We all know your student loan will only go so far. So what can you do to save those pennies and eventually a pretty substantial amount in the long run? Here is some advice from L&S Editor Marianne Lampon.

So there it is! Sticking to some of these ideas will really help save some money in the long run, proving a little really does go a long way.

John Rendall, who became famous for taking his pet lion on adventures around London in the 1960s, has died aged 76.

As he and his friend Anthony Bourke, visitors to London from Australia in 1969, were searching for holiday gifts, they came across a lovely lion cub (幼兽) for sale in the store of Harrods. They bought it and named it Christian. They looked after Christian in London for about a year, during which time an amazing bond formed between the two men and the lion. The three of them shared a flat over a furniture shop on London’s King’s Road, where cute and intelligent Christian quickly became a local celebrity, cruising (开车兜风) the streets in a Bentley, popping for lunch at a local restaurant, and even posing for a fashion advertisement.

In 1970, Christian outgrew Rendall’s flat and soon even the walled church garden where he went for exercise wasn’t large enough for him. They realized that their pet needed to live free in natural environment. At first, they planned to give Christian to Longleat Wildlife Park. However, later a coincidental meeting with English actor Virginia Mckenna, a star of the hit film “Born Free” led to Christian being flown to Kenya and placed under the expert care of “the father of lions” George Adamson, where he would introduce Christian to the wild. Rendall and Bourke spent several months with Christian, helping him adapt to the new environment, and then left unwillingly. A year later, they went back to Kenya, hoping to find the lion. When they finally found Christian, incredibly, Christian walked over slowly. Then suddenly he recognized them! He ran over and jumped up on them. They received a loving welcome from their lion, who had fit in with the wild in Africa.

Rendall and Bourke’s extraordinary reunion with Christian was filmed and is subject of a wonderful documentary and a book. The film of their reunion was found on a Japanese blog and posted on YouTube accompanied by I will Always love You, sung by Whitney Houston. The clip of the reunion was recently placed on YouTube and has received over 45 million hits.

Unknown to most of us laymen (门外汉), there is quite a lot of interest in developing edible tags for our food. These could perform the same role as today’s food labels but would also form a tasty snack after use — which would also do away with the information contained on the label.

Now, Japanese researchers have developed an approach to produce one such kind of unobtrusive (不阻塞的), edible tag, which can be safely embedded (嵌入) inside edible products. So far, the team has been experimenting with tags that are baked into cookies. Known as “interiQR”, such tags can be read using a device without altering the food or its packaging and don’t have any impact on the taste of the product.

One enormous drawback of our labels as they are today is that, cumulatively (渐增地), they lead to mounds and mounds of extra material used for packaging—which translates to increased waste and pollution. Using a QR cookie as a tag would help cut down on packaging waste while not altering the items in any way.

The information is contained in 3D-printed “infills”, around which the cookies are baked. Such a “label” would also allow producers, retailers, or customers to read the information using a QR code reader or a backlight at any point in a product’s life.

“Our 3D printing method is a great example of the digital transformation of foods, which we hope will improve food traceability and safety,” says senior author of the study, Kosuke Sato. “This technology can also be used to provide novel food experiences through augmented (提高的) reality, which is an exciting new field in the food industry.”

The team is confident that their cookie tags could prove to be a great help in reducing packaging waste worldwide once they’re adopted on a wide scale. Needless to say, suddenly having a cookie available to munch on with every purchase is incentive (刺激) enough to adopt the use of these interiQR cookies.