Still seeking a destination for your weekend break? There are some places which are probably a mere walk away from your college.

King's Art Centre

    A day at the Centre could mean a visit to an exhibition of the work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists on show anywhere. This weekend tees the opening of an exhibition of four local artists.

You could attend a class teaching you how to 'learn from the masters' or get more creative with paint —- free of charge.

    The Centre also runs two life drawing classes for which there is a small fee.

The Botanic Garden

    The Garden has over 8,000 plant species; it holds the research and teaching collection of living plants for Cambridge University.

    The multi-branched Torch Aloe here is impressive. The African plant produces red flowers above blue-green leaves, and is not one to miss.

    Get to the display house to see Dionaea muscipula, a plant more commonly known as the Venus Flytrap that feeds on insects and other small animals.

    The Garden is also a place for wildlife-enthusiasts. Look for grass snakes in the lake. A snake called 'Hissing Sid' is regularly seen lying in the heat of the warm sun.

Byron's Pool

    Many stories surround Lord Byron's time as a student of Cambridge University, Arriving in 1805, he wrote a letter complaining that it was a place of "mess and drunkenness". However, it seems as though Byron did manage to pass the time pleasantly enough. I'm not just talking about the pet bear he kept in his roans. He spent a great deal of time walking in the village.

It is also said that on occasion Byron swam naked by moonlight in the lake, which is now known as Byron's Pool. A couple of miles past Grantchester in the south Cambridgeshire countryside, the pool is surrounded by beautiful circular paths around the fields. The cries of invisible birds make the trip a lovely experience and on the way home you can drop into the village for afternoon tea. If you don't trust me, then perhaps you'll take it from Virginia Woolf一—over a century after Byron, she reportedly took a trip to swim in the same pool.

    Spider monkeys have long, thin arms with hook like hands that allow them to swing through the trees. They do not have opposable thumbs(对生拇指).

    The brown-headed spider monkey has a prehensile(缠绕性的)tail, which means it can grasp and can be used like a fifth leg to grab trees. During the day, the spider monkey searches for fruits, which make up the main part of its diet. They will also eat flowers, seeds, leaves, and small insects during the dry season when fruits aren't available. They spend most of the daylight hours climbing and swinging through the high branches of trees.

    The brown-headed spider monkey lives in a large community of about 20 to 100 male and female monkeys. They split into smaller groups for feeding. Females usually give birth to only a single baby each year or two. Young monkeys are carried on their mothers' stomachs until about 16 weeks old. Then they are strong enough to ride on their mothers' backs. All brown-headed spider monkey babies are born with a pink face and ears.

    Spider monkeys hug each other and wrap their tails around each other. They are very intelligent and have strong memories. They were named spider monkeys because they look like spiders as they hang upside down from their tails with arms and legs swinging. Their genus (属)name is Ateles, which means “imperfect”. This refers to the fact that they don't have thumbs.

    Hunting the brown-headed spider monkey is now barred in Ecuador, a country in northwestern South America, but humans have killed them for their meat for hundreds of years.

    The search engine Google celebrated on Thursday the 110th birthday of the first Native American woman engineer. Google honored Mary Ross with a special Google Doodle on its homepage.

    Ross was born on August 9, 1908, in the state of Oklahoma. She was the great-granddaughter of John Ross, the longest—serving chief of the Cherokee Nation. Her work is considered important to the early stages of the age of space travel.

    Ross showed special abilities in math and science from an early age. As a student, she developed an interest in aviation, or the practice of flying aircraft. She went on to earn a master's degree in mathematics from Colorado State Teachers College, now called the University of Northern Colorado.

    During World War II, Ross began working for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation as a mathematician. She earned a special certification in the field from the University of California in1949.Ross was later chosen to join Lockheed's top—secret Skunk Works team that worked on aircraft designs. The name refers to a group that is permitted to work independently on advanced projects. She was the only female engineer among the team's 40 members.

    Early on, she researched defense systems. By the late 1950s, her work centered on satellites and a series of space rockets called Agenda. The rockets were extremely important in the 1960s during the Apollo moon program.

    Ross also helped develop early design ideas for space travel between planets, including flyby space flights to study Venus and Mars. Ross retired from Lockheed in 1973.But she continued to give talks at high schools and colleges to encourage more women and Native Americans to study engineering. She died in 2008, a few months before her 100th birthday.

