3 . Some bacteria(细菌)have a superpower that scientists would love to use. These bacteria gain energy from light, just as plants do.Scientists have wanted to use cyanobacteria(蓝藻菌)to make electricity. But in previous research, they didn’t survive long on artificial surfaces. Researchers have now moved them to a living surface — a mushroom. Their creation is the first mushroom to make electricity.

Applied Physicist Simon Jackson and his team turned that mushroom into a mini energy farm. This bionic(生物电子的)mushroom combines 3D printing, conductive ink and bacteria to generate electricity. Its design could lead to new ways of combining nature with electronics.

Like plants, cyanobacteria make their own food from sunlight, releasing electrons(电子). When enough electrons build up in one place, they can create an electric current.

The researchers needed to bring a lot of these bacteria together. They decided to use 3D printing to place them precisely onto a surface.Jackson’s team chose mushrooms for that surface. After all, they realized, mushrooms naturally host communities of bacteria and other microbes. Finding test subjects for their tests was easy. Jackson simply went to the grocery store and picked up white button mushrooms.

Printing on those mushrooms, though, turned out to be a real challenge. 3D printers have been designed to print on flat surfaces, but mushroom caps are curved. The researchers spent months writing computer code to solve the problem. Eventually, they came up with a program to 3D print their ink onto the curved mushroom tops.

The researchers printed two“inks”onto their mushrooms. One was a green ink made of cyanobacteria. They used this to make a spiral pattern on the cap. They also used a black ink made of graphene, which is great at conducting electricity. They printed this ink in a branching pattern across the mushroom top.

Then it was time to shine.

“Cyanobacteria are the real heroes here,”says Jackson. When his team shone light on the mushrooms, the bacteria gave out electrons. Those electrons flowed into the graphene and created an electric current.

4 . I was ten when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Prior to that, she had been a(n) _______ woman, active to an extent most people found astonishing. As a child, I was amazed by her accomplishments. But at thirty-one, her life _______. And so did mine.

She could do anything, I _______. She won tennis tournaments. She took photographs and held her own exhibition. She _______ as a newspaper columnist, and she cooked Spanish dishes for the family.

Now, she faced her illness with the same _______. Words like “disabled” and “physical therapy” became part of a(n) _______ new world we entered together. _______, I began to help take care of her. And it became routine to _______ her into the kitchen, where she instructed me in the _______ of peeling carrots and potatoes and how to prepare a decent breakfast.

Every accomplishment was a ________ for us both: the electric typewriter, the car with power steering and brakes, her return to ________, where she earned a master’s degree in special education. She eventually founded an activist support group called The Handicappers. One day, without ________ much beforehand, she took me to a Handicappers meeting. I had never seen so many people with so many ________. I returned home, thinking how ________ we really were.

Because my mother accepted her condition with such optimism, I rarely felt sad or resentful about it. Instead, I viewed her drive to look forward to things I ________ as a great mystery and powerful inspiration in my life.

5 . As you read this, pause to reflect on your recent interactions. As a politician, husband, and father, I encounter various spoken language styles: analytical or chatty, formal or informal, pointed or gentle, cooperative or decisive. Talk is the currency of politics. It is our way of negotiating, debating, and persuading. Talk is also the currency of learning-how we develop our ideas, deepen our thinking and share our feelings.

That’s why I want speaking skills, sometimes called “oracy”, to play an important part in Labor’s plans for a reformed school curriculum (课程).

Employers value speaking skills equally with reading and writing. The ability to speak well and express yourself should be something every child should master. But the curriculum doesn’t allow us to provide this. This is short-sighted. An inability to express your thoughts fluently is a key barrier to getting on and doing well in life.

Oracy is in part about good public speaking and debating skills, but in reality, it’s about teaching young people to make strong arguments, choose wise words, understand their audience, form meaningful social connections, and use facial expressions and body language to convey their message. Above all else it’s about finding your voice. To work out who you are and what you believe. If reading opens up a world of imagination and possibility, then speaking and listening opens up a lifetime of empowerment-a chance for those who feel invisible in their own country to be heard. It is about the confidence to speak out, to call out injustice or harm.

And the other side of speaking is listening, which can also be taught. Listening, truly listening, develops tolerance and understanding. And as parents we can play our part. We’ve all been there, at mealtimes, silent as we all stare at our devices. Our job, all of ours, is to get off our screens and give young people, and adults, the gift of listening.

So, oracy―speaking and listening―needs to be placed firmly at the heart of school life.

