In agrarian(农业的), pre-industrial Europe,“you'd want to wake up early, start working with the sunrise, have a break to have the largest meal, and then you'd go back to work,”says Ken Albala, a professor of history at the University of the Pacific.“Later, at 5 or 6, you'd have a smaller supper.”

    This comfortable cycle, in which the rhythms of the day helped shape the rhythms of the meals, gave rise to the custom of the large midday meal, eaten with the extended family.“Meals are the foundation of the family,”says Carole Couniban, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, “so there was a very important interconnection between eating together and strengthening family ties.”

    Since industrialization, maintaining such a slow cultural metabolism has been much harder, with the long midday meal shrinking to whatever could be stuffed into a lunch bucket or bought at a food stand. Certainly, there were benefits. Modern techniques for producing and shipping food led to greater variety and quantity, including a tremendous increase in the amount of animal protein and dairy products available, making us more energetic than our ancestors.

    Yet plenty has been lost too, even in cultures that still live to eat. Take Italy. It's no secret that the Mediterranean diet is healthy, but it was also a joy to prepare and eat. Italians, says Counihan, traditionally began the day with a small meal. The big meal came at around 1 p.m. In between the midday meal and a late, smaller dinner came a small snack. Today, when time zones have less and less meaning, there is little tolerance for offices' closing for lunch, and worsening traffic in cities means workers can't make it home and back fast enough anyway. So the formerly small supper after sundown becomes the big meal of the day, the only one at which the family has a chance to get together.“The evening meal carries the full burden that used to be spread over two meals,”says Counihan.

Hampton Court Motor Cruiser

16 Hampton Court Road        TEL:208-977-1728

    Hampton Court Motor Cruiser is a boat docked on the River Thames. Facilities(设施) include heating, Smart TV and Wi-Fi. The price per stay also includes the free use of a 4-seat electric boat and barbecue facilities. There is no staff at all on board during your stay.

Hilton London Green Park

4-6 Half Moon Street        TEL:207-629-7522

    Hilton London Green Park stays in the heart of London. It features modern rooms with air conditioning. Wi-Fi is available in public areas and is free of charge. There is also a cocktail bar on site. All children are welcome.

Arbor City

12 Osborn Street            TEL:207-247-3313

    Arbor City Hotel is just next to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It offers free Wi-Fi and 24-hour room service. Air-conditioned rooms feature a TV, a safe and a shower. Parking is available on site and costs GBP 24 per day. For an additional charge, the hotel offers various breakfast options: English breakfast, Continental breakfast, Vegan and Dairy-free breakfast. The hotel is 10 minutes' tube ride from the West End.

Abercorn House Hostel

28-0 Bute Gardens            TEL:203-696-0215

    Abercorn House Hostel is located just a 3-minute walk from Hammersmith Underground Station, with a 24-hour front desk. Guests can stay in rooms or dormitories fitted with a wardrobe. Some come with a shower, while others offer access to a shared bathroom. They can also use a shared kitchen to prepare their meals. Wi-Fi is available and costs GBP 1 per hour. Non-smoking throughout.

    Modern inventions have speeded up people's loves amazingly. Motor-cars cover a hundred miles in little more than an hour, aircraft cross the world inside a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year motor-cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts of saving precious seconds in handling tasks.

    All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an air plane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jetlag; our bodies feel that they have left behind on another time zone. Again, spending too long at computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also have their dangers, according to some scientists, too much use may transmit harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence we do not like to think about.

    However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

    There was a time when some people's lives were devoted simply to the cultivation of the land or the care of cattle. No Multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced, they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone, Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence.

    A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    “It's extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just a bunch of individual components (零件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. “The added difficulty with such a project is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to make them all on our own,” he said.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, and then has to be matched well to everything it's connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect- scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications (应用). “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

    At times my mom has been uncomfortable seeing these qualities in me. For example, when I was 12, I went to Puerto Rico all by myself to stay with my grandmother for the summer. My mom was extremely nervous about it. She kept telling me how things were different in Puerto Rico, to always put on sunscreen, not to wander away from my grandmother, and other warnings. She helped me pack and did not leave the airport until she saw my plane take off.

    But despite her worries, she let me go on my own. As I moved into my teens, she continued to give me space to grow and learn even when it might have been difficult for her. When I reached my senior year, I decided to move away for college. Once again I found that I differed from my peers: while many of them wanted to stay close to home, I couldn't wait to be out in the world on my own. While my mom may not have been happy at the thought of me going away, she was supportive and excited for me.

    One big thing I realized during my senior year, as my mom granted me more freedom, was that she actually believes in me and trusts me. That means a lot. Most of my life, and especially when I was little, the main person I tried to impress in my schoolwork or other things was my mother. I knew she expected nothing but the best from me. Sometimes it was hard to live up to her standards; getting a single B on my report card would make me feel bad because I knew she wanted me to have all A's.

    I know that her high standards have helped me stay focused on what's important, like education, and made me who I am. I am thankful for her support and involvement in my life. Most of all I respect her. She is the strongest woman I know and that's why I have turned out so strong and independent.

    There are a couple different things that make ramen noodles an unhealthy choice. There's not much to these provision packets besides salt and carbohydrates. While those certainly get thrown around quite a bit as “bad-for-you” comments, you may not know how they actually harm your body. Firstly, there's the fact that most instant ramen servings contain over 1100 milligrams of sodium-that's approaching half of the maximum you should eat per day. When you take in that much sodium in a single sitting, your body overcompensates by holding more water. This can cause temporary water weight gain, leaving you feeling bloated(肿胀)and lacking in energy.

    But while you may feel bloated, chances are you won't feel full. Since the ramen contains lots of refined carbohydrates with virtually no protein or fiber, it's essentially the very definition of empty calories. And you've probably heard the song-and-dance about refined carbs; eating too much can lead your blood sugar to increase and then decrease, leaving you hungry and ready to eat again-which leads to weight gain.

    And, perhaps most upsetting of all, this quick-and-easy meal may stay with you much longer than you realize. Massachusetts General Hospital's Dr. Braden Kuo used a pill-sized camera to record the digestive tracts of volunteers who ate processed ramen noodles as well as fresh ones. With a video, Dr. Kuo was able to show that, after two hours when the fresh noodles were long gone, the ramen noodles were still there in the intestines.

    Doctors do know that years of eating the instant packets are linked to poor health. Another study, this one by the Harvard School of Public Health, assessed the long-term consequences of ramen consumption in South Korea, where it's a major course. They found that subjects, women in particular, who ate instant noodles at least twice a week had a 68 percent higher risk of diabetes and heart disease-than subjects who ate a more consistently natural diet.

    In short, eating ramen once in a while won't damage your health-as is true with most processed foods. But it's not something you should make a habit of-for your stomach and heart's sake.