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STANFORD UNIVERSITY

    Traveling is a very good activity. When you are fed up with your work and are allowed to take a holiday, you can go to the beautiful spots to enjoy the beauty of nature and the special character of other cities. You can breathe fresh air, visit some places of interest, meet different people and make friends with them. Then you will feel fully relaxed and you will have the energy to undertake the new tasks waiting for you.

    But sometimes, traveling is not an enjoyable thing. For example, when the bus or car you take has a bad accident, you may be trapped in it and waste your time. What's more, the weather can be changeable. If you are climbing a mountain, it may rain suddenly. You may be caught in the rain and may catch a cold. The worst thing is that you may have your money stolen and you may have an injury. All these are terrible things that can happen to a tourist.

    Therefore, before going on a trip, you must prepare yourself carefully. Firstly, you must have clear information about the weather. Secondly, you should choose a good companion so that you can help each other. Thirdly, you must be careful everywhere and try to avoid accidents. If you do these, you can enjoy your travels better and reduce unnecessary trouble.

    While there are many fascinating countries in the world to visit, I think there is something more adventurous, exotic (异国风情的) and romantic about visiting an island country. Take a look at some breathtakingly beautiful island countries in the world, which everyone should certainly visit at least once in his lifetime.

    Malta

    Malta is a beautiful southern European country in the Mediterranean Sea, which has a rich history and culture. There are amazing sky-high cliffs to climb, splendid temples to explore and lots of wonderful places to go scuba-diving. In fact, there are plenty of interesting things to see and to do in Malta and this island country has something for everyone. The historic part of Malta is shown in its incredible architecture, great walled cities, and many underground tunnels.

    Fiji

    Fiji is a fabulous island that has plenty of surprises for any adventurous travelers. It is famous for the world's best surf scenes, and many surfing enthusiasts travel to Fiji yearly to ride the great wives. Well, if surfing is not for you and you love sitting on the beach and relaxing, hiking or seeing breathtaking waterfalls, Fiji is certainly the best island country to visit.

    Maldives

    Not only is Maldives one of the most beautiful island countries, but it is one of the most popular honeymoon destinations. Situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Maldives is made up of a series of ancient coral reefs that grow up along the sides of ancient volcanoes, with fascinating beaches and luxurious resorts.

    Human began farming around 12,000 years ago, and only in the past 50 years have scientists realized we're not the only species to research into agriculture. A new study has revealed that a small Fijian ant species beat us to becoming the first farmers by almost three millions years.

    The ants have been observed carefully sowing seeds, fertilizing (施肥) them, and waiting for them to grow into plants which bear tasty fruit. What led to the formation of this relationship remains a mystery to scientists. But it puts the ants millions of years ahead of the first human societies to use farming techniques.

    The newly discovered relationship is unique to the animal kingdom. Researchers say they have already watched ants spread seeds, and ants feed plants, but they never had a case where they farm a plant they can't live without. The ants rely on the plants for shelter and food, while the plants need the ants to sow and spread their seeds.

    The find puts the ants millions of years ahead of the first human societies to use farming techniques, who began using agriculture around 12,000 years ago.

    As the plants grow under the care of the ants, the plants to keep further growth. Once the plant is big enough, its hollow chambers provide shelter for the ants. It had previously been spotted that the ants like to live in these small chambers, but the Munich researchers have uncovered the true nature of the relationship that ants sow and take care of the plants to grow themselves a new home.

    The ants will eat the fruit of the plant and harvest their seeds for further projects.

While many other examples of mutually (相互地) beneficial relationships between ants and plants exist, the discovery marks the only case in which both parties other for are totally dependent on each other survival.

When learning a new language, speakers often have non-native accents. Linguistic research suggests such accent is shaped by the speaker's first language that they learned when growing up. Schepens' team's research puts new light on just how strong these effects can be.

There're similar researches from other scientists, but Schepens' team analyzed a data set of more than 50,000 adults, who learned Dutch as their second or third languages. Besides, these adults came from more than 60 different first language backgrounds. These data were collected through a state exam administered by the Dutch government for foreigners that enter Holland. The exam rated each test taker's Dutch speaking proficiency(熟练，水平)

The team found that about half of the individual difference in the proficiency of learners could be accounted for by a handful of reasons: the learner's education and sex (women had higher scores than men), the learner's age when they arrived in Holland, the time they spent in Holland, and the learner's first language. This last reason was the most prominent one since it accounts for 50 percent of the explained difference in learners' proficiency.

What leads to this? Working with professor Hout, Schepens's team studied the linguistic similarity between Dutch and the 62 first languages spoken by different learners in the database. The huge majority—about 80 percent—of the effect of the language background was explained by linguistic similarity. Of the test takers who grew up speaking Arabic, only about 5 percent scored higher in Dutch speaking proficiency than the worst 50 percent of the test takers that grew up speaking German.

"Our results suggest this is largely due to the fact that German shares many linguistic characteristics with Dutch, but Arabic does not," says Schepens.

"This suggests a large part of the non-nativeness of a learner is simply due to the language they grew up with, and this reason is entirely out of their control," says Florian Jaeger." The result can play a part in language teaching."

A team in Europe are working with wood, but not in the usual ways. They are not carpenters（木匠）. Instead, they are scientists exploring how wood can lead to a greener electronic device, a transistor（晶体管）made from balsa wood, whose production releases less climate-warming gas into the air.

Transistors play an important role in computers and other devices. They act like tiny switches to control the flow of electricity. Engineers use them to process and store data. Today's laptops may host billions of them. So they must be tiny—only a little wider than a strand of DNA.

The new transistor being built by physicist Isak Engquist and his team at Sweden's Linköping University isn't as small as those. Big enough to see and hold, it can stand only an electric pressure that pushes electrons along. And it controls a current using charged particles（粒子）called ions.

This new technology shows a "proof of concept" that the idea can work, even if the new device is not yet ready to put into today's electronics. "While it seems large by today's standards, such a transistor still might prove useful for electronics that require low electric pressures," says Engquist.

"The new transistor suggests that future electronic devices might be made in living plants," Daniel Simon, a physicist in the team, says. "Imagine peeling away some bar k from a living tree," he says, "and stamping electronic circuits into the living wood."

In fact, Engquist says, "There are so many ways we can use wood and the components of wood that we would never have thought of." For instance, he can now imagine a wood-based sensor that could monitor crop health, measure pollution or survey a forest for fire risk.