A minister was on a long flight from China to London. The first warning of the approaching problems came when the sign on the airplane flashed on: Fasten your seat belts. Then, after a while, a calm voice said, "We shall not be serving the drinks at this time as there is going to be something unexpected. Please be sure seat belt is fastened."

    Soon the storm broke out. One moment the airplane was lifted on terrific currents of air. The plane dropped as if it were about to crash.

    The minister believed that he shared the discomfort and fear of those around him. As he looked around the plane, he could see that nearly all the passengers were upset and alarmed. The future seemed ominous and many were wondering if they would make it through the storm. Then he suddenly saw a little girl. Apparently the storm meant nothing to her. She was reading a book and everything within her small world was calm orderly. Sometimes she closed her eyes and then she would read again. Then she would straighten her legs, worry and fear were not in her world. The minister could hardly believe his eyes.

    It was not surprising therefore that when the plane finally reached its destination and all the passengers hurried to leave, the minister walked up to the girl he had watched for such a long time. Having commented about the storm and the behavior of the plane, he asked why she had not been afraid. The girl replied, "Because my dad is the pilot, and he's taking me home."

    Darek Fidyka, a 38-year-old Bulgarian, had been paralyzed (瘫痪的) from the chest down for four years after a knife attack. Scientists from Britain and Poland took cells from his nose, transplanted (移植) them into his back and re-grew his spinal cord (脊髓). Now he can walk and even drive a car. The doctors were delighted but said it was the first step in a long journey.

    The breakthrough came after 40 years of research by Professor Geoff Raisman, who found that cells had the possibility to repair damage to nasal (鼻腔的) nerves, the only part of the nervous system that constantly re-grows. “The idea was to take something from an area where the nervous system can repair itself and put it into an area that doesn't repair itself,” Professor Raisman said.

    Polish doctors injected (注射) the nasal cells into Mr Fidyka's spinal cord above the injury and used some nerves from his ankle to form a bridge across the damaged tissue. The nasal cells appear to have caused the spinal nerves to repair themselves.

    Professor Raisman achieved this with rats in the late 1990's, but this is his greatest success. “I think the moment of discovery for me was Christmas in 1997 when I first saw a rat, which couldn't control its hand, put its hand out to me. That was an exciting moment, because I realized then that my belief that the nervous system could be repaired was true.”

    Doctors chose the easiest case for their first attempt—it might not work for others. But there is a real sense of hope that an idea once thought impossible has been realized.

    David Nicholls, who helped provide money for the breakthrough, said information about the breakthrough would be made available to researchers across the globe.

    “What you've got to understand is that for three million paralyzed people in the world today, the world looks a totally brighter place than it did yesterday,” he said.

    There might be as many as 10 million species of complex life on this planet today —— a huge number. But add up all of the complex species that ever lived and some biologists think the grand total would be about five billion. The estimate leads to an astonishing conclusion: a staggering 99% of species are not around any more. They have been driven to extinction.

    More species are joining the ranks of the extinct every year. Many scientists believe we are living through an episode of remarkably rapid extinction, on a scale that has been seen only five times in the last half a billion years.

    They call this current episode the sixth mass extinction —— a large, global decline in a wide variety of species over a relatively short period of time. And they tend to agree that humans are the main cause.

    Over-hunting, overfishing, and human-driven habitat loss are pushing many species to the brink. In fact, we have changed the planet so much that some geologists are now suggesting that we have entered a new phase in Earth's history; an epoch they call the ＂Anthropocene＂. By 2100, it is expected that humans will have caused the extinction of up to half of the world's current species.

    Because we are living through this extinction, it is relatively easy for us to study the driving forces behind it. But how do we determine what caused other mass die-offs that happened long ago? To do so we have to look at what archaeologists, palaeontologists, geologists and other scientists have concluded from the evidence they have gathered.

    The trouble is, those scientists do not always agree with one another —— even about the most recent extinction event. As well as the five-or six- mass extinctions, there have also been many smaller extinctions.

    One of these mini extinction events happened towards the end of the Pleistocene, a few tens of thousands of years ago. It is sometimes called the ＂megafaunal＂ extinction because many of the species it claimed were particularly large animals, weighing more than 97lb (44kg). However, its cause remains a debate amongst scientists.

    Strongest Female Literary Characters of All Time

    There are some of history's most inspiring and great females who can be found on the pages of these novels.

