【推荐2】Save the rice for cooking, says the phone company, which has finally acknowledged the longstanding “trick” could do more damage.

You know the nightmare situation: You dropped your phone in water — be it pool, ocean, or toilet, your worries get the best of you, although iPhone 12’s and onwards are designed to survive 30 minutes of aquatic submersion. In the urgent need of saving your expensive device from potential damage, you remember your friend’s suggestion to throw it in a bag of rice overnight. Supposedly, the grain draws out any remaining water droplets from the smartphone’s tiny crevices, saving its precious circuitry in the process. They swore by it, after all. What is there to lose?

Well, as the phone company spotted earlier today, a recently updated document states that this “trick” could actually cause further issues in your phone. “Don’t put your wet phone in a bag of rice,” the company warns in the revised article on its dreaded Liquid Detection Alert, “For doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your phone,” while the rice starch (淀粉) can block the innards through the device’s small cracks. Besides all that, rice simply isn’t as effective as other materials, such as those silica packets you already should be recycling, anyway.

Among the other rumored solutions to avoid, the company advises phone owners not to use an “external heat source” such as a blow dryer, as well as leave the compressed air can in the utility closet. Similarly, trying to stuff cotton swabs, napkins, paper towels, or any other “foreign object” into charging ports could make things worse.

So, what should you do if your phone takes a plunge? The company advises a gentle approach in such situations, such as simply tapping the device against your hand “with the connector facing down” to dislodge liquid, then leaving it in an open, dry space with decent airflow for at least 30 minutes. From there, try connecting it to a cable charger. Yes. They really did pull out the trusty “Have you tried turning it on and off again?” line for this one.

【推荐1】Going to a gallery can be really enriching for children, but how to get them through the door? According to a psychologist Michael Atar, there’s an art.

With digital distractions everywhere, the thought of taking your kids to an art gallery — and they actually enjoy it — seems a huge challenge. It’s commonly thought that art galleries are anything but child-friendly places — they are usually described in popular media as stuffy and serious, demanding intense and extended periods of concentration for meditation in the backstory and meaning locked within each golden frame.

That common view depressingly makes galleries the least-visited heritage attractions for British families. Research has found that trips each year to theaters and castles far outnumber those to galleries, with a survey revealing that 35 percent of families have never been there at all. This is a crying shame as being exposed to art holds profound significance for the development of young minds, both intellectually and emotionally.

Beyond simply offering aesthetics (美学), art galleries serve as invaluable educational and instructional resources, fostering creativity, critical thinking and empathy. Here, children have the opportunity to engage in diverse perspectives, cultures and moods, with each painting, sculpture or photograph telling a story, inviting young viewers to interpret and connect with the artwork, and offering them different ways of seeing the world. But how can we get them engaged?

First, dispose of the idea of galleries being old-fashioned, outdated institutions to the dustbin. Similarly, see engagement with art being far wider than a collection of dry facts about the artist and history. Rather than trying to make kids “fit in” with fixed labels of a gallery, instead make the art gallery fit in with kids, defining their encounters on their terms. Besides, what really matters is that children build a connection with art. To encourage this, you can make it into a game, either with or without a reward, with simple quizzes such as, “Who can guess the artist?” or, “Who can identify the period it was made?” Also, don’t spend too long in the gallery for children naturally have shorter attention spans than adults, limiting your visit to 45 minutes in a gallery is perfect for stopping boredom creeping in.

【推荐2】Mona Lisa, oil painting on a popular wood panel by Leonardo da Vinci, is probably the world’s most famous painting. It was painted sometime between 1503 and 1519, when Leonardo was living in Florence, and it now hangs in the Louvre Museum, Paris, where it remained an object of pilgrimage (朝圣) in the 21st century. The sitter’s mysterious smile and her unproven identity have made the painting a source of ongoing investigation and fascination.

The painting presents a woman in half-body portrait, which has as a backdrop of a distant landscape. Yet this simple description of a seemingly standard composition gives little sense of Leonardo’s achievement. The three-quarter view in which the sitter’s position mostly turns toward the viewer, broke from the standard profile pose used in Italian art and quickly became the convention for all portraits one used well into the 21st century. The subject’s softly sculptural face shows Leonardo’s skillful handling of shading and reveals his understanding of the muscles and the bones beneath the skin. The delicately painted veil, the finely wrought hair, and the careful depiction of folded fabric demonstrate Leonardo’s studied observations and inexhaustible patience. Moreover, the visual curves of the sitter’s hair and clothing are echoed in the shapes of the valleys and rivers behind her. The sense of overall harmony achieved in the painting—especially apparent in the sitter’s faint smile—reflects Leonardo’s idea of connecting humanity and nature. In its exquisite combination of sitter and landscape, the Mona Lisa set the standard for all future portraits.

There has been much speculation and debate regarding the identity of the portrait’s sitter. Scholars and historians have given numerous interpretations, including that she is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo. That identity was first suggested in 1550 by artist biographer Giorgio Vasari. Another theory was that the model may have been Leonardo’s mother, Caterina. That interpretation was put forth by, among others, Sigmund Freud, who seemed to think that the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile emerged from a — perhaps unconscious — memory of Caterina’s smile.