Legend of The Five Rings

Legend of The Five Rings 

By: Rich Wulf 

Takuro staggered slightly as he walked out of the sake house, wincing at the bright light of the morning sun. His two comrades laughed as they spilled out on either side, similarly unsteady from the previous evening’s  entertainments. Takuro glanced about him with an arrogant sneer. He and his brothers had arrived in this village almost a week ago. This place was unaccusiomed to being visited by samurai; the peasants here were weak and afrais. They had offered food and lodging with qulet terror, asking for nothing in return, clearly petrified by the two swords at his hip. Takuro and his brothers had decided that they liked it here; this village was theirs now. As he looked around, however, he realized that something was different. The peasants all huddled at the edges of the open square begore the sake house. They watched quietly, waiting. There was still fear in their eyes, but it was different somehow. [download]

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Mammals

Mammals 

By: Thomson Gale 

Fossils are body parts of animals that lived very long ago. Not many long-ago mammals are preserved as fossils. But some entire mammal fossils have been discovered, such as a 10-foot (3-meter) woolly mammoth preserved in Siberian frozen ground, and an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros discovered inPoland, preserved in asphalt. Many long-ago mammals lived in a warm, wet world. They ate soft, leafy plants. The earliest known mammals were possibly shrew-like creatures living about 190 million years ago. Later larger mammals occurred, then disappeared, or became extinct. These include the mesohippus, a three-toed horse only 24 inches (60 centimeters) high; a giant pig with a head that was 4 feet (1.22 meters) in length; and the smilodon, a huge saber-toothed cat with canine teeth that were 8 inches (20.3.centimeters) in length. By about 15,000 years ago, long-ago people were hunting mammals with stone-pointed spears. [download]

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The Djinn in The Nightingales Eye

The Djinn in The Nightingales Eye 

By: A.S. Byatt 

There was once a young sailor who had nothing but his courage and his bright eyes but those were very bright and the strength the gods gave him, which was sufficient. He was not a good match for any girl in the village, for he was thought to be rash as well as poor, but the young girls liked to see him go by, you can believe, and they liked most particularly to see him dance, with his long, long legs and his clever feet and his laughing mouth. And most of all one girl liked to see him, who was the miller’s daughter, beautiful and stately and proud, with three deep velvet ribbons to her skirt, who would by no means let him see that she liked to see him, but looked sideways with glimpy eyes, when he was not watching. And so did many another. It is always so. Some are looked at, and some may whistle for an admiring glance till the devil pounces on them, for so the Holy Spirit makes, crooked or straight, and naught to be done about it. [download]  

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In The Whirl of The Rising

In The Whirl of The Rising 

By: Bertram Mitford 

The man could hardly drag one step behind the other. He could hardly drag by the bridle the tottering horse, of which the same held good. His brain was giddy and his eyes wearied with the unvarying vista on every hand, the straight stems of the mopani forest, enclosing him; a still and ghastly wilderness devoid of bird or animal life. He stumbled forward, his lips blue and cracked, his tongue swollen, his throat on fire; and in his mind was blank and utter despair, for he knew that he was in the heart of a waterless tract, extending for about a hundred miles, and for over forty hours no drop of moisture of any sort had passed his lips. Forty hours of wandering in the driest, most thirst-inspiring region in the world! He had made a bad start. There had been festivities at FortPagadithe night before, to celebrate the Jameson Raid and drink the health of its leaders. [download]

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Introduction to Systems Biology

Introduction to Systems Biology

By: Sangdun Choi, Ph.D.

Systems biology aims at a system-level understanding of biological systems (1,2). The investigation of biological systems at the system level is not a new concept. It can be traced back to homeostasis by Canon (3), cybernetics by Norbert Weiner (4), and general systems theory by von Bertalanffy (5). Also, several approaches in physiology have taken a systemic view of the biological subjects. The reason why “systems biology” is gaining renewed interest today is, in my view, due to emerging opportunities to solidly connect system-level understanding to molecular-level understanding, as well as the possibility of establishing well-founded theory at the system level. This is only possible today because of the progress of molecular biology, genomics, computer science, modern control theory, nonlinear dynamics theory, and other relevant fields, which had not sufficiently matured at the time of early attempts. [download]

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Greek and Roman Folklore

Greek and Roman Folklore 

By: Graham Anderson 

It has been some 80 years since William Halliday produced a short account entitled Greek and Roman Folklore. To attempt to cover the same ground now has presented this author with a challenge of compression. The amount of material available to Halliday and to H. J. Rose in the early part of last century was intractable enough, but the increase since the 1920s in theory alone has made a further survey increasingly necessary and increasingly beyond the scope of any single volume. This is all the more evident because classicists, in particular, tend to classify folkloric materials in so many other ways and tend to avoid folklore as a subject in its own right. I have set out to offer some overview of defi nitions of folklore and some limitations, ancient and modern, in the way we tend to approach it. [download]

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