【推荐2】For more than fifty years, athletes competing in the Olympic games have often been cheered on by either a furry or feathered friend. The Olympic mascot—a cartoonish representation of the host city’s culture and history is so important, and designs are often selected and finalized years before the Games take place. According to the International Olympic Committee(IOC) the role of these things is to help spread a “festive atmosphere” and embody the spirit of the event.

Over the decades, the world has welcomed snowmen, sasquatches, cowboy-hat-wearing bears and aliens to the Olympic stage. The first mascot was created in 1968 by designer Aline Lafargue for the Grenoble Winter Games in France. Affectionately named “Shuss”, the character consists of a two-toned head and lightning-bolt shaped leg attached to skis. Despiteholding the title of first ever mascot. Lafargue created and submitted her design for Shuss in just one night.

To find a worthy representative, each host country will typically organize a submission contest. In 2014 a competition held by Russia in anticipation for the Sochi Winter Games received more than 24.000 drawings. The winners a trio of arctic mammals were selected by a public vote with the results broadcast on Russian TV. But this hasn’t always been the case: For the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic, one of the first Olympic events to be heavily influenced by corporate financing, Disney won the private bid for mascot design.

Since these creatures are also important to official merchandise (指定商品), cuteness and cuddliness have long been key standards for any mascot’s success. Merchandise of Beijing’s round panda mascot Bing Dwen Dwen for the 2022 Winter Games is already “selling like hotcakes”.

Character design becomes especially important when the Games coincide with a unique moment in history. For example, Sydney, Australia, the host country of the first Olympics of the millennium (千禧年), adopted three mascots for the first time in the Games’ history. The three anime-style cartoons, Syd, Olly and Millie, were named in reference to Sydney, Olympics and Millennium and T-shirts from this landmark Games are still circulating second-hand resale sites now.

【推荐1】It’s true that quite a few most respected scientific authorities have confirmed that the world is becoming hotter and hotter. There’s also strong evidence that humans are contributing to the warming. Countless recent reports have proved the same thing. For instance, a 2010 summary about the climate science by the Royal Society noted that: The global warming over the last half-century has been caused mainly by human activity.

You may not believe that humans could change the planet’s climate, but the basic science is well understood. Each year, billions of tons of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere because of human activity. As has been known for years, these gases hold heat that would otherwise escape to space, wrapping the planet in an invisible blanket.

Of course, the earth’s climate has always been changing due to “natural” factors such as volcanic eruption or changes in solar, or cycles concerning the Earth’s going around the sun. According to the scientific research, however, the warming observed by now matches the pattern of warming we would expect from a build-up of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere — not the warming we would expect from other possible causes.

Even if scientists did discover another reasonable explanation for the warming recorded so far, that would give birth to a difficult question. As Robert Henson puts it: “If some newly discovered factor is to blame for the climate change, then why aren’t carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases producing the warming that basic physics tells us they should be?”

The only way to prove with 100% certainty that humans are responsible for global warming would be to run an experiment with two identical Earths — one with human influence and one without. That obviously isn’t possible, and so most scientists are careful not to state human influence as an absolute certainty.

【推荐2】Advice to “sleep on it” could be well founded, scientists say. After a good night’s sleep a problem that couldn’t be solved the night before can often appear more manageable, although the evidence until now has been anecdotal. But researchers at the University of Luebek in Germany have designed an experiment that shows a good night’s sleep can improve insight and problem-solving.

“If you have some newly-got memories in your brain, sleep acts on these memories and restructures them, so that after sleep the insight into problem which you could not solve before increases,” said Dr. Jan Born, a neuroscientist, at the university. To test the theory, they taught volunteers two simple rules to help them turn a string of numbers into a new order. There was also a third, hidden rule, which could help them increase their speed in solving the problem. The researchers divided the volunteers into two groups: half were allowed to sleep after the training while the rest were forced to stay awake.

Dr. Jan Born and his team noticed that the group that had slept after the training were twice as likely to figure out the third rule as the other group. “Sleep helped,” Born said in a telephone interview. “The important thing is that you have to have a memory representation in your brain of the problem you want to solve and then you sleep, so it can act on the problem.

“But Born admitted that he and his team don’t know how restructuring of memories occurs or what governs it. Pierre Maquet and Perrine Ruby of the University of Liege in Belgium said the experimental evidence supports the anecdotal suggestions that sleep can help develop creative thinking. Although the role of sleep in human creativity will still be a mystery, the research gives people good reason to fully respect their periods of sleep, they added.