    Elizabeth Bennet

    Called "Lizzie" or "Eliza" by her family and friends, Elizabeth Bennet is the stubborn and clever heroine from the 1813 Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. She's the second eldest of five daughters in the Bennet family and, like the rest of her sisters, she is expected to marry for status and money, not for love. To remain true to herself, she would rather remain single, a concept that was unheard at the time.

    Nancy Drew

    She first appeared in the 1930s but remains one of the most iconic female characters in all of literature. Created by Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy Drew wasn't simply a pretty girl. Instead, the brave, physically strong, and fiercely intelligent Nancy used her superior intelligence—not her looks—to solve a series of mysteries.

    Josephine March

    Jo March is the second eldest daughter in the March family and is a central focus in the novel Little Women, published by Louisa May Alcott in 1868. At 15, she is strong-willed, confident, and literary and unlike her sisters, she is outspoken and uninterested in marriage. Jo both struggles with and challenges society's expectations of how women in the 19th century should carry themselves, making her one of literature's most daring female characters.

    Hester Prynne

    Recognized by some critics as one of the most important characters in female literature, Hester Prynne is the leading character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. Married but separated by distance from her husband, Hester has an affair with a minister and becomes pregnant.

    Craft (手工艺）is becoming a heritage industry — but a record of disappearing skills might just come in handy in the future.

    Mr. Lobb (of John Lobb the bootmaker) mentioned that custom clothing and shoe-making were once the norm for everyone. How come，then，today a pair of normal Lobbs would set you back over £2,000? The price has obviously gone up because of lack of competition and higher wages，but would custom clothing once again be affordable to all if the demand was there? Do we just wave goodbye to these skills，or should we fight to maintain them?

    The disposable (一次性的）culture we “enjoy” today has existed in our life for almost two generations now. We like our products to be made by either a robot or invisible，cheap hands so that we can accumulate them cheaply and frequently. The concept of “craft” is something that's now largely considered to be strange，and seems to be limited to museums and dusty, independent shops. Hobby crafts such as knitting do undergo revivals (复兴)from time to time，but I think that's because they are seen as short-lived fashionable leisure pursuits rather than a craft worthy of revivals on a commercially feasible (可行的)scale.

To drive a revival in any of these crafts, you would probably need to apply the same marketing techniques that are used to sell any other items today. The consumer must believe that they just have to have it. If they don't have it now, it will either go up in price or go out of fashion — both reasons enough in themselves for a shopper to act.

    But does it finally matter if these skills will no longer serve any practicable use in the decades to come? I don't know the answer to that，but I have long thought it would be a good idea if we “banked” these skills somehow，just as we are not attempting to do with seeds. You just never know whether we'll need them in the future. Maybe it's time to establish a worldwide network of volunteers to record，through the written words and videos，as many of these dying skills as possible. Actually, a rough look on YouTube fills me with hope that an army of willing volunteers is probably out there already and just needs someone or something to gather them together.

    Chocolate could soon be a thing of the past, after scientists warned that the cacao plant, from which chocolate is made, could be extinct within 32 years.

    Over half of the world's chocolate comes from just two countries in West Africa­Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana­where the temperature, rain, and humidity provide the perfect conditions for cacao to grow. But the threat of rising temperatures over the next three decades caused by climate change, is expected to result in a loss of water from the ground, which scientists say could upset this balance.

    According to the related data, a temperature rise of just 2.1℃ could spell an end for the chocolate industry worldwide by 2050. Farmers in the region are already considering moving cacao production areas thousands of feet uphill into mountainous area­much of which is currently preserved for wildlife. But a move of this scale could destroy ecosystems that are already under threat from illegal farming and deforestation.

    Part of the problem, according to Doug Hawkins, is that cacao farming methods have not changed for hundreds of years. "Unlike other tree crops that have benefited from the development of modern, high yielding strains and crop management techniques to realize their genetic potential, more than 90% of the global cocoa crop is produced by small farms with unimproved planting material," he said. "It means that we could be facing a chocolate decrease of 100,000 tons a year in the next few years."

    Now scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have teamed up with American candy company Mars to keep chocolate on the menu. Using the controversial(有争议的) gene-editing technology known as CRISPR they are trying to develop a type of the cacao plant capable of surviving in dryer, warmer climates. If the team's work on the cacao plant is successful, it could remove the need for farmers in West Africa to relocate to higher ground, and perhaps even allow cacao to be grown elsewhere in the world.