Indoor Games to Play with Family This Winter

Gather round the table with your favorite warm drinks and try some of the following indoor games with your family and friends.

Escape Rooms

Have you ever been to an escape room? Whether you have or you haven’t，the escape room fun is far from being over, with choices to order your own home escape room tools! You can even find some online free escape room choices to try out for hours of thinking and exploring and lots of fun for everyone who takes part.

Balloon Volleyball

This indoor game is great for keeping active while people are stuck indoors, and it is super fun and doesn’t make a mess. All you need to do is blow up a balloon and throw it at each other, making sure it doesn’t hit the floor，just like volleyball. This is another great game for all ages, even babies.

Pictionary

Have you got any promising artists at home? This game is a classic and fun for kids and adults of almost all ages. All you do is make teams and take some paper and pens to write proper words. You can then either use the real Pictionary cards or go the DIY route, creating your own cards. Write your own song or movie titles for great fun!

Indoor Hopscotch

Hopscotch can be made in so many different ways and doesn’t necessarily have to be played with chalk on the sidewalk. Hopscotch made with popsicle(冰棒) sticks is a great indoor kids’ activity, but it can definitely be enjoyed by the whole family. Make squares creatively from all kinds of materials, maybe even with tape on your footcloth.

Famous American performer Chita Rivera died on January 30 in New York. She was 91 years old. The famed dancer, singer and actor won many awards and honors in her long career on Broadway and beyond.

Rivera first gained wide notice in 1957 as Anita in the original production of the musical play West Side Story. She was still dancing on New York’s Broadway stages a half century later in 2015’s The Visit.

“I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t moving or telling a story to you or singing a song,” she said at the time. “That’s the spirit of my life, and I’m really so lucky to be able to do what I love, even at this time in my life.”

Rivera was born on January 23, 1933, in Washington, D.C. Her father was a musician. He died when Rivera was seven. Her mother was of Scottish and Italian ancestry (血统).

Rivera studied dance as a young girl and was accepted into a highly respected school for ballet. She was 17 when she won her first part in a musical.

She won two Tonys, the highest award for live theater in the United States. Her first came in1984 with the production of The Rink. She won again in 1993 for the play Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The second Tony was an especially sweet victory for the star. Just five years earlier, Rivera had been in a serious car accident that broke her right leg. It could have ended her career. After months of physical treatment to regain her dancing skills, she returned to the stage singing and dancing as energetically as ever. She said, “It never entered my mind that I wouldn’t dance again.”

When accepting a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2018, Rivera said, “I wouldn’t trade my life in the theater for anything, because theater is life.”

A new study suggests that the climate change diet might not be good for polar bears. With Arctic (北极) sea ice reducing, many polar bears have to go to land for their diets during parts of the summer.

A study looking at Hudson Bay polar bears tried to figure out if the creatures can keep their healthy weight levels on such a diet. Researchers found that the majority of the creatures are losing weight no matter what they do to try to increase it.

Some bears find a lot of food — berries, eggs, sea birds and so on. But to get such foods takes a lot of effort. The bears use so many calories trying to eat that they end up losing weight and burning more energy than they take in. Other bears go into a time of semi-hibernation (半冬眠). But they also lose weight. So either way — eating different foods or sleeping a lot — does not work.

Researchers found that 19 of the 20 bears studied dropped an average of 21 kilograms over three weeks of being studied. The research observed their calorie intake, energy use and breathing in the wild. The bears lost about 7 percent of their body mass on average in just 21 days.

Polar bears try to keep up their weight in the summer after a spring when they eat a lot and gain weight. In the area of the Hudson Bay where researchers studied, lack of sea ice has meant polar bears are on land three weeks longer than in the 1980s.

Last September, when Arctic sea ice hit its yearly low, there was about 2.6 million square kilometers less sea ice than the same time in 1979. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service lists the polar bear as a threatened species due to the loss of its sea ice habitat.

Overall, the research shows that it is unlikely that polar bears can adapt to living on land.

Researchers say new evidence suggests Mimas, the icy moon of Saturn (土星), likely has a large underground ocean. Researchers based their finding on data collected by the American space agency NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Cassini observed Saturn and its more than 140 moons for more than 10 years before ending operations in 2017.

Researchers reported the data provided the best evidence yet of a hidden ocean about 20 to 30 kilometers beneath the frozen surface.

Mimas is a relatively small moon, about 400 kilometers wide. Researchers say Mimas doesn’t have formations (构造) on its surface found on other moons, which suggests the presence of underground water. These can include a broken surface as well as spring activity.

The amount of water thought to exist below the surface of Mimas would represent just 1.2 to 1.4 percent of Earth’s oceans. That is because the moon is very small.

However, Mimas does have a very large crater caused by a crash with a space object. The edges of it are raised very high. For this reason, the appearance of the moon has been compared to the fictional “Death Star” space station in the popular movie series Star Wars.

The researchers said the underground ocean appears to have formed recently in space terms, possibly between 5 and 15 million years ago. The ocean would likely have an overall temperature of around zero degrees Celsius. But the temperature at the seafloor might be much higher.

The water is in contact with the moon’s rocky center, which may create the right complex (复杂的) chemical conditions to support life. But the researchers noted that because the ocean is believed to be young, it might be a challenge for life’s development.

However, nobody knows how long life needs to appear from a suitable environment. The ocean on Mimas may offer a unique opportunity to explore the first stage of life’s development.

Scientists have said that in the past another moon of Saturn, Enceladus, might possess the warmth, water and chemical materials necessary to support life.