Lions are the top tourist attraction to Kenya and also considered critically endangered. One of the main causes of their death is that people kill them in return for lions attacking their cows. “We put our cows in a small cow shelter at night,” locals said, “and that's when the trouble would start. Lions would jump in the shelter and kill the cows”.

    There have been a lot of efforts to try to protect the lions, but it's a crisis and everyone is looking for a solution. One idea was land leases(租用), another was lion-proof fences. However, no one even knew that Richard Turere, a 13-year-old Maasai from Kenya, had already come up with something that worked.

    One night Richard was walking around with a flashlight and discovered the lions were scared of a moving light. An idea was born. Three weeks and much repairing later, Richard invented a system of lights that flash around the cow shelter, mimicking a human walking around with a flashlight. His system is made from broken flashlight parts and an indicator box from a motorcycle. “The only thing I bought was a solar panel（电池板）, which charges a battery that supplies power to the lights at night.” Richard says. He calls the system Lion Lights.

    His simple solution was so successful: his neighbors heard about it and wanted Lion Lights, too. He put in the lights for them. From there, the lights spread and are now being used all around Kenya. Someone in India is trying them out for tigers. In Zambia and Tanzania they're being used as well.

    This contest from the Winchester Poetry Festival is intended for “surprise and delight”. However, don't try to surprise and delight them with a short story or a photo of your cat dancing in a Tutu. Stick to a poem of up to 40 lines.

    Closing: Quarterly.

    Prizes: £1,000, £500, £250.

    Entry Fee: £5.

    Starts Theatre One-Act Play Competition

    This annual contest from Strerts Theatre in Cornwall is for plays for up to four adult actors, with a running time of between 25 and 35 minutes. Plays can be on any theme; you need to be 18 or over to enter.

    Closing: Annually.

    Prizes: £100 plus performance of your play in Sterns Studio.

    Entry Fee: £7.

    Artificium Short Stories & Poetry Prizes

    This one from Artificium, a journal of new fiction and poetry, has two categories: Short Stories and In Brief. The former is for stories of between 2,000 and 8,000 words in any genre（体裁）. The latter is for poetry of between 500 and 1,000 words.

    Closing: End of each month.

    Prizes: £200, £100, £50.

    Entry Fee: £5 for one, £9 for two.

    PENfro Open Poetry Competition.

    This contest from the PENfro Book Festival is for poems of up to 40 lines on any subject and in any style. Costa Award winning poet Jonathan Edwards, whose taste in poetry is broad-ranging, will be judging.

    Closing: End of each month. Prizes: £300, £100, £75. The top ten winners will be invited to read their works at a spoken word event at which Jonathan Edwards will present the prizes.

    Entry Fee: £4.

    I remember the first time I got on a horse. When I was a little boy aged two, my mom agreed to let me take a short ride and that was it! From then on, I drove my parents crazy begging for a horse.

    When I was four, I had mutism, in which children stop speaking in certain social situations. I went days, weeks, months without a sound at school. At most, I might quietly whisper to a friend. I suffered silently through school until I was ten when a psychologist had an idea. He asked me what I wanted more than anything else in the world. He explained I was going to be given an opportunity to work for that. And I was permitted to whisper the answer in my mother's ear, “A horse.”

    I was to get a horse, but I had to finish many weekly tasks. I had to answer the phone five times per week, something I had never done before. I had to say one word to my teacher at school and the list went on. For a child with mutism, saying one word to someone can be like climbing Mount Qomolangma. I did everything that was asked of me and the day came. His name was Sequoia, whom I fell in love with immediately. When I was with Sequoia, I forgot all about my problems and felt strong and secure.

    I am participating in society these days. My horse and I made it through a master's degree. I feel I owe my life to the horse and I try to give it back to him every day. He has given me the best gift I could ever imagine, my life.

    ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida's busiest airport is becoming the first in the nation to require a face scan of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights, including US citizens, according to officials there. The expected announcement Thursday at Orlando International Airport alarms some privacy supporters. They say there are no formal rules in place for handling data collected from the scans, nor formal guidelines on what should happen if a passenger is wrongly prevented from boarding.

    Airports in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Washington D.C. already use face scans for some departing international flights, but they don't involve all international travelers at the airports like the program's expansion in Orlando would. The image(图像) from the face scan is compared to a Department of Homeland Security database that has images of people who should be on the flight, in order to check the traveler's identity.

    US citizens at these airports can refuse to be scanned, but the agency “doesn't seem to be doing an adequate job letting Americans know they can,” said Harrison Rudolph, an expert at the Center on Privacy & Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.

    US citizens at the Orlando airport will be able to refuse face scans just like at the other airports if they don't want to provide their photograph, Jennifer Gabris, a spokeswoman for the US Customs and Border Protection said in an email. However, a notice about a possible rule change for the program states that “US citizens may be required to provide photographs upon entering or departing the United States.”

    “We're not talking about one gate,” Rudolph said. “We're talking about every international departure gate, which is a huge expansion of the number of people who will be scanned. Errors tend to go up as uses go up.”

    Two US senators（参议员） last month sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, urging that formal rules be carried out before the program is expanded. “It will also ensure a full test of this potentially sweeping program that could influence every American leaving the country by airport,” said the letter from the senators.

    Chinese scientists recently have produced two monkeys with the same gene, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, using the same technique that gave us Dolly the sheep. These monkeys are not actually the first primates(灵长类)to be cloned. Another one named Tetra was produced in the late 1990s by embryo(胚胎)splitting, the division of an early-stage embryo into two or four separate cells to make clones. By contrast, they were each made by replacing an egg cell nucleus(卵原子核)with DNA from a differentiated body cell. This Dolly method, known as somatic(躯体的) cell nuclear transfer(SCNT), can create more clones and allows researchers greater control over the edits they make to the DNA.

    Success came from adopting several new techniques. These included a new type of microscopy(显微术) to better view the cells during handling or using several materials that encourage cell reprogramming, which hadn't been tried before on primates. Still, the research process proved difficult, and many attempts by the team failed. Just two healthy baby monkeys born from more than 60 tested mothers. This leads to many researchers' pouring water on the idea that the team's results bring scientists closer to cloning humans. They thought this work is not a stepping stone to establishing methods for obtaining live born human clones. Instead, this clearly remains a very foolish thing to attempt, and it would be far too inefficient, far too unsafe, and it is also pointless.

    But the scientists involved emphasize that this is not their goal. There is now no barrier for cloning primate species, thus cloning humans is closer to reality. However, their research purpose is entirely for producing non-human primate models for human diseases; they absolutely have no intention, and society will not permit this work to be extended to humans. Despite limitations, they treat this breakthrough as a novel model system for scientists studying human biology and disease.

    All the housewives who went to the new supermarket had one great ambition: to be the lucky customer who did not have to pay for her shopping. For this was what the notice just inside the entrance promised. It said: "Remember, once a week, one of our customers gets free goods. This May Be Your Lucky Day!"

    For several weeks, Mrs Edwards hoped, like many of her friends, to be the lucky customer. Unlike her friends, she never gave up hoping. The cupboards in kitchen were full of things which she did not need. Her husband tried to advise her against buying things but failed. She dreamed of the day when the manager of the supermarket would approach her and say:" Madam, this is Your Lucky Day. Everything in your basket is free."

    One Friday morning, after she had finished her shopping and had taken it to her car, she found that she had forgotten to buy any tea. She dashed back to the supermarket, got the tea and went towards the cash-desk. As she did so, she saw the manager of the supermarket approach her. "Madam," he said, holding out his hand, "I want to congratulate you! You're our lucky customer and everything you have in your basket is free!"