Bananas are the perfect snack. Not only are they sweet and delicious, but they are easy to carry around, so you can take them anywhere. Best of all, bananas provide different things that the human body needs!

    Bananas grow best in warm places that get lots of rain. They grow on plants that look like trees.

    The banana plant, however, is considered a herb rather than a tree because it doesn't have a strong, woody stem(茎，干). The plants can grow as high as 30 feet. When they reach their full height, flowers grow out from the stem. These flowers produce bananas.

    Two or three times each year, the plants produce fruit. The bananas grow together, which seem like "hands". A hand is made up of 10 to 20 bananas. Growers sometimes call bananas "fingers".

    Each bunch(丛) of bananas has about 15 hands, and so a whole bunch may have as many as 200 bananas and can weigh more than 100 pounds.

    After about three months, the bananas are ready to be picked. At this point, they still aren't the sunny yellow color of bananas. Farmers pick them when they're green. That's how they're shipped to stores. They turn yellow along the way and are ready to be sold.

    If you love bananas, you've got a lot of company. Americans have been enjoying bananas since the first shipment arrived in the United States in 1876. Today, American eat more bananas than any other fruit. More bananas are sold than apples and grapes together. Every American eats over 26 pounds of bananas each year!

    Both seasonal flu, a disease like a very bad cold, and much larger pandemics, like the one caused by H7N9（禽流感） in 2013, are the result of a race between the flu virus  and the immune system which can protect people from illness. Here's how it works.

    Viruses, which cause pandemics, have two important proteins "haemagglutinin(H) and neuraminidase(N).H helps the virus go into a cell .N helps new virus break out of that cell .They are parts of a virus that may be known and dealt with by the immune system

    A flu virus attacks a host cell in order to reproduce itself. But the virus created out of it is quite different now. The virus's genetic material is copied with low fidelity. That difference produces virus which immune system does not always know and deal with immediately. Each year's seasonal virus is therefore a little bit different, and thus requires an updated vaccine to prevent people from getting that disease.

    Pandemics viruses have bigger changes in this process .Many hosts' defences are unprepared for such big changes, which happen three or four times a century .The 1918 pandemics was caused by viruses carrying H1 and N1.Anotber two pandemics in 1957 and 1968 were caused by viruses carrying H2and H3 together with N2.They are numbered by scientists. Much of this change goes on outside humans. A flu is usually from sick binds. Sometimes a bird-flu appears with materiel that enable it to spread among people .The H7N9 is recently worrying scientists in the health center.

    The flu virus sometimes jumps directly from a bird(often a chicken) to a person, but more usually passes through a pig The cells in bird and human are built differently, It means us that the virus needs different sets of material to attack them .Pig cells have features of both so that it can act as a platform in which the virus can fit from one to the other .Even after it has made humans ill, a virus cannot go ca to cause a pandemic unless it also gets the ability to pus easily between people, Luckily, this is something H7N9 has yet to do.

    Since the beginning of history, man has been fascinated by the idea of living forever, of winning the fight against death and disease. So far, this has only remained a dream, though a very powerful one. Many people have wondered whether it would be possible to find a way to preserve human bodies, and what would be the best way to preserve human bodies.

    It has long been known that meat or fruit can be kept fresh for long periods by freezing; in ancient China, for example, food was stored with ice to keep it fresh. This method could also be useful for preserving humans, and in fact many people have explored this possibility.

    However, most living beings that exist under warm conditions die when frozen. This is because of the harmful effects of freezing ice crystals, which are not only larger than the volume of the water originally in the cells, but also form sharp cutting shapes that harm the cells.

    In the 1940s Dr B. J. Luyet and a group of scientists in England were working on the problem of freezing cells without damaging them. Since the harm caused by ice crystals was the main cause of the damage, Luyet suggested removing some or all of the water from the cells before freezing them.

    Using living cells from chicken, Luyet and his assistants discovered that they could partly dry the chicken cells, using a mixture of the white part of an egg and glycerin, a clear thick liquid made chiefly from fats and oils. Some success was obtained. The chicken cells were dried, frozen for a period of time, and then carefully unfrozen.

    Almost all the cells recovered when they reached normal temperature. Since then, the cooling of whole animals to a temperature very much below freezing point for later unfreezing has become more of a possibility, and the glycerin method would probably be used to accomplish this. When this can be done completely and successfully, science will have moved much closer to its aim of freezing and storing incurable patients until the day they can be cured.

    When the Audet family turns on the lights at Blue Farm, they are using electricity that comes from cows- cow manure(粪肥).

    Cows produce a lot of waste. One cow can create 30 gallons of waste each day. Now imagine the output of over 1,000 cows at Blue Farm. That's really a big amount.

    When farmers clean their barns, they put the waste together，and spread some of it on their fields for fertilizer(肥料). But now places like Blue Farm have a new way of using cow waste. They use it to produce electricity.

    Here's how it works: A big machine moves back and forth cleaning the barn floor. "The cows are animals of habit; they get used to it,and just lift one foot and then another to let it go by. "says Marie Audet.

    The machine pushes the manure into a big 600-gallon tank like a small swimming pool. The tank is called a digester(化粪池) because what happens there is just like what happens inside a cow: Bacteria(细菌) get to work and continue to digest the manure.

    Methane gas(甲烷;沼气) in the atmosphere is known as a "greenhouse" gas because it keeps heat just like a greenhouse does, causing our planet to warm up. That's an environmental concern. But the digester has a good result. Its gas is kept and used to power electric generators(发电机).

    At Blue Farm, the generators make enough electricity to power 400 homes. The Audet family sells the extra electricity they can't use themselves.