Not so long ago, a sailor sailing across the cold waters of the northern Pacific Ocean might have had every chance of being confronted by a sea cow. This cow would have measured 10 meters long, and weighed between five and ten tones. And it would spend most of its day cruising the seas, eating grass growing underwater. The cow in question was known as Steller's sea cow, which is now extinct.

    Today, many people are unaware that such an extraordinary creature once existed, or don't know its incredible story. But scientists have discovered many fundamental facts about this mystical animal.

    Surprisingly, the first recorded sighting of a Steller's sea cow didn't happen until 1741, when a sailing expedition was stuck on an uninhabited island, later named Bering Island. The sailor survived by hunting and eating the huge sea cow. Like its modern relatives, the sea cow lived in herds. That and its slow-moving behaviour made it easy to be caught.

    Those sailors that escaped Bering Island spread word of the bounty(大量) of meat to be found off its shores. As a result, more and more expeditions came to hunt the animals. One report stated that one sea cow could feed 33 men for a month.

    Incredibly, just 27 years after the island and species had been discovered by modern man, the last sea cow was reported killed. That makes the Steller's sea cow one of the few truly large mammals known to have been driven extinct in the modern age.

    Planning a visit to the UK? Here we help with ways to cut your costs.

    AVOID BIG EVENTS  Big sporting events, concerts and exhibitions can increase the cost of accommodation and make it harder to find a room. A standard double room at the Thistle Brighton on the final Friday of the Brighton Comedy Festival (19 Oct.) cost £169.15 at Booking.com. A week later, the same room cost £118.15.

    If you can be flexible and want to know dates to avoid—or you're looking for a big event to pass your time—check out sites such as Whatsonwhen.com, which allow you to search for events in the UK by city, date and category.

    STAYAWAY FROM THE STATION If traveling to your destination by train, you may want to find a good base close to the station, but you could end up paying more for the sake of convenience at the start of your holiday.

    Don't be too choosy about the part of town you stay in. Booking two months in advance, the cheapest room at Travelodge's Central Euston hotel in London for Saturday 22 September was £95.95. A room just a tube journey away at its Covent Garden hotel was £75.75. And at Farringdon, a double room cost just £62.95.

    LOOK AFTER YOURSELF Really central hotels in cities such as London, Edinburgh and Cardiff can cost a fortune, especially at weekends and during big events. As an alternative consider checking into a self-catering flat with its own kitchen. Often these flats are hidden away on the top floors of city centre buildings. A great example is the historic O'Neill Flat on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, available for £420 for five days in late September, with room for four adults.

    GET ON A BIKE London's ‘Boris bikes' have attracted the most attention, but other cities also have similar programmes that let you rent a bicycle and explore at your own pace, saving you on public transport or car parking costs.

    Among the smaller cities with their own programmes are Newcastle (casual members pay around £1.50 for two hours) and Cardiff (free for up to 30 minutes, or £5 per day).  (358 words)

    Many people believe that you lose the ability to learn new languages as you get older. Language experts, however, will tell you that you're never too old to learn a new language. As you get older, it can be more difficult to learn a new language, though.

    Children and adults learn new languages in different ways．For children, language is their life. They study for thousands of hours every year, because they need to learn languages to become part of their communities. Adults, on the other hand，are already part of a language community. Learning a new language means becoming part of another language community, and adults seldom get the chance to practice as much as young children do.

    Moreover, children learning a new language are expected to make mistakes. This gives them freedom when learning to be daring and confident. Adults, however, often feel pressured to be perfect when learning a new language. This can discourage many people and make it even harder to learn a new language.

    Research has shown that children who learn a new language when they are very young will not be likely to have a “foreign” accent when speaking a different language. Some scientists also believe that it can take up to 10,000 hours of study to master a new language. This can be difficult for adults to achieve, but young children can accumulate(积累) those hours over several years as they grow up.

    When young children learn a new language, they come to see multiple languages as a “normal” part of society. This mindset (思维模式) helps them learn a new language without feeling like they're doing something unusual or “too hard”.

    So if you want to learn a new language, go for it! It's never too late to learn a new language. If you're older, it may take more work, but it can be done. If you're a young child, though, now is the time to step out and learn a new language!

