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    In the famous fairy tale, Snow White eats the Queen's apple and falls victim to a curse（诅咒）;in Shakespeare's novel, Romeo drinks the poison and dies; some ancient Chinese emperors took pellets（药丸）that contained mercury（水银）, believing that it would make them immortal, but they died afterward.

    Poison has long been an important ingredient in literature and history, and it seems to always be associated with evil, danger and death. But how much do you really know about poison?

    An exhibition, The Power of Poison, opened last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, intended to give the audience a more vivid understanding of poison.

    The museum tour starts in a rainforest setting, where you can see live examples of some of the most poisonous animals: caterpillars（毛毛虫）, frogs and spiders. Golden poison frogs, for instance, aren't much bigger than a coin, but their skin is covered with a poison that can cut off the signaling power of your nerves, and a single frog has enough venom to kill 10 grown humans.

    "Poisons can be bad for some things," Michael Novacek, senior vice president of the museum, told NBC News. "Yet they can also be good for others."

    A poisonous chemical found in the yew tree is effective against cancer, which is what led to the invention of a cancer-fighting drug called Taxol.

    The benefits from natural poisons are not limited to just medicine. Believe it or not, many substances（物质）that we regularly ingest（摄入）-chili, coffee and chocolate-owe their special flavors or stimulating（提神的）effects to chemicals that plants make to poison insects.

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    “Smombies” are very real and a growing cause for concern. Tired of having to constantly warn both locals and tourists to pay more attention to their surroundings to avoid serious accidents, authorities of a small German town have come up with a more positive solution — embedding (嵌入) traffic lights in the pavement to make them visible to people constantly looking down at their phones while walking.

    The seemingly ridiculous safety measure was put in place. Authorities in Augsburg decided to act, installing ground level traffic lights at two tram (有轨电车) stops last Tuesday. The lights flash red every time a tram is approaching, or when the regular traffic light turns red. “We realized that the normal traffic light isn't in the line of sight of many pedestrians these days,” said Tobias Hermes, a city administration official. “So we decided to have an additional set of lights — the more we have, the more people are likely to notice them.”

    Some Augsburg residents appear to be quite happy with the idea. “I think it makes sense,” said Jack Smith, “One always sees young people these days running over red lights. This makes it more obvious that you need to stop.” Others, however, found the need for ground traffic lights disturbing and even frightening. “I find it scary that smart phone users are so engrossed that they need to install lights in the ground so that they notice the tram coming,” one person told the local paper.

    But do this kind of pavement-embedded lights actually work? Well, if one interviewed teenager is to be believed, not really, “To be honest I didn't even notice it,” he said, “Maybe it'd be useful at night, but yeah, I didn't realize it was there until just now.”

    The word “smombie” — a mashup of the words smart phone and zombie — was born in Germany. It was voted “youth word of the year” in 2017, but the serious consequences of this behaviour are no laughing matter.

    Cigarette ends are everywhere — littering our streets and beaches — and for decades they've been thought of as "unrecyclable". But a New Jersey based company, called Terra Cycle, has taken on the challenge, and has come up with a way to recycle millions of cigarette ends and turn them into industrial plastic products. Its aim is to recycle things that people normally consider impossible to reuse.

    Obviously it would be even better for the environment if everyone just stopped smoking, but the statistics show that although there has been an increase in anti-smoking ads and messaging, between 2000 and 2014, global sales of cigarettes increased by 8 percent, and a whole lot of those cigarette ends are ending up as trash. Since most of our litter eventually ends up in waterways, cigarette ends can surely pollute the surrounding environment. "It only takes a single cigarette end to pollute a liter of water," Terra Cycle founder, Tom Szaky, said. "Animals can also mistake littered cigarette ends for food."

    So how do you go about turning all those poisonous ends into something useful? Terra Cycle does this by first breaking them down into separate parts. They mix the remaining materials, such as the tobacco and the paper, with other kinds of rubbish, and use it on non-agricultural land, such as golf courses. The filters(过滤嘴) are a little harder. To recycle these, Terra Cycle first makes them clean and cuts them into small pieces, and then combines them with other recycled materials,  making them into liquid for industrial plastic products.

    They're now also expanding their recycling offerings to the rest of the 80 percent of household waste that currently can't be recycled, such as chocolate packaging, pens, and mobile phones. The goal is to use the latest research to find a way to stop so much waste ending up in landfill(垃圾填埋), and then get companies to provide money for the process. And so far, it's working.

    "We haven't found anything that we can't recycle, "communications director of Terra Cycle, Albe Zakes, said. "But with the amount and variety of packaging and litter in the world, we are always looking for new waste streams to address."

