Light travels at a speed which is about a million times faster than the speed of sound. In one second, light travels about 300,000 km, but sound travels only 344m. You can get some idea of this difference by watching the start of a race. If you stand some distance away from the starter, you can see smoke come from his gun before the sound reaches your ears. This great speed of light produces some strange facts. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach us. If you look at the light of the moon tonight, remember that the light rays（光线）left the moon 1.3 seconds before they reached you. The nearest star is so far away that the light which you can see from it tonight started to travel towards you four years ago at a speed of nearly 2 million km per minute. In some cases the light from one of tonight's stars started on its journey to you before you were born.

    Thus, if we want to be honest, we cannot say “The stars are shinning tonight.” We have to say, “The stars look pretty. They were shining four years ago but their light has only just reached Earth.”

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    “This is your last chance,” warned Mrs Gillfeather. I broke out in a sweat and my hands started to shake. We both wanted to get to sleep, but before we could, I had to put a cannula(针管) in her arm.

    Before becoming a doctor I'd only a vague idea what a cannula was, coming from an hour spent with a plastic arm while at medical school. Once I became a doctor, however, I couldn't seem to get away from them.

    For those of you who are lucky enough to have never come into contact with one, they're tiny little tubes that are put into a vein(静脉)so that fluid or medicines can do directly into the blood. That's the theory. Unfortunately, the problem is that for them to work, you have to get them into the vein in the first place. This tends to be trickier than you'd imagine—and it's a job that tends to fall on the junior doctors.

    Mrs Gillfeather's veins were particularly elusive that evening. I'd been jabbing the needle in for at least 20 minutes.

    “Isn't there someone else who could do this?” she asked, for the fourth time. “Someone who knows what they're doing, perhaps,” she said under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear.

    Finally, I got it in. Mrs. Gillfeather and I both breathed a sigh of relief

    Just as I was about to leave the ward, the nurse called me over, “Max, there's another cannula to do on bed 16.”

    Hollywood is still seen as a “man's world”, but one woman is doing her best to change that.

    In May, 2017, U.S. director Sofia Coppola, 46, became the second woman in the history of the Cannes Film Festival to win the Best Director Award for her movie The Beguiled. The last time a woman won the award was 56 years ago.

    Coppola seemed to be born for a career in film. Her father is Francis Ford Coppola, who directed the famous movie The God father. Coppola first appeared as a, baby boy, Michael, in The God father.

    However, it didn't make her path to success easier. Instead, she grew up in the shadow of her father. People often criticized her for nepotism（裙带关系）and bad acting. She was named the “Worst Supporting Actress（配角）” and “Worst New Star” at the 1990 Golden Raspberry Awards for her acting in The God father Part III.

    After that, she turned to directing-what she really wanted to do all along. Her first film Lick the Star came out in 1998. And Lost in Translation soon won her an Academy Award in 2003. She gradually became famous for films focusing on women. “I just think, half the world is female,” she told Elle.com. She makes films with these females in mind. From the cute Lisbon girls in the Virgin Suicides to the teen queen Marie Antoinette, Coppola brings us into the amazing worlds of girls, rather than simply showing them as stupid, unimportant or useless, Deviant World noted.

    You probably know who Marie Curie was, but you may not have heard of Rachel Carson. Of the outstanding ladies listed below, who do you think was the most important woman of the past 100 years?

    Jane Addams (1860-1935)

    Anyone who has ever been helped by a social worker has Jane Addams to thank. Addams helped the poor and worked for peace. She encouraged a sense of community by creating shelters and promoting education and services for people in need. In 1931, Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

    Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

    If it weren't for Rachel Carson, the environmental movement might not exist today. Her popular 1962 book Silent Spring raised awareness of the dangers of pollution and the harmful effects of chemicals on humans and on the world's lakes and oceans.

    Sandra Day O'Connor (1930-present)

    When Sandra Day O'Connor finished third in her class at Stanford Law School, in 1952, she could not find work at a law firm because she was a woman. She became an Arizona state senator (参议员) and, in 1981, the first woman to join the U.S. Supreme Court. O'Connor gave the deciding vote in many important cases during her 24 years on the top court.

    Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

    On December 1,1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks would not give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Her simple act landed Parks in prison. But it also set off the Montgomery bus boycott. It lasted for more than a year, and kicked off the civil-rights movement. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” said Parks.

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    The Botanical Garden started life as Skylands, a large area in the grand manner. It is famous for a 44-room Tudor Revival granite mansion(公馆)designed John Russel Pope. Skylands has 96 acres of formal and naturalized gardens and is surrounded by over 1,000 acres of meadows(草坪) and woodlands. Purchased by the State in 1966 and officially named as the New Jersey Botanical Garden in 1984, the gardens contain approximately 5,000 species and varieties of trees and flowers.

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A living robot has been created out of frog skin cells. Xenobots, named after the frog species Xenopus laevis that the cells come from, were first described last year. Now the team behind the robots has improved their design and demonstrated new capabilities.

To create the xenobots, Michael Levin at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues obtained tissue from 24-hour-old frog embryos after very small physical operation. Where the previous version relied on the contraction of heart muscle cells to move them forward by pushing off surfaces, these new xenobots swim around faster. They also live between three and seven days longer than their previous generation, which only lasted about seven days, and have the ability to sense their surroundings to some extent, turning red when exposed to blue light.

"The fundamental finding here is that when you free skin cells from their normal context, and you give them a chance to build other things than what they normally build," says Levin. "To me, one of the most exciting things here is that they are plastic. This idea that even normal cells, not genetically modified, are in fact capable of building something completely different."

Because they are created from cells, the xenobots eventually break apart and are totally biodegradable, says team member Douglas Blackiston, also at Tufts University. He therefore hopes that they can be used for biomedical and environmental applications.

Previous attempts at creating living robots, such as a wirelessly controlled cockroach, have involved dealing with live animals, raising ethical concerns. Xenobots differ from these because they are made entirely of living cells. "The approach here is maybe ethically the least problematic because everything starts with cells. They have no neurons, so it's not an animal," says Auke ljspeert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, who wasn't involved in the research. "It's really cells, so I find it maybe the cleanest way."