The American newspaper has been around for about three hundred years. In 1721, the printer James Franklin, Benjamin's older brother, started the New England Courant, and that was what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. He filled his paper with stories of adventure, articles on art, on famous people, and on all sorts of political subjects.

    Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's Courant, few believe that newspapers in their present printed form will remain alive for long. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of purpose at a speed that would not have been imaginable just several years ago. The chief editor of the Times said recently, "At places where they gather, editors ask one another, 'How are you?', as if they have just come out of the hospital or a lost law case.” An article about the newspaper appeared on the website of the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

    Perhaps not, but the rise of the Internet , which has made the daily newspaper look slow and out of step with the world, has brought about a real sense of death. Some American newspapers have lost 42% of their market value in the past three years. The New York Times Company has seen its stock drop by 54% since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year. A manager at Deutsche Bank suggested that stock-holders sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has prevented the trouble only by changing part of its business to education; its testing and test-preparation service now brings in at least half the company's income.

    A complaint was received by the president of a major car company:“This is the fourth time I have written to you , and I don't blame you for not answering me because must sound crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of having ice-cream for dessert after dinner each night. Every night after we've eaten, the family votes on which flavor(味道)of ice-cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. I recently purchased a new Pantsmobile from your company and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy vanilla(香草)ice-cream my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice-cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to t now I'm serious about this question , no matter how silly it sounds: What is there about a Pantsmobile that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice-cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?'

    The Pantsmobile company president understandably doubted about the letter, but he sent an engineer there anyway. The engineer had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two got into the car and drove to the grocery store. The man bought vanilla ice-cream that night and sure enough, after they came back to the car it wouldn't start for several minutes. The engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, the man got chocolate. The car started right away. The second night, he got strawberry and again the car started right up. The third night he bought vanilla and the car failed to start.

    There must be a reason why the man's car wouldn't start when he bought vanilla ice-cream. What was it? After doing more research into the case, the engineer eventually found out. The cause. Vanilla ice-cream was the most popular flavor and was on display in a little case near the express check out, while the other flavors were in the back of the store and took more time to choose and check out. This mattered because the man's car was experiencing vapor(蒸汽) lock, which is excess(过度的)heat boiling the fuel in the fuel line and the resulting air bubbles (气泡) blocking the flow of fuel until the car has enough time to cool. When the car was running, there was enough pressure to move the bubbles along, but not when the car was trying to start.

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    As cultural symbols go, the American car is quite young. The Model T Ford was built at the Piquette Plant in Michigan a century ago, with the first rolling off the assembly line（装配线） on September 27, 1908. Only eleven cars were produced the next month. But eventually Henry Ford would build fifteen million of them.

    Modern America was born on the road, behind a wheel. The car shaped some of the most lasting aspects of American culture: the roadside diner, the billboard, the motel, even the hamburger. For most of the last century, the car represented what it meant to be American—going forward at high speed to find new worlds. The road novel, the road movie, these are the most typical American ideas, born of abundant petrol, cheap cars and a never-ending interstate highway system, the largest public works project in history.

    In 1928 Herbert Hoover imagined an America with "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." Since then, this society has moved onward, never looking back, as the car transformed America from a farm-based society into an industrial power.

    The cars that drove the American Dream have helped to create a global ecological disaster. In America the demand for oil has grown by 22 percent since 1990.

    The problems of excessive（过度的）energy consumption, climate change and population growth have been described in a book by the American writer Thomas L. Friedman. He fears the worst, but hopes for the best.

    Friedman points out that the green economy（经济）is a chance to keep American strength. "The ability to design, build and export green technologies for producing clean water, clean air and healthy and abundant food is going to be the currency of power in the new century."

    Years ago, students applying to colleges and universities had to have their applications and personal essays printed out and then “snail-mailed”. Flash forward to today's world of Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, where photos, videos and mobile phones rule. Fortunately, several new tools are making it easier for college applicants to use technology to show off their personalities, skills and creativity.

    ZEEMEE

    One of the more popular innovations in college applications is ZeeMee, a free mobile app that allows students to upload personal profiles and videos to create visual resumes. More than 220 colleges and universities offer a ZeeMee option as part of the application process. The video can show the unique creative aspects of the applicants.

