When people ask me to name typical British dishes, I have, however, struggled to think of an answer. Yes, we do have our own national dishes. We do have fish and chips, and we have other dishes like roast dinner and shepherd's pie. But how much do we actually eat them?

    Fish and chips, is made up of battered（绞碎的）fish and chips,which is often accompanied by a thick paste（酱）. The majority of British people really do love this dish but it is not something that we would eat,say,on a weekly basis.It's also not usually something that we would cook at home.The British people associate this dish with the seaside and it's something that will usually be eaten on a day trip there,bought from a takeaway fish and chip shop.

    Another favourite British dish is roast dinner.This is made up of roast meat,usually chicken or beef, accompanied by roast vegetables and a meat sauce called gravy（肉汁）.It is usually eaten on a Sunday,perhaps for a special family dinner.It can either be cooked at home or eaten in a traditional pub.We also eat a more elaborate version of this for our Christmas dinner.

    Although we do have our traditional dishes,our diet has been greatly influenced by other countries.You can find a wide range of international foods in the supermarket or varieties of different restaurants on our high streets.A famous saying amongst British people is that our national dish is now chicken tikka masala,a dish which is heavily influenced by Indian cuisine.

    Don't expect to be served a traditional dish if you ever get invited for dinner at a British family's home!

    It's a classroom. Instead of being told to sit quietly and listen, you are encouraged to stand up, jump around, imagine and act out. It's a class full of laughter and applause (鼓掌), emotion and energy. Welcome to drama class, one of my favorite classes at high school.

    In drama class we used to play a lot of “drama games”. We would improvise (即兴表演), copy and above all use our imagination.

    My favorite game was called “Spotto”. One person stood in the front of the class and performed a scene, completely out of their imagination. When one audience member yelled “Spotto!”, the performer had to freeze. Then the person who had yelled Spotto had to get up and improvise a new scenario (剧情) based on the position the first performer froze in. This went on as more and more people were added to the scene. Eventually the entire class would have joined the scene. Then the performers would start to leave in reverse (颠倒的) order.

    It was a lot of fun, and a good test of everyone's imagination to see what they would come up with. Drama class at my school often involved a big performance at the end of the term as well. We would work on a production throughout the term and put on a show for our parents and the school community.

    It was a great experience to perform on stage in front of a large audience. Drama class can help shy children, like me, to come out of their shells. It helped them become more confident and developed their public speaking skills. Drama class is also a great place to express oneself, and a way for children to use up some of their energy.

    The Broadcom MASTERS competition aims to find a balance between celebrating individual accomplishments and acknowledging that science seldom happens alone. The competition takes off when students from around the country are teamed up and have to solve a series of hands—on challenges in the spotlight.

    Nowadays, kids are fed with “the myth of the lone scientist”, so placing such challenges in the middle school period has a huge potential for impact. The focus on teambuilding skills gets students excited before more fears and stereotypes(成见)set in.

    The initial pool of qualified students comes from the participants in nation-wide science fairs. Those who score in the top 10％(about 10, 000 kids)have the qualification to apply. The judges select the top 300 young scientists, and that group is finally narrowed to 30 finalists.

    Selection at this stage is clearly an honor in itself, but it counts as step one for the finalists. They are then flown to Washington, D. C. and placed into teams of five for the hands-on part of the competition. Each team is made up of students with different talents and skills, including academic focus and experience.

    Unlike the science fairs, where most of the work takes place behind the scenes and students share a polished outcome, the hands-on challenges create a space where the work is the competition itself. The students take up a range of challenges in science, technology, engineering, math and so on. Each of the challenges will need the insight and skills of multiple team members.

    Judges observing the challenges aren't just looking for outcomes but also for leadership, teamwork and problem solving.

    The Broadcom MASTERS attracts increasing numbers of passionate and talented young people who are eager to take part in a program that helps them grow as scientists, engineers and inventors. It lets the students experience a sense of coming together with true peers. More importantly, it provides them with new skills to tackle future challenges.

    While every dog owner knows their dogs can read their moods perfectly, scientists have always been a little doubtful. Now thanks to some researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, we finally have some convincing evidence.

    For their study, biologist Corson Miller and his team exposes eleven selected dogs to digital images of women that were either angry or happy. Half the dogs were rewarded for touching the screen when shown a happy face, while the other half got their treat for selecting those that appeared angry.

    Interestingly, the dogs were not provided with the entire face. Some dogs were shown only upper halves while the others observed lower halves. That's because the scientists believe humans show their emotions on their entire face.

    After some training like how to recognize small differences like the wrinkles between the eyes or the changes in their shape that accompany the happy or angry expressions, the dogs were mostly able to identify the correct expression not only on a familiar face but on a strange face. The researchers concluded the dogs were smart enough to read human emotions.

    They also found those being trained to read angry expressions took a longer time to learn. They guess it may be because dogs find angry faces disgusting, causing them to withdraw quickly. However, once the smart dogs realized they were getting rewarded, the trepidation seemed to disappear. In fact, the dogs had such a good time playing the computer "game" That scientists had a hard time keeping them away from the touch screens after the study was completed.

    The researchers also noticed only dogs with a male owner had a harder time understanding the expressions correctly. Since the touch-screen models were all females, this confirmed what has been observed in previous studies dogs are more efficient at reading facial expressions of people that are the same gender as their owner.

The Ebola virus is an infectious disease that for years had almost no treatments, and it kill s about half the people it infects. Now a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases shows that a promising vaccine （疫苗）, named rVSV△G-ZEBOV-GP, doesn't just help to reduce infections, it also can cut those death numbers in half.

The vaccine is a single-dose （单剂） muscular one that causes cells to produce one of the virus's proteins. "Later, if the person is exposed to Ebola,"explains Rebecca Coulborn, a scientist with Epicentre, the medical research arm of Doctors Without Borders, "their immune system will recognize the viral protein. This recognition allows the immune system to be prepared to attack the virus and protect the person from Ebola virus disease."

Researchers showed rVSV△G-ZEBOV-GP was effective at reducing the risk of infection, but no one knew how capable it was of preventing death in someone who was vaccinated after becoming infected during an epidemic （流行病）. To figure it out, Coulborn and her colleagues focused their efforts on the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, which occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2018 and 2020.

"Every single Ebola health facility across the entire Ebola epidemic had a standardized list of all admissions," says Coulborn. This list included 2,279 confirmed Ebola patients, and it recorded whether or not each person had been vaccinated before they got sick—and if so, when they'd received the vaccine.

Coulborn found the death rate was 56% among the unvaccinated. But for those who'd received the vaccine, that rate was cut in half. This was true no matter when someone got vaccinated before the appearance of symptoms. Additionally, those who'd been vaccinated had less virus circulating in their bodies than those who hadn't. So the vaccine played an important role.

Rebecca Coulborn says she feels buoyed by the results—since they offer clear evidence that people who're at risk of contracting Ebola should be vaccinated early. It's an opportunity to cut chains of transmission （传播） and prevent an outbreak before it gains speed.