This book was already popular in our children’s department and has been made even better with this special edition, which includes 16 new maps. The collection of 68 maps takes you through 58 countries and six continents. It is packed with illustrated information, which includes famous historical figures, local dishes, festivals, wild animals and landmarks. Each page is a work of art to revisit, because each time you look you will notice something new.

This 100% cotton, machine-washable world map pillowcase features lots of wonderful illustrations, including animals, the seven wonders of the modern world and interesting facts, such as the first solo round the world hot air balloon, the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the world record migration of the humpback whale. It comes with wash-out pens so you can wash off the old design and colour it in all over again, and again. Perfect for sleepovers.

Palaeontology meets cartography in this atlas (地图册) that is perfect for any dinosaur-obsessed child. It is by the award-winning team behind Atlas of Animal Adventures and Lucy Leather land’s inky illustrations, which makes the book a joy to look at. It covers the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and includes maps on the shifting continents and fossil finds. On every page you meet a different creature and discover its behaviours, hunting techniques, defence tactics and migration patterns.

You get two gifts in one here. This 300-piece jigsaw of Europe comes with a 32-page picture atlas, so you can see and discover the continent in more detail with the maps and learn more about the countries as you are building the puzzle. Beautiful illustrations of animals, landmarks and attractions cover every centimetre of the jigsaw, making it challenging (but not too hard) to put together for children age 5+.

I became a magician by accident. When I was nine years old, I learned how to make a coin disappear. I’d read The Lord of the Rings and ventured into the adult section of the library to search for a book of spells—nine being that curious age at which you’re old enough to work through more than 1,200 pages of fantasy literature but young enough to still hold out hope that you might find a book of real, actual magic in the library. The book I found instead taught basic sleight-of-hand technique, and I dedicated the next months to practice.

At first the magic wasn’t any good. At first it wasn’t even magic; it was just a trick—a bad trick. I spent hours each day in the bathroom running through the secret moves in front of the mirror. I dropped the coin over and over, a thousand times in a day, and after two weeks of this my mom got a carpet from the hardware store and placed it under the mirror to muffle the sound of the coin falling again and again.

I had heard my dad work through passages of new music on the piano, so I knew how to practice—slowly, deliberately, going for precision rather than speed. One day I tried the illusion in the mirror and the coin vanished. It did not look like a magic trick. It looked like a miracle.

One of the lessons you learn very early on as a magician is that the most amazing part of a trick has nothing to do with the secret. The secret is simple and often dull: a hidden piece of tape, a small mirror, a duplicate playing card, diversion of the audience’s attention. In this case, the secret was a series of covert ( 暗 中 的 ) technique to hide the coin behind my hand in the act of opening it, a dance of the fingers that I learned so completely I didn’t even have to think. I would close my hand, then open it, and the coin would vanish not by skill but by real magic.

Dolphins are universally regarded as some of the cleverest creatures in the world. In captivity ( 圈养), they can be trained to complete complex tasks such as jumping through hoops and somersaulting through the air.

But their intelligence doesn’t stop there. In a recent study of cetaceans (鲸目动物)--a group of animals that includes dolphins and whales--researchers created a list of intelligent behaviors observed in 90 different cetacean species, reported the Guardian. For example, the smartest cetaceans hunt in groups, share knowledge through mimicry (模仿) and even care for each other's children. Some even consider their behavior to be human-like.

“There is the saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ seems to be true for both whales and humans,”

Michael Muthukrishna of the London School of Economics, co-author of the study, told the Guardian.

However, cetaceans don’t just use their brain power for survival. The study suggests that dolphins might even gossip. That's because some species greet each other with specific whistles, just as humans greet each other by name, the Guardian reported. Sometimes, a group of dolphins whistles the “name” of a dolphin that isn't there. Could they be speaking about their “friend” behind its back?

For the researchers, dolphin small talk is a big deal. As they found that the most social cetaceans also have the largest brains, they argue that cetacean intelligence developed to meet the demands of complex social groups.

Known as the “cultural brain hypothesis (假设),” it had only been used to explain the intelligence of humans and other primates (灵长目动物). The new study aimed to find a common pathway for the evolution of intelligence among biologically different species.

“It is interesting to think that whale and human brains are different in their structure but have brought us to the same patterns in behavior, ” Luke Rendell, a biologist at the University of St Andrews, told the Guardian.

Indeed, we still have a lot to learn about our intelligent ocean-dwelling neighbors. “We don’ t have to look at other planets to look for aliens,” Muthukrishna told the Guardian, “because we know that underwater there are these amazing species with so many parallels to us in their complex behaviors.”

One of a doctors’ most valuable tools is his nose. Since ancient times, medics have relied on their sense of smell to help them work out what is wrong with their patients. Fruity odors (气味) on the breath, for example, let them monitor the condition of diabetics (糖尿病病人).

But doctors can, as it were, smell only what they can smell—and many compounds characteristic of disease are odorless. To deal with this limitation, Hossam Haick, a chemical engineer at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, has developed a device which, he claims, can do work that the human nose cannot.

The idea behind Dr. Haick’s invention is not new. Many diagnostic “breathalysers” already exist, and sniffer dogs, too, can be trained to detect illnesses such as cancer. Most of these approaches, though, are disease-specific. Dr. Haick wanted to generalize the process.

As he describes in ACS Nano, he and his   colleagues created a series of electrodes made   of carbon nanotubes (纳米碳管). Each of these had one of 20 organic films laid over it. Each film was sensitive to one of a score of compounds known to be found on the breath of patients suffering from a range of 17 illnesses, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and bladder cancer. When a film reacted, its electrical resistance changed in a predictable manner. The combined changes produced an electrical fingerprint that would be diagnostic of the disease a patient was suffering from.

To test their invention, Dr. Haick and his colleagues collected 2,808 breath samples from 1,404 patients who were suffering from at least one of the diseases. Its success varied. It could distinguish between samples from patients suffering from gastric cancer and bladder cancer only 64% of the time. At distinguishing lung cancer from head and neck cancer it was, though, 100% successful. Overall, it got things right 86% of the time. Not perfect, but a useful aid to a doctor planning to conduct further investigations. And this is only the first model. Slightly adjusted, its success rate would be expected to improve.