Madame Tussauds—London

    Welcome to Madame Tussauds—a 125-year-old museum loved by visitors for its life-like waxworks of famous folk from the past and present, plus interactive exhibits. The following are three ticket options we'd like to recommend to you.

Option 1: All Inclusive Open Dated Ticket

    Why not treat your friends and family to our All Inclusive Tickets? Ticket is valid (有效的) for one visit with all of the following fantastic features:

● Valid for one year from date of purchase—perfect for a gift!

● Priority Access admission in true celebrity style

● Your very own hand made of wax(蜡).

    With your ticket you can enjoy the heroic new experience in three floors of multisensory fun featuring a mix of interactive themed areas, realistic wax figures and an ALL NEW Marvel Super Heroes 4D film adventure.

Option 2: Late Saver 50% off

    If you book online in advance and arrive at Madame Tussauds later in the day, your tickets can cost as little as £14.00. That's 50% off the standard on-the-day price!

    The last admission into Madame Tussauds is 5:30 p.m in off-peak periods and 6 p.m in peak periods. This gives you loads of time to fully enjoy the attraction.

    This ticket is available for online purchase only. Tickets are subject to availability at all times and only a limited amount are available each day, so be quick!

Option 3: Top 3 London Attractions

    Combine your visit to Madame Tussauds with a flight on the World famous London Eye and SEA LIFE London Aquarium, and save 25% on your adult and child tickets, or 33% on your family ticket when you book your tickets at least the day in advance!

    Please note: Child ages are 4—15. Under 4s are free. A family ticket consists of 2 adults and 2 children, or 1 adult and 3 children.

    Please note: Your combined ticket only gives priority admission to Madame Tussauds and Sea Life London Aquarium—all others are general queue flights.

For more ticket options, please visit our website at : www.madame-tussauds.com

    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-lie(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.

    Two heads are better than one. It means that two people working together have a better chance of solving a problem than one person alone. But not everyone likes working in a group.

    There can be a number of reasons why people dislike group work. Some may feel nervous or uneasy in group situations. Others might have had a bad experience with individuals who did not work well as a team. Another comment is that teachers or instructors fail to provide roles for group members. This may create a situation where everyone or no one wants to lead. Whatever the issue, the result is the same: the group does not realize its goal.

    Cooperative (合作的) learning is an educational method that can help to solve this problem. There are many methods of cooperative learning. Today we will talk about one: giving each person in a small group a specific duty to reach a shared goal. For example, if learners are divided into groups of four people each, their roles might be: leader, writer, checker and speaker. This structure helps ensure that everyone takes part equally in group work and allows each member to play a meaningful part in completing the shared goal.

    Before dividing learners into groups, it is a good idea for the teacher or club's instructor to first have knowledge about the language skill levels of participants. The goal is to make each group a mixture of higher- and lower-level language learners. Putting too many people with similar skill levels together could make the work too difficult or easy. Role cards can be a helpful tool in this method of cooperative learning. Their purpose is to remind learners of each person's role.

    Before the cooperative activity, the role of the teacher or activity instructor is to explain two things to the group: the main job for the activity and how the cooperative roles work. The person in charge may appoint these roles or let the English learners choose them. Then, during the activity, the instructor's job is to watch the groups and provide more guidance when needed. After the activity, the instructor may wish to provide feedback to groups on their work and their use of cooperation.

    With this cooperative learning method, you can say that four heads are better than just one.

    "A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smart phone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website" is the definition of "selfie" in the Oxford English Dictionary. In fact, it wasn't even in the dictionary until August of last year. It earned its place there because people are now so obsessed with (对……痴迷) selfies—we take them when we try on a new hat, play with our pets or when we meet a friend whom we haven't seen in a while.

    But is there any scientific explanation for this obsession? Well, you should probably ask James Kilner, a neuroscientist(神经系统科学家) at University College London.

    Through our lifetime we become experts at recognizing and interpreting other people's faces and facial expressions. In contrast, according to Kilner, we have a very poor understanding of our own faces since we have little experience of looking at them—we just feel them most of the time.

    This has been proved in previous studies, according to the BBC.

    Kilner found that most people chose the more attractive picture. This suggests that we tend to think of ourselves as better-looking than we actually are. To further test how we actually perceive our own faces, Kilner carried out another study. He showed people different versions of their own portrait—the original, one that had been edited to look less attractive and one that was made more attractive—and asked them to pick the version which they thought looked most like them. They chose the more attractive version.

    But what does it say about settles? Well, isn't that obvious? Selfies give us the power to create a photograph—by taking it from various angles, with different poses, using filters (滤色镜) and so on—that better matches our expectations with our actual faces.

    "You suddenly have control in a way that you don't have in non-virtual(非虚拟的) interactions," Kilner told the Canada-based CTV News. Selfies allow you "to keep taking pictures until you manage to take one you're happy with", he explained.

    When my sister Mertie told me she had put out tomato plants last summer, I was quite impressed.

    Since she was a garden-beginner, Mertie researched exactly how far apart to space her tomato plants; what kind of fertilizer to use; how to keep away the bugs（害虫）, etc. Once they were planted, she took care of them daily, anxiously awaiting the juicy tomatoes to appear. But, day after day, her plants were tomato-less while all of her neighbors who had also put out tomato plants were already enjoying the fruit of their labor.

    Frustrated (upset), Mertie gave in and went to the market to search fresh tomatoes. While paying, Mertie told the farmer her troubles. The farmer paused to think for a moment and then asked, "Well, what kind of tomatoes did you plant?"

    "I think they were called Big Boy," Mertie remembered.

    "Well there's your problem," the farmer explained. "Big Boy and Better Boy tomatoes have a 95-day growing period whereas regular tomato plants produce fruit in as few as 70 days…you just have to wait a little longer for the Big Boys."

    With that new knowledge, Mertie went home with excitement, knowing they would be worth the wait.

    Thinking about my sister's gardening experience, I had to smile. She just didn't know that Big Boy tomatoes took longer--neither did I--but once she discovered that information, she was no longer discouraged and upset about the lack of tomatoes on her plants. Instead, she was encouraged and excited to see them a few weeks later.

    It makes me wonder how many of us have "Big Boy" dreams in our hearts, yet we just don't realize that they are of the "Big Boy" variety so we are discouraged and worn out with the waiting process. Instead of waiting with excitement, we give up on our dreams and figure we must have done something wrong to stop them from coming to pass. Frustrated, we see other people's dreams coming true, and we wonder why ours haven't yet been achieved.

    It is well known that male humpback whales(座头鲸)are skilled singers. Their songs are thought to attract females in high frequency sounds while to compete with other males in low frequency sounds. Research led by the Wildlife Conservation Society has now made a new discovery.

    The study looked at the songs of two humpback whale populations, based on sound recordings collected from 2013 to 2018. One group was based in the South Atlantic, off the coast of Gabon, and the other in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar.  Analysis of the recordings showed that the two groups picked up musical ideas from each other and borrowed phrases and themes into their latest song. This suggested that the males from the two groups came into contact with each other over the five years and shared songs.

    To uncover this musical cooperation, researchers recorded the songs and transcribe them into more than 1,500 individual sounds and patterns, or song units.  They found that the units were composed into larger phrases, which were then repeated to form themes. These themes were sung for hours at a time, or even days. By 2018, both populations have been singing largely the same songs.

    "This similarity in the songs shows that these two populations come into closer contact than other southern populations, explains Dr Melinda Rekdahl, leading author of the study. As well as being an interesting phenomenon, she explains that those songs allow even greater insight into the workings of the humpback whale populations.