In 1823, a young woman noticed a strange fossil on a beach near Lyme Regis, England. She dug out the bones and had them carried to her home. She carefully arranged the skeleton on a table. Then she saw something extraordinary. The creature's neck was a meter long-more than half the length of its body. It was unlike any animal living on Earth.

Even at a young age, Mary Anning had a talent for spotting "curies" fossils. Her father died in 1810, leaving her family in debt, so Mary began selling her fossils to collectors. A year later, aged just 12, she made her first major discovery—a crocodile-like skull with a long skeleton. It turned out to be a sea creature that lived long ago. Named ichthyosaur, or "fish-lizard", it was the first extinct animal known to science.

Fossil hunting brought in money, but it was a dangerous occupation. One day, a rock fall killed her dog and almost buried Mary. Despite the dangers, she continued to look for new finds. The long-necked fossil she uncovered in 1823 was another long-dead sea reptile. Known as a plesiosaur, it would inspire legends—including that of the Loch Ness Monster.

Mary was not only a skilled fossil hunter, she also carefully examined and recorded her finds. However, she received little credit from other scientists. Only one of her scientific writings was published in her lifetime, in 1839. She was also not allowed to join London's Geological Society, as only men could become members.

Mary Anning died in 1847, but her contributions have not been forgotten. Her finds are now displayed in museums in London and Paris. The beach near her home is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, known as the Jurassic Coast. Her life continues to inspire visitors hoping to find their own fossil wonders. According to Britain's Natural History Museum, Mary Anning was "the greatest fossil hunter the world has ever known". She was also a scientist who changed the way we think about life on Earth.

Mr. Buxton taught me Shakespeare in 10th grade. We were reading Macbeth. Mr. Buxton, who probably had better things to do, nonetheless agreed to meet one night to go over the text line by line. The first thing he did was point out the repetition of themes. For example，the reversals of things.

What Mr. Buxton didn't tell me was what the play meant. He left the conclusions to me. The situation was much the same with my religious studies teacher in 11th grade， Mr. Flanders, who encouraged me to have my own relationship with the Gos pels.

High school was followed by college， where I read Umberto Eco's The Role of the Reader, in which it is said that the reader completes the text， that the text is never finished until it meets this voracious(渴求的) and engaged reader. The open texts, Eco calls them. In college, I read some of the great Europeans and Latin Americans: Borges and Kafka, Genet and Beckett， Artaud， Proust一 open texts all. I may not have known why Kafka' s Metamorphosis is about a guy who turns into a bug, but I knew that some said cockroach, and others, European dung beetle.

There are those critics, of course, who insist that there are right ways and wrong ways to read every book. No doubt they arrived at these beliefs through their own adventures in the stacks. And these are important questions for philosophers of every stripe. And yet I know only what joy and enthusiasm a bout reading have taught me, in bookstores new and used.

There is not now and never will be an authority who can tell me how to interpret, how to read, how to find the pearl of literary meaning in all cases.

Supposing the truth is not hard, fast, masculine, simple, direct? You could spend a lifetime thinking about this sentence， and making it your own. In just this way，the freedom to see literature, history, truth unfolding ahead of me like a book whose spine has just now been cracked.

Parts of East Asia could see "rivers in the sky" form due to climate change, bringing record-breaking levels of rainfall with them, a new study has revealed.

The team, from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, have already seen clear signs of global warming hitting parts of the country, so they wanted to see how bad things could get. "It's been becoming more and more clear that global warming means more than just warmer temperatures," they wrote.

One particularly-damaging extreme weather event is an increase in rainfall to unexpected and unprecedented (前所未有的) levels, which can result in flooding. To help predict rainfall events, researchers looked to one of the causes — the interaction of atmospheric rivers with mountain ranges.

"As the name suggests, atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of concentrated water vapour flowing through the atmosphere," the team explained. "When one of these bands meets a barrier, such as a mountain range, it can produce extreme levels of rainfall or snowfall."

Parts of East Asia have been subjected to (遭受) an increasing number of damaging, extreme weather events over the past decade.

To understand the impact, the team used high-resolution global atmospheric circulations model simulations (模拟) that virtually re-create the conditions in the atmosphere. They then looked at other regional climate models, comparing simulations based on real, meteorological data (气象数据) from 1951 to 2010 to predictions for 2090.

Authors used the climate scenario that would result in 4℃ of warming, compared to preindustrial levels — which is significantly more than 2℃ target set as part of Paris Climate Agreement.

First author, Professor Yoichi Kamae, said that their simulations predict strengthened water vapour transport, as well as increased rainfall at unprecedented levels. In simulations the greatest amounts of atmospheric river-related rainfall occurred on the southern and western slopes of mountains in East Asia, including in Japan, the Korean Peninsula, and northeastern China. They had to limit the study to East Asia due to computer time and processing limitations, but predict it would apply to other regions around the world.