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!

    Bats are the only mammals(哺乳动物) that can fly a great distance, but they have another ability. Many bats live a very long time for an animal of their size. European researchers are studying bats to understand why they lives0 long. They hope to make discoveries aimed at fighting the aging process in human beings.

    Last week, the group of scientists said they had identified important biological qualities in some bat species. The group studied bat chromosomes(染色体), a line of genes found in the nucleus(细胞核) of cells. The scientists were most interested in structures connected to the ends of the chromosomes. They are called telomeres(端粒), which protect the ends of chromosomes and shorten each time a cell divides. Scientists believe this shortening process causes cells to breakdown. They say this is what causes aging.

    The European researchers studied 493 bats from four bat species. The group used information that had been gathered over more than 60 years. Of these animals ，the greater mouse-eared bat generally lived the longest, an average of 37 years. The scientists said this and a related species, which are grouped together under the name Myotis, had telomeres that did not shorten with age. Another Myotis bat holds the record for oldest age, reaching 41years. The scientists' findings suggest that these bats cells have the ability to maintain and repair their telomeres. This, they said, helps guard against the aging process.

    Based on its body size, a bat like the greater mouse-eared bat would be expected to live four years. But, these mammals have been found to live nearly 10 times longer than that. The scientists found that only 19 species of mammals live longer than humans when their body size is considered. Eighteen of these are bats.

    The medical world is gradually realizing that the quality of the environment in hospital may play an important role in helping patients to get better.

    As part of a nationwide effort in Britain to bring art out of the museums and into public places, some of the country's best artists have been called in to change older hospitals and to soften the hard edges of modern buildings. Of the 2500 national health service hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have very valuable collections of present art in passages, waiting areas and treatment rooms.

    These recent movements first started by one artist, Peter Senior, who set up his studio at a Manchester hospital on northeastern England during the early 1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and that art should be enjoyed by a wider audience.

    A common hospital waiting room might have as many as 5,000 visitors each week. What a better place to hold regular exhibitions of art! Senior held the first exhibition of his own paintings in the outpatients waiting area of the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to be Britain's first hospital artist, Senior was so much in demand that he was soon joined by a team of six young art school graduates.

    The effect is striking. Now in the passages and waiting rooms the visitor experiences a full view of fresh colours, playful images and restful courtyards.

    The quality of the environment may reduce the need for expensive drugs when a patient is recovering from an illness. A study has shown that patients who had a view onto garden needed half the number of strong pain killers compared with patients who had no view at all or only a brick wall to look at.

    After the operation, Peter suffered severe pain, but insisted that he didn't need any treatment. One evening, he found Susan, his wife, crying in the kitchen of their apartment in a rare outburst of frustration. “If you won't help yourself, no one else can,” she said.

    Peter started a list “How to Help Myself”, and on it he wrote, “Keep communicating with the doctors, even if they are dark thoughts.” On October 20th, a few days before his 33 birthday, Peter wrote in a Facebook post, “It's been hard to get along with having an incurable Grade 4 brain cancer; it's been hard not to get angry and sad about it; and it's been hard to accept that modern medicine isn't able to fix me.” But at the same time, he wrote, “Every day I wake up not-dead is a gift.”

    Peter and Susan had other lists, detailing the things that they hoped to accomplish in life, which included a trip to Wimbledon; climbing Mt. Snowdon in Wales; and a list of musical wishes—from learning the Bach sonatas (奏鸣曲) and partitas (变奏曲) to performing the first violin part in a concert.

    Peter started working on Bach's six sonatas and partitas, the most difficult parts, which George Enescu, a world-famous violinist, once described as the Himalayas (喜马拉雅山) for violinists. Peter practiced every day, even if he could manage only fifteen minutes between medical treatments. As he mastered each piece, he posted his performances on Facebook. He finished on November 12th, then turned to the even more difficult Paganini caprices (随想曲), which he had often listened to in a recording by Itzhak Perlman. “It's something I always wanted to play when I grew up, like wanting to be a great baseball player,” he said.

    David Cameron is urging today's youngsters to abandon French to concentrate on the tongue of the future—Mandarin(普通话)。

    Cameron said: "I want Britain linked up to the world's fast-growing economies. And that includes our young people learning the languages to seal tomorrow's business deals.”

    "By the time the children born today leave school, China is to be the world's largest economy. So it's time to look beyond the traditional focus on French and German and get many more children learning Mandarin.” To strengthen his message , he quoted Nelson Mandela—the former president of South Africa who said "If you talk to a man in a language he understands that goes to his head; if you talk to him in his own language that goes to his heart.”

    Cameron said that a partnership between the British Council (英国文化协会) and Hanban will double the number of Chinese language assistants in the UK by 2016 and provide increased funding to schools of offering Mandarin as a language choice. In a development of the UK—China School Partnership programme , funding will also be provided for 60 headteachers to make study visits to China in 2014.

    In recent research the British Council found only 1% of the adult population speaks Mandarin to a level that allows them to conduct a basic conversation. Just 3,000 pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland entered for Chinese languages GCSEs in 2013, putting it far behind the traditional choices of French with 177,000, Spanish with 91,000 and German with 62,000 entrants(加入者), as well as Urdu, Polish and Arabic.

    Professor Dame Helen Wallace, the British Academy's foreign secretary, said, " a lack of qualified teachers could be a barrier to improve its popularity.”

    Laura Chan, one of the co—founders of a bilingual Mandarin—English primary school, said the prime minister's announcement was good news for the status of Mandarin. She said, "It's a great help. It will increase people's awareness of Mandarin as a language they can learn.”

Tests have shown robots can diagnose heart problems in as little as four seconds, as a review of artificial intelligence (AI) finds machines are now as good at spotting illness as doctors.

Analyzing a patient's heart function on a cardiac MRI (心脏磁共振成像) scan currently takes doctors around 13 minutes. But a new trial by University College London (UCL) showed an AI program could read the scans in less time with equal accuracy. There are approximately 150,000 such scans performed in the UK each year, and researchers estimate that fully using AI to read them could save 54 clinician-days (临床天数) at each cardiac centre per year. So it can make up for the shortage of doctors.

It is hoped that AI where computer systems are able to learn from data to identify new patterns with minimal human intervention will transform medicine by helping doctors spot diseases such as heart disease and cancer faster and earlier. However, most scans are still read by specially trained doctors.

Dr Charlotte Manisty, who led the UCL research, said, "Cardiovascular MRI offers in- comparable image quality for assessing heart structure and function. However, current manual analysis remains basic and outdated. Automated machine techniques offer the potential to change this and completely improve efficiency and accuracy, and we look forward to further research that could confirm the superiority to human analysis."

She added, "Our dataset of patients with a range of heart disease who received scans enabled us to demonstrate that the greatest sources of measurement errors arise from human factors. This indicates that automated techniques are at least as good as humans, with the potential soon to be 'super-human'—transforming clinical and research measurement precision."

Professor Alastair Denniston said, "Within those handful of high-quality studies, we found that by deep learning AI could indeed detect disease ranging from cancer to eye disease as accurately as health professionals. But it's important to note that it did not absolutely exceed human professional diagnosis. "