Good morning... I hope you all are doing well in your studies and if there is a problem related to your studies, please feel free to come to my office. Today, I and all the teachers decided to gather all the children for the speech on World Heritage Day. Since the day is around the corner, I wanted to give knowledge to my children on this subject. As a Principal of this school, I try not only to make my children perform well in studies, but also to enlighten them on subjects which are very much concerned about mankind.

World Heritage has been described as the common wealth of mankind. This day is a great reminder of our rich cultural past and it is our responsibility that we protect our heritage not only for ourselves but for future generations. Undoubtedly, heritage sites should be preserved and protected. They are invaluable wealth for mankind. The date of the holding of World Heritage Day is April 18 and it was first started in the year 1982.

I am speaking from my personal experience and I am sure every one of you must have noticed at some point. Regarding the fact that many people have developed irresponsible (negligent) attitude towards our national heritage. This is the reason that heritage buildings are often found damaged. However, it is due to the continuous repair work of such sites by the government that our nation is still able to keep its beauty, if not in its entirety, but at least to an extent it attracts millions of tourists a year.

World Heritage Day is actually a day for every concerned citizen of a country to feel proud of the great cultural property of its nation. At last, I want to say in many ways, we can contribute towards the maintenance (维持) of world heritage sites so that their beauty does not minimize and they remain the center of attraction for people all over the world.

Please consider what you can do to maintain the beauty of the world heritage. Let’s do our best!

【推荐1】Life as an astronaut has various unique attractions. This can include experiencing weightlessness and looking back at Earth as a pale blue dot. Food is not among them. Space travelers over the years have become used to certain foods such as freeze-dried ice cream and liquid salt and pepper. Now, the menu is set to be augmented, with the first space-grown lettuce (生菜) found to be as safe, nutritious and fresh as the Earth-grown variety.

Gioia Massa of NASA Kennedy Space Center is the lead scientist on the lettuce-growing project. She said that growing food in space could be wonderful for astronauts on missions lasting more than one month.   “If you store packaged food for a long time, not only will the flavour and nutritional quality decrease, but the vitamins will degrade. After eating such food, astronauts’ intake of nutrition is not ensured,” she said. “Besides, for them, there may also be psychological benefits of growing and looking after plants.

Lettuce has been grown in batches (分批) onboard the International Space Station (ISS). The vegetable production system is known as Veggie. It is composed of plant pillows (sealed units containing ceramic soil), LED lighting and a watering   system that allows astronauts to inject water through a tube. The lettuce crops grow undisturbed for 33 to 56 days before being harvested and eaten, or deep-frozen and returned to Earth for chemical and biological analysis.

The space-grown lettuces are similar in make-up to Earth-grown ones but they have higher levels of bacteria (细菌), possibly due to their growth in a warmer, more humid (潮湿的) and closed-air system. But they are not found to carry any harmful bacteria.

NASA is now enlarging the range of produce grown onboard the ISS. It will be quite some time before any vegetables can be transformed into a dish, however. “While we have nowhere to cook up there now, we can look forward to more things that taste fresh,” Massa explained.

【推荐2】After a day’s labor, Andreas Fichtner and his colleagues have spliced (绞接) together three segments of fibers, creating a 12.5-kilometer-long fiber-optic (光学的) cable. It will stay buried in the snow to spy on the activity of Grfmsvotn, a dangerous, glacier-covered volcano.

Fichtner, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, is one of the researchers using fiber optics to take the pulse of our planet. Much of their work is done in remote places, from the tops of volcanoes to the bottoms of seas, where traditional monitoring is too costly or difficult.

The technique used by Fichtner’s team is called distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. “It’s almost like radar in the fiber,” says the physicist Giuseppe Marra of the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory, in Teddington. While radar uses reflected radio waves to locate objects, DAS uses reflected light to detect events as varied as earthquake activity and moving traffic, and to determine where they occurred. Inside the cables are optical fibers. DAS involves shooting quick pulses of laser light down the fiber and detecting bits of light that scatter back to the laser source due to disturbances in the environment. When the earth’s surface vibrates and shifts, it pulls the cables, so a detector can identify these small changes.

The New York Times points out that although wireless and satellite technology are booming, good old-fashioned cables are still the most efficient way to send information across oceans. Repurposing cables could give scientists the ability to monitor high-risk zones that were previously hard to reach. They could help detect earthquakes and tsunamis a few seconds earlier than traditional warning systems.

In addition, fiber-optic cables could also help solve some of the biggest challenges for humans. In the recent years, scientists have started to use them to measure ocean waves and access fault (断层) information. It is believed that fiber-optic cables will serve to benefit us greatly in the future.

【推荐3】Huang Qinqin, a 29-year-old Chinese shoe designer, found her “personal legend” through her academic journey in China and the UK. She recently won the Culture and Creativity Award of Study UK Alumni Awards 2023-2024 for her contributions to arts and culture.

Huang’s education in both countries shaped her into what she is today. She started her own shoe brand, “ouvrir la boîte”, which means “to open the box” in French. Her designs have been featured in high-end stores and international fashion shows. Huang believes that the value of her products lies in the unique design philosophy itself.

Huang’s journey into design was unforeseen. She initially studied engineering but switched to international communications studies in college. It was during writing an essay on social sciences that she discovered her passion for shoe design. She went on to study design at Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion in the UK. To her astonishment, Huang discovered she was the only Chinese participant in the shoe design class. “While international luxury shoe brands like Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin are household names, Chinese brands are rarely seen in this field,” said Huang.

This finding fueled Huang’s determination to pursue her career as a shoe designer, hoping to fill the blank in the international market. She established her own brand and has been exploring her design concept of “the art of practical wear”. Her designs incorporate Chinese cultural heritage, such as materials from historical artifacts like jade (玉).

Looking back, Huang said that it took her a long time to find her lifelong passion. However, she believes that it is never too late to unlock one’s potential. Her diverse experiences, including garden design and dance, have become precious treasures in her life and have helped her develop self-directed learning abilities, which are essential skills for her startup business today.