Oyster

What is an Oyster card?

    Oyster is the easiest way to pay for journeys on the bus, Tube, tram, DocklandsLight Railway (DLR), London Overground and National Rail journeys in London Youcan store your travel cards, Bus & Tram Pass, season tickets and credit topay for journeys as you go.

Where to get an Oyster card?

There are a number of ways for you to get an Oyster card:

• At over 3,900 Oyster Ticket stops

• At Tube and London Overground station ticket offices

• At some National Rail stations

• At London Travel information Centres

• Online at tfl. gov. uk/oyster

How to use an Oyster card?

    To pay the correct fare on the Tube , DLR, London Overground andNational Rail services, you must always touch in on the yellow Oyster cardreader at the start of your journey, and touch out at the end. If you don't, amaximum cash Oyster fare will be charged. When using the bus or tram, you mustonly touch in at the start, but not at the end of your journey.

   What happens if I don't visit London very often?

    Don't worry. Any pay as you go credit on your card will notexpire (过期), so you cankeep it for your next visit or lend it to a friend.

Fares

Traveling by Tube from Central London (Zone l)to Heathrow (Zone6)

Adult Oyster single fare

£ 4. 20 Monday to Friday 06:30 - 09:30 and 16:00 - 19:00

£ 2. 70 at all other times including public holidays

Adult single cash fare £ 5.00

For further information，visit tfl.gov.uk /fares.

    Sometimes it can be easy to become too satisfied when it comes to living sustainably. We may all have recycling bins in our kitchens, but here are some ways you can live more sustainably.

    ⒈Put an end to plastic water bottles and one-off coffee cups

    The only way this is going to work is that if you have reusable options you really love, invest in a great water bottle. This is an advance payment, but it will save you money in the long run. A 750ml bottle of Evian costs 90p in Tesco, meaning if you buy one every two days you could save £10 within three weeks by filling up a reusable bottle at home.

    ⒉_______________________________________

    The high street is problematic on so many different levels. Not only are you buying items with questionable supply chains, but the carbon footprint of each product is shocking as well. Online shopping is even worse, with overpackaging for each item and the emissions from delivery trucks. The answer is to stick to reach-me-down or previously owned items as much as possible. Not only will this save you money, but there's also a sense of satisfaction in finding a hidden treasure from the flea market where you find outstanding bargains or something used, which you simply can't get from shopping in Wal-Mart or on Amazon.

    ⒊Think hard about your transportation

    Even if your car is supposedly a low-emissions model, it's still going to be a huge contribution to your carbon footprint. There are times when getting in a car can't be avoided, but if you can substitute just one flight a year with a train, one car journey a week with a bus, and one bus a month with a bike ride, you'll find that making more mindful transport decisions can easily make your day-to-day life more environmentally friendly with little effort.

    ⒋Try to buy local, seasonal produce

    You may think buying strawberries in December or courgettes in spring is no big deal, but the chemicals and fuel used to artificially copy the right environment for them to grow create harmful gas emissions. Similarly, the environmental impact of transporting produce from another country is huge. Buying from local farmers also means you can often ignore the huge amounts of packaging the supermarkets use.

    CHICAGO -- New research on vegetables and aging gives mothers another reason to say "I told you so." It is found that eating vegetables appears to help keep the brain young and may slow the mental decline（下降） sometimes associated with growing old.

    On measures of mental sharpness, older people who ate more than two servings of vegetables daily appeared about five years younger at the end of the six-year study than those who ate few or no vegetables.

    The research in almost 2,000 Chicago-area men and women doesn't prove that vegetables reduce mental decline, but it adds to mounting evidence pointing in that direction. The findings also echo（回应） previous research in women only.

    Green leafy vegetables including spinach（菠菜）, kale and collards （甘蓝） appeared to be the most beneficial. The researchers said that may be because they contain healthy amounts of vitamin E, an antioxidant（抗氧化剂） that is believed to help fight chemicals produced by the body that can damage cells.

    Vegetables generally contain more vitamin E than fruits, which were not linked with slowed mental decline in the study. Vegetables also are often eaten with healthy fats such as salad oils, which help the body absorb vitamin E and other antioxidants, said lead author Martha Clare Morris, a researcher at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center.