    Many celebrated Ross' life on social media. Twitter user Aaron Perez, for example, wrote: “Mary Ross was an engineer who pioneered in the field of satellites. I never would have known if it wasn't for the doodle. Women engineers deserve more recognition.”

    Supermarket shoppers who buy lots of foods on "two for one" deals are far more likely to be obese (肥胖的), a major study suggests.

    Cancer Research UK found that those with highest consumption of discounted foods were at 50 percent greater risk of obesity, compared with those with low take-up of such deals.

    The study of more than 16,000 households found almost one in three food and drink items in UK supermarket baskets were bought on promotion. And the discounts were far more likely to be applied to unhealthy foods, with almost half of all chocolate, crisps, popcorn, and savoury snacks bought on promotion.

    Shoppers whose baskets contained between 40 and 80 percent of goods on special offer were 54 percent more likely to be obese than those with a maximum 20 percent of foods on such deals. Those with highest take-up of the deals bought 30 percent less fruit, and nearly 25 percent fewer vegetables than those shunning the deals.

    The study follows a government consultation on proposals to ban "buy one, get one free" deals on unhealthy foods and supermarket "guilt lanes" as part of its childhood obesity strategy.

    One in five children are overweight or obese when they start primary school, rising to around one in three when they leave.

    Research has found that obesity increases the risk of 13 different types of cancer including bowel and breast disease.

    Alison Cox, director of cancer prevention at Cancer Research UK, said: "The government's proposed 9 p. m. ban on junk food ads is a step forward in fighting childhood obesity. Now we want to see restrictions on price promotions for unhealthy food and drink items, as well as those strategically placed at checkouts. This will help families to make healthier choices.

    "There isn't one magic fix for the problem, but getting rid of these encouragements to buy unhealthy food is key to changing it."

As a student in Pakistan, it had always been my dream {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (come) to China and immerse myself in its culture and events.In 2022, my dream finally came true. I arrived in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, to study at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

Chengdu, with its exquisite cuisine and rich history, attracted me from the moment I set foot in the city. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (situate) in the heart of Sichuan, Chengdu spreads out over the rich Chengdu Plain and is home to the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation system. It owes its {#blank#}3{#/blank#} (survive) to the mighty Minjiang River.

Over the past more than a year, I {#blank#}4{#/blank#}(have) the incredible opportunity to explore this magnificent city and witness its significant events firsthand. During one vacation, I had the pleasure of {#blank#}5{#/blank#} (visit) the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, an absolute must-see attraction in the city. This visit introduced me to {#blank#}6{#/blank#} whole new world. The base serves {#blank#}7{#/blank#} a place for public education and tourism, offering interactive activities that allow people to connect with these magnificent {#blank#}8{#/blank#}(creature).

My journey in Chengdu has just begun. With each passing day, I become more thankful for many chances {#blank#}9{#/blank#} invite me, promising to deepen {#blank#}10{#/blank#} (I) understanding of China and create lifelong memories.

A team in Europe are working with wood, but not in the usual ways. They are not carpenters（木匠）. Instead, they are scientists exploring how wood can lead to a greener electronic device, a transistor（晶体管）made from balsa wood, whose production releases less climate-warming gas into the air.

Transistors play an important role in computers and other devices. They act like tiny switches to control the flow of electricity. Engineers use them to process and store data. Today's laptops may host billions of them. So they must be tiny—only a little wider than a strand of DNA.

The new transistor being built by physicist Isak Engquist and his team at Sweden's Linköping University isn't as small as those. Big enough to see and hold, it can stand only an electric pressure that pushes electrons along. And it controls a current using charged particles（粒子）called ions.

This new technology shows a "proof of concept" that the idea can work, even if the new device is not yet ready to put into today's electronics. "While it seems large by today's standards, such a transistor still might prove useful for electronics that require low electric pressures," says Engquist.

"The new transistor suggests that future electronic devices might be made in living plants," Daniel Simon, a physicist in the team, says. "Imagine peeling away some bar k from a living tree," he says, "and stamping electronic circuits into the living wood."

In fact, Engquist says, "There are so many ways we can use wood and the components of wood that we would never have thought of." For instance, he can now imagine a wood-based sensor that could monitor crop health, measure pollution or survey a forest for fire risk.