【推荐1】Have you ever seen the auroras (极光) in the sky? Cosmic radiation (宇宙辐射) creates these pretty lights in the North and South Pole areas. It seems that cosmic radiation is a beautiful gift from space. But for some people, it can be dangerous.

A 53-year-old fight attendant in South Korea, who spent about 1,022 hours flying each year, passed away due to cancer. A South Korean court connected his death to great exposure (暴露) to cosmic radiation. During his career, nearly half of his flights crossed the areas in and around the North Pole, where cosmic radiation is extremely strong.

①       Cosmic radiation from space is hitting Earth nonstop, coming from both the sun and other stars in the Milky Way.

②       Earth’s magnetic field (磁场) and atmosphere (大气层) protect us from most cosmic radiation. The magnetic field is strongest near the equator and weakest at the poles. People living at higher latitudes (纬度), like in Heilongjiang province, are exposed to a little bit more cosmic radiation than those living at lower latitudes, like in Hainan province. Also, when you go higher in an airplane, the thin atmosphere increases exposure to cosmic radiation.

③      For flight attendants crossing polar areas and for astronauts in space, cosmic radiation can create health risks. NASA reported that the radiation exposure faced by astronauts spending six months in space is the same as having 1,000 chest X-rays.

④      However, what makes cosmic radiation dangerous also makes it useful. The light speed and energy of cosmic radiation have provided wonderful ideas for treating tumors (肿瘤). Scientists can now produce man-made radiation similar to cosmic radiation. Compared to the present ways of treating tumors, it can kill tumors better with less damage to healthy parts of the body around them.

【推荐3】If someone asks you, “    1    ” I think you will answer “Blue”. I’m afraid that you will be wrong.     2     It looks blue because we are looking at the blue sunlight. The sunlight is shining on little bits of dust (灰尘) in the air.

    3     I’m sure that you have asked this question, too. We know that there is air all around the world, but we couldn’t fly very high because as we go high, the air gets thinner. If we go far enough away from the Earth, we find there is no air.

Maybe we can answer some questions now. What is the sky? Where is it? It is all around the world.     4     In space, there is nothing, but only the Sun, the Moon, the Earth and all the other stars.

In one of my classes today we discussed the question of how our lives would be without a phone and I actually felt quite sad to hear how some kids these days cannot survive without their mobiles. Personally，I think nowadays we are controlled by our technology and pressurised（加压的）to keep up.

So let's see some of the points that came up in the debate and see if our generation really is addicted to electronic connections rather than true communication.

It is true that everything works at a fast pace these days，due to the quick access we have to pretty much anything and anyone. For example，you can contact someone who lives on the other side of the world within seconds. This is great if you think about bow connected we can stay to the people who are far away from us；however，on the contrary，can we be too connected to the people who are close to us? An argument arose（出现）about the fact that it is easier to message someone from your sofa than to meet them in person and talk. On one hand，it is easier and nice sometimes to carelessly chat to a friend this way．However，it is also lazier and rude to prefer to talk to someone on your phone rather than meeting up，if you are able to，in my opinion. Social skills are important to have and if you are not going to put effort into real-life communication，then you are not going to progress in this ability. Another point was that phones are very handy to look up something that you are wondering about. For example，if you don't know a word in another language,you can quickly and simply use a translator to help you out. This can be very helpful in many situations，but it can also make a person dependent on the internet to help with anything. This factor slightly takes away the diversity（多样性）“learning a language and speaking with people，as you are able to access everything you need by the web.

All in all，this question is very interesting to consider for oneself as we become day by day more dependent on technology. We should just realize how much we really need to be connected by our phones while considering the benefits and damage it can cause us.

From the moon to Mars, scientists have been looking for water — the key to life — in the solar system for many years. Recently, they have turned to Jupiter(木星)!

Jupiter is a gas giant(巨星). It doesn’t have an Earth-like surface. We can see strips(条纹) around it. They are actually cold, windy clouds.

On April 14, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE spacecraft successfully lifted off from French Guiana in South America. JUICE, short for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”, will collect data(数据) from Jupiter and its three moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

The three moons are believed to have big oceans of liquid water(液态水) under their icy shells(壳). According to ESA, he water on those moons could be six times as much as the amount in Earth’s oceans. The mission “will change our understanding of the solar system”, wrote Scientific American.

In 1998, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft found that Europa might be ejecting(喷射) water as far as 160 kilometers into space. That gave scientists the idea of studying the icy moons of Jupiter.

The oceans under these moons are likely to be tens of kilometers deep. But they are also trapped under tens of kilometers of ice, making it very difficult to study them. Although JUICE cannot land on the surface, it has lots of high-tech equipment to study the moon’s environment, including spectral imaging(光谱成像) tools and radar(雷达). They could give more data on things like the thickness of the oceans, their salt content(含量), and their distance from the icy shells above, reported Phys.org.

“The main goal is to understand whether there are habitable (可居住的) environments among those icy moons and around a giant planet like Jupiter,” JUICE team member Olivier Witasse said during a press conference (发布会) on April 6.