    The fats from healthy oils can help keep cholesterol（胆固醇）low and arteries （动脉）clear, which both contribute to brain health. The study was published in this week's issue of the journal Neurology and funded with grants from the National Institute on Aging.

Life in the Clear

Transparent animals let light pass through their bodies the same way light passes through a window. These animals typically live between the surface of the ocean and a depth of about 3,300 feet—as far as most light can reach. Most of them are extremely delicate and can be damaged by a simple touch. Sonke Johnsen, a scientist in biology, says, "These animals live through their life alone. They never touch anything unless they're eating it, or unless something is eating them."

And they are as clear as glass. How does an animal become see-through? It's trickier than you might think.

    The objects around you are visible because they interact with light. Light typically travels in a straight line. But some materials slow and scatter (散射) light, bouncing it away from its original path. Others absorb light, stopping it dead in its tracks. Both scattering and absorption make an object look different from other objects around it, so you can see it easily.

    But a transparent object doesn't absorb or scatter light, at least not very much. Light can pass through it without bending or stopping. That means a transparent object doesn't look very different from the surrounding air or water. You don't see it you see the things behind it.

    To become transparent, an animal needs to keep its body from absorbing or scattering light. Living materials can stop light because they contain pigments (色素) that absorb specific colors of light. But a transparent animal doesn't have pigments, so its tissues won't absorb light. According to Johnsen, avoiding absorption is actually easy. The real challenge is preventing light from scattering.

Animals are built of many different materials—skin, fat, and more—and light moves through each at a different speed. Every time light moves into a material with a new speed, it bends and scatters. Transparent animals use different tricks to fight scattering. Some animals are simply very small or extremely flat. Without much tissue to scatter light, it is easier to be see-through. Others build a large, clear mass of non-living jelly-like (果冻状的) material and spread themselves over it.

    Larger transparent animals have the biggest challenge, because they have to make all the different tissues in their bodies slow down light exactly as much as water does. They need to look uniform. But how they're doing it is still unknown. One thing is clear: for these larger animals, staying transparent is an active process. When they die, they turn a non-transparent milky white.

    If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America-and their Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic- wrapped snacks, their plastic waste would likely still be around four centuries later. Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world's oceans today, waiting to be eaten by some fish or oyster, and finally perhaps by one of us.

    Because plastic wasn't invented until the late 19th century, and its production only really took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a surprising 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin-the figure that shocked the scientists who published the numbers in 2017.

    No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, the earth's last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jam beck a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone's attention with a rough estimate between 5.3 million and 14 million tons of plastic waste each year just come from coastal regions.

    Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine(海洋的）animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly, stuck by abandoned things made of plastic. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplas-tics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across.

    "This isn't a problem where we don't know what the solution is, "says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist who has spent more than 25 years working with developing nations on garbage." We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle. "It's a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, he says, ideally before the ocean turns into a thin soup of plastic.

    Age has never been a problem for 16­year­old Thessalonika Arzu­Embry. After all, she's already got her master's degree.

    The North Chicago­area teen started homeschooling at the age of 4. She began having an influence on others soon after. When she was 6 years old, she was an inspirational speaker at an organization called Tabitha House Community Service, a shelter for people who were forced to leave their homes due to the situations such as earthquake, flood and other natural disasters.

    At the age of 11, she graduated from high school and then earned her bachelor's degree in psychology in 2013. She completed those classes online as she was traveling for church events and leadership meetings.

    She doesn't stop there, though. The teen plans to focus on aviation psychology(航空心理学) for her further study, a decision inspired by her father who is a pilot. She grew up around airplanes and took fights all the time. Her goal is to use it to determine whether pilots are dealing with problems that could have deadly results once the plane takes off­a topic that has been in the news lately. For her, it's a mix of two of her interests.

    In her free time, Thessalonika enjoys playing tennis, swimming and being active in her youth group at church. She also has three self­published books, which are on her site. Jump the Education Barrier is written to help students finish college, and in the future aims to help business owners with trends. Her third book The Genius Race, has a wider appeal. It is designed to help people to be geniuses in various areas of life.