Bright-line will officially begin its long-awaited high-speed train service to Orlando, Florida, on Friday. Here’s what travelers should know about Bright-line.

Bright-line serves Miami, Aventura, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach.Orlando service begins on Friday.

Bright-line aims to expand service to Tampa in its next phase.

Travel between Miami and Orlando is scheduled to take just over 3.5 hours, according to Bright-line’s website.

Bright-line offers two classes of service: Smart Fares, which is described as a “comfortable business class” with leather seats, power ports and free Wi-Fi, and Premium, which is comparable to first class with free snacks and drinks, priority boarding, checked bags and a special lounge.

One-way Smart fares between South Florida and Orlando start at $79 for a limited time for travelers 13 and older. The starting rate for kids between the ages of 2 and 12 is $39.   Additionally,   an automatic 25%off is applied to Smart Fares for groups of four or more people traveling together.

Premium fares start at $149.

Tickets can be purchased at Bright-line stations,on the company’s website and through its app.

Beginning this fall, students at select colleges and universities can receive up to 25%off Smart fares if they create their Bright-line account with their student email address.

The list of participating universities is available online.

Dogs and cats are allowed on Bright-line trains. The website’s pet policy says that pets must be leashed or crated while in Bright-line stations and on trains. The West Palm Beach and Fort Lauder dale stations have pet relief areas.

During the pandemic, Tokyo’s lively Mejji University campus stood still. My students were restricted to their homes, appearing only as small figures on my screen during Zoom lectures on human-computer interaction. I spent the days in my lab, looking for ways to pass the time.

On a particularly bland day in 2020, I was recalling about how, before the pandemic, Tokyo used to be packed with people who had flown across the world to enjoy the exciting food scene. But now restaurants were empty and people longed for foods they once relished. I missed drinking wine in a bar, watching others enjoying their evenings. I wondered how I could contribute during these trying times. That’s when an idea struck: why not create a device to bring the flavor of the world into people’s homes?

In Japan, companies use taste sensors to monitor the quality of products. These devices measure the strength of the five basic tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami — and assign each a value. It dawned on me that if taste could be quantified, perhaps it could also be recreated. I dissolved foods such as pizza and fries, measured how they rated, then made 10 liquid samples that each represented a taste. When copying the taste of food, it’s like following a recipe; I combined the 10 liquid samples to reflect the taste sensor’s measurements of the dissolved dish.

Taste the TV (TTTV), released in 2021, looks like a television screen — but you can lick it. Once the viewer selects a dish from the screen menu, an image of the food will appear, and above the screen a device containing my liquid flavor samples will spray in a combination that creates the taste of the chosen food. The spray then rolls films over the screen, and they can enjoy the taste of pizza without even biting into a slice.

My invention was received pretty well worldwide. My students and I would be interested in finding how else to challenge traditional ways of enjoying media, and we knew we wanted to expand on TTTV.

The best thing that has happened in Florida, since the beginning of July is that the electricity department has kept functioning. It is reported that daily maximum temperature is above 43℃. It is not just the United States, where 100 million people are under heat-warning notices, that is suffering. There is currently a series of such heat waves around the world. Temperatures exceed 40°C from Madrid to Cairo, where suffering power is unavailable. In Beijing July 18thsaw a 23-year-old record broken by a 27th consecutive day with a maximum temperature above35℃, which means people hadn’t even enjoyed one cool day during that period. By increasing the possibility of a wide range of extreme events, global warming also increases the chances that they will come in waves.

There are things to do as soon as the mercury (水银柱) rises. Get homeless people to cooling stations; encourage people to look in on elderly neighbors, the weak citizens and especially women over 80, who dominate the excess deaths associated with heatwaves; make it possible for those who must work outside to do so early in the morning;put hospitals on an emergency footing.

There are also things to be done in advance. It is crucial to work out where the people at greatest risk live. One thing that can help is deciding where to plant trees, which both provide shade and,as water evaporates through their leaves, cool the air. There are smart choices to be made about the built environment, from the best sort of pavement and courtyards designed for passive cooling to the popularity of white roofs. There are building codes to update so as to make those choices easier, as well as regulations to change so that workers are not endangered by midday heat.

All these measures are easier to take when a city has resources to devote to them. In the developing world, where a lack of air conditioning makes heat all the more deadly, such resources are scarce. What is needed for leaders is to take the issue seriously and for local politicians is to see cooling plans as a way to compete for votes. Unfortunately, such a strategy works best in places where voters have already felt the consequences of failing to act. Some studies re-veal that many places are at increasing risk of vicious heatwaves but have yet to experience one particularly troubling. Florida at least knows what to expect—and what it will have to go on expecting for decades to come.

“Just imagine it, chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee.” Whether portrayed by Rex Harrison, Eddie Murphy or Robert Downey, Jr.,Doctor Dolittle learned to talk to animals.But in reality, science has remained some distance from solving the long-standing question of how we humans learned to talk during our evolution.

