It was summer, and my dad wanted to treat me to a vacation like never before. He decided to take me on a trip to the Wild West. We took a plane to Albuquerque, a big city in the state of New Mexico. We reached Albuquerque in the late afternoon. Upon Paul, my dad’s friend, picked us up from the airport and drove us up to his farm in Pecos.

His wife Tina cooked us a delicious dinner and we got to know his sons Ryan and Kyle. My dad and I spent the night in the guestroom of the farm house listening to the frogs and water rolling down the river nearby. Very early in the morning, Uncle Paul woke us up to have breakfast. “The day starts at dawn on my farm,” he said. After breakfast, I went to help Aunt Tina feed the chickens, while my dad went with Uncle Paul to take the sheep out to graze (吃草). I was impressed to see my dad and Uncle Paul riding horses. They looked really cool.

In the afternoon, I asked Uncle Paul if I could take a horse ride, and he said yes, as long as my dad went with me. I wasn’t going to take a horse ride by myself anyway. So, my dad and I put on our new cowboy hats, got on our horses, and headed slowly towards the mountains. “Don’t be late for supper,” Uncle Paul cried, “and keep to the track (足迹；踪迹) so that you don’t get lost!” “OK!” my dad cried back. After a while Uncle Paul and his farm house were out of sight. It was so peaceful and quiet and the colors of the brown rocks, the deep green pine (松树) trees, and the late afternoon sun mixed to create a magic scene. It looked like a beautiful woven (编织的) blanket spread out upon the ground just for us.

Suddenly a little rabbit jumped out in front of my horse.

We had no idea where we were and it was getting dark.

Grady and his family go camping every summer. As it was becoming hotter, here came the camping time.

Having planned the camp long, the family finally decided the destination --- the Great National Forest. With food, necessity and cookers loaded onto the car, the family squeezed into the car. The car door closed, heat was shut outside.

In the car, Jared, Grady's younger brother was playing with a toy dinosaur, making great noise. Grady's mother talked excitedly with his father. On settling in the car, Grady put on the earphone and turned on the music. He neither wanted to join his brother nor joined any talk. After what seemed to be hours, the car stopped where they headed. Grady threw down his backpack and slammed the car door.

“This will be a lengthy week,“ he said unhappily to no one in particular. He looked around the campground. Hundreds of tall and green fir trees, some as tall as church towers, covered the mountainside like a green carpet. The sun would be setting soon. Grady thought maybe the heat wouldn't be unbearable. But actually now in the mountain, the hot stickiness of July was closely attached to him.

Grady hated camping, but it was something his family stuck to every summer. His father liked cooking over an open air, telling stories about how to survive things like bear attacks and bites of bees. His mother and Jared liked to hike and take pictures of animals. Jared had a collection of bug pictures that he had pinned to the walls in his half of their room. Grady thought they were just scary and proof that Jared was a strange kid.

They set up camp - two tents, one for his parents and one for himself and Jared. While everyone else started preparing dinner, Grady, looking for some place to cool down, set off for the nearby stream, which was deep enough to swim in.

5 . Dry ice is carbon dioxide in frozen form, with a temperature of about -78.3℃.     1     Instead, when dry ice melts, it turns into a gas. So when you see dry ice “smoking”, it’s frozen carbon dioxide melting into its gaseous state. Dry ice is a popular matter in science experiments and for a good reason. It creates projects that look cool.

Experiment: Healthy Dry Ice Yogurt Popsicles (冰棍)

This dry ice experiment is a simple project, but it’s certainly wonderful.     2     Even kids as young as five will at least appreciate the observations. It should take you about 10 minutes or less to have a frozen treat to enjoy.

Materials

One large block of dry ice

Large spoon or tube-shaped piece of metal

Four Popsicle sticks

One cup of your favorite juice

Tall glass filled with water

Directions

Use the large spoon, or tube-shaped piece of metal to make a Popsicle-shaped hole in the middle of the block of dry ice. You can set the ice on a towel on your counter to do this work.     3    

Add a Popsicle stick to the middle of the space so that when you pour in the liquid, it will freeze around the Popsicle stick.

    4     After several minutes, remove the Popsicle from the block of dry ice and dip it into a tall glass of water. Do this to warm up the Popsicle just a bit first.     5     You are sure to succeed!

6 . Harry is a vehicle called a pod—in other words, something like a car. But Harry has no steering wheel or brake pedal. Harry does not even have a driver. Yet Harry is carrying passengers around London for the next few weeks.

Harry is part of an experiment called GATEway that is testing how people react to driverless vehicles. The name GATEway is short for Greenwich Automated Transport Environment. The experiment aims to help cities prepare for the future of transportation. The GATEway experiment does not test new technology. Instead, it tests the way existing technology can work in society.

The pod operates in an area of London called Greenwich, home of time and navigation museums. Other places where pods will be tested are Coventry, Milton, Keynes and Bristol. The pods run using sensors and a 3D map of the area. A safety operator rides along to take control in case of an emergency.

