【推荐1】Until the Road Ends (By Phil Earle)

In this Second World War story, Peggy and her dog Beau are separated when she is sent to the countryside for safety. Left behind in the city, Beau becomes an unlikely hero, searching the streets and helping families as bombs (炸弹) fall around them. Will he and Peggy ever be reunited?

Finding Bear (By Hannah Gold)

In the continuation of The Last Bear, April is home from her adventure but she can't stop thinking about Bear. When she hears that a polar bear has been shot and injured in Svalbard, she believes it is her friend and she sets out on a journey to the northernmost reaches of the Arctic to find him.

Calling the Whales (By Jasbinder Bilan)

Tulsi and her friend Satchen discover a whale trapped in a fishing net. Aiming to free the creature, they repeatedly dive (潜水) down into the sea. But in the end, they have to accept the failure. Heading home to ask for help, they get caught in a storm and their boat overturns. Just as they think all is lost, help arrives from an unexpected source.

City of Horses (By Frances Moloney)

Thirteen-year-old Misty’s life is turned upside down when she has to move far away from her friends. Her new home is on an estate (庄园) where horses run free, and she soon gets to know Dylan, a mysterious local boy who loves horses. When the horses come under threat, Misty must find the courage to help save her new home.

【推荐2】You can’t just rely on textbooks to learn English, if you want to learn a foreign language well. Actually, you need an excellent language environment. This does not mean that you have to move abroad or live with foreigners. It is also a good way to read the original books, and the best and most reliable ones are the classics. Here are four famous books. Let’s see which one you are most interested in.

Ulysses

Ulysses did “stream of consciousness” before the term existed, and it’s also a complicated (难懂的) novel filled with references, wordplay, confusing jokes, and intense, personal reflections by the characters.

Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick has a fame for being very dull. Melville’s novel wasn’t received well on publication (it took decades before people really started to realize how great it is), and the negative evaluation (评价) is repeated every year when students are forced to read it.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a masterpiece in the literary world, being the inspiration, basis, and model for so many modern novels. You’re probably more familiar with its plot (情节) and characters than you think. For a book written in the early 19th century, its modernity is surprising only until you realize this is the novel that in many ways defines what a modern novel is.

The Big Sleep

It’s true that the book is written in what seems to modern audiences like a self-consciously tough style, peppered with old-fashioned expressions, and the plot is famously complicated, even for a mystery. It actually has several loose ends that never get solved, but it doesn’t matter.

【推荐1】Millions of New Yorkers and visitors ride the city’s subway and other trains each day. The public transportation system offers more than just a trip, however. It also has one of the most extensive public art collection in the world,with much of it under city streets.

Some people call it New York’s “underground art museum”. It includes more than 250 works of art. They are meant to brighten everyone’s ride around the city. There is a huge painting of the night sky on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal. New Yorkers have been looking up at that artwork for 100 years.

Sandra Bloodworth has directed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s arts program since it began in 1985.“But actually, it really began much earlier. When the subway was founded in 1904, a percentage of money was set aside to create a special ornamentation (装饰) within the system, in order to make the place a very special place that people would want to use.”he says. For the past 30 years, artists have been asked to make works that relate to city life or to the neighborhood around a train station. There are coastal scenes at stations near the Atlantic Ocean.

Rider Tonya Pierre praises the underground art.“When I’m stressed, I look at the subway art. I love the colors.Where I live, they have a mosaic (镶嵌画) of a man and a woman, like floating across the water, and it’s beautiful.It’s just beautiful to have art everywhere.”Nearby is Alejandra Acosta,a visitor from Colombia.“I think it’s nice when you see these kinds of things that catch your eye when you’re walking in spaces like the subway stations that seem a little bit dull. They don’t have a lot of decoration.”

【推荐2】Hidden in the trees, behind the leaves, look closely and you’ll see eyes staring back at you. This is SlothBot, a robot inspired by the famously slow animal-sloth (树獭).

For the next several months, visitors to the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be able to observe the testing of the new high-tech tool in the battle to save some of the world’s most endangered species. Researchers are testing the SlothBot near the Garden’s popular Canopy Walk.

Built to take advantage of the low-energy lifestyle of real sloths, SlothBot demonstrates how being slow can be ideal for certain applications. Powered by solar panels and using innovative power management technology, SlothBot moves along a cable strung between two large trees as it monitors temperature, weather, carbon dioxide levels, and other information in the Garden’s 30-acre midtown Atlanta forest.

“Slowness is a design principle of SlothBot,” says Magnus Egerstedt, professor and chair in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “That is not how robots are typically designed today, but being slow and energy-efficient will allow SlothBot to stay in the environment to observe things we can only see by being present continuously for months, or even years.”

About three feet long, SlothBot’s imaginative 3D-printed shell helps protect its motors, gearing, batteries and sensing equipment from the weather. The robot is programmed to move only when necessary, and will locate sunlight when its batteries need recharging.

“The most exciting goal we’ll demonstrate with SlothBot is the union of robotics and technology with conservation,” says Emily Coffey, vice president for conservation and research at the Garden. “We do conservation research on endangered plants and ecosystems around the world, and SlothBot will help us find new and exciting ways to advance our research and conservation goals.”

“SlothBot could do some of our research remotely and help us understand what’s happening with pollinators(传粉者), interactions between plants and animals,   and other phenomena that are difficult to observe otherwise," Coffey adds.