    Chocolate is good for your heart, skin and brain. Usually, people think that chocolate is bad for their health. They describe chocolate as “something to die for” or say “death by chocolate”. Now they should bite their tongues! Evidence is showing that some kinds of chocolate are actually good for you in the following ways:

    A happier heart

    Scientists at Harvard University recently examined 136 studies on cocoa—the main ingredient in chocolate and found that it does seem to strengthen the heart．Studies have shown heart benefits from increased blood flow. These benefits are the result of coca's chemicals, which seem to prevent both cell damage and inflammation (炎症)．

    Better blood pressure

    If yours is high, chocolate may help. Jeffrey Blumberg from Tufts University recently found that people with high blood pressure who ate 3.5 ounces of dark chocolate per day for two weeks saw their blood pressure drop quickly.

    Muscle magic

    Chocolate milk may help you recover after a hard workout (锻炼). In a small study at Indiana University, people who drank chocolate milk between workouts did better on a tiredness test than those who had some sports drinks.

    Better for your skin

    German researchers gave 24 women a half-cup of special cocoa every day. After three months, the women's skin was moister (滑润的) and smoother. The research shows that chocolate helps protect and increase blood flow to the skin, improving its appearance．

Brain gains

    It sounds almost too good to be true, but research suggests that chocolate may improve your memory, attention span, reaction time, and problem-solving by increasing blood flow to the brain．

    Imagine a school where self-awareness is celebrated, students are encouraged to solve maths problems by writing on the walls and applying learned lessons to real life is more important than homework. These are a few of the concepts that makes Space of Mind School unique.

    Located in a home built in 1896 in Florida, US, the program serves students in grades 2 through 12 and will accept kindergarten students next year. It also offers an after-school program for students who attend traditional schools, as well as evening programs for adults and educators and weekend events for families.

    There is a different atmosphere from that of a traditional school building. Tables and brightly colored walls are white boards. In the science room, students are studying climate changes at a weather station, while in the music room, a student is solving an equation (等式) with his academic coach while he connects music theory and maths.

    The daily schedule at the school also stands out. "We don't assign boring or exhausting homework." said Space of Mind founder and CEO Ali Kaufman. "Instead of homework, we ask that they go home and take a video of themselves applying a lesson they learned or cooking a meal for their family that they learned how to make at school."

    For lunch, instead of traditional cafeteria dishes such as pizza, the school offers organic meals made out of products from local gardens and farms. "Our students also run a business at the Delray Beach Green Market on Saturdays so they can understand sustainable living practices and how to run a business," Kafman said.

    " We are also the first school program in Florida to start and end each day with 15 minutes of meditation (冥想)," Kaufman said. "The positive results we have been seeing in the students from meditation are amazing. We are really about infusing social, emotional and creative skills with academic and life skills."

    Have you ever imagined what it would be like to see the world through an animal's eyes? For example, what a chimpanzee sees as it sits at the top of a tree, or a penguin's view as it dives into the sea to catch its dinner?

    These questions are answered in the nature documentary Animals with Cameras, produced by the BBC. The three-part series was first aired in the UK last month. To explore animal stories "told" by the animals themselves, the documentary's filmmakers worked with scientists to develop cameras that wild animals could wear.

    "Never before have we seen such high-quality footage (连续镜头)directly from the animal's point of view, " BBC Nature executive producer Fred Kaufman told PBS." This miniseries greatly expands our comprehension of animal behavior and this camera technology opens up new possibilities for discovering so much more."

    Indeed, the groundbreaking technology provides a new viewpoint of the animal kingdom. New cameras with enough battery life to shoot for hours at a time were designed to be comfortable enough for animals to wear, according to the documentary's camera designer Chris Watts.

    The technical challenges didn't stop there. Some animals were very curious about the equipment, with some even fighting each other for the chance to wear a camera. In the case of chimpanzees, "we had to create dummy (仿造的)cameras, so that every chimpanzee could get one", the miniseries' wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan told Live Science.

    For animals that were comfortable enough to be with human beings, the cameras could be fitted and removed by hand. But for others, the cameras came off automatically using a timed release and were collected afterward. This meant that the cameras needed to be as tough as possible.

    To avoid disturbing the animals, scientists who were good at dealing with wildlife came to help by putting the cameras on the animals." The last thing we want to do is cause them distress." the documentary's producer Dan Rees told the BBC. "To follow an animal in the first place, there had to be a clear benefit in terms of knowledge about it that might be useful to protecting a species in the future.

    Their efforts certainly paid off. " Footage that captures (捕捉)these rare and exciting glimpses of animals bidden habits is important to scientists, but documentaries like Animals with Cameras also resonate with (引起共鸣)audiences, connecting them with the beauty - and danger - of wildlife in their natural environments," Live Science noted.