The London architectural studio «Two Create» has created a colorful interior for a new modern hospital of Queen Elizabeth in Birmingham.
The hospital interior looks rather cheerful and gives only positive emotions. Green apartments give more healthy happy life.
Queen Elizabeth led celebrations on Monday to mark 800 years since the sealing of the Magna Carta, one of the world's most significant historical documents and credited with paving the way for modern freedoms and human rights.
On June 15, 1215, in fields by the banks of the River Thames at Runnymede to the west of London, England's King John agreed to the demands of his rebelling barons and accepted the Magna Carta, Latin for "Great Charter", which for the first time placed the monarch under the rule of law.
In the centuries since, it has taken on huge global significance, becoming the basis for the U.S. Bill of Rights, the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Three of its 63 clauses still remain on Britain's statute book.
"What happened in these meadows eight centuries ago is as relevant today as it was then. And that relevance extends far beyond Britain," British Prime Minister David Cameron said.
He said the document had changed the world, inspiring people from the founding fathers of the United States and Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
"Its remaining copies may be faded, but its principles shine as brightly as ever," Cameron told the ceremony attended by the queen, other royals and global figures including U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Magna Carta came into being during a period of great political upheaval in England with conflict between King John, his nobles and the English church.
It was essentially a peace deal to address the problems of the day and was annulled by the pope shortly afterwards. But updated versions, which included two original clauses regarded as pivotal in establishing the rule of law, were re-released regularly by or on behalf of succeeding monarchs.
The clauses read: "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.
"To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice."
Originals Exist
Four original copies of the document, written on a single sheet of parchment about the size of A3 paper, still exist.
At Monday's ceremony, a new art installation was unveiled and the American Bar Association's Magna Carta Memorial, which was erected at the site in 1957, was re-dedicated.
U.S. Attorney General Lynch said the charter was a bedrock to free societies globally, while Cameron also used the anniversary as a political opportunity to underpin his plan to overhaul human rights laws and reduce the influence of Europe.
However, John Dyson, chairman of the Magna Carta Trust, said King John and the barons would have been bemused that the document would garner such interest hundreds of years later.
"They would surely have been astonished that over time Magna Carta came to be regarded as one of the most important constitutional documents in our history," he said.
"They would not have believed that barons' lists of demands would become a symbol of democracy, justice, human rights and perhaps above all, the rule of law for the whole world. But that is exactly what has happened."
Author: Stefan Wermuth | Source: Reuters [June 15, 2015]
Evidence of a prehistoric "farming collective" has been discovered after aerial laser scanning was carried out in the South Downs National Park.
Large-scale farming from before the Roman invasion suggests a high level of civilisation, archaeologists said.
The survey also revealed the route of a long-suspected Roman road between Chichester and Brighton.
It covered an area between the Arun river valley in West Sussex and Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Hampshire.
The "Lidar" survey technique uses an aircraft-mounted laser beam to scan the ground and produce a 3D model of features that survive as earthworks or structures in open land or woodland.
Images of land between Lamb Lea Woods and Charlton Forest showed that a field system already protected as a scheduled monument was just a small part of a vast swathe of later pre-historic cultivation extending under a now wooded area.
James Kenny, archaeological officer at Chichester District Council, said it suggested a civilisation closer to ancient Greece, Egypt or Rome than what is known of prehistoric Britain.
"One of our biggest findings is the discovery of a vast area farmed by pre-historic people on an astonishing scale," said Trevor Beattie, chief executive of the South Downs National Park Authority.
Mr Kenny added that the evidence raised questions about who was growing the crops, who was eating the food and where they were living.
"The scale is so large that it must have been managed, suggesting that this part of the country was being organised as a farming collective," he said.
The route of the road suggests the Romans would have headed out from their settlement at Chichester on Stane Street, the road to London, before branching east towards Arundel.
"The recognition of the 'missing link' in the Roman road west of Arundel was a highlight in a project full of exciting results," said Helen Winton, aerial investigation manager at Historic England.
Source: BBC News Website [July 13, 2016]
Looking different to your parents can provide species with a way to escape evolutionary dead ends, according to new research from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
The work by researchers at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences looked at polyploid hybrids in the genus Nicotiana, the group that includes tobacco.
Unlike humans, which are diploids -- with two copies of each of their 23 chromosomes (one from each parent), - polyploids can have three, four or more copies of each chromosome. This makes them particularly prone to producing hybrids and, - in contrast to better-known hybrids such as the mule which is (the sterile product of a cross between a male donkey and a female horse), means that crosses between polyploids are often fertile.
While hybrids might be expected to be a blend of the two parent species, the researchers found that they tended to have shorter and wider flower openings than both of the parent species which means that a wider range of pollinators can enter the flowers.
By allowing a wider range of insects to pollinate them, hybrids make themselves much less vulnerable to the extinction of a single pollinator.
Dr Elizabeth McCarthy, who carried out the work as part of her PhD at QMUL but who is now at University of California Riverside, said: "Some plants evolve increasingly specialised relationships with the species that pollinate them. A classic example is Darwin's Madagascan orchid, first discovered in 1798. Its exceptionally long nectar spur led Charles Darwin to propose that it was pollinated by a moth whose proboscis -- the organ that extracts the nectar -- was longer than that of any moth known at the time. Darwin's prediction was spectacularly verified 21 years after his death when just such a moth was discovered."
The problem with this sort of specialised relationship -- which we now term coevolution -- is that if one of the two species involved becomes extinct, the other is also doomed.
The findings are >published in Nature Plants.
Source: Queen Mary University of London [August 08, 2016]
