Our room was on the second floor but you could still hear the roar of the ocean and see the stars at night. I used to take long walks along the water. The food in town was wonderful and the people were very friendly. The area was very quiet and peaceful, and fairly deserted.

    The last evening of our vacation, however, we all heard strange footsteps following closely behind us as we were walking up to our room in the holiday centre. We turned around and noticed a fairly young man moving very rapidly across the beach and getting closer to us. He was tall and wore a baseball cap. We didn't have any cell phones on us. I never saw Dad as worried as he was then and knew that something was terribly wrong. The sense of fear started to overwhelm Mom and me. We had had such a good time in town. Now, the night was rapidly turning into a dangerous situation.

    We could hear the man's footsteps getting closer. Dad's face was almost pale. The so-called intruder (侵入者) had moved nearer and nearer when all of a sudden, the nearby vending (自动贩卖) machine started going crazy and spitting out cans of soda! The noise actually scared the intruder and he ran out of sight. My parents were shaking, but we all turned around to see who had put money into the vending machine downstairs, and actually saved us, but no one was around at all.Not a soul.

    It's one vacation I will never forget.

    January means it's time for coats and gloves and cold weather. While many of us are preparing ourselves for the cold weeks ahead, in some cities winter is the “hottest” season of all because it's the time for winter festivities.

    Every year 2 million people visit the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan. This internationally well-known event began in 1950, when some local high-school students built six snow statues in Odori Park. Since then, the festival has grown to include lots of snow sculptures as well as a snow-sculpting contest that draws competitors from all over the world.

    In December, Finland created its 13th annual Snow Village, which will remain open until April, if weather permits. Snow Village lies nearly 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. The village is designed by builders skilled in working with snow and ice. Visitors can take a tour of the village, eat in a restaurant made of ice or go dancing in the disco igloo(拱形圆顶小屋). They can also spend the night in a hotel made of snow. There's even an ice chapel(小礼拜堂) for couples who want to get married in Snow Village.

    Since 1935, the Fur Rendezvous has been held every February in Anchorage, Alaska, America's most northern state. Among the festival's many attractions is the World Championship Sled Dog Race, which draws sled dog teams from many countries. Dogs also take center stage in the Dog Weight Pull, in which dogs compete to see which one can pull the heaviest weight. The festival features sports like skiing, basketball, boxing and softball as well as the Grand Prix Auto Race in downtown Anchorage. True to the festival's name, there's also a fur auction(拍卖), where buyers buy real Alaskan furs. The first Fur Rendezvous lasted only three days. Now it's a 10-day event that attracts thousands of visitors.

    Breakdancing is set to make its debut(首次亮相) as an Olympic sport at Paris2024, Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris organizing committee, said on February 21". Skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing which have already been added to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, have been invited to return in Paris.

    Estanguet said the choices responded to a need to make the Olympics "more urban" and “more artistic". "We have chosen to present the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with the four sports because they are creative, appealing to youth and completely in line with our vision. They reflect perfectly Paris 2024's identity.”

    Breakdancing is an example of a sport "which can be played anywhere and anytime in urban and other environments." It appeared at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires in the form of head-to-head "battles". In competitive breakdancing, "breakers face off in "battles" against each other, either as individuals or teams. Breakdancers use- a mix of physical and artistic skills combining elements from gymnastics or acrobatics(杂技).

    The IOC had announced that the number of competitors at Paris 2024 would be restricted to 10,500, which limited the opportunity to add sports. But the organizers said the inclusion would not necessitate the construction of permanent facilities and would involve just 248 competitors, including 32 breakdancers. The surfing events are likely to be held in established surf center such as Biarritz or Lacanau in southwest France.

    The inclusion still needs to be rubberstamped by the IOC, which is expected to decide on which sports to add in Paris after next year's Tokyo Games.

    In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified(木乃伊化的) and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. "Not one or two here and there", reported English Illustrated Magazine, "but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep. " Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer. One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.

    Those were the days of generously funded explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the estates and museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

    In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites' wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.

    "They're really displays of daily life," says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After peering beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection — a bridge between people today and those of long ago. "You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us."

    When young, I loved going on trail(小路) runs. It was my favorite way to escape stress. So, when I was back in my hometown after a tough first year of my Ph. D. program, I thought a trail run was just what I needed. But instead of helping me relax, the run did just the opposite.

    After I moved to the city for college, where my runs were on flat concrete paths instead of winding dirt trails, I used a GPS watch. When I went on trail runs again in the country, it constantly reminded me of the fact that I wasn't keeping up with my usual pace. I turned my watch off, thinking that would allow me to enjoy my surroundings and find the peace I expected, but I worried I was underperforming. "Why can't I let go and just enjoy myself?" I wondered. But after some introspection(反省), I realized why I was struggling­both on trail runs and in graduate school.

    Going into my Ph. D. , I had thought that my solid undergraduate track record would set me up for instant success. To my surprise, I was wrong. I lacked confidence in my research abilities which I thought stopped me performing well and I constantly felt my progress was too slow. Other students'self-confidence and their excellent results made me feel insecure. Finally, one day I broke down in tears in my adviser's office.

    Then came my visit home: I was having trouble because I hadn't properly adjusted my expectations to the differences between an urban run and a trail run.

    A Ph. D. is like a trail run: Sometimes you can run fast. Sometimes you might find yourself climbing up a steep, winding trail at a snail's pace. And that's OK. Barriers are unavoidable, and success looks and feels different on a challenging trail than it does on a smooth, flat path. Sometimes it's best to take a deep breath and do your best to meet the challenge.

A group of small, waggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach an agreement on where to build their nest.

"We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don't want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions on their own," says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how copying bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a "waggle dance". The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it waggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach an agreement when a majority are waggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached an agreement within about half an hour, even when they didn't have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.