【推荐1】When you think of Chinese food in the US, fried rice, or General Tso’s chicken may first come to mind. But a new museum exhibition in New York City is trying to expand visitors’ palates (味蕾). It features stories of famous cooks like Martin Yan and home cooks whose food represents 18 different regional cooking styles of China.

“I think it’s unfair to just classify Chinese cooking as one,” says Kian Lam Kho, an organizer of “Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy: Stories of Chinese Food and Identity in America” at the Museum of Chinese in America. “Even with the same dish or same cuisine, every family has a different variation.” That’s why the organizers say if you want to taste the full range of Chinese cuisine in the US, you’ll need to go beyond restaurants and into home kitchens, which can play a central role in many immigrants’ lives.

“The kitchen itself is kind of a comfort when you come to a new country. That’s the one place where you set up as your home base, and you cook things that you remember from your past,” explains Audra Ang, another organizer.

One of the home cooks showcased in the exhibition is Ni Biying, 80, of Manhattan. She worked as a live-in babysitter for years before she could finally afford to rent a home with her own kitchen. These days, you can usually find her moving around her one-bedroom apartment as a sweet smell of vinegar and rice wine floats from her stove. For Ni, a small dinner for friends and family means preparing almost a dozen different dishes. She learned some of her techniques from her father, who made most of her family’s meals when she was a child. “I still miss the beef with stir-fried celery my father used to cook,” she says. And it’s the kind of comfort food that defines Chinese food for Ni.

【推荐2】Your action can speak louder than your words. It is important to know another language and how to communicate without words when you are in another country. Before saying anything, people communicate with each other by using gestures. However, many gestures have different meanings, or no meaning at all, in different parts of the world.

In the United States, nodding your head up and down means “yes”, while in some parts of Greece and Turkey, it means “no”. In the southeast of Asia, it is a polite way of saying “I heard you”.

Today in the USA, when someone puts his thumb up, it means “Everything is all right.” However, in Greece it is bad manners to do so. Also putting your clasped hands up above your head means “I am the winner.” It is the sign which players often make. In Russia it is the sign of friendship.

In the USA, holding your hand up with the thumb and index finger in a circle, and the other three straight means “Everything is OK.” In France, it means “You are worth nothing.”

It is also important to make eye communication. If you look down when talking to an American, he or she may feel that you are shy, or you are trying to hide something.

Besides these, you should also know there are some topics that can not be talked about, such as age, weight and marriage. You can talk about the weather, work, sports, food, where one lives and news of the day.

【推荐3】In the home country, a common language gives you the ability to communicate easily with the people around you; and you learn something about your country’s history, people’s habits, likes and dislikes, customs and traditions. This understanding influences your own behavior, and what you expect of others.

Living abroad, it doesn’t take long to realize that many things don’t “work” the same, especially when moving from “the West” to “the East”. Besides a different language, each country has its own social system and laws and ways of solving problems. You will find some of them strange and alien. Sometimes you may feel uncomfortable because you realize that things are not the same as you think they are supposed to be. This is what has become known as “Culture Shock”.

Living in an environment with an unfamiliar(不熟悉的) culture can cause stress, anxiety or worse-mental or physical illness in some cases. Culture shock is the shock of experiencing an unknown or new culture. Cross-culture Adjustment is the period of anxiety, great pain and confusion suffered when entering a new culture. It can have effects on a person’s emotions and behavior. You should learn to accept and try to be used to different situations. One thing is certain: it is far easier to accept the new order of things than to try to change it.

Most Asian people can bear foreigners and accept their strange habits and behavior, not only because it might be to their benefit but out of natural politeness and restraint(克制) in front of others. Westerners should not make use of this. They must try to accept and obey local rules and rules of behavior.

【推荐1】Although it has been revealed in recent years that plants are capable of seeing, hearing and smelling, they are still usually thought of as silent. But now, for the first time, they have been recorded making ultrasonic (超声的) cries when stressed, which researchers say could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops.

