Maybe it has been the influence of the current scene: the type among urban biking. Apparently, urban biking requires entirely different bikes than suburban hiking does and therefore a Bike Design Project started where five design studios across five cities had to come up with a perfect urban bike. The winning bike will be manufactured for a limited run of 100 hikes and will be in stores next year. Industry, a Portland-based studio, came up with a very interesting bike: one that uses bluetooth and handlebars (车把手) that tell you when to stop or turn.

    Industry worked together with Ti Cycles to create a bike with a 3D printed titanium frame (钛框架). The hike is called Solid and can be connected to a smartphone APP: My Bike. This APP alarms a user when a light needs replacement and if something gets wrong with one's brakes. There is also software called Discover My City, which has a series of routes through Portland's most trendy neighborhoods, with suggestions about where to eat and shop.

    Nevertheless, the idea with cycling is that you need to focus on the road and not on your smartphone. This bike therefore uses integrated feedback on handlebars. Those handlebars tell a user when to turn, as they will buzz when a turn appears. As you are getting closer, they will buzz more frequently. And then there is the possibility to control your light via built-in sensors and change gears by pressing an electronic button.

    Although the bicycle looks highly interesting and can be seen as a piece of art for the designing world, we don't know if we would like our bike to have an automatic buzz when we are approaching a turn. On the other side, it could add some extra safety to traffic in general. Whether you like the bike or not, you have to admit the Portland-based studio brings the concept of urban biking to a whole new level.

    "You'll be blind by the time you're twenty-five," a doctor at Children's Hospital predicted. "Your blood sugars are much too high." It consumed me. No matter where I was or what I was doing, it was overhead like a dark cloud, waiting for just the right opportunity to break open and destroy my world.

    I liked painting. Losing myself in painting filled me with peace. Painting provided me with the only place where I could escape from those threatening words.

    When I was twenty-one, my right eye went blind. Precisely three months after my twenty-fifth birthday, I had a massive hemorrhage (大出血) in my left eye because of an accident. For the next twenty years, vision came and went. I went through many eye operations in an attempt to keep my vision. But after one final operation, I lost the battle and all remaining vision. And I buried all dreams of painting.

    Desperate, I enrolled in (注册) a sixteen-week program for the blind and visually impaired (损伤的). I learned personal adjustment and the use of a computer with adaptive software. A whole new world opened up to me through this program.

    "Jaws and Window-Eyes are leading software for the blind," my instructor told me. "You can use the Internet, e-mail and Microsoft with all its tools and features." It's amazing! Hope went up for the first time in years. "By learning how to use hot keys to control the mouse, you can use Microsoft Access, Excel and Powerpoint," my instructor added.

    For the next several years, I learned that when one door closes, another door opens. There are plenty of choices available for the blind and visually impaired through the gift of technology. Not only do I have a speaking computer, but I have a speaking watch, alarm clock and calculator.

    Recently, the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, added about 1,000 words and new definitions to its website. The changes are to help users understand a mix of terms, some dating back many centuries. The additions include words such as "brencheese", "deathshildy" and "hip-pop".

    The new entries are part of the company's update to oed.com, its searchable online dictionary for paid members. The OED makes changes to the website four times each year. But the latest print version has been in process since the year 2000, and may not be ready for 10 more years. That information comes from Katherine Connor Martin, who heads the company's dictionary operations in the United States.

    Usually, the OED watches usage of a word for at least 10 years before deciding whether to add a new entry, new definition or word related to an existing entry, she said. This general rule, however, is sometimes not followed. That is what happened with "tweet", a word that the OED added far before the 10-year mark. Other times, the company adds words that are very old, but were not included in the dictionary in the past.

    “It's funny because we talk about new words, but many of the words we add are already obsolete. It's just that they were never in the dictionary before," Martin told the Associated Press.

    That is the reality, she said, of a historical dictionary trying to put more than 1,000 years of English into books that already have over 855,000 entries. So, you get "brencheese", a rarely used term for when bread and cheese are eaten together. The word dates back to the year 1665. The word "deathshildy" is from Old English. It means someone who is guilty of a serious crime and condemned to death.

    The website defines the term "hip-pop" for music that combines parts of hip-hop and popular music. The OED discovered the term “hip-hip pop” was used in a 1985 story from a Pennsylvania newspaper. It noted that the term "hip-pop" appeared in a 1991 U. S. newspaper report about the rap artist M.C. Hammer.

