The first day of the month of May is known as May Day. It is the time of year when warmer weather begins. People celebrate the coming of summer with customs that are expressions of joy and hope after a long winter. Today, May Day activities have been moved to the May Day holiday on the first Monday of the month. It is a public holiday when families take advantage of the time off to visit some of the UK's many attractions, including parks, zoos, historic buildings, ancient towns and villages and beautiful countryside.

    May Day celebrations have their origins in the Roman festival of Flora, the goddess of fruit and flowers, which marked the beginning of summer. People would decorate their houses and villages with leaves and flowers they picked at daybreak in the belief that the vegetation spirits would bring good luck. In the very early morning, young girls went into the fields and washed their faces with dew (露水). They believed this made them very beautiful for the following year.

    May Day was an important day in the Middle Ages and was a favorite holiday of many English villages. People of the time used to cut down young trees and stick them in the ground in the village to mark the arrival of summer. This is the origin of the maypole (五月柱). People danced around them in celebration of the end of winter. Maypoles were once common all over England and were kept from one year to the next. The tallest maypole is said to have been put up in London on the Strand in 1661. It stood more than 143 feet high and was cut down in 1717, when it was used by Newton to support a new reflecting telescope (反射式望远镜) invented by Dutch scientist Huygens.

    There were smiling children all the way. Clearly they knew at what time the train passed their homes and they made it their business to stand along the railway, wave to complete strangers and cheer them up as they rushed towards Penang. Often whole families stood outside their homes and waved and smiled as if those on the trains were their favorite relatives. This is the simple village people of Malaysia. I was moved.

    I had always traveled to Malaysia by plane or car, so this was the first time I was on a train. I did not particularly relish the long train journey and had brought along a dozen magazines to read and reread. I looked about the train. There was not one familiar face. I sighed and sat down to read my Economics.

    It was not long before the train was across the Causeway and in Malaysia. Johore Baru was just another city like Singapore, so I was tired of looking at the crowds of people as they hurried past. As we went beyond the city, I watched the straight rows of rubber trees and miles and miles of green. Then the first village came into sight. Immediately I came alive; I decided to wave back.

    From then on my journey became interesting. I threw my magazines into the waste basket and decided to join in Malaysian life. Then everything came alive. The mountains seemed to speak to me. Even the trees were smiling. I stared at everything as if I was looking at it for the first time.

    The day passed fast and I even forgot to have my lunch until I felt hungry. I looked at my watch and was surprised that it was 3:00 pm. Soon the train pulled up at Butterworth. I looked at the people all around me. They all looked beautiful. When my uncle arrived with a smile, I threw my arms around him to give him a warm hug (拥抱). I had never done this before. He seemed surprised and then his weather-beaten face warmed up with a huge smile. We walked arm in arm to his car.

    I looked forward to the return journey.

    When you eat fish, you probably eat it off a plate, using a fork. Well, the dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, eat their fish from conch（海螺）shells!

    Scientists have found some of these bottlenose dolphins（宽吻海豚）using their large beaks to trap fish in shells underwater. Then, carrying the shells to the surface, they shake out the fish into their mouths and eat them. Clearly, using the conch shells allows the dolphins to catch more fish than they would be able to without such a tool. The technique has been called "conching".

    Researchers noticed dolphins engaging in the behavior a handful of times from 2007 to 2009. This dolphin trend seemed to become popular.

    Simon Allen, a scientist, was surprised to see the conching technique spreading. "In the lasts four months alone, the research team have seen and photographed the behavior no less than six times, possibly even seven," he said in a press release. He thinks the dolphins may be learning conching from one another.

    Dolphins are known to be highly intelligent. The size of their brain is large in proportion（比例）to their body size. Compared with other animals, they have highly developed communication and social skills. This species of dolphin also uses other tools. They will break off pieces of sponges that grow in the ocean, for example, and use them to cover their beaks. This allows them to search for food on the ocean floor without hurting their noses.

    Scientists are going to keep trying to catch the dolphins in the act of conching. They hope to see evidence of the dolphins teaching one another the technique. They also want to know how the dolphins get fish in the conch shell. Do they push the fish into the shell with their beaks? Or do they chase the fish into the shell before carrying them up to eat?

    However they do it, Allen believes these dolphins to be particularly clever. "I wouldn't be too surprised to find such cunning ploys being adopted by Shark Bay's bottlenose dolphins," he said in statement.

    The idea of turning recycled plastic bottles into clothing is not new. During the last five years, a large number of clothing companies, businesses and environmental organizations have started turning plastics into fabric to deal with plastic pollution. But there's a problem with this method. Research now shows that microfibers could be the biggest source of plastic in the sea.

