The Cambridge Science Festival Curiosity Challenge
Dare to Take the Curiosity Challenge!
The Cambridge Science Festival (CSF) is pleased to inform you of the sixth annual Curiosity Challenge. The challenge invites, even dares school students between the ages of 5 and 14 to create artwork or a piece of writing that shows their curiosity and how it inspires them to explore their world.
Students are being dared to draw a picture, write an article, take a photo or write a poem that shows what they are curious about. To enter the challenge, all artwork or pieces of writing should be sent to the Cambridge Science Festival, MIT Museum, 265 Mass Avenue, Cambridge 02139 by Friday, February 8th.
Students who enter the Curiosity Challenge and are selected as winners will be honored at a special ceremony during the CSF on Sunday, April 21st. Guest speakers will also present prizes to the students. Winning entries will be published in a book. Student entries will be exhibited and prizes will be given. Families of those who take part will be included in celebration and brunch will be served.
Between March 10th and March 15h, each winner will be given the specifics of the closing ceremony and the Curiosity Challenge celebration. The program guidelines and other related information are available at: http: //cambridgesciencefestival. org.
The US inventor Thomas Alva Edison once said, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. " He was not exaggerating. Perspiration, indeed, plays a very important role in Chinese scientist Tu Youyou's success.
Tu was given the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 for discovering a new drug for malaria, a deadly disease caused by the bite of some types of mosquito. She is the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize in science. "It is the pride of the whole Chinese science community, which will inspire more Chinese scientists, " China Daily noted.
Malaria is a disease that infects around 200 million people and kills about half a million people each year, according to the Economist. Tu's discovery has saved millions of lives, especially in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, by 2013 malaria deaths had fallen by 47 percent compared with 2000.
But the road to this achievement was a tough one to travel. In the late 1960s, during the "cultural revolution " (1966-1976), Tu joined a government project on which she began research on a new malaria drug.
In the beginning, Tu read a lot of old folk remedies(药方), searched texts that were hundreds or thousands of years old and traveled to remote places.
Over several months, Tu and her team collected over 600 plants and created a list of almost 380 possible remedies.
"This was the most challenging stage of the project, " Tu told The Beijing News. "It was a very labor-demanding and dull job, in particular when you faced one failure after another. "
But the hard work and the dullness failed to break the team's spirit. In the following months, she and her team tested the remedies on malaria-infected mice and they found that an extract(提取物)from the plant qinghao seemed to work well.
Not that the work was easier after that. The fact that the extract didn't always work against malaria discouraged some of her teammates. But Tu was ambitious to make a contribution to the world and so she encouraged her teammates to keep going. They decided to start again from the beginning.
In 1971, they were rewarded for their efforts. After nearly 200 failures, Tu finally made an extract that was 100 percent effective against malaria parasites. The extract was called "Artemisinin(青蒿素)".
"Thanks to decades of hard work, Tu and her team had provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people every year, " said the Nobel Prize Committee. "It has greatly improved human health and reduced suffering. "
As a senior high school student, my future is always on my mind. To be exact, thoughts of the future have kept me up countless nights and made me worry enough to do poorly on more than one test. Because of this, words of wisdom are a source of comfort. Steve Jobs gave a speech to Stanford's graduating class in 2005 and his words resound repeatedly in my mind whenever I think about my future.
It wasn't always like that, though. It started when I became a junior, when college came into view. It's the first big step to making your life your own. So when Jobs discussed his life as a student, some fears were eased. He, too, felt the need to attend college to make something of himself. He faced what many are extremely afraid of: uncertainty. His lack of understanding caused him to stop attending college and focus on what he felt was important. His story had a happy ending, of course, since he certainly turned out well.
This doesn't mean that students shouldn't attend college, but rather that they shouldn't worry so much. You'll get where you need to go, even if your path is a bit more winding(蜿蜒的)than you'd like.
Jobs talked about the hardships in his work. His love of his work helped him carry on and he got where he was meant to be, which restates the point: don't panic.
One particular part of his speech stayed with me. Steve Jobs quoted(引用)the saying "Stay hungry, stay foolish" and it has become my motto. Staying foolish is realizing that you are still a fool, no matter how much you've learned or experienced. There is always more to explore. Staying hungry is wanting to find those things about which you are still uneducated.
Steve Jobs's level of success is attainable, and I aim to prove that. With the will power to go into the world living every day like it's my last and allowing the future to take care of itself, I will do great things. In the last moments of my life, I'll be proud of what I have done and hope to have all the wisdom a person could wish for.
No one is sure how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids near Cairo. But a new study suggests they used a little rock 'n' roll. Long-ago builders could have attached wooden poles to the stones and rolled them across the sand, the scientists say.
"Technically, I think what they're proposing is possible, " physicist Daniel Bonn said.
People have long puzzled over how the Egyptians moved such huge rocks. And there's no obvious answer. On average, each of the two million big stones weighed about as much as a large pickup truck. The Egyptians somehow moved the stone blocks to the pyramid site from about one kilometer away.
The most popular view is that Egyptian workers slid the blocks along smooth paths. Many scientists suspect workers first would have put the blocks on sleds(滑板). Then they would have dragged them along paths. To make the work easier, workers may have lubricated the paths either with wet clay or with the fat from cattle. Bonn has now tested this idea by building small sleds and dragging heavy objects over sand.
