【推荐1】Let’s take a look at these traditional events in the UK.

Gurning is a British word meaning to pull a funny facial expression. The World Gurning Championships sets out to crown(加冕) a contestant who can pull the strangest face of all. The contest takes place every year in Egremont, Cumbria, as part of the town’s Crab Fair, which dates back to 1267.

Hosted by the Bottle Inn pub in Marsh wood, Dorset every year, this 20-year-old nettle eating contest sees dozens of competitors take part in eating as many nettle stalks(荨麻茎) as possible within one hour. Winners normally eat around 70ft of nettle stalks!

Every January, the Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival takes place, which dates back more than 200 years. The strange festival consists of a performer wearing a five-stone metal and straw bear costume, while parading through the town streets with a group of Appalachian and Morris dancers.

Wife carrying race

If you think your husband is strong enough to carry you in a race, then you may be in with a chance of winning this odd tradition, held in Dorking, Surrey every March. The sport actually originates from the Viking invasion(入侵) of 793 AD. The tradition wasn’t revived in the UK until 2008, but now comes with a friendlier feel. The winner receives £100, while the carrier of the heaviest wife is given a pound of sausage.

【推荐3】Austin City Limits (ACL) Music Festival is a music event that is held every year. It takes place at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, and is hosted over two weekends in late September and early October, each lasting three days. It is an event that has grown in popularity since it began and now has as many as 450,000 people taking part in it.

The festival was founded in 2002 and is produced by C3 Presents, which is an Austin-based company. At first, it was inspired by a weekly music series broadcast, filmed live by KLRU, the local Austin television station, which is also called Austin City Limits. The first event was only two days long and 67 bands performed on five stages and the audience was around 25,000.

By 2003, around 100 bands were taking part in ACL Music Festival and in 2004, the event grew to over eight stages and extended (延续) to three days. The top attendance at the event was 75,000 people. The festival even won the Pollstar’s Festival of the Year Award in 2005. That year became known as the “Dust Bowl” year as the festival crowd kicked up so much dust that it was difficult for festival goers to breathe. The organizers settled this problem by using watering devices on the site.

With the exception of heavy rain in 2009, the festival continued over the next few years without any major dramas. In 2013, the organizers decided to extend the event over two weekends. Another important fact about that year was that the event was canceled on the third day of the second weekend due to heavy rain causing floods. Besides, the festival was called off due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.

In recent years, there have been many excellent actors performing at the festival. Other than that, there are many other attractions at ACL Music Festival. These include Austin Eats and ACL Art Market. Furthermore, there is an ACL Cares section at the festival that allows festival goers to give something back to the community.

【推荐1】Strategically adding weak points along microscopic chains called polymers (高分子聚合物) actually makes them harder to tear, researchers report in the June 23 Science. Polymers are used in car tires, and therefore the findings could help reduce plastic pollution as tires wear down over time.

When tires rub against the road, they drop microplastics of rubber and plastic polymers, which pollute waterways and air. Every year, tires release an estimated 6 million metric tons of these microplastics into environment. Stronger polymers that break apart less easily could limit the amount of particles shed annually.

To make such tough materials, Stephen Craig, a chemist at Duke University, and colleagues added molecules called cross-linkers to the polymers. These cross-linkers connected these polymer chains to their many neighbors, and they were specifically designed to break apart easily. At the microscopic scale, the polymers act like a tangle (乱团) of spaghetti with the cross-linkers holding them all together and helping them keep their shape, says Craig’s collaborator Shu Wang, a chemist at MIT. When the team stretched the polymer spaghetti, the individual cross-linkers broke easily, as expected. But the larger tangle material required more force to break than they expected.

The secret to the increased toughness lies in the path the tear has to take, Craig says. The tear goes through the easy-to-break cross-linkers rather than through the tougher polymer chains. Each broken connection follows the path of least resistance but avoiding the long polymer chains means breaking many cross-linkers, which requires more stretching force overall.

This isn’t the first time researchers have used weak connectors to make polymers stronger. But unlike in similar materials, the increased toughness doesn’t come at the expense of other beneficial properties like stiffness (风度). Craig says he hopes the findings will help extend the lifetimes of car tires and plastics, potentially limiting annual microplastic pollution.

【推荐2】Uber and Hyundai have joined forces to develop a flying taxi to be used for the ride-sharing company, and you could order one within three years. The two companies showed a model of the futuristic electric air taxi at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Eric Allison, head of Uber Elevate, said, “We’ve been making satisfactory progress towards a goal of launching Uber Air ride-sharing program by 2023.”

The self-flying electric taxi is designed to carry up to four passengers with a pilot and fly on trips of up to 60 miles. It will be 100% electric, and during the busiest hours will need around five to seven minutes to recharge, according to Hyundai. And while the air taxi will be controlled by a pilot at the beginning, Hyundai believes that in the near future, it could be autonomous.

Hyundai will produce and deploy the air taxis, while Uber will provide airspace support services, connections to ground transport, and the computer system for customers. Mr. Allison added, “We believe Hyundai has the possibility to build Uber Air flying taxis at a great speed unseen in the aerospace industry of the present time, producing high-quality carriers at high volumes to drive down passenger costs per trip.”

According to Uber, the air taxis will first be launched in three cities — Los Angeles, Dallas, and Melbourne. Once the taxis are up and running, they could help to stop the pain of sitting in a long line of cars on a road that cannot move.

Jaiwon Shin, Head of Urban Air Mobility Division at Hyundai Motor Company, added, “We are in a completely new period of time in which the skies above our cities will be opened. Urban Air Mobility will set people free from heavy traffic, so that they can spend more time on activities they care about and enjoy.”

【推荐3】Silkworms(蚕)were first brought from Asia to the ancient city of Byzantium around A. D. 550. It was two men who presented some silkworm eggs from China to Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople, where he created a fruitful silk industry. Silkworms reached Italy through Sicily in the 12th century, and by the 13th century, silkworm farming had moved north to the Po River Valley. By the 16th century, silkworm farming had been introduced to the Como area.

Since silkworms require a constant, mild temperature, entire sections of farmhouses were turned over to them and whole families would often join in the work, adding fuel round the clock to fires to maintain the proper warmth. “Some even gave the worms the house and slept outside with the animals, ”says Ester Geraci, an official at Como’s Educational Silk Museum.

The process began with the 10-to 14-day incubation(孵化)of silkworm eggs. According to the museum, keeping the tiny, delicate eggs at just the right temperature was the task of the women. Once hatched, the worms, only about one millimeter long, had to be fed night and day. From a birth weight of only half a milligram, they would grow 10, 000-fold to a final weight of around five grams and a length of 8 to 9 centimeters in just 30 days. Then, in the final three days of their youth stage, the worms would start to make their cocoons (茧) out of one continuous thin silk-up to 1, 200 meters long-which they produced from near their mouths. After about a week, the cocoons were placed briefly in a hot, dry place to kill the adult insects inside. These cocoons were then put in hot water to facilitate the difficult and boring task of obtaining the silk. The minute end of the cocoon’s silk had to be located and placed onto a round object, which then unwound it from the water-warmed cocoon. The silk was then cleaned and made into fabric.