Itzhak Khait and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that tomato and tobacco plants made cries at frequencies humans cannot hear when stressed by a lack of water or when their stem it cut.

Microphones placed 10 centimetres from the plants picked up sounds in the ultrasonic range of 20 to 100 kilohertz, which the team says insects and some mammals would be capable of hearing and responding to from as far as 5 metres away. A moth may decide against laying eggs on a plant that sounds water-stressed, the researchers suggest. Plants could even hear that other plants are short of water and react accordingly, they speculate (推断).

On average, drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour, while tobacco plants made 11. When plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour, and tobacco plants 15. Unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour, on average.

It is even possible to distinguish between the sounds to know what the stress is. The researchers trained a machine-learning model to recognize between the plants’ sounds and the wind, rain and other noises of the greenhouse, correctly identifying in most cases whether the stress was caused by dryness or a cut, based on the sound’s intensity and frequency. Water-hungry tobacco appears to make louder sounds than cut tobacco, for example.

Enabling farmers to listen for water-stressed plants could “open a new direction in the field of precision agriculture”, the researchers suggest. They add that such an ability will be increasingly important as climate change exposes more areas to drought.

“The suggestion that the sounds that drought-stressed plants make could be used in precision agriculture seems feasible (可行的) if it is not too costly to set up the recording in a field situation,” says Anne Visscher at the royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK.

She warns that the results can’t yet be broadened out to other stresses, such as salt or temperature, because these may not lead to sounds. In addition, there have been no experiments to show whether moths or any other animal can hear and respond to the sounds the plants make, so that idea remains based on guesses for now, she says.

【推荐2】Myth: If you cut your hair, it will grow long faster.

Truth: That’s not true. “Your hair isn’t like a lawn or a rosebush, where cutting can stimulate fresh growth,” says Phillip Kingsley. The length of your hair is genetically determined. When it reaches a certain length, it stops growing. When you clear up the dead split ends. This make your hair look healthier, but not necessarily longer.

Myth: If you skip meals, you lose weight fast.

Truth: There’s no truth in this advice. Not only will you not lose weight by starving yourself, but according to Carol Ann Rinzler, this may actually cause you to gain weight. Rinzler reasons that missing a meal causes your metabolism(新陈代谢) to slow down so that you burn food more slowly. This only makes you feel hungrier and by the time you finally do reach the table you will probably eat more food. Strange as it may seem, studies show that eating several small meals and snacks throughout the day is a healthier way to lose pounds.

Myth: If you swallow gum，it will stay inside your stomach for seven years.

Truth: Actually, it takes just a few days for gum to make its exit---not seven years, says Nei Izenberg, M. D., editor of Kids Health organization. But because gum is made of the same thing as rubber, it cannot be fully digested in your stomach--- so if you gum up the works on a regular basis, you might find yourself in a sticky situation.

Myth: The best way to stop a nosebleed is to lift your head back.

Truth: Now that’s bad advice. Bloody noses are caused by broken blood vessels, so while lifting your head back might stop the fluid from rushing out of your nose, it won’t stop the bleeding; you’ll just end up swallowing lots of blood. Your best bet “Rest quietly. Don’t poke or pick, and the blood will naturally clot (凝结) within a minute or two,” suggests Dr. Izenberg.

【推荐3】National Geographic Exhibit "Titanic: The Untold Story"

The National Geographic Museum is always an interesting and educational place to visit. The admission isn't free but is definitely worthwhile for unique exhibits like this. We'll be taking a self-guided tour hut there may also he museum staff on hand.

About the exhibition

On this exhibition, you will be surprised to find that the sunken Titanic was discovered by Robert Ballard, who was then carrying out a top secret Cold War mission(任务). In 1985,Ballard’s mission was to dive to depths of 9,800 feet using a camera system called Argo to find and document the exploded remains of the submarine (潜艇) Scorpion. The objective of the mission was to gain evidence to determine what led to her loss. After concluding his successful investigations,Ballard used the final 12 days of his expedition to discover the remains of Titanic.

