Here is your best chance to travel around the UK in 2012: More than 200 B&Bs (bed & breakfast) across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are selected to offer you amazing services for your stay at their lowest prices! Don't miss it. Just collect the vouchers（活动券）in our B&B Daily printed from 01/ 04/ 2012 to 07/ 04/ 2012 and book the stays for your travel following the terms and conditions below:

● The offer includes a room for the night and a breakfast the next morning.

● The offer is of two kinds: £20 per room, per night, valid（有效的）during stay

period of 02/ 04/ 2012—31/ 05/ 2012 and then again 01/ 09/ 2012— 31/ 10/ 2012; £35 per room, per night, valid during stay period of 01/ 06/ 2012 — 31/ 08/ 2012.

● The offer is valid for a basic twin or double room only.

● The stay must be booked directly with the chosen B&Bs before 28/ 04/ 2012.

● Each voucher can only be used by the holder to book one room for one night.

● If voucher holders book either the £20 or £35 per room per night, any additional

    services such as lunch, evening meal or activities may require an extra charge. But these are not required in order to take up the offer. Please check directly with your chosen B&Bs to see what extra services are available.

● Vouchers must be presented on arrival. If no vouchers are presented, the B&Bs may reserve（保留） the right to charge at full price for every night of stay.

● Vouchers may not be used together with any other offer.

● The voucher holders must pay for the stay in full at the time of booking. Additional £10 may be paid to confirm（确认）the booking and will be returned on arrival.

● The B&Bs reserve the right to refuse voucher holders' bookings for people under the age of 18.

    If you live in the U.S., you're probably used to throwing banana peel into the trash. But people in other countries, including India, have been taking advantages of their nutritional benefits for many years.

    While the flesh of a banana is soft and sweet, the skin is thick, hard and slightly bitter. To eat the peel, you can fry, bake, or boil it for at least 10 minutes. Also, the riper bananas get, the thinner and sweeter banana peel will become. That's because of a natural plant hormone(激素) called ethylene(乙烯) that fruits release as they ripen. Ethylene interacts with the sugars and fiber in the banana skin, changing complex sugars into simple sugars and breaking down pectin, a form of fiber in bananas that keeps them stiff. That's why the older your banana is, the flimsier(不结实的) it feels.

    The sweet flesh of a medium-sized banana contains great percentages of your daily recommended intake of various nutrients, such as:

·12% of your daily fiber, which helps with digestion and may help lower your risk of diabetes(糖尿病)

·17% of your vitamin C, which is important for your immune system as well as your growth

·20% of your vitamin B6, which aids the body's ability to turn food into energy

·12% of your potassium, which helps with the development of cells, tissues, and organs throughout the body

    If you eat the skin along with the flesh, you will get an even bigger increase in these same nutrients.

    Eating the peel is not only good for your body but also better for the earth. The average American ate 11.4 pounds of bananas in 2014. Since a medium-sized banana weighs about 0.3 pounds, that equates to about 38 bananas per person, or about 12 billion for the whole of the U.S. And since most of us throw away the peel, that also means a lot of organic waste.

    Contrary to popular belief, people who sleep six to seven hours a night live longer, and those who sleep eight hours or more die younger, according to the latest study ever conducted on the subject. The study, which has tracked the sleeping habits of 1.1 million Americans for six years, weakens the advice of many sleep doctors who have long recommended that people get eight or nine hours of sleep every night.

    “There's an old idea that people should sleep eight hours a night, which has no more scientific basis than the gold at the end of the rainbow,” said Daniel Kripke, professor of psychiatry（精神病学）at the University of California at San Diego who led the study published in a recent copy of JAMA Psychiatry.

    The study was not designed to answer why sleeping longer may be harmful or whether people could extend their lifespan by sleeping less.

    But Kripke said it was possible that people who slept longer tended to suffer from short-term absence of sleeping, a condition where weak breathing puts stress on the heart and brain. He also stressed that the need for sleep was similar to that for food, where getting less than people want may be better for them.

    The study quickly caused warnings and criticism（批评）, with some sleep experts saying that the main problem of America's sleep habits was deprivation（剥夺）, not sleeping too much.

    “None of this says sleep kills people,” said Daniel Buysse, a psychiatrist at the university of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

    “You should sleep as much as you need to feel awake, alert and attentive the next day,” Buysse added. “I'm much more concerned about people short-changing themselves on sleep than people sleeping too long.”

    “Sleeplessness produces a variety of health consequences that were not measured in the study,” critics said.

