Michelin inspectors, the super secret spies of the restaurant industry, are the anonymous (匿名的) keepers of the famous Michelin star rating. They've been writing anonymous reports of restaurants for over 100 years.

    “We say it's a little like the CIA,” said inspector “M” with a laugh. She asked that her identity not be revealed. “My whole life is staying under the radar, staying away from cameras, using fake names, trying to steal in and out of restaurants quietly.”

    Along with their boss, Jean Luc Naret, the director of the Michelin Guide, about 90 inspectors around the world decide which restaurants will win the cooking equivalent (等价物) of an Oscar, the Nobel Prize and Megamillions jackpot (百万彩票) all at once. The Michelin Guide covers 23 countries, and out of the 45,000 rated restaurants, less than 100 have the top rating — only nine American restaurants carry three stars.

    If the name “Michelin” brings the tires on your car to mind, you're not too far off. The Michelin rating began in France in 1900 as a marketing trick. The Michelin brothers thought their customers would bum more rubber if given a list of hotels and restaurants to explore.

    Inspector “M” admitted being an inspector leads to a lonely dining life. “Most of the time we dine alone,” she said. “It gives us the ability to really focus on the food and the atmosphere and capture the entire experience.” To cover their tracks, “M” said sometimes two inspectors will dine together and write two separate papers. It's better than saying “table for one”, right?

    “When you're really, really into food and very crazy about food, everything else that's going on around you isn't so important,” she said.

    Helen Monson has always been interested in helping her community. Her first volunteer experience was for the American Red Cross when she was in high school. When she was a school teacher, she also found time to volunteer.

After she retired, she started volunteering to help the old. When her father was older, he was not able to see as well as he used to, which made her sad because he had always enjoyed reading.

    She decided it would be fun to read to elderly people in her community. She also helped one woman write her stories. Ann was almost 100 years old, and Helen wrote down information about her life when she visited Ann. She put the information in a book and got it published. Ann was very excited to share her life story with her children and grandchildren.

    One day Helen read an article in the newspaper about refugees (难民) who needed to learn English. Now, she meets once a week with Sahra, a 38-year-old woman from Somalia. Sahra is learning reading and writing skills. Helen gave Sahra a camera and asked her to take pictures of her daily life. She developed the pictures, and then asked Sahra questions about them. In the end they wrote a book together and used the photos in the book. This helped Sahra learn many new words about her everyday life.

    Helen says, “The most rewarding part of volunteer work is becoming friends with the people I help. They enrich my life as well as I enrich theirs.”

Plastic-Eating Worms

    Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills(垃圾填埋场), and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

    Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物) and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes (酶) from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.

    Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food — beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. “Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well,” she explains, “The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond. ”

    Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?

    Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process — not simply “millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.”

    Gardeners such as Prince Charles who claim that talking to plants encourages them to grow have long been seen as a little silly. But scientists have discovered evidence which suggests the Royal may actually be right and they could be listening to him. Biologists at Tel Aviv University in Israel have found that flowers can act as a plant's "ears" to help them detect the sound of approaching insects.

    When the researchers played recordings of flying bees to evening primrose flowers, within three minutes the sugar concentrations in the nectar (花蜜) of its flowers increased. The fluid, produced to attract pollinating (授粉) insects, was on average 20 percent higher in flowers exposed to the buzz compared to those left in silence or exposed to higher pitched sounds. Professor Lilach Hadany, who led the study, said: "Our results document for the first time that plants can rapidly respond to pollinator sounds in an ecologically relevant way."

    However, Prof Hadany said a plant's ability to respond to pollinators may be weakened in city environments or beside a busy road. While plants require water, sunlight and the right temperature to grow, it is widely believed they do not have senses in the way animals do.

    But the study, published on the open-science website BioRxiv, suggests the efforts of gardeners who talk to their plants may not be in vain. "Plants' ability to hear has implications well beyond pollination—plants could potentially hear and respond to herbivores, other animals, the elements, and possibly other plants," Prof Hadany added.

    A month-long experiment conducted by the Royal Horticultural Society in 2009 found female voices appear to speed up the growth of tomatoes. The research offers a possible explanation — women's voices were at the right frequency for the plants to hear.

    On a rainy winter day, several decades ago, a British artist named Christopher got on a train in Oxford to go to London. When he began his journey, he never knew that it was the beginning of almost 40 years of accidents and near death experiences.

    During the journey, the train fell into an icy river, killing 12 passengers. Christopher managed to swim back to the river bank. He only had a broken leg.

    Two years later, Christopher was on a plane from London to Manchester when a door suddenly opened and he fell out. A few minutes later, the plane crashed; 27 people were killed. Christopher was so lucky that he landed in a haystack (干草堆).

    A few years later, he was hit by a bus, but again had no serious injuries. Then a year after that, he was driving on a mountain road when he saw a truck coming straight at him. He drove the car off the road, jumped out, landed in a tree — and watched his car fall 100 meters down the mountain.

    "There are two ways you can look at it," Christopher said. "I'm either the worlds unluckiest man, or the world's luckiest." When a reporter asked Christopher what he thought, he chose the "luckiest" one.

    Two years ago, aged 71, Christopher bought his first lottery ticket (彩票) in 50 years and won more than 2 million. After this, a TV company in America said they wanted him to make an advertisement. At first he accepted, but then he changed his mind. Christopher said he would not fly to Los Angeles for the filming, because he did not want to push his luck. Who knows? If he had accepted the invitation, maybe he would have had another accident. But Mr. Christopher is a lucky man. If he had had another accident, he probably would have survived that too!

I've spent over a year in India, and in those 365 plus days, I've learned a lot about getting around Indian cities. My biggest lessons have been learned through being cheated, particularly by taxi and rickshaw (人力车) drivers, but that doesn't mean those are bad ways to travel, as long as you know what you're doing. Below are the best ways to get around the city of Delhi, India, and tips for how to keep from being the victim of scams (欺骗).

Taking taxis is a great way to get around the city of Delhi and chances are, if you arrive in Delhi by plane, as soon as you make it through customs, you'll be swarmed by Indian taxi drivers. At the Delhi airport, be sure to arrange for a taxi to your hotel at one of the two Delhi Traffic Police Taxi Booths. One is inside the airport, and one is outside. The key is to make sure to go to a booth run by the police, rather than by independent taxi drivers.

Rickshaws are one of my favorite ways to get around Indian cities, in part because it's how the locals often travel. Auto­rickshaws are more common, but bicycle rickshaws are still used in Old Delhi. If you do have a chance to take a bicycle rickshaw, you should do it at least once for a unique experience that should only set you back about 15 rupees. Auto­rickshaw rates around Delhi range between 30 and 80 rupees, depending on distance.

If you really want to travel around Delhi like the locals, take a public bus. Indian buses become very crowded and most do not have air conditioning. They are, however, very cheap. A bus trip won't set you back any more than 15 rupees, as long as you stay within the city limits. Since Indian buses get so crowded, try to board the bus at the start of the route so you can get a seat.

The train is a great way to get around within the city of Delhi. Fares are reasonable, between six and 22 rupees. All departure announcements are in both Hindi and English, and tokens can be purchased for between 6 and 22 rupees.