The exhibition — originally exhibited at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — shows the history of the discovery from an entirely new angle. Not only are visitors exposed to the historical events that led to the ship’s finding, but they can hear the fascinating stories of some of the passengers on board the ship. In addition to items borrowed from families of the survivors that have not been reunited since the night the ship sank in 1912, the exhibition contains those from the rich collections of the National Archives and the 20th Century Fox Archives. There are also movie sets and clothes worn by actors from the 1997 movie Titanic.

Price

Regular:$15

Seniors/Students/Military : $ 12

Children 5—12 ( free under 5 ) : $ 10

【推荐1】Jakarta, Indonesia (AP)—When a garbage collector came to Ghina Ghaliya’s house in the Indonesian capital and asked if she had an old mobile phone that his children could use to access the Internet, it sparked (引发) an idea for a broader campaign to help students stuck at home by COVID-19.

“He said it does not matter if it is an ugly one, as long as his children can use it for learning from home,” said Ghaliya, a journalist at a national newspaper.

Shortly after COVID-19 hit Indonesia, Ghaliya and 11 other journalists in Jakarta organized a group to provide food and money for people in need. They stared hearing from parents who wanted their children to be able to study online but lacked a way to access the Internet.

Ghaliya and the other journalists decided to shift（转移）their focus to providing mobile phones for underprivileged students, many of whom were still not allowed to do face-to-face learning when the new school year started in July.

They announced their campaign through social media and the response was strong, with some people donating(捐赠)second-hand units and others giving cash. So far, nearly 300 phones have been distributed to Indonesian students around Jakarta as well as to remote regions like Papua, the country’s most eastern province.

Khaissyah Levi, 16, is a high school student in Depok, who attends online classes in the morning. His father Deny Sayuti had been lending his mobile phone to him for his studies, but that meant Sayuti could only do his work as a motorcycle taxi driver for part of the day, missing out on peak times like the morning rush hour.

Sayuti worte to Ghaliya’s group in August, and his family received a mobile phone a month later. Sayuti believes that his son can now do better with his online studies. “Now I see him more comfortable, and he can directly reach out to his friends and teacher,” Sayuti said.

【推荐2】A huge 42 percent of marriages in the UK end in divorce, the highest rate in Europe. What is happening in the UK to cause such a phenomenon? Many consider the family to be the basic building block of society. If marriages and families are falling apart, is the UK society also falling apart? Is the UK’s cultural identity breaking down? The UK of today is one of the most multicultural countries on earth. There are exotic sights and sounds on the street comers of every British city. British cuisine is now one of the most diverse (多样的) around. Everyone speaks with a different accent.

Is such diversity (多样性) a good thing? Well, it makes the UK a very exciting place to live in. There are new ideas everywhere. There is great freedom to be who you want to be, and most people will not criticize you for who you are. Yet such freedom seems to come at a cost. Some British people regard ethnic minorities (少数民族) as coming to the UK to steal jobs. When the economy does badly, this feeling increases as unemployment rates rise. So it could be argued that the breakdown of marriages in the UK is income part because of the pressures put upon families by wider problems in British society. Many people become stressed when those problems arise, and that can then make their family life unhappy as well.

Another possible reason for the high divorce rate might be that marriage no longer has the same value or meaning for British people as it once did. Church attendance in the UK has been falling for the last 50 years, suggesting fewer people consider marriage a holy thing. Since 1991, there has been a drop of 50 percent in people getting married in church rather than a register office.

Then there is the financial side. In the past, married couples paid lower government taxes than single people. That tax incentive (激励) policy, which used to reduce a couple’s tax by up to 500 in a year, has now disappeared, making the cost to keep a marriage higher.

However, the 42 percent UK divorce rate isn’t the highest rate in the past forty years! Meanwhile, some measures are being taken to strengthen marriage in the UK by the government.