On 29 May last year, I was doing my swim training for a half Ironman race in the bay near my home.

    I was finishing my first loop (圈) when I felt jaws coming around my body and a sharp pain. The water was dark, so I couldn't see anything. It just came out of nowhere and then it was gone in a flash. I knew it was something really big and assumed it was a shark. I panicked, but knew I needed to get out of the water. I was kicking wildly in case it came back. There was a lifeguard boat close by, so I waved my arms in the air and screamed for help. It got to me within 20 seconds. At that point I didn't feel anything; adrenaline (肾上腺素) had taken over. The lifeguards held me under the arms and pulled me up out of the water. Then the pain kicked in and it was pretty hard to bear. Some muscle had been bitten off my right arm. I felt a lot of warm, gushing blood.

    My chest felt heavy, as if someone had put their foot on it, and I was having trouble breathing. It was extremely painful. When I got to the hospital, I told the nurses to put me to sleep because of the pain. I just wanted them to fix me.

    I woke up after surgery four hours later. My doctor was amazed when I managed to move my fingers: the bite just missed a major nerve. My right lung had been damaged; I had several broken bones and a nerve in my leg was cut, so I have reduced feeling at the top of my leg. The shark also bit through my upper back muscle.

    Local experts determined that the shark was probably 9-10 feet long. It was young, about seven years old. It just attacked me, left and didn't come back because it figured I wasn't food.

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    Uthman Affan was a very rich man who was known for his generosity. In fact he was so generous that people still tell stories about him today, more than a thousand years later.

    Uthman lived in Medina. It is a very dry part of the world where there isn't a lot of rainfall. One year, the rain didn't come and there was a drought（干旱）. People were running out of food. Things got so bad that the people had to eat leaves from the trees in order to survive.

    You can imagine how happy the people and the merchants（商人）were when they learned that a group of camels（骆驼）were approaching Medina. Each camel carried a lot of food, and the people looked forward to being able to eat good food again. Knowing that the group belonged to Uthman made the people even happier, for they knew he is well-known for generosity. But it was not welcome news for the merchants in Medina, because Uthman was a very sharp businessman. Although he was fair, Uthman drove a very hard bargain.

    Even so, the merchants immediately went to Uthman. They wanted to buy the food on the camels from him so they could sell it for two or even three times its usual price at that time. So they were ready to pay any price Uthman asked. But Uthman turned them down. The merchants raised their offers again and again, but each time Uthman refused. Finally the merchants made their best offer: five times the value of the food. Guess what? Uthman had made a decision to give away all the food to the starving people of Medina.

    Home gardening is an enjoyable family activity. It brings many benefits to your body's health, your wallet and the environment. There is the fun of growing whatever pleases you all year round. And you can get the freshest and safest vegetables.

    However, being a home gardener in modern society is tricky. As you have too much to do every day and have no time to take good care of them, all your plants may die. Luckily, there are many gardening apps that are helpful in teaching the art of growing a wonderful garden.

    One of them is Gardenia. It can provide a great deal of information for crazy gradeners who want to increase their gardening skills and continue growing fresh produce. If you've got a smart phone with this app, everything becomes a lot easier, whether you are a beginner or an expert in home gardening.

    Gardenia is designed to teach you the best gardening tips, and it can predict how fast the plants much have grown and what needs to be done. It is light with a beautiful interface (界面), user - friendly and easy to use. Anyway, Gardenia is a perfect planting organizer for you to use and plan your green tasks. It was developed by an experienced home gardener.

    The best thing about this app is its over 90,000 different plants library for you to choose and the right way of planting each of them. More importantly, it helps everyone recognize a plant that grows well in their local area. So it's always something you deserve to enjoy! Do use it on your phone if you're really interested in gardening.

    Airbags, now found in almost every vehicle, have saved countless lives and largely reduced the severity of injuries in crashes. Similar technology could greatly reduce broken hips (髋部) resulting from a fall, something most seniors fear.

    Dr. Robert Buckman and his start-up company, Active Protective in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has developed a promising solution, a wearable airbag that can protect hip bones in the event of a fall. The idea was the result of Dr. Buckman's years as a doctor at Temple University. He noticed how many elderly people were being brought into hospitals with broken hip due to falls, and how they often never completely recovered from the injuries. He started to ask what he could do for these people, and that was when he started trying to figure out whether there was a way of helping people who were at the highest risk of falling and suffering these kinds of injuries.

    The device is worn much like a regular belt, but on the outside of the clothing, and it includes sensors that monitor the movement of hips. If the device detects that the person, is falling, an airbag opens before the person hits the ground, cushioning the fall. When the wearer hits the ground, the bag reduces the force to the hip bones by 90 percent, enough to avoid the majority of hip injuries.

    With one out of every three people aged 65 and older suffering serious falls each year, Active Protective has a big market for its wearable device. It also has the potential to sizably reduce hip - related health care expenses: Hip injuries among the elderly cost the US health care system in 2012 $30 billion, which doesn't include the long-term care expenses associated with the high percentage of patients that can no longer live independently.

    This may be sad to hear, but the number of Britain's famous red telephone boxes has been falling for decades. The phone box is well-known to foreign fans of Britain and visitors to the country. There are still many left to enjoy, however.

    There is deep feeling for the bright red boxes with the Queen's coat of arms (盾形徽章). The places that still have the red box are mostly small and in the countryside. In these places, the phone box may be a symbol of community, as well as a landmark (地标).

    But there are still several cities, including London, that still have original red phone boxes in place.

    For tourists, they probably make the perfect place for a selfie (自拍照). Visit London any day in the summer and you'll see people with their smartphones taking photos with the red box behind them. People who receive the photo will have no trouble guessing where the selfie was taken.

    Ever since mobile phones became more widespread, there has been less and less point in public phones. But although the red boxes are no longer popular places to make a call from, new uses are being found for them all the time. The famous design created by Giles Gilbert Scott back in 1924 lives on, but in ways the British architect (建筑师) would never have imagined.

    Some of the new ways the phone boxes are being used are quite unusual. For example, some have been changed into tiny coffee shops. Others are hat stores. In one distant area of the country, a red box that had not been used for a long time has been turned into a small lending library.

    Even back in their heyday in the last century, phone boxes were put to other uses. Some people even used them as toilets in an emergency.

But for many, they were a safe place to hide if you were caught up in the rain. Britain's weather is unpredictable: sun one moment, heavy rain the next. So if you are planning to visit the UK and want the perfect British selfie, standing inside a red telephone box in a rainstorm may be your best bet.

Emerald Coast Science Center Field Trips

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