1 . We live in a town with three beaches. There are two parts less than 10 minutes’ walk from home where neighborhood children gather to play. However, what my children want to do after school is pick up a screen — any screen — and stare at it for hours. They are not alone. Today’s children spend an average of four and a half hours a day looking at screens, split between watching television and using the Internet.

In the past few years, an increasing number of people and organisations have begun coming up with plans to counter this trend. A couple of years ago film-maker David Bond realised that his children, then aged five and three, were attached to screens to the point where he was able to say “chocolate” into his three-year-old son’s ear without getting a response. He realised that something needed to change, and, being a London media type, appointed himself “marketing director from Nature”. He documented his journey as he set about treating nature as a brand to be marketed to young people. The result was Project Wild Thing, a film which charts the birth of the World Network, a group of organisations with the common goal of getting children out into nature.

“Just five more minutes outdoors can make a difference,” David Bond says. “There is a lot of really interesting evidence which seems to be suggesting that if children are inspired up to the age of seven, then being outdoors will be on habit for life.” His own children have got into the habit of playing outside now: “We just send them out into the garden and tell them not to come back in for a while.”

Summer is upon us. There is an amazing world out there, and it needs our children as much as they need it. Let us get them out and let them play.

3 . Australia, France or… Mars? When considering a place to emigrate to, Mars might not be the best choice in your list, but according to an online survey, more than one in ten of British would accept a one-way ticket there. Yes, you read that correctly —because the Mars One mission is looking to emigrate to Mars, the first voyagers will not be able to return back to Earth. The organizers suggest applicants think over their applications, because the agreement didn’t come with a return ticket. But still thousands of people agreed to it.

The Mars One aims to construct a human settlement on Mars. Thankfully, applications for the program are entirely voluntary and potential astronauts can back out at any time during the strict selection process.

In order to apply, the candidate must be over 18, have A2 English level and be adaptable and curious. The following selection process consists of four rounds.

The first round is an online application including general information and a one-minute video in which the applicant answers some given questions and explains why he or she should be among the first humans to set foot on Mars. At the end of the first round, a team of Mars One experts will decide which applicants will pass to the next round.

The remaining applicants must then provide a medical statement from their doctor stating that they have met all the requirements. Successful candidates will then be briefly interviewed by Mars One’s chief medical officer Norbert Kraft.

One-hundred healthy, smart candidates are then in the third round which will test their team work ability and communication skills through a series of group challenges.

The final part of the testing process is the ability to stay alone. Even the best astronauts in history can hardly enjoy the silent space. Following this challenge, the forty remaining candidates will be reduced to thirty who will then undergo the Mars Settler Suitability Interview. Following on from the first selection series, international crews of up to six groups of four will become full time employees of Mars One.

4 . Montreux, Lake Geneva, Switzerland

After passing away in 1991, Freddie Mercury's body was burned and. his ashes spread around in Lake Geneva. A statue o£ the lead singer of Queen was unveiled(揭幕) on November 25,1996, and overlooked the lake.

Nine Mile, Jamaica

In the village of Nine Mile lies a statue built just feet away from Bob Marley s childhood home, where the Reggae singer was buried after his death in 1981. In 1991, the Jamaican government declared Marley's birthday, February 6, a national holiday, and Nine Mile held an annual music festival in honor of the singer.

Joshua Tree National Park, Joshua Tree, Calif.

Gram Parsons was a regular visitor to Joshua Tree National Park until his death in 1973, and he and his friend Phil Kaufman made an agreement that whoever died first, the survivor would take the other guy's body to Joshua Tree and burn it. This agreement would be the foundation for one of the greatest stories in rock and roll history. Today, there is a Gram Parsons statue in Joshua Tree National Park.

Stone Mountain, Ga.

