The pupils of Grangetown High have been busy getting to know their newest and tallest classmate — a 7-meter-tall giraffe outside their school.

    The giraffe is a huge sculpture (雕像) made by a local artist. The school's headmaster noticed the sculpture in the artist's garden as he drove past one day, and thought it would be perfect for his school. “I knew everyone would love it,” he said, “because our basketball team is known as the Grangetown Giraffes, and they wear giraffes on their shirts. So I asked them to write a letter to the artist, asking how much it would cost to buy the giraffe. He was very kind and got it ready to deliver (递送) in six weeks — all for nothing! It was expected to arrive one Sunday morning, so that the pupils would see it when they got to school on Monday — at that time they had no idea that we were getting it.”

    The artist, Tom Bennett, was a university professor (教授) of chemistry before he left that job in 2006 and only took up metalwork a couple of years ago. “I've always drawn pictures,” he said. “I can even remember doing it on my first day at school — I drew a horse. I wanted it to be the best horse picture ever, but I don't think I succeeded.” Tom's first metalwork was a bicycle for two that he and his wife could go cycling on together. “It was the most uncomfortable bike ever created,” he said, “so I gave up making bicycles and went into sculpture instead.”

    Meanwhile the pupils at Grangetown High are very happy with their new classmate. “We're going to hold a competition to give it a proper name,” said one girl. “Everyone likes the expression on its face, so perhaps that will give us some ideas.”

    Are you preparing for a big test? If so, you may want to go play some basketball in between hitting the books. Doctors are starting to find more and more information that suggests a connection between exercise and brain development. Judy Cameron, a scientist at Oregon Health and Science University, studies brain development. According to her research, it seems that exercise can make blood vessels, including those in the brain, stronger and more fully developed. Dr. Cameron claims this allows people who exercise to concentrate better. As she says, “While we already know that exercise is good for the heart, exercise can really cause physical changes in the brain.”

    The effects of exercise on brain development can even be seen in babies. Babies who do activities that require a lot of movement and physical activity show greater brain development than babies who are less physically active. With babies, even a little movement can show big results. Margaret Barnes, a pediatrician（儿科医生）, believes in the importance of exercise. She thinks that many learning disabilities that children have in elementary school or high school can be traced back to a lack of movement as babies. “Babies need movement that stimulates their five senses. They need to establish a connection between motion and memory. In this way, as they get older, children will begin to associate physical activity with higher learning,” says Margaret.

    Older people can strengthen their brains as well. Columbia University studied a group of seniors ranging in age from seventy to seventy-nine. Their study showed a short-term memory increase of up to 40 percent after exercising just three hours a week. The exercise does not have to be very difficult, but it does have to increase the heart rate. Also, just like the motion for babies, exercise for older people should involve some complexity. Learning some new skills or motions, such as with yoga or tai-chi, helps to open up memory paths in the brain that may not have been used for a long time.

    For most people, any type of physical activity that increases the heart rate is helpful. The main goal is to increase the brain's flow of blood. And your brain can benefit from as little as three to four hours of exercise a week.

    Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her loyal friend and musical partner, Lester Young, Holiday had a great influence on jazz and pop singing. Her voiced style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of controlling tempo (节奏). Above all, she was admired for her deeply personal and direct approach to singing.

    She co-wrote a few songs, and several of them have become jazz standards, notably God Bless the Child, Don't Explain, and Lady Sings the Blues. She also became famous for singing jazz standards written by others, including Easy Living and Strange Fruit.

    Her early career is hard to track down with accuracy. But she later gained work singing in local jazz clubs before being spotted by a talent scout (星探), John Hammond in 1933.

    Her voice and recordings were loved for the depth of emotion and intensity she could bring to classic standards. Her range of voice was not the greatest, but her extraordinary low rough voice was soon to become very famous and influential.

    She was an important icon (偶像) of the jazz era and influential in the development of jazz singing. In the late 1930s, she began singing a civil rights song called Strange Fruit, a song which told the tale of a lynching (用私刑处死) of a black man in the Deep South. It was very controversial for that period and it was not played on radios. It was recorded for Commodore Records and she performed it many times over the next 20 years.

    Billie Holiday had a difficult upbringing which influenced her attitude toward life. She experienced many violent relationships. She also became increasingly dependent on various drugs which contributed to her early death in 1959, aged just 44.

    Bike Share Toronto is the city's official bike share program, designed to give locals and visitors a fun, affordable and convenient alternative to walking taxis, buses and the subway. There are 200 Bike Share Toronto stations and 2,000 bikes across the city, making Bike Share the most accessible way to get around and explore.

    How it works

    Become an Annual Member or buy a day Pass to access the system.

    Find an available bike nearby, and get a ride code or use your member key to unlock it.

    Take as many short rides as you want while your pass or membership is active.

    Return your bike to any station, and wait for the green light on the dock(停靠点) to make sure it's locked.

    Choose a plan

    For Visitors

    Day Pass: $7. Unlimited 30-minute rides in a 24-hour period.

    3-Day Pass: $15. Unlimited 30-minute rides in a 72-hour period.

    For locals

    Monthly Pass: $25. Unlimited 30-minute rides for a month.

    Annual Membership: $90. Unlimited 30-minute rides for a whole year. The Annual Membership is the best deal for locals of Toronto and other frequent riders.

    The fee of the first 30 minutes of each ride is included with the membership or pass price. Don't charge extra fees if you drop off your bike within 30minutesatany other station. If you keep a bike out for longer than 30 minutes a time, you will be charged an extra fee, $1.50 for the first extra 30 minutes, $4 for the next 30 minute, and $7 for each additional 30 minutes after that.

    Contact us

    Customer Service: (855)898-2388

    Repair Service: (855)-2378

    Corporation Partners: (855)898-2398

    Employment Opportunities:(855)898-2498

    You've heard of the fat suit and the pregnancy suit; now meet AGNES—the old person suit.

    AGNES stands for “Age Gain Now Empathy(换位体验)System” and was designed by researchers at MIT's AgeLab to let you know what it feels like—physically—to be 75 years old. “The business of old age demands new tools,” said Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab. “While focus groups and observations and surveys can help you understand what the older consumer needs and wants, young marketers never get that Ah ha! moment of having difficulty opening a jar, or getting in and out of a car. That's what AGNES provides. ”

    Coughlin and his team carefully adjusted the suit to make the wearer just as uncomfortable as an old person who has spent a lifetime eating poorly and not doing much exercise. Special shoes provide a feeling of imbalance, while braces on the knees and elbows limit joint mobility. Gloves give the feeling of decreased strength and mobility in the hands and wrists, and earplugs make it difficult to hear high—pitched sounds and soft tones. A helmet with straps(带)attached to it presses the spine(脊柱), and more straps attached to the shoes decrease hamstring flexibility, and shortens the wearer's step.

    AGNES has been used most recently by a group of students working on a design of an updated walker. By wearing the suit they could see for themselves what design and materials would make the most sense for a physically limited older person. Coughlin said the suit has also been used by clothing companies, car companies and retail goods companies to help them understand the limitations of an older consumer.

    “AGNES is not the destiny of everybody,” he said. “She is a badly behaved lady who didn't eat and exercise very well. A secondary benefit we've found with AGNES is that it has become a powerful tool to get younger people to invest in their long-term health. ”

Plastic-Eating Worms

    Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills(垃圾填埋场) and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

    Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物)and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes (酶) from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Cun ent Biology in 2017.

    Federica Bcrtocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food — beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. "Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well," she explains, "The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond."

    Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?

    Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process — not simply "millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic."