Before the law sits a gatekeeper. Tothis gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into thelaw. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. Theman thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometimelater on. "It is possible," says the gatekeeper, "but notnow." The gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walksto the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into theinside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: "If it tempts you so much, try going insidein spite of my prohibition. But take note. I am powerful. And I am only themost lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each morepowerful than the other. I cannot endure even one  glimpse of the third."

The man from the country has notexpected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone,he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat,at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar's beard, he decidesthat it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. Thegatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front ofthe gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be letin, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper ofteninterrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many otherthings, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at theend he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man,who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything,no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it allbut, as he does so, says, "I am taking this only so that you do not thinkyou have failed to do anything." ②

During the many years the man observesthe gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and thisfirst one seems to him the only barrier for entry into the law. He curses theunlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud; later, ashe grows old, he only mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in thelong years studying the gatekeeper he has also come to know the fléas ( PZ) inhis fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper.Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are reallydarker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But herecognizes now in the darkness a ray of light which breaks out of the gatewayto the law. Now he no longer has much time to live.

Before his death he gathers in his headall his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has notyet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up hisstiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the greatdifference has changed things considerably to the disadvantage of the man. ③ "You are insatiable (不知足的)."^t"Everyone strives after the law," says the man, "so how isit that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?" Thegatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach hisdiminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, "Here no one else can gainentry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I'm going now to close it."④

    In Hollywood, as in war, truth is often the first casualty. Stories told on screen demand heroes, devils and a clear plot line. Real life, on the other hand, tends to get messy—the lines between good and bad often cross. Two years ago, director Oliver Stone was severely criticized in the press for playing fast and loose with certain facts in JFK. Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father has largely escaped such criticism in the U.S., but only because Americans are unfamiliar with the story it is based on.In Britain,where people have lived with the case of the Guildford Four for 20 years,the film's reception has been considerably stormier.

    The movie tells the tale of Gerry Conlon,who along with three other youths was falsely accused of killing five people in a 1974 I.R.A.bombing of two pubs in Guildford,England.The four—three men and a woman—served 14 years in prison before their convictions（定罪）were overturned. Seven friends and relatives of Conlon's (the Maguire Seven),including his father,also served many years on false charges of having made the bombs.

    Though Sheridan never set out to make a documentary,he has been attacked for needlessly twisting the facts of the case.The film,for instance,shows the Maguire Seven on trial with the Guildford Four,though the cases were tried separately.In some of its most affecting scenes,it shows Conlon,played by Daniel Day-Lewis,sharing a jail cell with his father,though the two were often not even in the same prison.A grand and heroic part is carved for actress Emma Thompson,playing Conlon's lawyer,Gareth Peirce,but in reality Peirce was a minor figure and another lawyer, Alastair Logan,deserves most of the credit for freeing the Four.An important scene in which Peirce steals a crucial piece of evidence from a police file was fabricated for the film;it was a police investigation that uncovered the buried evidence of Conlon's innocence.

    Sheridan insists that he was seeking an "emotional honesty" and that the real subject of his film was a son's changing relationship with his father.But if that was his intended subject,say some close to the case,the director should have used someone else's story."The truth is that Gerry Conlon had very little time for his father,"says Sean Smyth,an uncle."It's a good film,well acted and everything,"admits Conlon's aunt,Anne Maguire."But I think if they'd put more of the true facts in,it would have been a much more powerful film."

    Scientists have always been interested in the high level of organization in ant societies. American researchers have watched ants build life-saving rafts to keep afloat during floods. They also have recorded how ants choose their next queen — the female whose job is to produce eggs.

    New technology is helping to improve researchers' understanding of the insects. But there is still a lot to be learned.

    Fire ants living in Brazilian forests are perfectly at home in an environment where flooding is common. To save themselves, the insects connect their legs together and create floating rafts. Some ant rafts can be up to 20 centimeters wide.

    David Hu is an engineer with the Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, saying, "If you have 100 ants, which means 600 legs, 99 percent of those legs will be connected to a neighbor. So they're very, very good at keeping this network. "

    David Hu and other Georgia Tech researchers wanted to study ants and the secret of their engineering. They froze ant rafts and then looked at them with the help of computed technology, or CT images. The pictures showed that larger ants serve in central positions to which smaller ants hold. The larger ants create pockets of air that keep the insects afloat.

    Scientists say small robots or materials that can change shape could be programmed in a similar way, working towards a shared goal.