After one of the most unfortunate deaths in hip hop history, the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation was developed by Tupac's mother in 1997. The foundation began a center for the arts in 2005 as a youth arts training program. Located in Stone Mountain, the center has a peace garden with a statue of the late rapper.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool (UL) have developed a robot that can run experiments on its own. It’s not new for labs to use robots. But earlier robots usually stayed in one place and     1     (do) one job over and over again. The UL robot is different. It’s able to     2     (easy) move around in the same kind of space as humans do. It uses a special system called LIDAR to guide     3     (it). With one long arm which can turn in almost any direction, the robot can use several different kinds of lab equipment and carry out     4     variety of tasks.

The scientists says it took a lot of work     5     (program) the robot so that it could do things without     6     (make) mistakes. Once the programming is done, though, the robot makes     7     (few) mistakes than a human.

To test their robot, the scientists gave it a task: find a material     8     was able to produce hydrogen (氢) from water. The robot was programmed to understand the basic methods for the experiment, but it     9     (give) 10 different things it could change which could influence the results. That meant that the robot could choose from around 98 million different mini-experiments. Over the next 8 days, the robot ran 688 experiments, always choosing its next experiment based     10     the results of the last one.

8 . A new study conducted in China, and published by the medical journal Neurology, indicates people who sleep for a large amount of time up their stroke (中风) risks by 85 percent. In addition, those who take regular 90-minute naps (小睡) increase their risks of stroke by 25 percent, compared with brief-30 minute naps or avoiding naps entirely. Disturbed sleep also raised stroke risk by 29 percent, according to the study.

Researcher Dr. Xiaomin Zhang, head of the team, told the Associated Press, “People, especially middle-aged and older adults, should pay more attention to their time spent in bed attempting to sleep and midday napping, and sleep quality, because appropriate duration of sleep and nap and maintaining good sleep quality may complement other behavioral interventions for preventing stroke.” Dr. Zhang cautions that the study only shows an association between long periods of sleep and a stroke, but does not prove that naps and long periods of sleep cause strokes.

Other studies have pointed out a link between excessive (过度的) or poor sleep and obesity (肥胖), which leads to increased stroke risk. Those risks, including high blood pressure, were factored into Dr. Zhang's team's data.

Dr. Zhang's study collected data from 31,750 people living in China with a median age of 62. After six years of self-reported follow-ups and physical examinations, 1,500 of the participants were found to have suffered strokes during that ensuing period of time.

Dr. Zhang noted that the study is limited, since it was conducted mainly on elderly patients. The advice within it may apply only to the elderly.

Dr. Salman Azhar, director of stroke at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City said, “If you sleep so much, you're actually decreasing your activity and a reduction in activity leads to a number of things that increase your risk of obesity.” Activity seems to be the key, according to Azhar. If activity is limited and the amount of sleep increases, the stroke risk will increase.

9 . Lewis Carroll was the pen-name o£ Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English writer and author of two of the best loved children's books in English literature — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The characters and phrases from these books have entered and become part of the English lexicon (词典) in a way that was comparable to those from Shakespeare's works.

Charles Dodgson was born on January 27,1832 and spent the first eleven years of his life at Warrington. Dodgson was educated first by homeschooling, then at boarding schools in Richmond and at Rugby, and finally at Charist Church College, Oxford. In later life, he remembered his boarding school experience with no fondness. Still, he was an excellent student and did very well academically throughout. For all his brilliance or perhaps because of it, he couldn't be bothered to spend long hours studying and so he didn't. If things came easily, that was fine; if they didn't, well, that doesn't seem to have bothered him overmuch.

His book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland first came into being in 1862 as a story he made up for Alice Liddell, the ten-year-old daughter of his friend Dean Henry Liddell. Later he wrote it down and showed the book, illustrated with his own drawings, to another friend, the fairy tale writer George Macdonald and his children. They loved it and enthusiastically urged him to get it published. Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. And in 1865, with illustrations more professionally done by Sir John Tenniel, it became an immediate bestseller. Its sequel (续集) Through the Looking-Glass proved equally popular.