Planned track closures

We are always working to improve our infrastructure (基础设施) and technology to make sure our customers can enjoy a safe, reliable and comfortable experience on trains and at our stations. Sometimes we need to temporarily close tracks or stations to complete upgrades or work to ensure our trains run safely and on time. Additionally, some track closures will affect Cross River Rail, which is Queensland’s largest rail infrastructure project. Most works are scheduled outside of peak times to minimise disturbance.

Here are lines affected in February.

Service arrangement:

Buses will replace trains and operate as close as possible to the train timetable. During certain closures, some train services will be operating to an altered timetable.

More information:

·If you are travelling during this time, plan your journey at translink.com.au, call 13 12 30 or download the My TransLink app.

·For ticket information, please ask at your local station or call 13 16 30.

·Many stations have wheelchair access from the car park or entrance to the station platforms. For assistance, please call 13 16 17.

Rural Patagonia is famous for its wonderful nature. A Google search for “bicycle tour Patagonia”   led my friend Rachel and me to the Carretera Austral:   a 770-mile stretch of mostly unpaved highway. We packed our bikes into hoxes and flew to Puerto Montt, a port city some 650 miles south of Santiago. From there, we continued south for several days and set foot on the Carretera.

It took about two weeks to cycle the route through wild forests, windswept plains, and snow-capped mountains. On our last full day along the Carretera-and three days into a constant rainstorm-we found ourselves at a loss for where to sleep. We were cold and wet.

We were still 30 miles from Villa O’Higgins, which marked the end of the Carretera and the promise of a hot shower. From there,   we’d ride about 600 miles further along somewhat better roads to Ushuaia.

There was no way we were going to make O’Higgins by nightfall. We hadn’t passed a nice campsite in hours. We’d just stopped beside a small stream when we spotted a cowboy-looking man walking out of the trees. And we saw that the stream led to a small house. The man came to the road. “Do you know a dry place to camp?” Rachel asked.

The man invited us into his home. We shared hot chocolate and conversation in his warm, rough kitchen. He brought out an old copy of Patagon Journal, and we were amazed to see a photo of our host, Erasmo Betancourt, on the cover. It turns out that our new friend was a well-known cowboy-turned-activist who had been an outspoken opponent of the damming(筑坝)of Patagonia＇s rivers. In recent decades, local farmers, fishermen, and conservationists have fiercely resisted the construction of hydroelectric(使用水力发电的)dams on the region＇s mighty rivers. Our adventure wouldn’t have been possible if not for their fierce love of this beautiful land and devotion to its protection.

The next morning, we thanked our host and hit the road. Is there anywhere on Earth so remote that one cannot encounter humanity?

Isaac Newton’s book, the Principia, transformed human understanding of the forces of nature, providing a mathematical basis for the movement of planets, moons, and comets (彗星), as well as objects on Earth. Recently, a new survey has more than doubled the known number of first editions of the book, including the first ones found in Asia. Nearly 200 first editions of Principia were newly identified in the survey, bringing the total known number to 386. The volumes cover 27 countries on five continents, including Africa and Australia.

Until now, the size of the Principia’s first edition had been thought to be small — around 250 — based on a 1953 survey that put the number of copies at 189. That figure partly reflects a long-held idea that the book, formally titled the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was virtually incomprehensible outside of a small circle of expert mathematicians. But the new survey suggests that the great volume, at 500 pages and written in Latin, may have been popular in many parts of the world.

Behind the pages of the Principia, in which Newton laid out his three laws of motion, is an interesting history that involves the astronomer Edmond Halley and other great figures. Most famous today for the comet that bears his name, Halley sought Newton’s input on the shape of planetary orbits, a question that Halley and his colleagues had been puzzling over. Excited by Newton’s answer — an ellipse (椭圆) , and even more so by a paper he later sent to show his calculations, Halley pushed Newton to write the Principia, then funded its publication and was key to promoting it.

Such a precious book of knowledge carries enormous value. “In a sense, the Principia combined all the work that was done for the previous hundred years,” says Mordechai Feingold, a science historian at the California Institute of Technology. “It took Newton to put together the ideas, that Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and other scientists had put forth insofar as heavenly bodies (天体) are concerned, to realize that Earth is a planet like any other planet and there’s a mutual (相互的) attraction between all those heavenly bodies.”

“If the self or person of today, and that of tomorrow, are not the same, but only like persons, the person of today is really no more interested in what will befall (降临到……头上) the person of tomorrow, than in what will befall any other person,“ Joseph Butler, a well-known philosopher wrote in 1736.

The theory caught the attention of a researcher called Hal Hershfield, who suspected that a disconnection from our future selves might explain many unreasonable elements of human behaviour including our unwillingness to exercise often.