    Dr. Mark Browne in Santa Barbara, California, has been studying plastic pollution and microfibers for 10 years now. He explains that every time synthetic (合成的)clothes go into a washing machine, a large number of plastic fibers fall off. Most washing machines can't collect these microfibers. So every time the water gets out of a washing machine, microfibers are entering the sewers and finally end up in the sea.

    In 2011, Browne wrote a paper stating that a single piece of synthetic clothing can produce more than 1, 900 fibers per wash. Browne collected samples from seawater and freshwater sites around the world, and used a special way to examine each sample. He discovered that every single water sample contained microfibers.

    This is bad news for a number of reasons. Plastic can cause harm to sea life when eaten. Studies have also shown that plastic can absorb other pollutants.

    Based on this evidence, it may seem surprising that companies and organizations have chosen to turn plastic waste into clothing as an environmental "solution." Even though the science has been around for a while, Browne explains that he's had a difficult time getting companies to listen. When he asked well-known clothing companies to support Benign by Design—his research project that seeks to get clothes that have a bad effect on humans and the environment out of the market, Browne didn't get a satisfying answer. Only one women's clothing company, Eileen Fisher, offered Browne funding.

Los Angeles Could Be One Of The Few Cities The Olympics Can't Ruin

    In just the past several years, six cities—Boston; Rome; Stockholm; Hamburg, Germany; Krakow, Poland; and Oslo, Norway—have decisively rejected the idea of hosting the Olympics.

    The games' high costs, damaging effects on poor communities in the places that have recently hosted them have turned cities, against them—fostering the belief that "nobody wants to host the Olympic Games anymore."

    But Los Angeles is different. And on Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council made final decision to try to get the chance to host the 2024 Olympics, taking the step Boston and many others never did. In LA, organizers promise they can hold an Olympics that stays within its $5.3 billion budget Organizers in every possible host city make the same promise. But when it comes to LA, where residents greatly support the plan, even people who doubt the Olympics believe that success in hosting the Olympics without any loss might be possible. "It's basically sound," said Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, who wrote the book on the financial risks the Olympics bring to cities and their taxpayers. "I think they'll be able to do it without any financial downside, although there is always some risk attached."

    There's another reason to believe LA could succeed: It's done it before. It last hosted the Olympics in 1984, when the Olympic turned a small profit. No host since has replicated that feat.

    The Los Angeles Coliseum, which was used for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, will again serve as the place of the games, along with a new NFL stadium set to open in Inglewood in 2019. There's no need for a new Olympic village, thanks to dorms at UCLA. When LA announced its final three stadiums this month, chairman Casey Wasserman said proudly that a Los Angeles Olympics won't require any new construction—instead, it will rely entirely on already planned or temporary (临时的) places.

    Three months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Rebecca Sell, then 24, a photojournalist for Fredericksburg photographed a New Orleans couple worriedly examining water-spotted photo albums. As she took the photo, something within her clicked. "I told them I could take the ruined pictures, copy them and give them digitally restored (修复) photos," she recalls. Although a bit sceptical, the couple agreed. Rebecca took their photos home, restored them and took them to the couple at their temporary home. "It felt so good to be able to do that for them," says Rebecca.

    When her editor, Dave Ellis, saw the photo of the couple, he suggested they go back and restore damaged photos for even more people. So in January 2006, with paid time off from the paper, the two set up shop in Pass Christian. After posting a notice in the community newsletter, Rebecca and Dave received 500 photos in four days. For each, the pair took a new digital picture, then used high-tech software to erase water spots and restore colors. It just so happened that a popular website linked to Dave's blog about the experience, and soon Operation Photo Rescue, as it came to be known, had emails from hundreds of volunteers, including photographers and restoration experts, eager to help.

    Though digital restoration is a painstaking process, mending irreplaceable family pictures means the world to victims like Emily Lancaster, 71, who took out piles of ruined photo albums after Katrina, never thinking the mess could be saved. But she just couldn't bear to part with a few treasured pictures, including a portrait of her father, who had passed away, and a photo of her husband as a boy. Then she heard about Operation Photo Rescue. "I didn't have a whole lot of hope they could fix them, but they did," Emily says. "Almost every day I think about all the pictures I've lost. I'm so happy to have these two."

    In the five years since Katrina, Operation Photo Rescue has collected thousands of pictures ruined by floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. Volunteers make "copy runs" to disaster areas across the country to gather damaged photos from survivors; operating costs are covered by donations. "It's great to be able to give people some of their history back," says Rebecca. "One person told me that thanks to us, her grandmother got to see her photos again before she passed away. Moments like that remind me why I do this."