Still seeking a destination for your weekend break? There are some places which are probably a mere walk away from your college.

King's Art Centre

    A day at the Centre could mean a visit to an exhibition of the work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists on show anywhere. This weekend tees the opening of an exhibition of four local artists.

You could attend a class teaching you how to 'learn from the masters' or get more creative with paint —- free of charge.

    The Centre also runs two life drawing classes for which there is a small fee.

The Botanic Garden

    The Garden has over 8,000 plant species; it holds the research and teaching collection of living plants for Cambridge University.

    The multi-branched Torch Aloe here is impressive. The African plant produces red flowers above blue-green leaves, and is not one to miss.

    Get to the display house to see Dionaea muscipula, a plant more commonly known as the Venus Flytrap that feeds on insects and other small animals.

    The Garden is also a place for wildlife-enthusiasts. Look for grass snakes in the lake. A snake called 'Hissing Sid' is regularly seen lying in the heat of the warm sun.

Byron's Pool

    Many stories surround Lord Byron's time as a student of Cambridge University, Arriving in 1805, he wrote a letter complaining that it was a place of "mess and drunkenness". However, it seems as though Byron did manage to pass the time pleasantly enough. I'm not just talking about the pet bear he kept in his roans. He spent a great deal of time walking in the village.

It is also said that on occasion Byron swam naked by moonlight in the lake, which is now known as Byron's Pool. A couple of miles past Grantchester in the south Cambridgeshire countryside, the pool is surrounded by beautiful circular paths around the fields. The cries of invisible birds make the trip a lovely experience and on the way home you can drop into the village for afternoon tea. If you don't trust me, then perhaps you'll take it from Virginia Woolf一—over a century after Byron, she reportedly took a trip to swim in the same pool.

    Movie Nights at the Museum brings you classic movies in a classic location. Each film has been chosen for its connection to an area of our knowledge.

We start this movie season with ocean-inspired cinema to celebrate the arrival of the noble blue whale in the Museum's typical hall, the site for the series.

    So get your popcorn, take your seat, and settle in for Movie Nights at the Museum.

Jaws

    Did you know that great whites actually find the taste of human flesh not tasty? However, this legendary Steven Spielberg thriller sees a giant great white shark cause destruction on the shores of a New England beach town in the mid-1970s.

Free Willy

    Did you know that the killer whale is not a whale? It's actually a dolphin. In this heart-warming 90s classic, orphan Jesse makes friends with a trapped killer whale and does whatever it takes to return him to his family and ocean home.

Finding Nemo

    Contrary to popular belief, fish are actually good at remembering things. Follow young clownfish Nemo, taken unexpectedly from his Great Barrier Reef home, and his father and forgetful partner who go on a brave journey to find him, in this charming Disney adventure.

The Little Mermaid

    In this classic Disney tale of a mermaid princess who dreams of becoming human, Ariel falls in love with a handsome prince, much to the sadness of her father and long-suffering friends. But did you know that a fish is actually brown and flat, with both eyes on one side of its body?

Ticket: £ 28, Member: £ 25.

    When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

    It goes like this: You can't take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We'd take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom's friend was waiting to give us a ride home—our first car ride of the day.

    The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal (多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence—the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

    Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox—and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

    On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

    I'm writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn't try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

    As an oceanographer（海洋学家）, I've spent many years developing robots to explore the ocean, and now we're putting that technology to use in our JASON Project, a program that's designed to inspire students and get them interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In theaters throughout the country, we bring kids together and send back to them on large screens our live explorations of large areas of the globe. Not only are the kids observers, but they can operate robots moving across the area while broadcasting images back to them. The kids have the sensation（感受） of really being at the site with us.

    I believe advances in robot technology will one day be the key to a new kind of travel. In the next 10 or 15 years, people will have rooms in their houses that will be able to simulate (模拟) other environment. I like to call this rooms “home domes” -- small theaters with screens and advanced equipment that can reproduce the sights, sounds, smells, and feel of a desert, or a forest. Hand in hand with these rooms, I can see a market for travel robots located in countries around the world. You could rent (租)a robot working in a rain forest, then go into your home dome, where you yourself operate the robot's movements. The equipment in the room will receive the sensations in the robot's environment and simulate them for you.

    Today, much of the world's population never travels more than 50 or 60 miles from home. And even a person with enough time can see only a part of the earth's sights. But this new way of travel will cost so much less in both time and money and allow people to see a lot more of the globe. And simulated travel will also help protect our planet. You can't take large groups of tourists to look at Dian Fossey's gorillas（大猩猩）. But a small robot, with no animal smell, can get very close to a gorilla and send the sights, sounds, and smells back to a million people.

    Two deer jumped out in front of 16-year-old Amanda Floyd's car. She stepped on the brake, stopping the car just in time. But later, she started texting. Distracted (分心的)，Amanda turned left and right, then crashed into another car. Luckily, she wasn't in a real car--she was in a driving simulator (模拟器) at Roosevelt High School, Ohio, US. “I never really realized that cars make a turn that much," Amanda, a Junior, said. She added that she wouldn't text while driving anymore.

    The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) and State Highway Patrol brought the simulator to the school. They said they wanted to help students learn about the danger of driving while drunk, while texting, or while talking on the phone.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, distracted driving claimed 3,4501ives in2016 alone. Experts believe the actual figure is probably higher.

The simulator is basically a computer program. Like many computer games, it was a hit with the students. They lined up and crowded around to watch each other take turns. The simulator has a steering wheel! (方向盘) ,brake and gas pedal (油门踏板) . It is made up of three large computer screens on a table.

    Students choose a distraction, such as driving while drunk or texting. They always crash, of course. Then, they are pulled over by the police to be taught the bad results of their driving: how much damage they've caused, what their fine is, if anyone died in the accident, and if they're going to go to prison.

    "It teaches how to drive without being on the road," said Shante Thompson, 16. She had just crashed into a deer.

    ODOT spokesman Justin Chesnic said hundreds of kids have gone behind the wheel so far. He said even more have benefited from watching their classmates. "Driving is such a major responsibility, so take it seriously" he said. “Put away your cellphone. A lot of the accidents out there are because of distracted driving. It can not only change your life, but it can change someone else's life forever. The results are serious."

    Today, we are constantly bombarded with media reports about research on the right diet to follow to help us maintain a healthy lifestyle or lose weight—but it's hard to know which one to pick and, once chosen, it's harder still to stick to it. And now there's another choice to get our teeth into.

    A flexitarian(弹性素食者)diet involves eating plant—based foods and only occasionally eating meat and fish. This eating style allows you to supplement some ingredients that you wouldn't get in a stricter vegan(素食主义者)diet—another trend growing in popularity. And like veganism, flexitarianism isn't about eating carefully to help you lose a few pounds—it's something people choose for ethical reasons, to help the planet. And a study into the global food system and how it affects the climate, has found that eating mainly plant-based foods is one of three key steps towards a sustainable future for all by 2050.

    This research found that food waste will need to be halved and farming practices will also have to improve to achieve this. But without a single solution, a combined approach is needed. Dr Marco Springmann from the University of Oxford was one of the lead authors of the report. He told the BBC “We really found that a combination of measures would be needed to stay within environmental limits and those include changes towards healthier more plant—based diets.”

    But whereas vegans think it's wrong for animals to be killed for food, flexitarians believe eating meat once in a while is acceptable. And Dr Springmann agrees—as long as we “treat it as a luxury, it's probably OK but you shouldn't have more than one serving of red meat, which includes beef and pork, per week.” And here's another fact to digest: If we moved to this type of diet, the study found that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture would be cut by more than half.