Lockers(储物柜)have been the symbol of American high school for decades. But walk down any hallway of the new Germantown High School in Madison County, Mississippi, and you won't spot a single locker.

    New technology such as e-books, interactive(互动的)assignments and Web-based learning is making lockers in

    American high school a thing of the past.

    Officials from schools that have listed several benefits: less noise, less delay and an increased sense of safety.

    “It's all to create an environment that's student-friendly”, said Ronnie McGehee, chief official of the Madison County School District.

    Getting rid of lockers can also cut hundreds of thousands in construction costs. Madison County saved $200,000 by not including lockers in the new high school, McGehee said.

    It is also believed that removing lockers could help prevent school violence. ”Lockers give kids a place to hide things”, said Mike Nelson, founder of a safety- training group. Nelson believes that some school shootings and other incidents could have been prevented if there had been no lockers.

    However, Andrew Booth, a 10th-grader at Gemantown High, said there are some disadvantages of not having a locker. “It can make your book bag really heavy”, he said. The 16-year-old has four textbooks “plus notebooks and a binder(活页夹)” to carry to school each day.

    He said some teachers have shelves at the back of the classroom on which students can leave their bags. Others provide an extra set of textbooks in the classroom, so students don't have to carry books from home.

    New York architect Peter Lippman said schools will have to address such concerns and find ways to give students a “sense of space” “If you are carrying books around, it does limit your flexibility in the classrooms,” he said.

Lippman said he would like to see schools starting to use the new free space to provide less structured learning opportunities for students, including gathering areas and learning centers. “If you think about a school with just rows of lockers-there's nowhere for learning opportunities in that”, he said.

    Earlier this month a study showed that bees can teach themselves to play football. They can learn by watching and, rather than copy what they have seen, change it to make it better. Bees also have a clever trick for helping their friends find lunch. New research shows that bees leave smelly little footprints on flowers that help them know what flowers they and their family members have recently visited.

    The discovery was made by scientists from University of Bristol who report these smelly footprints help bees distinguish  between their own scent(气味), the scent of a relative and the scent of a stranger. And by using this ability, bees can improve their success at finding good sources of a food and avoid flowers that have already been visited and mined of nutrients.

    The Bristol team performed three separate experiments with bumblebees(大黄蜂)in which they were repeatedly exposed to rewarding and unrewarding flowers at the same time that had footprints from different bees attached to them. Each flower type either carried scent -marks from bumblebees of differing relatedness or were unmarked. The marks were either the bee's own marks, sisters from their nest, or strangers from another nest.

    The study shows that not only can bumblebees tell the marks of their own nest mates from strangers, but they can also discriminate between the smell of their own footprints and those of their nest mate sisters, which could help them to remember which flowers they have visited recently. But it doesn't explain how they use that in the wild. They may detect the footprints of their friends and keep moving on, since that flower may be tapped out. Or they may smell a bit of familiar foot smell and dive in, seeing it as a marker that nectar(花蜜)is present.

    Mr. Bean is an internationally recognized comedy character on TV and in films. He constantly gets into awkward and absurd situations, which greatly amuses audiences regardless of their nationalities or culture. The humour is always made clear through a series of simple and funny acts that rely purely on body language, which is universal.

    One of my favourite shows is that Mr. Bean has a meal in a fancy restaurant. After being seated at his table, Mr. Bean takes out a card, writes a few words on it, seals (密封) it in an envelope and places it on the table. After a moment, he looks back at the envelope but this time he looks surprised, as if he did not know it was there. He opens it to find a birthday card and delightedly puts it on the table for everyone to see.

    When he looks at the menu, an astonished look swiftly appears on his face. He takes all the money out of his wallet, counts it and puts it in a saucer (茶托). He then looks from the menu to the money with concern until he finds one thing that makes him smile. Then he orders a dish called "steak tartare". When the dish arrives, he is shocked to discover that "steak tartare" is actually raw hamburger. He makes an attempt to eat it, but it is clear from the look on his face that he finds the taste truly disgusting. He cannot hide his feelings, except when the waiter asks if everything is all right. When this happens, he smiles and nods, indicating that everything is fine. When the waiter is not looking, however, he busies himself hiding the raw meat anywhere he can reach-the sugar bowl, the tiny flower vase, inside a bun (小圆面包) and under a plate. He becomes so desperate in the end that he even hides some inside the purse of a woman sitting near him and throws some down the trousers of the restaurant's violinist!

