
H a l l i d ay a n d
Noah Soule.The
unusual fungi
grow in lava flows
in Hawaii. There Dictyophora
are significant multicolor
sexual arousal
characteristics in the foetid odour
of this unique mushroom, academics wrote. Women who sniffed
the shroom experienced an orgasm instantly. DAILY MIRROR

Shakespeare in modern English now?

James Shapiro

he Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeares language is too difficult for todays audiences to understand. It recently announced that
over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate
all of Shakespeares plays into modern English.
Many in the theater community
have known that this day was coming, though it doesnt lessen the
shock. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been one of the stars in the
Shakespeare firmament since it was
founded in 1935. While the festivals
organizers insist that they also remain committed to staging Shakespeares works in his own words, they
have set a disturbing precedent.
Other venues, including the Alabama
Shakespeare Festival, the University
of Utah and Orlando Shakespeare
Theater, have already signed on to
produce some of these translations.
However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of
money and talent, for it misdiagnoses
the reason that Shakespeares plays
can be hard for playgoers to follow.
The problem is not the often knotty
language; its that even the best directors and actors British as well as

NOTHING SHAKESPEAREAN ABOUT THIS:

The reason for the translations is
that the Bards plays can be hard for
contemporary playgoers to follow

American too frequently offer up

Shakespeares plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of
what his words mean.
Claims that Shakespeares language is unintelligible go back to his
own day. His great rival, Ben Jonson,

13

TRENDS

reportedly complained about some

bombast speeches of Macbeth, which
are not to be understood. Jonson
failed to see that Macbeths dense soliloquies were intentionally difficult;
Shakespeare was capturing a feverish mind at work, tracing the turbulent arc of a characters moral crisis.
Even if audiences strain to understand exactly what Macbeth says,
they grasp what Macbeth feels but
only if an actor knows what that
characters words mean.
Two years ago, a different kind of
theatrical experiment, in which
Shakespeares Much Ado About Nothing, in the original language, trimmed
to 90 minutes, was performed before
an audience largely unfamiliar with
Shakespeare: inmates at Rikers
Island (New York). None of them
walked out on the performance,
though they were free to do so. They
were deeply engrossed, many at the
edge of their seats, some crying out
at various moments and visibly
moved by what they saw.
Did they understand every word?
I doubt it. Im not sure anybody other
than Shakespeare, who invented
quite a few words, ever has. But the
inmates didnt have to follow the play
line for line, because the actors, and
their director, knew what the words
meant; they found in Shakespeares

language the clues to the personalities of the characters.

Ive had a chance to look over a
prototype translation of Timon of
Athens that the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival has been sharing at workshops for the past five years. While
the work of an accomplished playwright, it is a hodgepodge, neither
Elizabethan nor contemporary, and
makes for dismal reading.
To understand Shakespeares
characters, actors have long depended on the hints of meaning and shadings of emphasis that he embedded
in his verse. They will search for
them in vain in the translation: The
music and rhythm of iambic pentameter are gone. Gone, too, are the shifts
which allow actors to register subtle changes in intimacy between
you and thee. Even classical allusions are scrapped.
A technology entrepreneurs
foundation is bankrolling the Oregon Shakespeare Festivals new
venture. Id prefer to see it spend its
money hiring such experts and
enabling those 36 promising American playwrights to devote themselves to writing the next Broadway
hit like Hamilton, rather than waste
time stripping away whats Shakespearean about King Lear or Hamlet. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Times of India, Pune, October 11, 2015 Pp.13

Nasa plans to set up

Mars colonies by 2030
global achievement that marks a
transition in humanitys expansion
asa has said that it plans to as we go to Mars not just to visit, but
have humans living on Mars to stay.
While there, humans will live
in the next few decades. Moving to have Earth Independent and work within habitats that supcolonies on the Red Planet will be the port human life for years, with only
end point of years of research, the routine maintenance. Theyll haragency has said, but it plans for that vest Martian resources to create
to be complete by the 2030s. Nasa laid fuel, water, oxygen and building materials and use adout the plans in a
vanced communicalarge document:
tion systems to
Nasas Journey to
send information
Mars Pioneering
back with only a
Next Steps in Space
20-minute delay.
Exploration. The
But before it gets
document lays out the
to that stage, it will
three stages of Nasas
begin in the Earth
plan to get to Mars.
Reliant one. This
The first is Earth Reli- HOMING IN: Nasa plans to
ant; the second is harvest Martian resources to stage will include
Proving Ground, create fuel, water and oxygen making sure that
equipment works,
where the operations
will be tested out in deep space, but and learning more about the effects
in an environment that allows hu- of spending extended periods of
time in space since the eventual
mans to get back to Earth in days.
Nasa hopes that those two first Mars missions could see people livstages allow it to get to the Earth ing on the planet for decades, or poIndependent stage. It sees the Earth tentially never coming back.
Independent colonies as being a THE INDEPENDENT
Andrew Griffin

SHORT CUTS
GLAMOUR BUST:
Victoria Secrets
Fantasy Bras
priced at $2
million are part
of the Singapore
JewelFest. This
eye-wateringly
expensive
lingerie took
more than 1,380
hours to make,
using 16,000
rubies,
diamonds and
sapphires

Scientists accurately recreate a rat brain

cientists have accurately recreated a lump of rat brain, making a

computer that can respond as the real thing would. The virtual brain
mimics the one found in a young rat, which would be made up of 30,000
neurons connected by a web of 40-million synapses. They hope that the
digital brain can be used to define the different types of neurons that go into
a real one, measuring how they fire and mapping out how they are
connected. Once that is done, theyll be able to work towards getting an
accurate, high-resolution picture of the brain.

Menopause may turn good cholesterol into bad

hat has previously been known as good cholesterol high density

lipoprotein (HDL) may actually contribute to heart diseases in women
while they are transitioning through menopause, new research has found. The
researchers found that HDL, the good cholesterol, may not protect women
against atherosclerosis, better known as hardening of the arteries that typically
occurs as the result of high blood pressure, smoking and/or cholesterol.