To find out, Hershfield first had to find a way to measure someone’s ”future self-continuity”. He settled on a simple graphic that presented pairs of circles representing the current self, and a future self (see below).The circles overlapped (重叠) to varying degrees，and the participants had to identify which pair best described how similar and how connected they felt to a future self 10 years from now.

He then compared these responses to his participants’ real-life hehavior. Hershfield first looked at his participants’ real-life savings and he found that the more the participant felt connected to their future self, the more money they had already squirrelled away. What’s more, people who score highly on the future self-continuity measure have higher moral standards than the people who struggle to identify with their future selves.

Hershfield confirmed that someone’s (in) ability to identify with their future self can have long-term consequences for their overall wellbeing and that our sense of connection to our future selves can be strengthened. You might consider a simple imaginative exercise in which you write a letter to yourself 20 years from now, describing what is most important for you now and your plans for the coming decades.

It might seem strange to start a “conversation“ with an imagined person but once your future self becomes alive in your mind, you may find it much easier to make the small personal sacrifices (牺牲) that are essential to preserve your wellbeing.

The weather forecast calls for a slight chance of thunderstorms, but you can only see a few white clouds overhead.    16    You spend a few minutes warming up and then wait! Is that thunder you hear? Was that a lightning flash?

What do you do? Keep playing until the thunder and lightning get closer? Go sit on the metal bench(长椅)under the trees to see what happens? Or get in your car and drive home?Correct answer: If no substantial, non-concrete shelter is nearby, get in your car and wait out the storm. Why?

    17    Although the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are less than 1 in a million, some factors can put you at greater risk. Lightning most often strikes people who work outside or engage in outdoor recreational activities.     18    Florida is considered the “lightning capital” of the country, with more than 2,000 lightning injuries over the past 50 years. From 2009 to 2018,lightning caused an average of 27 deaths per year in the United States.     19    

·If the weather forecast calls for thunderstorms, postpone your trip or activity.

·When thunder rolls, go indoors. Find a safe, enclosed shelter. Safe shelters include homes, offices, shopping centers, and hard-top vehicles with the windows rolled up.

·    20    After you see lightning, start counting to 30. If you hear thunder before you reach 30, go indoors. Suspend activities for at least 30 minutes after the last clap of thunder.

·If you are caught outside with no safe shelter nearby，crouch(蹲下)down in a ball-like position with your head tucked(收拢)and hands over your ears.

A Florida man likes to shop at garage sales for old plaques(纪念匾)so he can reuse the wooden backs. Recently, he was looking through a___________he bought years ago when one _________a small ball caught his eye.

The man took a moment to___________what was written on the plaque and quickly realized there was a___________stone inside the ball-a piece of moon rock brought back on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The plaque and rock had been a___________to the state of Louisiana by then-President Richard Nixon but___________ended up in a garage sale for the man to find years later.

“I can’t even tell you how long I___________it for. I’m not even sure how much I___________for it. The wood in the plaques is such nice wood and that is what I___________them for," the man said. The man __________the Louisiana governor’s office, which____________him to the Louisiana State Museum. The man hand-delivered his____________to the Louisiana State Museum. He didn’t want to take a chance that something might happen to it during__________.The museum’s director is____________for his generosity and __________for reuniting the state with this priceless object. “It is an extraordinary piece of Louisiana history,” he said. “We’re____________to take possession of this piece and to share it with our audiences.”

After Apollo 17____________on Earth, Nixon____________379 pieces of the satellite stone to all the states as well as foreign nations. Over time, those gifts began to____________A 2002 search found that many were unaccounted for. To date, the fate(命运)of 171 rocks remains __________

China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has detected a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) — strange radio     41     (signal) from outer space — for the first time. Scientists on the FAST project with the National Astronomical Observatories of China broke the news     42     Wednesday.

The FRB originated some three billion light years away from Earth. FRB is one of the     43     (hot) ever topics in astronomy. It was not until 2007     44     the first FRB was discovered by humans. Fewer than 100 FRBs have been detected internationally to date. There is still no convincing     45     (explain) for the origin of FRB in the international scientific community at present.

FRBs mostly only appear once, which makes them very hard     46     (track). The FRB detected by FAST’s real-time detection terminal, however, is one that has been observed before.     47     (know) as FRB121102, it was first discovered in 2012 and found to repeat in 2015. Analysis of data later     48     (indicate) that the signal came from a dwarf galaxy (矮星系) three billion light years away. The first pulse from FRB121102     49     (spot) by FAST on August 30. After this,     50     telescope recorded dozens of pulses from the FRB over the course of days. On September 3 alone, more than 20 pulses were detected.