As the weather costs you a loss on trains and flights, we look at your rights.

Cancelled trains

    On a single ticket, a passenger will usually receive 25% of the fare if the train is delayed by 15 minutes. If the delay reaches 30 minutes, the compensation（补偿金）rises to 50%, and if it's over an hour you should be able to reclaim the whole cost. Clear arrangements vary according to train operators（运营商）.

    If you were due to travel, to say Aberdeen from London, your train is cancelled and you decide not to travel, you can get a full compensation. If you had a non-cancelable ticket with one operator, and failed to make that train because the connecting train was delayed, you can take the next available train.

Flights

    If your flight is cancelled because of the snow you have the right to s full compensation of the ticket, or to be rerouted home on a later flight.

    But you will have no right to get a delay or cancellation compensation under EU rules, because the snow is an extraordinary circumstance beyond the airline's control. If you don't take the compensation and choose to be rerouted, and it means you are stuck at the airport overnight, it's the airline's duty to pay for a reasonably priced hotel room and meals.

    The airline has to reroute you at the earliest opportunity, or at the passenger's free time, you are supposed to take the availability of seats.

    If you choose to be rerouted or if your departure is delayed by more than two hours, airlines also have to provide assistance such as food. The airlines keep this quiet and getting the money out of the low-cost operators can be a hard job. Keep evidence of cancellations, all receipts, and use your mobile to video any offer to pay by airline staff.

    Did you ever notice your shadow at different times of the day? Shadows change as the day goes on.

    In the morning the sun makes long shadows. In the middle of the day, the sun seems to be right over your head and your shadow is very, very small. As the sun goes down in the afternoon, shadows grow very long again. But the long afternoon shadows fall in a different direction from the long morning shadows.

    Long, long ago people told time by the shadows. Put a piece of paper in the sunlight. Stand a pencil in a spool in the middle of the paper. The shadow of the pencil will fall on the paper and move as the day goes on. Use a watch and every hour marks the place where the shadow falls. Now your paper is a sundial（通过太阳辨别时间的日规）and you can tell every sunny day. Just look at your paper sundial and see where the shadow falls.

Tour in the Museum

    Experts or folk scholars lead the tour in the museum and throw further light on certain exhibits. Lectures and interactive events will be held to discuss popular scientific topics. Two public themed lectures will be held every month, like "Unlock the Space Station" and "Looking into the Amazing Brain" etc.

    Fan Workshop

    The series of hands-on courses include "WEDO2.0 Robot", "First Step for Robot Design", "Get Creative with Lego", "Space Exploration" and "Science and Technology" etc. Through exploration, cooperation, creation and sharing, the workshop is set to interest students in science, engineering and mechanics.

    Everyone Can Code

    Based on Apple's Swift language and Swift Playgrounds, the courses, such as How an app is produced, Exploration into Face ID and Program for Dash robot are available to fuel teenagers' interest in programming and cultivate their logical thinking. The aim is get people to feel the fun in programming.

    Live Show

    Unlike the traditional teaching mode, a scientific show will present the scientific principles. The public is able to see the show as well as be in the show to feel the charm in a closer place. Fourteen topics are now available, including "the Power of Structure", "Voice and Music" and "Secret for a Polar Bear to Keep Warm".

    A primary school in UK has banned Valentine's Day cards because of concerns that young pupils spend too much time talking about boyfriends and girlfriends.

    Ashcombe Primary School in Weston Super Mare, Somerset, has told parents that cards declaring love can be "confusing" for children under the age of 11, who are still emotionally and socially developing. In this month 's newsletter(通讯), Peter Turner, the head teacher, warned that any cards found in school would be confiscated(没收). He wrote: "We do not wish to see any Valentine's Day cards in school this year. Some children and parents encourage a lot of talk about boyfriends and girlfriends. We believe that such ideas should wait until children are mature enough emotionally and socially to understand the commitment involved in having or being a boyfriend or girlfriend." Mr. Turner said any family wanting to support the Valentine's Day idea should send cards in the post or deliver them to home addresses by hand.

    His views were endorsed by Ruth Rice, 46, who has twins Harriet and Olivia at the school. She said, "Children at that age shouldn't really be thinking about Valentine's Day, they should be concentrating on their schoolwork." They are at an age when they are impressionable(易受影响的)and most parents including myself are with Mr. Turner." She added that "the cards cause too much competition. If someone gets a card and another doesn't, then someone will be disappointed."

    However, Rajeev Takyar, 40, who has two children Jai, 11, and Aryan, five, at the school, said he was "very angry". He said, "There are schools that have banned computer games and snowballs, and now Valentine's Cards." I think banning the cards stops children from having social skills. How are they going to learn about relationships otherwise? It's ridiculous. Alec Suttenwood, father of three children, said of the ban: "It's totally ridiculous. Young children just send the cards to each other as friends and to their parents. It's just a bit of harmless fun. There is no difference between this and Mother's or Father's Day."

Why do we talk the way we do? It might date back to when our ancestors left the jungle for the open plain. Between 5. 3 million and 16 million years ago, Africa's landscapes changed from thick, leafy forests to wide-open grasslands. This environmental change pushed our ancestors out of the trees and onto the ground. Along with all of the physical and behavioral changes this may have caused, researchers also believe it may have changed the way we speak. 

"Open landscapes provide us with fewer objects to affect signal communication, meaning our voices can travel further compared with that in thick forests, " Charlotte Gannon, a researcher who studies language development, told Newsweek. "The move to these open spaces may have increased the effectiveness of our communication. "

By comparing the vocal calls of the orangutan (大猩猩) , Gannon and her team were able to establish how different calls could travel across different landscapes. In their study, the team played 487 calls from orangutans and measured their audibility (可听度) at set length over an overall distance of over 1, 300 feet in the South African plain. 

"Our results were surprising, " Gannon said, "The rule of sound spread suggests that lower-frequency ( 低频率) sounds (the grumphs) would have traveled further than higher-frequency sounds (the kiss squeaks). Our results actually found the opposite to this. " In these environmental settings, consonant (辅音)-like calls traveled a lot further than vowel ( 元 音 ) -like calls. Actually, around 80 percent of consonant-based calls were audible at 1, 300 feet, compared to only 20 percent of vowel-based calls. 

Gannon said these results highlight the importance of studying living orangutan to learn about our species' history. "We can view them as time machines that allow us to recreate key moments of our history so we can learn more about the development of our language, " Gannon said. "Despite their popularity in modern languages, consonants have often been forgotten when discussing speech development. Our research highlights not only their presence in ancient times but their importance to the development of language. "

Earthquakes are something that people fear.There are some places that have few or no earthquakes.Most places in the world,however,have them regularly (有规律地).Countries that have a lot of earthquakes are usually quite mountainous.

The most talked about earthquake in the United States was in San Francisco in 1906.Over 700 people died in it.The strongest one in North America was in 1964.It happened in Alaska.

Strong earthquakes are not always the ones that kill the most people.In 1755,one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded was felt in Portugal.Around 2,000 people died.

In 1923,a very strong earthquake hit Tokyo and the Yokohama areas of Japan.A hundred and forty thousand people died.Most of them died in fires which followed the earthquake.

One of the worst earthquakes ever was in China in 1976.It killed a large number of people.The worst earthquake ever reported was also in China,in which about 830,000 people were killed.This earthquake happened in 1556.

Earthquakes worry people a lot.The reason is that we often do not know when they are coming.People cannot prepare for it.