Recently,a study by a team of researchers in Great Britain has demonstrated how the rapid succession of opening and closing mouth rhythms by chimpanzees—known as lip-smacking (砸吧嘴)—mimics the natural pace of human mouths talking.This phenomenon has been observed before in other ape species who performed lip-smacking movements at around 5 Hz, which falls within a range of mouth opens and closes characteristic of all spoken languages, namely between2 and 7 Hz.But it wasn’t until now that this lip-smacking timing connection had been made in our closest evolutionary relatives.The last years had seen accumulating evidence that these rhythms from deeper within our primate ancestry, recycled, so to speak,as a cornerstone for speech evolution.

“But the sense of evolutionary continuity towards speech still had a big gap to cross—the African apes.There was no evidence for speech like rhythm neither in gorillas, bonobos,nor chimpanzees”, says Adriano Lameira of the University of Warwick, who led the study. The study followed two domestic populations of chimpanzees, as well as two wild populations in Uganda. Researchers observed lip-smacking at an average of 4.15 Hz. They made all their observations whenever a chimpanzee was grooming(理毛；梳毛) another. Picture a hairdresser engaging in idle chatter with a customer at the beauty salon.

The confirmation of speech like rhythm of the mouth in chimpanzees does not reveal how language came about in our own ancestry, but it offers the final confirmation to scientists that we are looking at the right place, that we are on the right track to unlock this mystery and that great apes in enclosed areas and the wild still have to reveal all their secrets about human nature and human origins.

Lameira also notes that variation in lip-smacking times both between and within the chimp groups do not appear to be hard-wired. Rather, the lip-smacking variability likely reflects how individual differences and environmental factors, and even social conventions, affect how chimpanzees communicate with each other. Even Doctor Dolitle might well be amazed.

If you thought that your child’s academic performance is based solely on the number of hours spent studying, you’re sorely wrong.     16     And one of the major, mostly ignored, influencing contributors is physical health.

Physical activity and health can actually boost a person’s ability to learn. According to a study, exercise can improve a child’s cognitive abilities, health, and academic performance significantly. Regular aerobic exercise enhances the functioning of the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in learning and verbal memory.     17     Even the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal cortex—parts of the brain that control thinking and memory—are found to be in better health in those who exercise regularly than in the brains of those who don’t exercise.

The effect of exercise on memory and thinking is both direct and indirect. Directly, regular exercise gives the ability to stimulate the release of growth factors, chemicals in the brain that affect the health of brain cells, as well as the survival of new brain cells.     18     It will also reduce stress and anxiety.

    19     Studies show that the added study length doesn’t bring about the expected learning effects. Furthermore, the greatest cognitive benefits from physical education have been seen to come about when physical education is given either in the first half of the day or midday rather than at the end of the day. The benefits of exercise in terms of academic performance also apply to college students. According to a recent study in the North Carolina State, just an hour of exercise every week can bring about great changes.     20    

It was a busy morning and I had several urgent tasks to complete. As I was walking by a noisy road, I saw an old lady standing perilously(危险地)close to the traffic. Although my mind was_______, I realized that I should warn her to stay away from the _______traffic rushing by.

When I_______her, I noticed that she was attempting to get attention of passers-by who were too busy to_______her. She kept_______to the middle of the road. When I tried to_______ move her back further away from the road, she said that she had dropped her house key in the middle of the road. I knew I was getting_______but determined to help.

It was the worst time of the day to cross a busy road without a traffic_______. I cautiously _______onto the road waving my hands desperately and almost expecting to be________by an ongoing vehicle. At first, one lane________and then I moved further on. Just then a school bus was drawing near and I boldly stepped in front of it to stop it. My experience had been that school bus drivers were always________of reckless(不顾后果的)pedestrians like me. The school bus stopped exactly________the spot where the key had fallen. I quickly picked up the key and ran back. Although the bus driver sounded the horn violently at my recklessness, the school children who were watching my actions ________a cheer and clapped.

The old lady embraced me warmly as I gave back the key. I hope the school children would do the same when their ________comes in life, but safety comes first.

Getting angry could help you achieve your goals, a new research suggests. Often     36     (perceive) as a negative emotion, anger can actually be powerful     37     (motivate) for people to meet challenging targets in their lives. It is useful in achieving more challenging goals,     38     does not appear to be linked to easier tasks.The finding also suggests emotions that are often considered negative,such as anger,boredom,or sadness,can be useful.

Lead author Heather Lench, a professor at Texas A and M University, USA, stated that people often believed a state of happiness was    39     ideal, and the majority of people regarded the pursuit of happiness as a major life goal.” The view that positive emotions are perfect for mental health and well being     40     (be) noticeable in psychological accounts of emotion, but many researches suggest a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in     41     (good) outcomes.” She added that the functionalist theory of emotion suggests that all emotions, good or bad, are reactions     42     events within a person’s environment and serve the purpose of alerting that person to important situations that require actions.

In the study researchers conducted experiments    43     (involve) more than 1,000 people, and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 respondents. The researchers found that anger increased effort towards attaining a desired goal,     44     (frequent) leading to greater success and the effects of anger in encouraging people to reach for and achieve their goals were specific to situations     45     the goals were more difficult to realize.