    The website has added several other terms related to modern culture. They include three popular terms: "binge-watching", "spoiler alert" and "microaggression".

    Here are a few other new entries if you long to read on.

    "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is one of the most common sayings in the English languages. This is because apples were one of the first foods that medical professionals recognized as healthy­their benefits became obvious when  quite simply, doctors found that people who ate apples were sick less often than those who did not. Today we have a more specific understanding of why apples are so beneficial to overall health.

    Apples can help keep your levels of bad cholesterol (胆固醇) down. The pectin (果胶) in apples helps you to maintain cardiovascular health and reduce LDL cholesterol(which is the "bad" kind). Apples themselves do not add cholesterol to your diet and are full of water and fiber to help prevent the cholesterol in other foods you might digest. According to Health Diaries, people who eat two apples per day may lower their cholesterol by as much as 16 percent.

    Apples are naturally low in calories and high in water content. Eating an apple can satisfy your hunger and keep you from reaching for high-sugar, high-calories snacks. By eating apples, you will be more able to maintain a healthy weight because they fill you up, potentially stopping you from eating food that encourages a waistline increase.

    Apples contain respectable levels of boron (硼) which helps build healthy bones, and can also prevent diseases like arthritis. Apples are rich in vitamin C, which is known to help build immunity.

    Studies have shown that apples can decrease the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and liver cancer. One theory is that the apple skins are responsible for this, so be sure not to peel your apple before you eat them, as you could remove some of the health benefits.

    If you'd like to go travelling, the following World Heritage Sites may be your best choices.

    Jiuzhaigou Valley Scenic and Historic Interest Area

    Jiuzhaigou Valley, which lies in the northern part of Sichuan Province, China, reaches a height of more than 4, 500m, with a series of different forests ecosystems. It's especially famous for its narrow landforms and excellent waterfalls. Some 140 kinds of birds also live in the valley, as well as a number of endangered plants and animals, including the giant panda. Jiuzhaigou Valley was recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1992.

    Khami Ruins National Monument

    The city of Khami, which developed after the capital of Great Zimbabwe had been given up in the mid-16th century, is of great archaeological (考古的) interest. The discovery of objects from Europe and China shows that Khami was a centre for trade over a long period of time. It joined the World Heritage List in 1986.

    Henderson Island

    Henderson Island, which lies in the eastern South Pacific, is one of the few atolls in the world whose ecology (生态) has been untouched by humans. It is famous for the 10 plants and 4 birds that can only be seen on the island. It was recorded in the World Heritage List in 1988.

    Old City of Jerusalem

    As a holy city for three different religions (宗教) in the Middle East, Jerusalem has always been of great religious importance  It was given a World Heritage status in 1981 and placed on the "List of World Heritage in Danger" the following year.

Every year, thousands of teenagers participate in programs at their local art museums. But do any of them remember their time at museum events later in life? A new report suggests that the answer is yes--and finds that arts-based museum programs are credited with changing the course of alumni's（毕业生的） lives, even years after the fact. 

The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles recently asked researchers to conduct à study to find out how effective their long-standing teen art programs really are. They involved over 300 former participants of four programs for teens that have been in existence since the 1990s. Alumni, whose current ages range from 18 to 36, were invited to find out how they viewed their participation years after the fact. 

Among the alumni surveyed, 75 percent of them thought the teen art program experience had the most favorable impact on their own lives, beating the family, school and their neighborhoods. Nearly 55 percent thought that it was one of the most important experiences they had ever had, regardless of age. And two-thirds said that they were often in situations where their experience in museums affected their actions or thoughts. 

It turns out that participating in art programs also helps keep teens keen about culture even after they reach adulthood: Ninety-six percent of participants had visited an art museum within the last two years, and 68 percent had visited an art museum five or more times within the last two years. Thirty-two percent of alumni work in the arts as adults. 

Though the study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of teen-specific art programs in museums, it reflects other research on the important benefits of engaging with the arts. A decade of surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts found that the childhood experience with the arts is significantly associated with people's income and educational achievements as adults. Other studies have linked arts education to everything from lower dropout rates to improvement in critical thinking skills.