November isn’t the only time when people come together to raise money for good causes. Here are three other major charity events from around the world.

What started off as a race of 680 women in a London park in 1994 to raise money for a cancer charity has now turned into a massive nationwide event, with thousands of women up and down the UK taking part every year.

Known for dressing head to toe in pink, participants raise money for breast cancer research by being sponsored to take part in marathons, which are organized all year round. Since it began, more than 8 million women have taken part, raising over ￡547 million for Cancer Research UK.

Normally taking place in mid-August, this program encourages young Australians to give something up for 40 hours in order to raise awareness of less fortunate youths around the world.

Participants raise money which is donated to good causes worldwide, by giving something up for the weekend, including the use of technology(TVs, computers, smartphones and so on), or even food. Since it began in 1975, World Vision Australia, the event’s organizer, has raised over ＄200 million.

Each year, thousands of people ride the 545-mile route from San Francisco to Los Angeles in order to raise money and awareness for HIV (AIDS-related causes). Cyclists make the trip over seven days, stopping each night at designated camps to shower, eat and relax. The mainly male riders are known for their colorful riding sportswear, with some dressing as nuns(修女), cowboys or even in bikinis. The event has raised around ＄100 million since it began in 2001.

83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the trend. As Brazilian landowners cut down rain forests to make room for profitable plantations(种植园) and cattle grounds , he struggled to bring the jungles of his childhood back to life.

“When I was a child, the peasants cut down the trees to make grasslands and charcoal, and the water dried up and did not come back,” he told the reporters. “I thought:‘Water is valuable, no one makes water and the population will not stop growing. What is going to happen? We are going to run out of water.’”

With only some donkeys and a small team of hired workers, Antonio Vicente set about bringing back the forest to his land. What started out as a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life , and Antonio recalls often spending whole days and nights in his young jungle, surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Over the last 40 years, he has planted an estimated 50,000 trees on his 31-hectare land, which now make up a small but unique area of rain forest, and a haven for wildlife.

As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there are now over 20 water sources on his land that were no longer there when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there. Today, the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.

“There are toucans(巨嘴鸟)，all kinds of birds, squirrels, lizards, and even the boars are returning,” 83-year-old Vicente says. “If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed.”

If you have some free time to socialize, do you prefer to spend it with your best friend or partner, or with a larger group of people?

A new study investigated what group size people actually look for and encounter in everyday life. The scientists asked more than 4, 000 people from the U. S. and the Netherlands to report the size of their social groups for a wide variety of activities. For eight different activities (going to a bar, chatting at work, chatting off work, having dinner, going on a holiday, going to a movie theatre, working on a project, playing sports), people reported a group size of two more often than they reported larger group sizes. Interestingly, for about half of these activities, women reported a group size of two significantly more often than men did, suggesting that women prefer a social group size of two even more than men do.

The researchers also used a research technique called real—time experience—sampling in the second part of the study. 274 volunteers were asked seven times a day to report the last social situation they had experienced. The results were clear. Two was the most common group size with 52. 6 percent. Thus, this part of the study also suggested that two is the most common group size in social interactions.

So why do people prefer spending their time with one other person compared to spending their time with larger groups? Researchers explained that in general, social interactions with just one other person allow for more control of the situation, especially when it comes to reciprocity ( 互助). When we interact with just one other person, one's choices directly affect the other person and only that person. Thus, it is easy to distinguish whether there is mutual cooperation (for example, both people take turns paying for dinner) or whether someone acts selfishly (for example, one person never pays the bill). In larger groups, the situation gets much more complicated.

For many people, going a few hours without your smartphone can feel like a lifetime. Now, one expert claims that humans are becoming so dependent on technology, that we’re actually merging (融合) into it.

Speaking at the Fast Company European Innovation Festival, Professor Yuval Noah Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University claimed that it’s becomingmore and more difficult to tell where humans end and machines begin. He said: “It’s increasingly hard to tell where I end and where the computer begins. In the future, it is likely that the smartphone will not be separated from you at all. It may be embedded in your bodyor brain, constantlyscanning your biometric data and your emotions.”

During his speech, Professor Harari highlighted how humans have affected our environment over time, and suggested that now may be thetime to affect ourselves. He said: “Humanity has always remained constant. If we told our ancestors in the Stone Age about our lives today, they would think we are already Gods. But the truth is that even though we have developed more wonderful tools, we are the same animals. We have the same emotions, the same minds. The coming revolution will change that. It will change not just our tools, it will change the human being itself. ”

If we do manage to merge with machines, Professor Harari suggests it could open the door to setting upcivilizations beyond Earth. He added: “Life willbe able to break out of planet Earth and no longer be confinedto this flying rock.”

While Professor Harari’s claims may sound farfetched (牵强的), he isn’t alone in his vision of a machine­human world. Back in 2017, Elon Musk claimed that humans should merge with machines, or risk becoming irrelevant. He said: “Over time I think wewill probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence anddigital intelligence.”