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.

There is a saying about the south-western Chinese province of Guizhou: “Not three feet of flat land, not three days without rain, not a family with three silver coins.” But,with the help of a spicy sauce, Tao Huabi, also known as “China’s hottest woman”, has well and truly opposed this rule.

Born in 1947, the eighth daughter of a poor family in a village of mountainous Guizhou, Tao did not go to school and did not learn to read or write. She spent her childhood hungry,and survived the Great Chinese Famine by eating plant roots,according to a biography on Weibo. When her husband died, she moved to the city of Guiyang and started selling noodles with a sauce that she made herself, She eventually opened the charmingly named Economical Restaurant in the 1990s. When a new highway brought truck drivers to Guiyang, she gave them free jars of the sauce and they spread the word.In 1996, she set a factory up in a house in Guiyang, and a year later Lao Gan Ma Special Flavour Foodstuffs Company was born.

Miranda Brown, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, who is writing a book on the history of Chinese food, says that in China, Lao Gan Ma’s popularity is mainly because her products are natural. Chinese consumers tend to want foods that perfectly mix regional flavors and use ingredients grown from the soil of those regions. And today Lao Gan Ma is also increasingly popular overseas, especially in the US.

According to its website, the company produces 1.3 million bottles daily, helping the historically poor Guizhou achieve 10. 5% growth—the second fastest of every Chinese province that year, and ahead of the national rate of 6.7%.

As for the godmother herself, an article in Yicai Global describes her as the Queen of a “red kingdom” of chili fields.

A new research led by University of Pittsburgh psychologists shows that older adults may be able to prevent declines (衰退) in a certain kind of memory by sticking to regular exercise.

From the study, exercising about three times a week for at least four months is how much people need to obtain the benefits in episodic memory. Episodic memory, which is supported by a part of the brain that’s known to benefit from exercise, is the kind that deals with events that happened to you in the past. It’s also one of the first to decline with age.

Exercise that gets the heart pumping has shown promise in increasing brain health, and experiments in mice show that it improves memory — but studies looking at the same link in humans have come out mixed.

During the research, the team read 1,279 studies carefully, eventually narrowing them down to just 36 that met specific criteria (标准). Then they used specialized software and no small number of Excel spreadsheets to transform the data into a form where the different studies could be directly compared. That work paid off when they found that pooling together those 36 studies was enough to show that for older adults, exercise can indeed benefit their memory.

Past analyses looking at connections between exercise and memory didn’t find one, but the team took several extra steps to give them the best chance of finding a link if one did exist. They limited their search to particular groups and age ranges as well as a specific kind of strict experimental setup. Another key was focusing specifically on episodic memory.

With that much larger pool of participants, the team was able to show a link between exercise and episodic memory. The team also found the greatest effects of exercise in those who hadn’t yet experienced any cognitive (认知的) decline.