    Over millions of years, African penguins have developed a keen sense of where to find food. Once they're old enough, they set off from the shores on which they were hatched（孵化） for the first time and swim long distances in search of tasty fish like anchovies and sardines. But they don't search directly for the fish themselves. When African penguins head out to sea, they look for areas with low surface temperatures and high chlorophyll（叶绿素）. Because those conditions signal the presence of algae（藻类）. And lots of algae means lots of plankton（浮游动物）, which in turn means lots of their favorite fish. Well, that's what it used to mean.

    Climate change plus overfishing have made the penguin feeding grounds a mirage（海市蜃楼）. The habitat is indeed plankton﹣rich, but now it's fish﹣poor. Researchers call this an "ecological trap." "It's a situation where you have a signal that previously pointed an animal towards good﹣quality habitat. That habitat has been changed, usually by human pressures. The signal stays, but the quality in the environment gets worse."

    Richard Sherley, a zoologist at the University of Exeter and his team used satellite imaging to track the African penguins from eight sites along southern Africa. Historically, the birds benefited from tons of fish off the coasts of Angola, Namibia and western South Africa, but now they're going hungry.

    "I was really hoping we'd see them going east, and finding areas which the fish had moved to but it ends up being quite a sad story for the penguins." said Richard.

    The researchers calculate that by falling into this ecological trap, African penguin populations on South Africa's Western Cape have declined by around 80 percent.

    Some research groups are exploring the idea of moving them to a place where they can't get trapped, like the Eastern Cape. But Sherley thinks that a solution in the long run means making and carrying out rules to create more sustainable（可持续的） fishing industry, which needs public support.

    It was the night before my election. I was running for Sophomore Vice President.

    I had prepared a performance for the election--a funny boxing match. The fight had popular moves as seen in Dodge Ball, Iron Man, and Super Smash Brothers. In the end, I would perform my famous move, the Power-Punch from Hot Rod.

    My friend Cheyenne and I rehearsed (排练) the fight for hours, but the fight would not be a fight without music and sound effects. This is where my brother came in. He stayed up all night to work on that soundtrack. And when my computer's disk burner (刻录机) went out at 6 in the morning, he spent a college student's week's worth of incomes to replace it.

    Why would he go into all that trouble? Because he knew that out of all the other important things he could be doing, this was imperative to me. He knew because it was once important to him. Having graduated from Layton High just a year earlier, he knew what it was like to be in the center of people's attention. He knew how fun high school could be, and he wanted me to have a great experience.

    I ended up losing the election, but that day changed my world forever. The lesson my brother taught me became my most important belief. But it wasn't until I had a similar opportunity that I really understood why he cared so much.

    What did it take for me to understand? It was the performance. The rest of the cast and I would rehearse every day after school for 6 months all for what? The chance to perform a play eight times. As I came out on that stage for the first time and listened to the laughter, I was filled with joy. By the end of the play, the audience broke into tears, and so did we. What happened? We had the sweet opportunity of giving them an unforgettable theatre moment -- a moment to laugh, reflect, and shed tears.

    The famous director of a big and expensive movie planned to film a beautiful sunset over the ocean, so that the audiences could see his hero and heroine in front of it at the end of the film as they said goodbye to each other forever. He sent his camera crew out one evening to film the sunset for him.

    The next morning he said to the men, "Have you provided me with that sunset?"

    "No, sir," the men answered.

    The director was angry. "Why not?" he asked.

    "Well, sir," one of the men answered, "we're on the east coast here, and the sun sets in the west. We can get you a sunrise over the sea, if necessary, but not a sunset."

    "But I want a sunset!" the director shouted. "Go to the airport, take the next flight to the west coast, and get one."

    But then a young secretary had an idea. "Why don't you photograph a sunrise," she suggested, "and then play it backwards? Then it'll look like a sunset."

    "That's a very good idea!" the director said. Then he turned to the camera crew and said, "Tomorrow morning I want you to get me a beautiful sunrise over the sea."

    The camera crew went out early the next morning and filmed a bright sunrise over the beach in the middle of a beautiful bay. Then at nine o'clock they took it to the director. "Here it is, sir," they said, and gave it to him. He was very pleased.

    They all went into the studio. "All right," the director explained, "now our hero and heroine are going to say goodbye. Run the film backwards so that we can see the 'sunset' behind them."

    The "sunset" began, but after a quarter of a minute, the director suddenly put his face in his hands and shouted to the camera crew to stop.

    The birds in the film were flying backwards, and the waves on the sea were going away from the beach.