Were dinosaurs (恐龙) warm-blooded or cold-blooded? According to a new study, scientists have found that they were somewhere in the middle. This new study shows that dinosaurs were very different from most of today's animals that are either warm or cold-blooded.

    “I think we were all surprised by this,” said Felisa Smith from the University of New Mexico. “The idea certainly took some getting used to.”

    A study by a team of scientists led by John M. Grady of the university studied many different kinds of dinosaurs in their research. They looked at growth rate (比率), body temperature and body size of different kinds of dinosaurs.

    How are warm-blooded animals different from cold-blooded animals? Warm-blooded animals like humans can control their body temperature. They eat a lot, and burn calories (卡路里) quickly. They have a more active lifestyle than cold-blooded animals. While cold-blooded animals such as snakes do not control their body temperature. Instead, they must use sunlight to keep warm, and they move much more slowly. Cold-blooded animals do not need to eat very much. Their bodies slow down in colder temperatures.

    Besides dinosaurs, there are other animals that are not completely warm-blooded or cold-blooded, such as great white sharks.

The most anticipated films of 2018

    Thanks to movies like Wolf Warrior 2, Never Say Die, Youth, The Fate of the Furious an Dangal, the 2017 box office gross (票房收入) has reached new heights. Meanwhile, audience have been fed up with Hollywood's long dependence on sequel (续集) films. A lack of origin stories has been criticized for a while.

    As we embrace the new year, let's look to the future, and the most anticipated films in t following year.

Guardians of The Tomb

Country: China and Australia

Release Date: Jan 19, 2018

Director: Kimble Rendall

Stars: Li Bingbing, Kellan Lutz, Wu Zun, Kelsey Grammer

    An innocent discovery of a well-preserved mummified Emperor from 200 BC China unearths a 2000-year-old nightmare — a secret that should have remained buried.

Monster Hunt 2

Country: China

Release Date: Feb 16, 2018

Director: Raman Hui

Stars: Bai Baihe, Jing Boran, Tony Leung Chiu-wai

    Monster Hunt was a huge commercial success, breaking numerous box office records. The film took place in the distant past, when the human race existed alongside the Monster race. Monster Hunt 2 is the sequel of it.

Avengers: Infinity War

Country: United States Release

Date: May 4, 2018

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Josh Brolin, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Hiddleston, Chris Evans

    The upcoming American superhero film, based on the Marvel Comics superhero team the Avengers, is the sequel to 2012's Marvel's the Avengers and 2015's Avengers.

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

Country: United States

Release Date: July 13, 2018

Director: Genndy Tartakovsky

Stars: Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, David Spade

    This 3D animated cartoon movie, the sequel of Hotel Transylvania 2, is a fantasy-comedy for your whole family to enjoy.

    A family is a collection of people who share the same genes（基因）but cannot agree on a place to pull over for lunch. Ed and I, plus his parents and sister Doris and eight-year-old niece Alisha, are on a road trip to Yosemite. Ed wants Subway, I want. In-N-Out Burger, Doris wants Sonic. In the end, we compromise on McDonald's, where Alisha will get an action figure.

    It's a three-hour drive to Yosemite, but we're taking a little longer, as we're working in a tour of Highway 80's public restrooms. As the saying goes, “Not one bladder（膀胱）empties but another fills.” Many of these restrooms belong to gas stations. I prefer them to the high-tech ones on planes.

    We get back on the road. Ed is driving now. When all the tabloids（小报）have been read, the travel has grown tedious and anyone under age 12 asks “Are we there yet?” at ever-shortening internals. Just outside Manteca, California, we stop for coffee. At a Starbucks checkout, Ed buys a CD of Joni Mitchell's favorite musical picks. The hope is that it will have a calming effect.

    As we pull back onto the highway, it starts to pour. Then something amazing happens. As we climb the mountain, the rain turns to snow. The pines are spotted with white. We're struck dumb（说不出话）by the scene outside. For a solid 15 minutes, everyone forgets about their bladder, their blood sugar and the temperature. Alisha has never seen snow, so we pull over to make snowmen and catch snowflakes on our tongues. Then Ed realizes we need tire chains, and we have to turn back and drive 30miles to Oakhurst. “Good,” says Doris. “There was a very nice restroom there.”

    It has long been thought that elephants rely on their large ears and bathing in rivers to stay cool in hot climates. New research, however, has showed that the world's largest land animals have a secret trick of controlling their body temperatures.

    Scientists have long been puzzled by temperature regulation(调节)in elephants. Generally, animals with large bodies tend to hold more heat because, compared to their size, they have a small surface area for heat to escape from. Elephants, with their heavy­weight frames, would appear to be at a disadvantage in the heat of their African and Asian habitats, especially because they have thick fur to protect them from bushes and trees.

    Scientists thought that these creatures, which weigh up to 13 tons when fully­grown, grow large ears to help them stay cool. The skin on the ears is thinner, so blood which flows into them cools down more easily. But findings by researchers at two universities in Vienna have showed that elephants are also able to cool down by increasing the blood flow to skin patches(斑) in other parts of their bodies.

    The researchers studied six African elephants at Vienna Zoo as they moved between outdoor and indoor environments to see how the temperature on their skin surface would change. They found up to 15 “hot spots” all over an elephant's body surface, in addition to large patches on the ears. The study shows how these patches expand as the air temperature increases and more blood flows nearer to the skin surface. Other experiments show that elephants in the wild use the same “windows” to control their body temperature.

    Elephants have two additional ways to stay cool: flapping(拍打)the ears and bathing. Together with these tricks, the skin hot spots allow the animals to keep their body temperature always at about 36 degrees—one degree less than humans'.

    I was attending a party one night given in Sir Ross's honor; and during the dinner, the man sitting next to me told a humorous story based on the quotation(引语): “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

    The storyteller mentioned that the quotation was from the Bible. He was wrong. I knew that, and I knew it positively. There couldn't be the slightest doubt about it. And so, to get a feeling of importance and display my superiority, I appointed myself as an unwelcome committee of one to correct him. He stuck to his guns. “What? From Shakespeare? Impossible! Absurd! That quotation was from the Bible.” And he knew it.

    The storyteller was sitting on my right; and Frank Gammond, an old friend of mine, was seated on my left. Mr. Gammond had devoted years to the study of Shakespeare. So the storyteller and I agreed to submit the question to Mr. Gammond. Mr. Gammond listened, kicked me under the table, and then said: “Dale, you are wrong. The gentleman is right. It is from the Bible.”

    On our way home that night, I said to Mr. Gammond: “Frank, you knew that quotation was from Shakespeare.” “Yes, of course,” he replied, “Hamlet, Act Five, Scene Two. But we were guests at a happy time, my dear Dale. Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn't ask for your advice. He didn't want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid your sharp angle.” The man who said that taught me a lesson I'll never forget. I not only had made the storyteller uncomfortable, but also had put my friend in an embarrassing situation. How much better it would have been had I not become argumentative.

    Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right. You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.

    We have encountered a crisis around the corner. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who's responsible?

Actually, it's more like, what is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it – Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.

    There's been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before – there are more and more readers, and more and more books.

    The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example.

    Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.

    As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.

    On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.

    In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.

    In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg's invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.