SPECIAL EVENTS THIS WEEKEND

Captain Goodfellow

    Do your children enjoy interesting stories, funny games, and exciting dances? Captain Goodfellow will be ready to teach all these things to children of all ages at the City Theatres on Saturday morning at 10:00 . Free.

    Walking Tour of the Town

    Forget your worries on Saturday morning. Take a beautiful walk and learn about local history. Meet at the front entrance of City Hall at 9:30. Wear comfortable shoes!

    Films at the Museum

    Two European films will be shown on Saturday afternoon at the Museum Theatre. See Broken Window at 1:30. The workers will be at 3:45. For further information, call 4987898.

    International Picnic

    Are you tired of eating the same kind of food every day? Come to Central Park on Saturday and enjoy food from all over the world. Delicious and not expensive. Noon to 5:00 p.m.

    Take me out to the Ballgame

    It's October, and tonight is your last chance to see the Redbirds this year. Get your tickets at the gate. It might be cold. Don't forget sweaters and jackets.

    Do you want to hear “The Zoo”?

    “The Zoo”, a popular rock group from Australia, will give their first US concert this year tomorrow night at 8 Rose Hall, City College.

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    Scientists around the world are striving for effective detection of cancer in the early stages,which is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body,and a Chinese scientist may have found a quick way of knowing whether malignant tumors（恶性肿瘤）exist in a patient's body,with just one drop of blood.

    Malignant tumors in early phases can be cured.However,it's extremely difficult to be aware of cancer in its early stages,as patients don't show obvious symptoms and thus it can only be found in its later stages,which is already too late,so to detect cancer early remains a global challenge for scientists.

    Back in 1989,scientists have found a kind of heat shock proteins (HSP),named Hsp90α,which existed in human bodies and can be used as a cancer biomarker detection kit.Scientists around the globe have been working on it since then,and more than 10,000 journals have been published on accredited magazines,yet no one has actually turned their research results into medical products.

    However,Luo Yongzhang and his team in Tsinghua University's School of Life Sciences in Beijing seemed to have cracked the code,after working on the problem since 2009.The team has produced an artificial Hsp90α protein for clinical use that gains structural stability by regrouping proteins.The test kit can diagnose multiple kinds of cancer by analyzing a drop of human blood.This means they are able to "create" the protein,in any quantity,and at any time they wish to.

    The kit has since been used in clinical trials involving 2,347 patients at eight hospitals in China.It was the first clinical trial in the world to test if the protein could be a useful tumor biomarker for lung cancer,and it succeeded. Now,the kit has been approved to enter the Chinese and European markets,24 years after Hsp90α was discovered.

    Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford. At that time, few people went to college, but Noah loved to learn so his parents let him go to Yale, Connecticut's only college. He left for New Haven in 1774. Noah's years at Yale were the years of the Revolutionary War.

    Sometimes 70 children of all ages were in one-room schoolhouses with no desks, poor books, and untrained teachers. Noah did not like that. Their books came from England. Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, Noah wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

    For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read.

    When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English. Noah used American spellings like “color” instead of the English “colour”, “music” instead of “musick” and “center” instead of “centre”. He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like “skunk” and “squash”. It took him over 27 years to write his book. When finished in 1828, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it.

    Noah did many things in his life. He worked for copyright laws, wrote textbooks, Americanized the English language, and edited (编辑) magazines. When Noah Webster died in 1843, he was regarded an American hero.

    Planning a visit to the UK? Here we help with ways to cut your costs.

    AVOID BIG EVENTS     Big sporting events, concerts and exhibitions can increase the cost of accommodation and make it harder to find a room. A standard double room at the Thistle Brighton the final Friday of the Brighton Comedy Festival (19 Oct.) cost ￡169.15 at Booking.com. A week later, the same room cost ￡118.15.

    If you can be flexible and want to know dates to avoid -or you're looking for a big event to pass your time—check out sites such as Whatsonwhen.com, which allow you to search for events in the UK by city, date and category.

    STAY AWAY FROM THE STATION     If traveling to your destination by train, you may want to find a good base close to the station, but you could end up paying more for the sake of convenience at the start of your holiday.

    Don't be too choosy about the part of town you stay in. Booking two months in advance, the cheapest room at Travelodge's Central Euston hotel in London for Saturday 22 September was ￡95.95. A room just a tube journey away at its Covent Garden hotel was ￡75.75.And at Farringdon, a double room cost just ￡f62.95.

    LOOK AFTER YOURSELF     Really central hotels in cities such as London, Edinburgh and Cardiff can cost a fortune, especially at weekends and during big events. As an alternative consider checking into a self-catering flat with its own kitchen. Often these flats are hidden away on the top floors of city centre buildings. A great example is the historic O'Neill Flat on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, available for ￡420 for five days in late September, with room for four adults.

    Did you ever have to say "no" to somebody? Such as a classmate who asks to go to lunch with you? New research suggests that, at least socially, a rejection (拒绝) should not include an apology. In other words, saying you are sorry does not make the person being rejected feel any better. In fact, it might make the rejected person feel worse. That is surprising. Many people consider it to be good manners to say they are sorry when they turn down a request.

    Gili Freedman is doing some related research at Dartmouth College. For her research, she asked over 1,000 people to respond to different examples of social rejection. In one example, the researchers asked people for their reaction (反应）after a person named Taylor asked to join a co-worker who went out to lunch every Friday. And Taylor was told "no". But in some cases, the person rejecting Taylor offered an apology. In other cases, the people doing the rejection did not say they were sorry. People were asked how they would feel if they were being turned down, just as Taylor was. Most said they would be more hurt by a rejection with an apology than a rejection without an apology.

    Freedman said the reason is that apologies make people feel like they need to say that the rejection was okay— even when they felt like it was not okay. Rejection without an apology lets them express their feelings of disappointment, hurt or anger more easily. Freedman also said that an apology often makes the person doing the rejection feel better—even as it makes the person being rejected feel worse.

    Her research deals only with social communication. A business situation might be very different. "If a manager rejects a job interviewee or a boss must tell an employee that he or she is being fired from a job," Freedman said, "reactions to apologies may be different."