The Cambridge Science Festival Curiosity Challenge

                                                                        Dare to Take the Curiosity Challenge!

    The Cambridge Science Festival (CSF) is pleased to in form you of the sixth annual Curiosity Challenge. The challenge invites, even dares school students between the ages of 5 and 14 to create artwork or a piece of writing that shows their curiosity how it inspires them to explore their world.

    Students are being dared to draw apicture, write an article, take a photo or write a poem that shows what they are curious about. To enter the challenge, all artwork or pieces of writing should be sent to the Cambridge Science Festival, MIT Museum, 265 Mass Avenue,

Students who enter the Curiosity Challenge and are selected as winners will be honor at a special ceremony during the CSF on Sunday, April 21^st. Guest speakers will also present prizes to the students. Winning entries will be published in a book. Student entries will exhibited and prizes will be given. Families of those whotake part will be included in celebration and brunch will be served.

    Between March 10^th and March15h, each winner will be given the specifics of the closing ceremony and the Curiosity Challenge celebration. The program guidelines and other related information are available at :http:// cambridge science festival.org.

    At times my mom has been uncomfortable seeing these qualities in me. For example, when I was 12, I went to Puerto Rico all by myself to stay with my grandmother for the summer. My mom was extremely nervous about it. She kept telling me how things were different in Puerto Rico, to always put on sunscreen, not to wander away from my grandmother, and other warnings. She helped me pack and did not leave the airport until she saw my plane take off.

    But despite her worries, she let me go on my own. As I moved into my teens, she continued to give me space to grow and learn even when it might have been difficult for her. When I reached my senior year, I decided to move away for college. Once again I found that I differed from my peers: while many of them wanted to stay close to home, I couldn't wait to be out in the world on my own. While my mom may not have been happy at the thought of me going away, she was supportive and excited for me.

    One big thing I realized during my senior year, as my mom granted me more freedom, was that she actually believes in me and trusts me. That means a lot. Most of my life, and especially when I was little, the main person I tried to impress in my schoolwork or other things was my mother. I knew she expected nothing but the best from me. Sometimes it was hard to live up to her standards; getting a single B on my report card would make me feel bad because I knew she wanted me to have all A's.

    I know that her high standards have helped me stay focused on what's important, like education, and made me who I am. I am thankful for her support and involvement in my life. Most of all I respect her. She is the strongest woman I know and that's why I have turned out so strong and independent.

    Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers , small tightly knit (联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 1,200 languages between them.

    Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialization, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalization and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

    At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number (中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

    Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busum in Cameroon (eight remaining Speaker), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark) none of these seems to have much chance of survival.

    There are two main things that make aircraft engineering difficult: the need to make every component as reliable as possible and the need to build everything as light as possible. The fact that an airplane is up in the air and can't stop if anything goes wrong, makes it perhaps a matter of life or death that its performance is completely dependable.

    Given a certain power of engine, and consequently a certain fuel consumption, there is a practical limit to the total weight of aircraft that can be made to fly. Out of that weight as much as possible is wanted for fuel, radio navigational instruments, passenger seats, or freight room, and of course, the passengers or freight themselves. So the structure of the aircraft has to be as small and light as safety and efficiency will allow. The designer must calculate the normal load that each part will bear. This specialist is called the "stress man." He takes notice of any unusual stress that may be put on the part as a precaution against errors in manufacture, accidental damage etc.

    The stress man's calculations go to the designer of the part, and he must make it as strong as the stress man says is necessary. One or two small parts are always tested to prove that they are as strong as the designer intended. Each separate part is tested, then a whole assembly—for example, a complete wing, and finally the whole aeroplane. When a new type of aeroplane is being made, normally only one of the first three made will be flown. Two will be destroyed on the ground in strict tests. The third one will be tested in the air.

    When a plane has passed all the tests it can get a government certificate of airworthiness, without which it is illegal to fly, except for test flying.

    Making the working parts reliable is as difficult as making the structure strong enough. The flying controls, the electronic equipment, the fire precautions, etc. must not only be light in weight, but must work both at high altitudes where the temperature may be below freezing point and in the hot air of an airfield in the tropics.

    To solve all these problems the aircraft industry has a large number of research workers, with elaborate laboratories and test houses, and new materials to give the best strength in relation to weight are constantly being tested.

Scientists have long thought about whether each animal species has a different language, much like different human languages that we cannot understand. Language experts agree on the fact that the way animals communicate through various calls does not fit the definition of human languages.

Animal calls are not considered a language because the calls are limited to signals related to food activities, warning about the presence of enemies and so on. They lack the characteristic of productivity that all human languages share. That is — humans create new expressions every day by combining different words to express meanings. Animal calls are fixed in their meanings, while human language goes further and includes expressions of complex ideas that do not have a limit.

However, animals do communicate. People who study humans believe that people speak with their entire bodies. To express a message, one does not always need words. Have you ever shared a private joke with your friends across the table? All you did was to give them a self-satisfied smile, Animals can communicate in much the same way as humans do. Although animals do not have the ability to speak words, they can use other methods, such as gestures, movements, calls and their sense of smell. In short, most of their communication is not related with speech.

If animals can make noises, why can't they talk? Humans and animals both have the necessary organs that produce sounds, such as lungs, throat, voice box, lips and tongue. But the differences lie in the movement and relative position of these organs that make it possible for us to speak.

When humans developed from apes, a lot of our features were improved to better shape sounds along the way. The mouth started getting smaller and the neck grew longer. All other animals, including our closest animal relatives — chimpanzees, have little similarity, which determines humans' ability to speak.

Like reading? Interested in Chinese classical novels? Have a look at the following four books which are we known to most Chinese as Four Masterpieces.

The Water Margin

The Water Margin, also known as All Men Are Brothers in Pearl Buck's translation, Shui Hu Zhuan in Chinese, is along chapter novel with the Song Jiang Uprising in the late Northern Song Dynasty as the main background and type of heroic legend. It is an immortal (不朽的) novel and has inspired many storytellers. The author of the novel is generally regarded as Shi Nai'an (1296~1371).

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the first full-length historical romance novel in China. Its author is Luo Guan zhong (about 1330~1400), a famous novelist in the late Yuan Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty. Characters such as Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Zhuge Liang have become household names among the Chinese.

Journey to the West

Journey to the West is the first romantic chapter novel about gods and devils in ancient China. There are 100 copies of Journey to the Westin the existing Ming Publications without the author's signature. Wu Yuxuan, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty, first proposed that the author of Journey to the West was Wu Cheng'en (1500~1582) of the Ming Dynasty.

The Dream of the Red Chamber

The Dream of the Red Chamber, also called The Story of the Stone, is said to be the greatest masterpiece of Chinese fiction. It is generally believed to be written by Cao Xueqin (about 1715~1763), a writer of the Qing Dynasty. With hundreds of persons and their stories, the story is very complex but also very interesting for its encyclopedic character(百科全书式的人物).