    Researchers at North Carolina State University are also studying ants. They examined how Indian jumping ants choose the leader of the colony when they lose their top female or queen.

    Given that many people 's moods(情绪)are regulated by the chemical action of chocolate, it was probably only a matter of time before somebody made the chocolate shop similar to a drugstore of Chinese medicine. Looking like a setting from the film Charlie& the Chocolate Factory, Singapore's Chocolate Research Facility (CRF) has over 100 varieties of chocolates. Its founder is Chris Lee who grew up at his parents' comer store with one hand almost always in the jar of sweets.

    If the CRF seems to be a smart idea, that's because Lee is not merely a seasoned salesperson but also head of a marketing department that has business relations with big names such as Levi's and Sony. That idea surely results in the imagination at work when it comes to making different flavored (味道)chocolates.

    The CRF's produce is “green” made within the country and divided into10 lines, with the Alcohol Series being the most popular. The Exotic Series—with Sichuan pepper, red bean (豆), cheese and other flavors also—does well and is fun to taste. And for chocolate snobs, who think that they have a better knowledge of chocolate than others, the Connoisseur Series uses cocoa beans from Togo, Cuba, Venezuela , and Ghana, among others.

    The streets of Stockholm may be cold and snowy during winter, but it is one of the world's hottest startup(创业) centers and a good choice for people with talent worldwide.

    Once the snow melts(融化) in early spring, the city is among the greenest in the world. Two thirds of Stockholm is made up of either water or parks, and locals make it the first thing to enjoy these peaceful surroundings. Less than l% of Swedish employees work more than 50 hours per week.

    The quality of life is important. New parents are given 480 days of leave to look after their babies, while childcare is heavily supported in various sides. Little wonder that Sweden was rated the best location in the world for family life. Adam Webb, 34, a British businessman and father-of-one, said, "Everything is set towards helping parents, from giving dads time off on almost full pay to free bus rides for anyone with a baby carriage."

    Stockholm is also proud of what Vogue magazine recently ranked as Europe's coolest neighborhood. On the island of Sodermalm, just south of the city centre, independent record stores still make money, while plenty of cafes offer a taste for Scandinavia's love affairs with timeless style.

    Many major international companies, including H&M and Ericsson, offer expats(外来者) accommodation for the first three months of their contracts(合同) in Stockholm. But other foreigners arriving in the city are left to battle with a unique property market and a shortage of apartments. More than a third of Swedes live in rented housing, half of which is owned by local governments or state rental companies. If you're lucky enough to get a firsthand contract for this kind of accommodation, it is yours for life. Expats are welcome to join the queue, but in Stockholm they will find around half a million locals in front of them and an average wait of nine years.

    "Finding a place to live is the single biggest challenge when moving to Stockholm, but there is a lot going on to try and solve the problem," said Julika Lamberth from Stockholm Business Region, a state-funded company working to increase investment in the city.

Albert Einstein's 1915 masterpiece "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity" is the first and still the best introduction to the subject, and I recommend it as such to students. But it probably wouldn't be publishable in a scientific journal today.

Why not? After all, it would pass with flying colours the tests of correctness and significance. And while popular belief holds that the paper was incomprehensible to its first readers, in fact many papers in theoretical physics are much more difficult.

As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, "There was a time when the newspapers said that only 12 men understood the theory of relativity. I do believe there might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than 12."

No, the problem is its style. It starts with a leisurely philosophical discussion of space and time and then continues with an exposition of known mathematics. Those two sections, which would be considered extraneous today, take up half the paper. Worse, there are zero citations of previous scientists' work, nor are there any graphics. Those features might make a paper not even get past the first editors.

A similar process of professionalization has transformed other parts of the scientific landscape. Requests for research time at major observatories or national laboratories are more rigidly structured. And anything involving work with human subjects, or putting instruments in space, involves piles of paperwork.

We see it also in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the Nobel Prize of high school science competitions. In the early decades of its 78-year history, the winning projects were usually the sort of clever but naive, amateurish efforts one might expect of talented beginners working on their own. Today, polished work coming out of internships(实习) at established laboratories is the norm.

These professionalizing tendencies are a natural consequence of the explosive growth of modern science. Standardization and system make it easier to manage the rapid flow of papers, applications and people. But there are serious downsides. A lot of unproductive effort goes into jumping through bureaucratic hoops(繁文缛节), and outsiders face entry barriers at every turn.

Of course, Einstein would have found his way to meeting modern standards and publishing his results. Its scientific core wouldn't have changed, but the paper might not be the same taste to read.