Different cultures have their unique celebrations of the calendar New Year's traditions. Now let's learn some of famous New Year's traditions around the world.

The Netherlands

Amsterdam hosts one of the world's largest street parties on New Year's Eve. If you attend, buy some oliebollen to eat at mid-night. It is usually believed that eating these deep fried oily balls wI'll drive away evil spirits in the New Year. Dam Square (the craziest), Nieuwmarkt, and Leidseplein host unofficial street parties with music, fireworks and beer tents. Amsterdam's celebration is not for the casual partier: Some attendants have compared it to a war zone!

Scotland

Celebrating Hogmanay, which stands for the last day of the year, is a big deal in Scotland. It is so grand that it often overshadows Christmas. Christmas was outlawed by the Church of Scotland for nearly four centuries, and it didn't make a comeback until 1958. Though the holiday has regained its popularity, the New Year Festival of Hogmanay still holds a sacred place in Scottish hearts.

Australia

Sydney Harbor hosts one of the biggest New Year's Eve celebrations in the world. It's mid-summer in the southern part of globe, and thousands of people gather around the Opera House in advance. An air-plane show and a water display open the celebration at 6:00 pm. A family-friendly fireworks show starts at 9:00 pm, while the main attraction-the Harbor Light Parade is at midnight.

The United States

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people flock lo New York City to see the Big Apple drop at midnight. This New Year's Eve tradition actually began as a replacement for fireworks, which had been forbidden in New York. In addition to watching balls drop, in other US cities you can watch peaches, giant walleye, and other locally relevant symbols lowered as the clock strikes midnight.

The Curiosity Detector was never fully sterilized before it landed on Mar. And there's been debate whether the rover drill might pollute certain subsurface areas thought to potentially give birth to life. But it turns out the detector may not need to drive somewhere to pollute that spot with Earth's micro-livings. Because if there are any tiny earth livings on the detector, the strong winds on Mars might be able to spread them around the Red Planet instead.

“Wind storms are very common on Mars. So you have one point of pollution, and given the proper conditions, you could spread whatever you were carrying there to distant places." Said Armando Azua-Bustos, a research scientist at the Center for Astrobiology at the Superior Council of Scientific Research in Spain.

Azua-Bustos is now more certain that such spread might be possible because of an experiment his team carried out in Chile's Atacama Desert-the conditions of which are greatly similar to the Mars'. There, his team placed containers along two paths cutting from the coast into the driest parts of the Atacama. One path was 30 miles long; the other 40 miles long. They waited for winds to deliver coastal dust to the containers. Then they grew whatever landed.

On both paths, they found amounts of bacteria species, which suggests that micro-livings are indeed able to fly over the driest and most sun-shined desert on Earth in just a few hours—and arrive unharmed. The details are in the journal Scientific Reports.

The researchers say wind could therefore be a way to easily pollute another planet with Earth micro-livings if spacecraft aren't sterilized—or a way for Martian life in once-fertile areas to give birth to others by lying on dust in the wind.

July 20 marks 50 years since human beings first landed on the moon. That day in 1969 made astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin well-known names. But years before that, a lesser-known figure was on a mission to make that first moon landing possible.

His name was John Houbolt, the son of Dutch immigrants. Houbolt grew up on a farm in Joliet, Illinois. He studied engineering at the University of Illinois and eventually worked his way to NASA.

It was there, in the early 1960s, that he made his career to defend what was, at the time, an unpopular idea—but would ultimately be critical to getting Apollo 11 to the moon and safely back.

“John once faced a mixture of indifference until things started to change, and engineers started to realize his data might be right.” Todd Zwillich, author of the original audio-book about Houbolt's life. It is called The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon.

So what was Houbolt's unpopular idea? He defended what's called lunar orbit rendezvous. The idea involves sending a spacecraft into orbit around the moon—and from there, sending only a small light space vehicle down to the moon's surface, instead of the entire spaceship.

Zwillich says while Houbolt didn't invent the idea, he was the one who started to apply it. Most people who know the most about this mission feel that without lunar orbit rendezvous, Apollo 11 couldn't have succeeded. And without John Houbolt, you probably would not have had lunar orbit rendezvous.

Zwillich's book also explores the kinds of challenges NASA engineers face today, as they make plans to get back to the moon and, ultimately, to Mars, orders of magnitude of a bigger problem , which bringing us a lot of problems to think about.

Those problems, he says, create plenty of debates today. With the story of John Houbolt as an example, something considered highly unlikely now might be the key to eventually putting people on the Red Planet.