The Museum: The Charles Dickens Museum in London is the world's most important collection of material relating to the great Victorian novelist and social commentator(时事评论员). The only surviving London home of Dickens (from 1837 until 1839) was opened as a museum in 1925 and is still welcoming visitors from all over the world . On four floors, visitors can see paintings, rare editions, manuscripts(手稿),original furniture and many items relating to the life of one of the most popular and beloved personalities of the Victorian age.

Opening Hours

The Museum is open from Mondays to Saturdays 10:00—17:00; Sundays 11:00—17:00.

Last admission is 30 minutes before closing time.

Special opening times can be arranged for groups , who may wish to book a private view.

    Admission Charges: Adults: £5.00; Students: £4.00; Seniors: £4.00; Children: £3.00; Families: £14.00 ( 2 adults & up to five children)

    Group Rates: For a group of 10 or more, a special group rate of £4.00 each applies. Children will still be admitted for £3.00 each.

    Access: We are constantly working to improve access to the Muse um and its collection. Our current projects involve the fitting of a wheelchair ramp（波道）for better access, a customer care kit and an audio tour for visitors with impaired(受损的)vision. Our Handling Sessions are also suitable for the visually（视觉上地）impaired. The Museum has developed an online virtual（虚拟的）tour through the Museum. Click here to visit all the rooms in the Museum online.

    Hire the Museum: The Museum can be hired for private functions, performances soirees(社交晚会)and many other social occasions.

    Find Us: The Museum may be reached by using the following buses:7,17, 19, 38, 45, 46, 55, 243. And by these underground services: Piccadilly Line; Central Line. For a map, please click here. T he British Museum and the Foundling Museum are within walking distance.

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    Have you ever been afraid to talk back when you were treated unfairly? Have you ever bought something just because the salesman talked you into it? Many people are afraid to speak out for their rights. Dr Robert Albert, author of Stand Up, Speak Out, and Talk Back thinks it's because their self-respect is low.

    But Albert and other scientists are doing something to help people help themselves. They offer "assertiveness training" courses A. T. for short. In the A.T. Course people learn that they have a right to be themselves. They learn to speak out and feel good about doing so. They learn to help themselves without hurting other people.

In one way, learning to speak out is to get rid of fear. A group taking an A. T. Course will help the shy person to lose his fear. But A. T.uses an even stronger motive— he needs to share. The shy person speaks out in the group because he wants to tell how he feels. Whether or not you speak up for yourself depends on your self-respect. If someone you face is more "important" than you, you may feel less of a person. You start to doubt your answers to problems. You can get to feel good about yourself. And once you do you can learn to speak out.

    People typically wash their hands seven times a day in the United States, but they do it at a far higher temperature than is necessary to kill germs, a new study says. The energy waste is equivalent to the fuel use of a small country. Amanda R. Carrico, a research assistant professor at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment in Tennessee, told National Geographic that hand washing is often “a case where people act in ways that they think are in their best interest, but they in fact have inaccurate beliefs or outdated perceptions.”

    Carrico said, “It's certainly true that heat kills bacteria, but if you were going to use hot water to kill them it would have to be a way too hot for you to tolerate.”

Carrico said that after a review of the scientific literature, her team found “no evidence that using hot water that a person could stand would have any benefit in killing bacteria.” Even water as cold as 40°F (4.4℃) appeared to reduce bacteria as well as hotter water, if hands were scrubbed, rinsed(冲洗)and dried properly.

    Using hot water to wash hands is therefore unnecessary, as well as wasteful, Carrico said, particularly when it comes to the environment. According to her research, people use warm or hot water 64 percent of the time when they wash their hands. Using that number, Carrico's team calculated a significant impact on the planet.

    “Although the choice of water temperature during a single hand wash may appear unimportant, when multiplied by the nearly 800 billion hand washes performed by Americans each year, this practice results in more than 6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions annually,” she said.

    The researchers published their results in the July 2013 issue of International Journal of Consumer Studies. They recommended washing with water that is at a “comfortable” temperature, which they noted may be warmer in cold months and cooler in hot ones.

    Antarctica(南极洲)'s melting ice, which has caused global sea levels to rise by at least 13.8 millimeters over the past 40 years, was thought to primarily come from the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet(WAIS). Now, scientists have found that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)—considered largely unaffected by climate change—may also be melting at an unexpectedly rapid speed.

    The WAIS, whose base is below sea level, has long been considered the most likely to break down. Besides gravity, a deep current of warm water slips beneath the sheet, melting it from below until it becomes a floating shelf at risk of breaking away. In contrast, extreme cold and a base mostly above sea level are thought to keep the EAIS relatively safe from warm waters.

    But as greenhouse gases warm much of the planet, driving stronger polar winds, some scientists think warm water carried by a circular current will start to invade East Antarctica's once unassailable ice. A cooperation of more than 60 scientists last year, published in Nature, estimated that the EAIS actually added about 5 billion tons of ice each year from 1992 to 2017.

    Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues combined 40 years of satellite imagery and climate modeling and found that overall Antarctica now sends six times more ice into the sea each year than it did in 1979, with the majority coming from West Antarctica. But East Antarctica was responsible for more than 30% of Antarctica's contribution to the 13.8-millimeter sea level rise over the past 40 years. “The more we look at this system the more we realize this is fragile,” Rignot says. “Once these glaciers become unstable there is no red button to press to stop it.”

    Rignot hopes the study brings greater attention to a part of Antarctica that has traditionally been understudied. Helen Fricker, a glaciologist (冰川学家) in California, agrees. “We need to monitor the entire Antarctica and we just can't do that without international cooperation.”

    When I first married my wife, I lived and worked in Ontario, moving from small town to big city as I pursued my career as a radio broadcaster. We have two sons, both of whom were born in Toronto and moved with us to Ottawa. They went to school, grew up there, and then pursuing their own careers, they also moved. One went to Canada's east coast near a city called Halifax and the other headed to the west coast Vancouver. We had a dilemma; we were left in the middle.

    The problem wasn't pressing at the time because I was still working and my job was in Ottawa. However, as we began to considering retirement we wondered where we should spend our final years. We couldn't be close to both of our children and there was no telling when they might again relocate. For several reasons, we settled on a small town on Vancouver Island. At least we were close to one of them. However, he had his sights set on Hollywood and, when an opportunity presented itself, he left Canada and headed south. So, there we were, and still are, in our little west coast town. We love our little corner of paradise (乐园）but we paid a price. We have not been there for some important events such as the births of two of our grandchildren. We have missed watching them grow up, backyard barbecues, and the normal, noisy households. Our home, while comfortable, is also very quiet.

    Every fall we travel to see the children and try to spend a week or more with them and we make the even longer trip to see our grandchildren, who are now teenagers, actually into their twenties. They seldom come to visit us. The distances are just too great and it is costly.

    Fortunately, both our boys are doing well and our grandchildren are growing straight and tall. We love all of them and they love us but the reality is that they don't need us. We have done our jobs and at least in theory，we can sit back, relax and enjoy the time remaining to us. In fact, we're happy but there were times I think about the things we didn't see. They have also missed having a set of parents and grandparents around.

    Life has been good for our family but we have paid a price.