6 . The sperm whale is an astonishing creature. It’s longer than a semi-truck, weighs more than 90, 000 pounds and is the largest member of the toothed whale family. It’s known to dive 6, 500 feet in search of food, and to stay down there for longer than an hour at a time.

Perhaps most fantastically, the sperm whale’s brain weighs as much as 20 pounds-the biggest of any species on Earth. But when it comes to brains, is size all that matters? There’s a lot we don’t know about the sperm whale’s intelligence because it’s difficult to carry out neurological (神经的) testing on such a huge marine mammal. But some clues point to sperm whales being much smarter than we give them credit for.

A 2021 study published in Biology Letters, for example, looked back to 19th-century historical logbooks from whalers. Researchers found that sperm whales were at first easy to catch-but almost immediately, the whales learned how to evade hunters and whaling success dropped by 60 percent. The study suggests that the whales passed information to one another through soundwaves to avoid being caught.

Animals that have big brains usually have a few things in common. They usually live long lives; for example, sperm whales can live for 70 years or longer. Additionally, they’re capable of complex behaviors and they tend to be more socia1. Whales may work together to hunt or communicate in a language all their own.

What’s more, humans, whales and dolphins all have spindle neurons in their brains. These nerve cells make us capable of deeper thought, such as reasoning skills, memory, communication and adaptive thinking. And like humans, whales have emotional intelligence- meaning they＇re capable of empathy, grief and sadness. Still, in proportion to (与…成比例)our body size, the human brain is bigger than that of the sperm whale.

Yet there’s still so much we don’t know about how smart sperm whales really are. And just like the whalers of a century ago, we have likely been underestimating marine mammals, whether large or small, for as long as we’ve known of their existence.

7 . The train had been long delayed. Running out of _________, Andy put down his book and looked out. He found the_________at once: it was raining hard.

He lay down and fell asleep but was soon woken up by a woman. She handed him his bag and _________ that it had slipped to the floor. He gratefully took it back and opened it,_________ to see his mother’s scarf and some sandwiches inside.

Andy’s thoughts drifted(飘)to when he was _________. His mother had insisted on putting her scarf in. “If it rains, it may get cold.” He remembered feeling_________and had taken it out. But it was still here.

_________ Andy realized he was burning with fever. Feeling helpless, he called his mum. “Take a _________I have put in medicine, just_________,” she suggested. Touched by his mother’s__________he took the medicine and soon fell deep asleep in the__________of the scarf.

Andy woke up later feeling much better. Then he noticed the woman,who’d__________him earlier, __________ holding a baby in her arms, both shaking. Their clothes did little against the cold wind.

Without thinking twice, Andy wrapped his mother’s scarf around the baby. To his __________, the child soon fell asleep in the love of not one, but two__________.

8 . African penguins live on the rocky coasts of South Africa, Namibia and nearby islands. Like other types of penguins, the birds have white feathers covering their chests and black feathers covering their backs. They form lifelong pair bonds with mates, but they nest in huge colonies — so, scientists wondered how the birds were able to identify their partners among the sea of black-and-white birds. They wondered if their chest spots had something to do with it. To test this theory, they studied 12 African penguins at a zoo and marine park near Rome called Zoomarine Italia.

In one test, they hung two life-size photographs of the African penguins. One showed a random member of the colony, while the other showed the test subject’s mate. The scientists recorded the birds’ interactions with the photos: How long did they spend looking at each one, as well as how much time did they spend standing near each photograph? The penguins spent more time gazing at the photo of their partners — about 23 seconds longer, on average — than looking at the other photo. They also stood next to the image of their beau s for twice as long. Then, the researchers covered up the heads of the birds in the photographs, leaving only their speckled bodies visible, and the penguins still lingered near their partners’ portraits.

In another experiment, the researchers hung up two photos of a bird’s mate — but, in one, they had digitally removed its spots. In this case, the penguin again spent more time looking at the photo with the dots.

Finally, the researchers posted two photographs of penguins with digitally removed spots — one of the test subject’s mate and the other of a random penguin from the colony. In this scenario, the penguins did not appear to recognize their partners. They spent roughly the same amount of time gazing at or standing near both photos.

Together, the results of these experiments suggest African penguins are zeroing in on their partners’ spots and using them like name tags, scientists say.

“Our results provide the first evidence of a specific visual cue responsible for spontaneous individual recognition by a bird and highlight the importance of considering all sensory modalities in the study of animal communication,” the researchers write in the paper.