At a supermarket, two women are shopping. One is a stay-at-home housewife who loves to create delicious masterpieces. The other is a supervisor at an advertising agency. The two ladies stop in the frozen foods section. "I'm so tired, "sighs the professional woman." I don't know what to do about supper. "Her friend suggests, "What about a microwave dinner?" The weary professional sighs, "I don't feel like cooking tonight."

It is true that Americans have cakes for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and instant dinners. Most Americans enjoy the convenience of prepackaged meals that can be served in 10 minutes or less. However, if you think American cooking means throwing the packaged contents into the microwave, think again. Many Americans recognize the value of cooking skills, admitting that there's nothing better than a good home-cooked meal.

For those who need guidance in their cooking, recipes are lifesavers. Recipes list all the ingredients for a dish, the amount of each to use, and a description of how to put them together. Most good cooks have a shelf full of cookbooks ranging from locally published recipe collections to national bestsellers. Magazines devoted to home management, are full of tasty selections. Friends often increase their recipe collection by passing around their favorites cards.

For experienced cooks, recipes are merely references. They often make adjustments, depending on the people they need to serve, the available ingredients and their personal taste. Some cooks prefer instead to depend on their feelings to cook the right flavors.

Of course, as a "land of immigrants," America has imported all varieties of cooking. Most good cooks in America are "fluent" in several cooking "dialects": Mexican, Italian, Chinese and traditional American style, just to name a few. But whatever the dialect, cooking is a language everyone understands.

Small and round transparent water bottles filled with natural water could help provide a solution to London's plastic waste problem, according to Skipping Rocks Lab, the company in the British capital that produces them. They added that the balls have been made of plant and seaweed extracts and will decompose（分解）after four to six weeks if not consumed.

With many cities struggling to get rid of vast numbers of used plastic water bottles, the ‘Ooho’ has begun to meet the thirst of consumers in San Francisco and London. A report published last Thursday said more than 4,000 plastic bottles had been removed from the River Thames in a month last year, proving the scale of the waste problem.

"We think Ooho may not be the solution for all the applications that plastic bottles have, but definitely for short term consumption it could be a solution," said Rodrigo, the founder of Skipping Rocks Lab. In a trial near London Bridge last Wednesday, Ooho drew a mixture of surprise, amusement and delight among those who sampled them. London's city assembly said Ooho was a step forward. "It could be part of the solution but not the only solution. You also need to be able to refill bottles at railway stations for example," said Leonie Cooper, the Chair of the assembly's environment committee.

The company aims to target, among other consumers, marathon runners, who will be able to eat the Oohos mid-race without concerns about the environment. It is also considering sealing alcohol for a whole new market. "People see these small round bubbles and they just think ‘shots’. So that's definitely something we're looking at," said Skipping Rocks Lab Chief Operating Officer Lise. "We have sealed alcohol, we want to perfect it, and hopefully this will be the great change of the future."

The ride-sharing company Uber has removed its self-driving cars from the streets of San Francisco, California. The action came after a dispute between Uber and state officials over whether the vehicles needed special permits to operate.

Uber recently launched testing of its self-driving service in San Francisco. But shortly after the launch, California's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) told the company to stop the self-driving vehicles. State officials said the Uber cars needed the same special permit given to about 20 other companies testing self-driving technology in California. Uber argued that its technology does not make vehicles fully autonomous, and so the special permit was not needed. It added that all of Uber's "self-driving" cars have a driver sitting in the passenger seat to take over if needed.

The head of Uber's self-driving technology, Anthony Levandowski, explained the company's position in a blog post. He said the self-driving Uber vehicles do use high-technology tools to assist drivers. But they are not fully autonomous and require a driver to be at the controls at all times. He compared the technology to solar carmaker Tesla's advanced driver assist tools. Telsa's Autopilot system allows its cars to steer in a lane, change lanes, and speed up or slow down based on nearby traffic. The company tells drivers that, when using Autopilot, they should still always be ready to take control of the vehicle. Vehicles equipped with these high-tech driver assist tools do not need a special permit to operate in California.

It's hard to understand why the DMV would seek to require self-driving Ubers to get permits when it accepts that Tesla's autopilot technology does not need them," Levandowski wrote. San Francisco's mayor, Ed Lee, praised the DMV for stopping Uber's self-driving vehicles. He said he supports self-driving development and testing. But only under conditions that put human bicyclists' and pedestrian safety first."

Popular culture often shows alcohol as a big part of the college experience in the United States. Television programs and movies about American college life have images of wild parties with young people either drinking alcohol or holding a drink.

Now, a new study of alcohol use suggests that some college students may be missing meals so they can have more drinks or get drunk faster. Researchers are calling this kind of behavior "drunkorexia".

The study involved 1,184 college students between the ages of 18 and 26. Researchers found that 80 percent of those studied had demonstrated some kind of drunkorexia in the past three months. They had performed heavy physical exercise, eaten low calorie meals or even missed meals for up to a full day before drinking alcohol.

Dipali Rinker organized the study and presented its findings to the Research Society on Alcoholism in June. She says students see drunkorexia as a way to keep their body weight down while drinking alcohol. And it causes them to feel the effects of alcohol quickly and with more intensity(强度). Rinker says unhealthy eating habits are only one of the reasons why this type of behavior is dangerous. Heavy drinking is linked to drunk driving, unprotected sex, and alcohol poisoning.

George Koob, who directs a U.S. governmental agency that studies alcohol related problems, says that the percent of students using alcohol has not increased in recent years. But what worries him is that the number of students drinking to the point of "blacking out" has increased. Blacking out is when a person drinks so much alcohol they have no memory of their actions while drunk.

Koob notes that college students in Canada and Europe also face issues with alcohol. But he feels a big part of the problem is that Americans do not fully understand alcohol's effects. Most people do not know the part of the brain where decisions are made is not fully developed until age 25 and that alcohol harms the development of that part of the brain, he adds.