    The baby monkey is much more developed at birth than the human baby. Almost from the moment it is born, the baby monkey can move around and hold tightly to its mother. During the first few days of its life the baby will approach and hold onto almost any large, warm, and soft object in its environment, particularly if that object also gives it milk. After a week or m, however, the baby monkey begins to avoid newcomers and focuses its attentions on “mother" the real mother or the mother-substitute(母亲替代).

    During the first two weeks of its life warmth is perhaps the most important psychological(心理的)thing that a monkey mother has to give to its baby. The Harlows, a couple who are both psychologists, discovered this fact by offering baby monkeys a choice of two types of mother substitutes one covered with cloth 4nd one made of bare wire. If the two artificial mothers were both the same temperature, the little monkeys always preferred the cloth mother. However, if the wire model was heated, while the cloth model was cool, for the first two weeks after birth the baby monkeys picked the warm wire mother-substitutes as their fuvorites. Thereafter they switched and spent most of their time on the mw comfortable cloth mother.

    Why is cloth preferable to bare wire? Something that the Harlows called contact(触摸)comfort seems to be the answer, and a most powerful influence it is. Baby monkeys spend much of their time rubbing against their mothers' skins, putting themselves in as close contact with the parent as they can. Whenever the young animal is frightened, disturbed, or annoyed, it typically rushes to its mother and rubs itself against her body. Wire doesn't “rub" as well as does soft cloth. Prolonged(长时间的)“contact comfort" with a cloth mother appears to give the babies confidence and is much more rewarding to them than is either warmth or milk.

    According to the Harlows, the basic quality of baby's love for its mother is trust. If the baby is put into an unfamiliar playroom without its mother, the baby ignores the toys no nutter how interesting they might be. It screams in terror and curls up into a furry little ball. If its cloth mother it now introduced into the playroom, the baby rushed to it and holds onto it for dear life. After a few minutes of contact comfort, it obviously begins to feel more secure. it then climbs down from the mother-substitute and begins to explore the toys, but often rushes back for a deep embrace(拥抱)as if to make sure that its mother is still there and that all is well. Bit by bit its fears of the new environment are gone and it spends more and more time playing with the toys and less and less time holding onto its “mother.”

Crocodiles today look very similar to ones from 200 million years ago. There are also very few species alive today—just 25. Other animals such as lizards (蜥蜴) and birds have achieved a diversity of many thousands of species in the same amount of time or less.

Prehistory also saw types of crocodile we don't see today, including giants as big as dinosaurs, plant-eaters, fast runners and snake-like forms that lived in the sea. The rate of their evolution is generally slow, but occasionally they evolve more quickly because the environment has changed. In particular, their evolution speeds up when the climate is warmer, and their body size increases.

The body size of crocodiles is important because it interacts with how fast animals grow, how much food they need, how big their populations are and how likely they are to become extinct. The limited diversity of crocodiles and their apparent lack of evolution is a result of a slow evolutionary rate. It seems the crocodiles arrived at a body plan that was very efficient and perfect enough that they didn't need to change it in order to survive. This perfection could be one explanation why crocodiles survived Cretaceous period (白垩纪), in which the dinosaurs died out.

Crocodiles generally develop better in warm conditions because they cannot control their body temperature and require warmth from the environment. The climate during the age of dinosaurs was warmer than it is today, and that may explain why there were many more varieties of crocodiles than we see now. Being able to draw energy from the sun means they do not need to eat as much as a warm-blooded animal like a bird or a mammal (哺乳动物).

The teenage Snowboarder.

I was born in Denver, USA. and started snowboarding aged eight when my dad took me to a resort in the mountains. About two hours from Denver. The hill looked unbelievably steep and scary. So My dad had to do a lot of persuading to get me on a board. Because I was so young. I hadn't even thought of asking him if I could start snowboarding? But he was already into it and wanted me to love it, too—-He made it look so simple, and in the end I managed just fine.

After this experience, it wasn't long before I'd developed a love of sport and had improved my ability too. I started competing aged ten. Some people entered loads of competitions and ended up getting bored of snowboarding. But my love of taking part and winning got stronger as I got older, which always help me to push myself harder. I enjoyed not having a fixed plan and sometimes this went well, like when I became the first female ever to get a perfect 100 at a local competition. I wasn't sure I'd even attempted the jumps that got me the score until I actually set off. That achievement increased my trust in my own abilities.

During the summer I focused on training and my studies while there's no snow. Although I trained daily, it's nice not having to stick to quite a strict diet like I did in the winter. I also got to spend lots of time with my friends then. It's the best way of dealing with not being able to do what I loved so much and what I was really good at.

Now. I have to think carefully about my future. Snowboarding is such a huge part of my life now. But I also feel it's important to have something else I can do. just in case I don't succeed as a professional snowboarder or I get injured. I'm wondering whether becoming a doctor is a possibility. if my active life allows time for doing a college degree, it's impossible to imagine myself growing tired of the sport. But I can't go on snowboarding my whole life.