The Ivy League schools are some of the most selective colleges in the United States. If you’re planning to apply to any of them, be realistic about your chances of being admitted.

Columbia University

Columbia is one of the largest of the Ivies, and it has a close relationship with neighboring Barnard College, one of the nation’s top women’s colleges. The university is home to an excellent medical school, law school, business school, engineering school, and numerous other programs.

Brown University

With a rich history dating to 1764, Brown University is the second smallest of the Ivies, and the school has more of an undergraduate focus than universities such as Harvard and Yale. The university’s campus is close to the Rhode Island School of Design(RISD), one of the nation’s top art schools, and students can easily cross-register between the two institutions.

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth is the smallest of the Ivies, but don’t be misled by its name. It is a university, not a college. The attractive Dartmouth campus is home to a business school, medical school, and engineering school.

Princeton University

Like Dartmouth, Princeton is on the smaller side and has more of an undergraduate focus than many of the Ivies. The school’s 500-acre campus with its stone towers and Gothic architecture ranks as one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. Sitting on the edge of Lake Carnegie, Princeton is home to numerous flower gardens and tree-lined walks.

Sake（日本米酒）is produced in almost every corner of Japan. It has a place in the soul of the Japanese and has been woven into the history and culture of Japan.

I’ve been told to leave Tokyo if I really want to understand the drink since it is a product of the countryside in Japan: rice from the fields, water from the mountains.

“You can tell a great deal about a place from the sake produced there. It’s made with local water and local rice. So when you taste it, you’re truly tasting a part of local culture, ” explains Koichi Hasegawa, the 13th-generation owner of Buko Shuzo Brewery in Chichibu, one of the closest towns to Tokyo.

As I taste my way through the different grades of sake, Hasegawa speaks poetically of the drink. “Sake is an important part of the journey of life. It’s present at birthdays, weddings and funerals, ” he says. “Drinking sake beneath the cherry trees in spring or under the autumn moon, drinkers might think over the beginning and ending in their lives. No sake, no life. ”

For much of its history, sake-making was reserved for temples, and sake still plays a key part in Japan’s religious ceremony. People believe its giddy（微醺的）effect helps them communicate with gods.

“On first taste, sake is delicious. Before long, it kicks you off your feet, ” says Yogoemon Ide, the president of Ide Sake Brewery—a family-operated brewery that has been in business for 21 generations—near Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest and holiest mountain. “I think sake is a supernatural liquid. It was originally used to spread the word of God. ”

Stepping out of Yogoemon Ide’s brewery and gazing up at Mount Fuji, I recognize an additional taste of the lde sake: an aftertaste of the cold, unfriendly climate around the potentially life-threatening volcanic mountain.

The world’s largest astronomy museum in Shanghai, China opened on July 18, 2021, with its architecture and exhibitions celebrating the complexity of the vast and largely unknown universe.

Most obviously, the museum’s surface is intentionally designed without straight lines or right angles to mirror both the continuous state of time and space and the complex gravitational relationships among suns, moons and stars in the universe. “This design draws from the classic ‘ three-body problem’ in physics, the unsolved question of how to mathematically calculate their movements,” explains Wong, the chief architect. “While the calculation can be carried out between two heavenly bodies, the orbits become messy and unpredictable with three.”

The complexity is also translated into the new museum’s three key attractions: the oculus (圆洞天窗), the inverted dome (倒穹顶) and the sphere.

Opening up above the museum’s main entrance is the oculus. It acts as a timepiece, producing a circle of sunlight that travels across the floor throughout the day to indicate the time and season.

Next comes the inverted dome that sits at the roof line. Inside the inverted dome, visitors are cut away from the view of the nearby urban context. It gives visitors the chance to have a sweeping view of the open sky. “We want people to have a real contact with the universe and understand the special nature of Earth as a place that hosts life, unlike any other place that we know of in the universe,” Wong said.

Built in the roof of the lower Museun wing, as if rising out of the horizon, the sphere gradually comes into view as visitors go around the building, the drama unfolding as though they were approaching a planet from one of its moons, allowing visitors to have an illusion (幻觉) of weightlessness or anti-gravity.

Other major elements in and around the new museum include a crowd-drawing range of temporary and permanent exhibitions, a 78-foot solar telescope, an observatory, an education and research center, and the digital sky theater.

This month, science fiction magazine Lights peed changed its normal publishing schedule to bring readers a special issue: “Women Destroy Science Fiction! ”

It’s more than just a collection of stories entirely edited and written by women. It’s an exhibition of all the ways in which women are writing—and have written.

Many of the stories will be considered the best hard science fiction even by the pickiest critics (评论家). For example, Tananarive Due’s Like Daughter deals with what happens when humans have easy access to cloning. The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick by Charlie Jane Anders takes place in a future where changing brain chemistry is as common as taking vitamins now.

However, it is also true that the authors are more focused on the relations between people, or between people and society, or changing cultural and gender roles. There are stories that refuse to stay firmly within science fiction borders. For example, James Tiptree Jr. ’s Love Is the Plan and the Plan Is Death is a mixture of horror, mystery and even love, something not commonly seen in science fiction.

So are women destroying science fiction?

If your idea of science fiction is limited to the concept formed by works like Isaac Asimov’s Night Fall and Arthur Charles Clarke’s Childhood’s End, then many of the stories within these pages may well seem like devastation.

“But the stories we read and the stories we tell shape who we are, ” Pat Murphy once said in a famous speech back in 1991. “They also shape the culture they’re born into. Thus, if women keep writing such kind of science fiction, and keep calling it science fiction, the room for science fiction will expand. They will exist nicely beside other kinds of science fiction. ”

I cannot agree more. Women have the right to create a space for themselves within science fiction. one filled with their dreams, experiences and realities.