    I like to watch Mr. Bean on TV, but I wouldn't like to meet someone like him in real life and I certainly wouldn't like to have dinner with him!

    In our annual Readers' Choice Awards survey, we asked our readers to rate their favorite cities in the world for arts and culture. These cities are centers of music and dance, museums, and theaters. Here are four of them where you can find inspiration in the arts, starting with the top spot.

    Rome, Italy

    At its peak, the Roman Empire extended over nearly two million square miles of land across Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa. Today, that history is on display everywhere. The city's main attractions are famous not because of tourist advertisements, but because they are really so impressive. No wonder it's known as the Eternal City: You could spend forever here and find new artistic and cultural treasures every day.

    Paris, France

    Hemingway famously called Paris "a moveable feast", but wherever you go while in the city, there is always something to see, hear, taste or feel. With some 150 museums, Paris doubles as an art history class, offering the very best of the discipline across centuries and styles.

    London, United Kingdom

    London is inspiration and setting for the rise of Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell and Eliot and the breeding ground for all those iconic (标志性的) bands: The Kinks, The Clash and The Stones. London is also Banksy's favorite canvas, home to more than 1,000 galleries, and the kind of place where you can spend a whole day in a single museum and still be ready for more when it opens the next morning.

    Vienna, Austria

    As we all know, Western music would be unrecognizable without Austria's capital, which nurtured many famous musicians. It's also the site of the Vienna Secession, a revolutionary art movement founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt. Visitors today can see the fruits of all that creativity in the city's 100 – odd museums.

Isatou Ceesay was born in 1972 in a small village in Gambia, Africa. As a teenager, Ceesay was forced to drop out of school because of poverty. She carried some goods with many girls like her to sell in the market to raise herself At that time, the plastic bags, being strong and light, became popular in Gambia. The problem was that people did not reuse the bags and simply threw them behind their homes. Over time, the houses were surrounded by trash.

Ceesay lived in such an environment for many years. She kept learning from the surrounding environment and planned to take action to change. In 1997, she started a recycling movement called One Plastic Bag in Gambia. She educated women in Gambia to recycle plastic waste into income for themselves. In the beginning, the movement had a mission to educate their village colleagues about the need to reuse garbage and recycle plastic waste, rather than letting the garbage increase behind their homes.

Over time, the movement became big and able to support and provide income for women around. It was also able to greatly reduce plastic waste in Gambia. But the work of collecting trash turned to be taxing. During the rainy season, plastic waste became wet and difficult to take, and after that it still took patience to dry it before it could be processed.

Ceesay said, "As a habit, people are used to pouring their garbage behind their houses, and because it is not visible, they forget it. But the bad effects again knock on your door very quickly — dirty air, various diseases and so on. Of course, if one man's house is clean but his neighbor's is not, then the man is also not healthy."

For 17 years, Ceesay has contributed to one of the most important problems about the plastic waste. In 2012, she got the TIAW Difference Maker Award in Washington, DC, United States. Her story was written into a book, which inspires many others to join or become makers of change in their own communities.

Josefa Marin went to New York from Mexico in 1987, supporting her daughter back home with the $140 a week she earned at a sweater factory. With that small income, she had to collect recyclables, trading in cans for five cents each.

When the clothing factory closed down in the late 2000s, she became a full-time recycler, picking up cans and bottles to make ends meet.

Marin's story is not unique. Millions around the world make a living from picking through waste and reselling it – a vital role that keeps waste manageable. In New York City, the administrative department collects only about 28 percent of the cans that could be recycled. Rubbish collectors keep millions of additional recyclables out of landfills every year.

Yet collectors are ruled out by government policies. The United States Supreme Court in 1988 stated that household garbage is public property once it's on the street. That enables police to search rubbish for evidence, but that protection hasn't always been extended to recyclers. And in places like New York City, which is testing city-owned locked containers to hide garbage from rats, containers are made clearly inaccessible for collectors.

"There's value in the waste, and we feel that value should belong to the people, not the city or the corporations", says Ryan Castalia, director of a nonprofit recycling and community center in Brooklyn.

Recognized or not, waste pickers have long been treated with disrespect. Marin recalls an occasion when someone living next to a building where she was collecting cans threw water at her. "Because I recycle it doesn't mean I am less of a person than anyone else," she says.

Some governments are starting to realize that protecting the environment and humanity go hand in hand. The United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, for example, calls for an end to poverty and all the risks it brings.