THE COALITION LOCKER

    Another relatively new tool comes from the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, now used by more than 110 member colleges and universities. Among the group's stated goals are getting students engaged in college prep early and using technology to create a supportive application process that encourages reflection and self-discovery.

    Students who sign up for the free platform get access to a digital “locker”, which they can use all through high school to save class papers, artwork, newspaper stories, videos and photos to share with colleges when they eventually apply.

    VIDEO — CHAT INTERVIEWS

    At some schools, an interview with an admission officer is an important part of the application process. To make it easier, several virtual interviewing tools have popped up, such as a video-based platform from Kira. More than 140 universities worldwide use Kira's video assessment tool to conduct real-time interviews with prospective students. During the interview, candidates are shown the questions prerecorded by the particular school and must respond in real time by talking into the camera on their laptop or phone. In addition to showing their ability, to speak fluently in English and think on their feet, it helps admission officers determine the “motivation, commitment and drive” of applicants.

    UNIQUE SCHOOL TOOLS

    Some universities have come up with their own ways to allow students to show their skills and personalities. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, encourages applicants to display their technical abilities and creativity by submitting a “Maker Portfolio” —a written or videotaped description of a project that shows creative and problem-solving skills. While a new app would fit the bill, the project could be anything from an origami design to a potato cannon.

    The surface of Venus（金星）has never seemed very hospitable. Temperatures change around 470℃（900℉）, the result of a runway greenhouse effect，and the pressure of its atmosphere, thick with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, is some 90 times that of Earth's. Lead（铅）would flow like water on Venus, and water cannot have existed in liquid form for perhaps a billion years.

    Now NASA'S Magellan spacecraft seems to have found one more horror in the nasty landscape: active volcanoes. Last week the space agency released the first detailed map of Venus and the most dramatic images ever made of its surface. The picture offer the best evidence to date that a planet once assumed dead is actually a lively pot of geological change.

    The most amazing image is of Venus's second tallest mountain, Maat Mons, which rises 8km（5 miles）. Most of the planet's many peaks, including 9.5-km-（6-mile-） high Maxwell Montes, look bright in the radar pictures Magellan takes from its orbit above the permanent could cover. That means they are strong reflectors of radar waves. But Maat Mons is dark; like the Stealth bomber, it absorbs much of the radar falling on it.

    This interesting fact, say project scientists, is a strong hint that the mountains has recently been covered with lava. Rock that sits on the surface of mountaintops appears to weather quickly in the hot，chemically reactive atmosphere, creating a soil that is rich in iron sulfide（硫化铁）• It is this mineral, the scientists believe, that can easily be seen on radar. If Maat Mons doesn't have any, it has probably been resurfaced, perhaps within the past few years.

    Such resurfacing has undoubtedly taken place in Venus lowlands: earlier images of the planet showed vast areas that are remarkably free of craters（火山坑）.That would be easy to explain on a Planet like Earth, where cratering from meteor strikes is erased by steady erosion. But while there is some evidence of wind erosion on Venus, the best explanation for the lack of cratering is periodic lava flow. Magellan has found direct evidence of such flows, including domelike upwellings and hardened streamed of rock trailing down the sides of Venusian peaks. There are also signs of other geologic activities, including dramatic faulting and several distinct incidents of mountain building. But the evidence can't indicate whether they really occurred millions of years ago. The case for active Venusian volcanoes is not yet proved, but Magellan, which is now well into its second complete survey of the planet's surface, may eventually settle the issue.

Richard Holmes, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, famous for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, "The Age of Wonder", he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, "Falling Upwards", he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists (气球飞行者).

Mr Holmes's love of balloons was aroused at a village festival and his enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures. He refers to the cheerful tone used in many first-hand ballooning stories, and applies it in this second-hand account. He describes men and women wrapped up in fur coats under their hydrogen-filled balloons, enjoying cold chicken and champagne and looking back to earth to see mankind "for what it really is."

Mr Holmes makes much of the strange side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in balloons to spy on enemy movements. And during the Prussian attack on Paris in 1870-71， balloonists managed to fly out of the city to communicate with the French government in exile (流亡) in Tours.

"Falling Upwards" contains much of the historian's writing characteristics, such as footnotes and bibliography (文献书目), but its epilogue (后记) refers modestly to what has gone before as "a series of true balloon stories". It does touch on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work. Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the airplane.