The aye-aye, in the same family as people, monkeys and apes, is about 40 cm long, with a bushy tale about the same length as the body. The dark brown fur is long and woolly, giving the animal a rather shaggy(蓬松的) appearance. They are found only on Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa. It lives in the tropical forests in the east and north of Madagascar.

    The aye-aye is mostly arboreal(栖息在树上的), but is sometimes seen walking on the ground. It's active during the night, looking around in the trees for food. The aye-aye is actually the largest primate(灵长类动物) active during the night. Large eyes help the aye-aye find its way about at night. During the day, the aye-aye sleeps in a nest in a tree. Aye-ayes spend almost the whole night travelling about and feeding.

    Aye-ayes live alone. Sometimes pairs are seen, but basically little is about their lives. They don't Icap and cling to trees like primates. They move about on all four legs.They occasionally make brief cries but are silent. Worms inside dead wood form the largest part Of the aye-aye diet. The aye-aye also feeds on fruit, eggs, and bamboo shoots.

    The front feet of the aye-aye are unique. All the toes are long and thin, but the third is exceptionally long. The aye-aye taps on the tree trunk and listens for movement as searches places "'here worms might-be located. It bites at the tree to make homes. then it uses its third finger to reach inside and hook out worms, The front teeth of the aye-aye grow continuously and are worn down by its eating at bark in its search for worms.

    Aye-ayes are close to be gone or totally gone. Because of deforestation (伐木), or forest destruction, the animals have therefore been forced to eat villagers' crops, and many aye-ayes been  have been killed while doing In addition. Some people on Madagascar believe that seeing an aye-aye is a sign that someone close to them will die, so they kill the animals on sight.

    People typically wash their hands seven times a day in the United States, but they do it at a far higher temperature than is necessary to kill germs, a new study says. The energy waste is equivalent to the fuel use of a small country. Amanda R. Carrico, a research assistant professor at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment in Tennessee, told National Geographic that hand washing is often “a case where people act in ways that they think are in their best interest, but they in fact have inaccurate beliefs or outdated perceptions.”

    Carrico said, “It's certainly true that heat kills bacteria, but if you were going to use hot water to kill them it would have to be a way too hot for you to tolerate.”

Carrico said that after a review of the scientific literature, her team found “no evidence that using hot water that a person could stand would have any benefit in killing bacteria.” Even water as cold as 40°F (4.4℃) appeared to reduce bacteria as well as hotter water, if hands were scrubbed, rinsed(冲洗)and dried properly.

    Using hot water to wash hands is therefore unnecessary, as well as wasteful, Carrico said, particularly when it comes to the environment. According to her research, people use warm or hot water 64 percent of the time when they wash their hands. Using that number, Carrico's team calculated a significant impact on the planet.

    “Although the choice of water temperature during a single hand wash may appear unimportant, when multiplied by the nearly 800 billion hand washes performed by Americans each year, this practice results in more than 6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions annually,” she said.

    The researchers published their results in the July 2013 issue of International Journal of Consumer Studies. They recommended washing with water that is at a “comfortable” temperature, which they noted may be warmer in cold months and cooler in hot ones.

    There is an old saying that America and Britain are "two nations divided by a common language." No one knows exactly who said this, but it reflects the way many Brits feel about American English. But are American and British English really so different?

    Vocabulary

    The most obvious difference between American and British English is vocabulary. There are hundreds of everyday words that are different. For example, Americans go on vacation while Brits go on holidays; New Yorkers live in apartments while Londoners live in flats. There are far more examples than we can talk about here. Fortunately, most Americans and Brits can usually guess the meaning through the context of a sentence.

    Past Tense Verbs

    You'll also find some differences with past forms of irregular verbs. The past tense of "learn" in American English is "learned". British English has the option of "learned" or "learnt". The same rule applies to "dreamed" and "dreamt", "burned" and "burnt", and "leaned" and "leant". Americans tend to use the -ed ending; Brits tend to use the-t ending.

    Spelling

    There are hundreds of slight spelling differences between British and American English. Noah Webster, an author, politician and teacher, made an effort to reform English spelling in the late 1700s.

    Webster wanted to spell words the way they sounded. You can see Webster's legacy(遗产) in the American spelling of words like color (from colour), honor (from honour), and labor(from labour).

    Not So Different After All

    British and American English have far more similarities than differences. With the exception of some regional dialects, most Brits and Americans can understand each other without too much difficulty. They watch each other's TV shows, sing each other's songs and read each other's books. They even make fun of each others' accents.

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Richard Holmes, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, famous for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, "The Age of Wonder", he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, "Falling Upwards", he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists (气球飞行者).

Mr Holmes's love of balloons was aroused at a village festival and his enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures. He refers to the cheerful tone used in many first-hand ballooning stories, and applies it in this second-hand account. He describes men and women wrapped up in fur coats under their hydrogen-filled balloons, enjoying cold chicken and champagne and looking back to earth to see mankind "for what it really is."

Mr Holmes makes much of the strange side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in balloons to spy on enemy movements. And during the Prussian attack on Paris in 1870-71， balloonists managed to fly out of the city to communicate with the French government in exile (流亡) in Tours.

"Falling Upwards" contains much of the historian's writing characteristics, such as footnotes and bibliography (文献书目), but its epilogue (后记) refers modestly to what has gone before as "a series of true balloon stories". It does touch on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work. Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the airplane.