Love working with children? Looking for an exciting new opportunity? Want to work on a friendly, fun and supportive team? This is what our team member Anna says about working at My Crèche:

     “It's the nicest place I've ever worked. Everyone is so friendly and we have so much fun working together. They give me opportunities to learn new things every day. They care about my personal development. Working at My Creche has enabled me to build relationships with the children as well as parents within the community which makes me feel so welcomed in the local area.”

    Conveniently located in the heart of Crouch End, London, N8, My Creche offers drop-in and pre-booked childcare for children aged 6 weeks to 5 years of age. We also provide after-school and breakfast clubs for children up to 8 years old. Our goal is to enable parents to pursue personal and professional activities when they need to, with total peace of mind knowing their children are being cared for in a safe and fun environment.

    We are looking for an enthusiastic and committed professional with excellent interpersonal skills, who is committed to ensuring the best outcomes and care for children. This is an excellent opportunity for a proactive individual to be a part of a fresh and progressive childcare concept and we welcome newly qualified professionals. We are a small and very supportive team with great training opportunities.

    The successful candidate will:

    Have a certificate Level 3 in Childcare and Education.

    Have experience working with children.

    Be an excellent communicator with strong people skills.

    Be energetic and able to multi-task.

    Salary: £16,500 — £19,000 per year depending on experience and qualifications.

    Full time (flexible work available) and 28 days annual leave.

    What would work be like if you had no boss?Imagine you could make all your own decisions and no one told you what to do.

    A Swedish software company,Crisp,decided to get rid of their CEO.First,they needed to find out what a CEO actually did.Then they shared those duties among staff and board members,which is exactly what they did.And the employees believes it's been a good change.An employee named Heinrik Kniberg says the company can now act faster,"If you want to get something done,you stand up and start driving that.Workers are also more active and satisfied."And any big decisions are made during the all-member meetings several times a year.

    So,if it's working well for Crisp,could this model become more widespread? Online retailer（零售商）Zappos tried out a similar plan but had unpleasant results.Almost a fifth of its staff decided to leave,and CEO Tony Hsieh admitted that "self-management is not for everyone".Mr Houston,founder of file-sharing service Drew Dropbox,says that total freedom doesn't always feel good,because you no longer know what you're supposed to do,what is important and you're bumping up against other people."

    Would you like to work somewhere with no boss?

    Field Trip Day

    On Friday, May 16, our class will take a field trip to North Park Zoo. The zoo has lions, elephants, and other interesting animals. Many of the animals we have been studying will be there for us to closely examine.

    Our class will be divided into six teams. Each team will have five students and one leader. The leaders are listed in the table.

    What You Need to Know

    The cost is $1.00 for students to enter the zoo. We will leave the school at 9:00 a.m. and return at 2:30 p.m.

    On the morning of the trip, the students will be divided into teams. One student from each team will receive a camera. The cameraman will take pictures of the team, the animals, and other fun sights at the zoo.

    All members should wear blue shirts. Be sure to wear comfortable shoes because we will be walking all day. Please bring a bag lunch and a drink. We will have a picnic at the park inside the zoo. Bring a healthy snack, such as a piece of fruit and a drink, for later in the day.

    When we are at the zoo, always remain with your team. Do not leave the team without asking permission from the team leader.

    Feeding the Animals

    The ONLY animals that students are allowed to feed are those in the children's Zoo. Special food can be bought at the zoo for 25 cents and given to these animals. Do not feed your lunch to them. It is not food for the animals.

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.

Coca-Cola is to test a paper bottle as part of a longer-term goal to get rid of plastic from its packaging entirely. The prototype(样本) is made by a Danish company from an extra-strong paper shell that still contains a thin plastic liner (衬垫). But the goal is to create a 100% recyclable, plastic free bot tle capable of preventing gas escaping from carbonated(碳酸) drinks. The barrier must also ensure no fibers get into the liquid. 

That may have a risk of changing the taste of the drink ——or potentially can't meet the requirements of health and safety checks. But industry giants (巨头)are backing the plan. Coca-Cola, for example, has set a goal of producing zero waste by 2030. Coca-Cola was ranked the world's number one plastic polluter by charity group Break Free From Plastic(摆脱塑料) last year, closely followed by other drink-producers Pepsi and Nestle. 

The Paper Bottle Company, or Paboco, is the Danish firm behind the devel-opment of the paper-based container. Part of the challenge has been to create a structure capable of standing the forces exerted by carbonated drinks —— such as cola and beer —— which are bottled under pressure. On top of that, the paper needs to be mouldable to create different bottle shapes and sizes for different brands and take ink for printing their labels. 

After more than seven years of lab work, the firm is now ready to host a trial in Hungary this summer of Coca-Cola's fruit drink Adez. Initially, this will in-volve 2, 000 bottles distributed via a local retail chain. 

But it is also working with others. Absolut, the vodka maker, is due to test 2, 000 paper bottles of its own in the UK and Sweden of its pre-mixed, carbonated raspberry drink. And beer company Carlsberg is also building prototypes of a paper beer bottle. 

Michael Michelsen, the firm's commercial manager, says the bottles are formed out of a single piece of paper-fiber-based material to give them strength. 

When it comes to architectural accomplishments, humans like to think they stand at the top. That is to underestimate the astonishing achievement s of social insects; for example, white ants raise skyscraping nests. The true master builders of the insect world, however, are the hundreds of species of stingless bees.

In a new study, Ms. Di Pietro and her colleagues observed over 400 colonies of the stingless bee species in a large bee house in Brazil in 2022 and 2023. Around 95% of the colonies exhibited honeycombs（a structure made by bees） built up in horizontal layers（水平分层）, like tiered wedding cakes, while the rest adopted a spiral（螺旋的） structure.

Since the stingless bee shows a strong preference for a horizontal-layer honeycomb structure, it's surprising that spiral honeycombs occur. The team confirmed that there was no difference in the average cell-building rate between the two styles, and therefore no efficiency advantage.

In order to rule out a genetic explanation for the different styles, the researchers transplanted workers from colonies that built in one tradition to colonies that built in the other, having first emptied the host structures of their native adults. The imported workers soon switched to the local style, which was then continued by the colony's young insects as they eventually matured into workers.

Dr. Tom Wenseleers guessed that the bees may switch styles as a way of coping with the build-up of small construction errors made by their fore-runners. Such a process, in which multiple organisms indirectly affect each other's behavior through the traces they leave in their environment, is known as stigmergy（共识主动性）. The researchers later introduced a sign of spirals to the otherwise perfect horizontal-layer honeycombs, and found that it did indeed cause the bees to switch to building spirals.

These results suggest that stingless bees can pass on different building traditions across generations and individuals needn't be instructed by their peers. "The findings are the clearest demonstration of cultural differences naturally appearing in insects. Insect culture would once have been thought impossible," says behavioral biologist Andrew Whiten, who wasn't involved in the research. "Less than a century ago, culture was thought to be uniquely human."