Evidence from the sand supports this idea. Researchers found small amounts of fat, as well as a large amount of stone and the remains of paths.
However, physicist Joseph West thinks there might have been a simpler way, who led the new study. West said, "I was inspired while watching a television program showing how sleds might have helped with pyramid construction. I thought, 'Why don't they just try rolling the things? '"A square could be turned into a rough sort of wheel by attaching wooden poles to its sides, he realized. That, he notes, should make a block of stone "a lot easier to roll than a square".
So he tried it.
He and his students tied some poles to each of four sides of a 30-kilogram stone block. That action turned the block into somewhat a wheel. Then they placed the block on the ground.
They wrapped one end of a rope around the block and pulled. The researchers found they could easily roll the block along different kinds of paths. They calculated that rolling the block required about as much force as moving it along a slippery(滑的) path.
West hasn't tested his idea on larger blocks, but he thinks rolling has clear advantages over sliding. At least, workers wouldn't have needed to carry cattle fat or water to smooth the paths.
Investing in yourself
Figuring out how to invest your money can be a difficult task. This is something that you will want to learn how to do.
. Things that will improve your knowledge, skills or health are all great investments. However, before you start, you need to be clear about what you will gain out of doing all of these things.
You may think investing in yourself means investing in your education. . There are some other things you can do as well as buying a gym membership or learning a new skill.
So what are some specific things you can do? . Reading books can really expand your mind and allow you to learn different skills and gain knowledge. I'm talking about the books where you will actually learn a new skill, not fiction books.
You can also take courses and attend seminars. These programs are taught by people with a high level of knowledge or skill. . Only in this way can you avoid being fooled by some sales presentation.
Moreover, investing in yourself is a safe way to keep your money. Although a savings account is seen as the most secure investment, that isn't 100% safe. Even if you never experience your bank closing down, the return is little when inflation (通货膨胀) is taken into consideration. . But over time, they will show up in terms of your happiness level as well as your level of success.
A. The benefits will stay with you
B. This is just one way
C. If you aren't a reader, you should start with that
D. The more you do this, the more valuable you will be
E. The best way to invest your money is to invest it in yourself
F. Of course, you need to do some research before investing
G. When you invest in yourself, you may not see gains right away
Everyone back home told me that one of the nicest things about college is the people you meet. They all assured me that I would 1friendships that could last a lifetime. I would always smile and agree. Frankly, before I 2college, I really didn't care.
I lived in the 3where six guys lived in two small connecting rooms. All my roommates seemed to be good guys, but I didn't really try to get to know them.
I have always been rather quiet and never been able to make friends 4. I would always forget names after I met people. When we 5again and they called out my name, I would reply with an 6wave and a weak hello. This was how things went for the first month or so. After a while, things started to 7. A couple of my roommates would try and keep me talking. Soon, these two roommates and I started becoming fairly 8. We began going to the cafeteria together, 9together, and meeting in the library to study.
One night my roommates invited me to listen to a fellow roommate's practice with one of our college choir. They drove me across campus where my roommate was to 10.
It so happened that this was my birthday, but I had kept quiet about it. So you can imagine my 11when we entered the recital hall and the 120-member choir began to sing "Happy Birthday" to me. 12at the dorm, my friends held a small party for me, complete with a card and a cake.
I was completely shocked, and I felt 13to be able to call them friends. It was then that I realized that college means 14the piece of paper you receive at the end—it's an 15in both life and people.
Dogs are desperate for human eye contact. It's hard for most people to resist a flash of puppy-dog eyes. Dogs split off from (they) wolf relatives. A paper has found that dogs' faces are structured for complex
(expression) in a way that wolves' aren't. There are two muscles work together to widen and open a dog's eyes, causing them to appear (big), and objectively cuter. for wolves neither muscle was present. When dogs work these muscles, humans respond more positively. This isn't simply accidental love story, where the eyes of two species just so happen to meet across a crowded planet. Like all the best partnerships, this one more likely (result) from years of evolution and growth.
For a species to change quickly, a pretty (power) force must be having effects on it. And that's where humans come in. We connect
(close) with animals capable of exaggerating the size and width of their eyes, (make) them look like our own human babies.
Over the past few years, there has been a big increase in the number of people sharing information online. In this article, we will learn about some positive factors for people to share information online.
We often share information with our friends in the office or at home to educate, entertain or pleasantly surprise them. In this way we can connect with others. This is also true while sharing information online. If you look at the Facebook wall posts of your friends, you will realize that most of their updates are usually famous quotes, entertaining videos, inspirational images, funny jokes, etc. 94% of those who responded to a survey by The New York Times said they put a lot of thoughts into how the content they are sharing will be beneficial to others.
A lot of people share information online to portray their true self to the outside world. Some people, especially those who are shy and not comfortable talking about their areas of interest in the presence of others, find it extremely convenient to share that information online with like-minded individuals.
78% of the respondents in the study of The New York Times said they shared information online because it helps them develop better relationships. Today, a lot of people do not have the time to meet each other in person, and the Internet has become a great substitute. A lot of people now "meet" each other online, rather than in conventional places like restaurants and pubs.
Lastly, when we share our thoughts online, we are actively engaging with the vast community of people who are a part of the World Wide Web. Sharing information will make a difference to the viewpoint of others, or add to their understanding about the world.