GATEway is intended to see how pedestrians and cyclists may adapt to driverless vehicles. Harry holds up to four people (three passengers and a safety operator) and can travel at speeds up to 16km/h. It is being tested in Greenwich on pedestrian paths, but not on roads with other vehicles.

If you are in Greenwich during the next few weeks you may see Harry, but you cannot ride in it during the trial. Over 5,000 people applied to be a passenger in Harry but only about 100 were chosen.

You can, however, ride in a similar pod at Heathrow Airport in London. The Heathrow pods run on tracks so they are not being tested with pedestrians, cyclists or other drivers. If the trials are successful, the first pods could be operational on the roads of the UK in 2020.

Today, I saw the funny incident happening outside a grocery shop. Two little kids were playing together happy. One was very fat with a large stomach, which was eating junk food. The other kid reached out or felt his stomach, joking, “See how big your stomach it is, but you are still eating much!” I amused and looked at the other kid. I couldn’t help laugh out as he was much fatter with an even large stomach!

In your opinion, it is no good having too much junk food, which might be to blame on the fatness of children.

Notice

Student Union

9 . The surface of Venus（金星）has never seemed very hospitable. Temperatures change around 470°C（900°F）, the result of a runway greenhouse effect，and the pressure of its atmosphere, thick with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, is some 90 times that of Earth’s. Lead（铅）would flow like water on Venus, and water cannot have existed in liquid form for perhaps a billion years.

Now NASA’S Magellan spacecraft seems to have found one more horror in the nasty landscape: active volcanoes. Last week the space agency released the first detailed map of Venus and the most dramatic images ever made of its surface. The picture offer the best evidence to date that a planet once assumed dead is actually a lively pot of geological change.

The most amazing image is of Venus’s second tallest mountain, Maat Mons, which rises 8km（5 miles） . Most of the planet’s many peaks, including 9.5-km-（6-mile-） high Maxwell Montes, look bright in the radar pictures Magellan takes from its orbit above the permanent could cover. That means they are strong reflectors of radar waves. But Maat Mons is dark; like the Stealth bomber, it absorbs much of the radar falling on it.

This interesting fact, say project scientists, is a strong hint that the mountains has recently been covered with lava（^§S）. Rock that sits on the surface of mountaintops appears to weather quickly in the hot，chemically reactive atmosphere, creating a soil that is rich in iron sulfide（硫 化铁）• It is this mineral, the scientists believe, that can easily be seen on radar. If Maat Mons doesn’t have any, it has probably been resurfaced, perhaps within the past few years.

Such resurfacing has undoubtedly taken place in Venus lowlands: earlier images of the planet showed vast areas that are remarkably free of craters（火山坑）.That would be easy to explain on a Planet like Earth, where cratering from meteor strikes is erased by steady erosion. But while there is some evidence of wind erosion on Venus, the best explanation for the lack of cratering is periodic lava flow. Magellan has found direct evidence of such flows, including domelike upwellings and hardened streamed of rock trailing down the sides of Venusian peaks. There are also signs of other geologic activities, including dramatic faulting and several distinct incidents of mountain building. But the evidence can’t indicate whether they really occurred millions of years ago. The case for active Venusian volcanoes is not yet proved, but Magellan, which is now well into its second complete survey of the planet’s surface, may eventually settle the issue.

10 . Most of us have lost our wallet at some stage in our lives. But few would imagine having it returned after a nearly seven-decade gap. Edward Parker dropped his wallet in 1950 into an inaccessible spot behind a bookshelf, while working as an electrician, repairing World War Two bomb damage in the palace. The wallet stayed there until this year when a builder, doing some restoration work, finally found it.

The wallet is a time capsule. Its leather and webbing has long ago started to disintegrate. But it contains numerous pictures of family, invoices (发票), receipts, old union cards, results of a chest X-ray (sent to him in 1948, the same year as the NHS was founded), a national service card dated 9 December 1944 and a medical insurance card. His business cards-E Parker, Electrical Contractor-seem almost original. Reflecting the typical methods of contact of the time, they have an address but no telephone number.

A month ago I was speaking a press officer Lambeth Palace and he mentioned that the wallet had just been handed in. We thought it might be nice to try and work out whose it was and give it back to the family. Edward Parker is a pretty common name, but his medical card contained two places of residence-Poets Road and Springdale Road in north London. From this, Islington Council were able to find details of a marriage between Edward Parker and Constance Butler in 1947.

That information was enough to work out that he was still alive and in a care home in Essex, so I went to visit him. Now 89, Edward has dementia (痴呆), but he was clearly happy to get the wallet and in particular, the photographs back. He pointed out pictures of his mother and father, his brother, his cousins and his wife Constance, who was with him when I visited. He hadn't seen a picture of his father since he lost the wallet, Constance, 90, says.