【推荐1】Recent research discovered that a low-cost computer training program can help older persons drive less dangerously.

“We developed a training program, called Drive Aware, which could be used by anyone who has a computer,” says Jing Feng, co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at NC State. “Drive Aware is a cognitive (认知的) training program for older persons that helps them notice traffic risks more effectively. The purpose of our recent study was to see how much Drive Aware changes trainees’ driving behaviors once they get behind the wheel.”

The researchers found 27 persons aged 65 and up to test Drive Aware. In a driving simulator (模拟器), all of the study participants (参与者) experienced a basic driving exam. The “active training” group was made up of nine of the study participants. Every two weeks, the active training group had two Drive Aware trainings. A group of nine additional study participants was asked to take “passive training”. This group watched videos of others receiving the Drive Aware instruction. This happened twice, with each lasting about a week. The control group, which was made up of the remaining nine study participants, received no training. After that, all 27 study participants performed a second driving exam in the simulator.

The study participants in the active training group experienced 25% fewer “unsafe incidents (事件)” following the training, according to the researchers. There was no obvious change in the number of dangerous incidents among study participants in the passive training and control groups.

“This testing was done with a fairly limited number of study participants,” Feng says. “If we can succeed in getting the fund, we’d like to further our testing with more people to clearly prove how effective this training is at reducing accidents among older drivers.”

【推荐2】Emma Li spent almost three years on China's '996 schedule': working from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, six days a week. “I was deprived of all my personal life,” says she. Usually, she had a small window to eat, shower and go to bed-but she sacrificed sleep to regain some personal time. Often, Li would stay up surfing the internet, reading the news and watching online videos until well after midnight.

Li was doing what the Chinese have called 'bàofüxingáoyè' — or 'revenge bedtime procrastination' (RBP). The phrase spread rapidly on Twitter in June after a post by journalist Daphne K Lee. She described the phenomenon as when “people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours”.

Psychology may explain the reason why people would choose to regain this leisure time even at the expense of sleep. A growing body of evidence points to the importance of time away from work pressure. “One of the most important parts of recovery from work is sleep. However, sleep is affected by how well we separate ourselves from stress,” says Sheffield University's Kelly. It's important, she explains, to have a rest when we can be mentally distanced from work, which would explain why people are willing to sacrifice sleep for post-work leisure.

In fact, experts have long warned that insufficient sleep is an ignored global public-health epidemic (流行病). A 2019 survey showed that 62% of adults worldwide feel they don't get enough sleep. People mentioned various reasons for this lack, including stress and their sleeping environment, but 37% blamed their heavy work or school schedule. Long hours at the office aside, another part of the problem is that modern working patterns mean people find it harder to draw boundaries between work and home.

【推荐3】A team of divers has recently discovered what’s believed to be the longest underwater cave in the world, just three miles from the white sand beaches of the Mexican resort (度假胜地) of Tulum.

The findings confirm that the huge 164-mile-long Sac Actun system is connected to the 53-mile-long Dos Ojos system, bringing the total length of the caves to amazing 216 miles. Some of the caves have a depth of more than 332 feet.

With more than 200 caves, they thought there was chance that something record-breaking would be found below the surface-they just had no proof-until now. Divers have long known that Tulum’s underground caves and rivers are frequently connected, but finding this connection was a task that involved years of searching through labyrinthine (复杂的) passageways.

More exciting than the amazing underwater photographs coming out of the caves is the possibility of uncovering the secrets of the Maya civilization, which ruled this region before the 16th century.

“The area also has lots of historical treasures,” said underwater archaeologist and project director Guillermo de Anda. “Parts of the region were inhabited by the ancient Maya civilization before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The discovery will help us better understand the rich culture in the region.”

The combined cave will be known as the Sac Actun system. But while its size makes it the longest underwater cave, it can’t take the title of the longest cave. That belongs to the Mammoth Cave in the American hillsides of Kentucky-thought to be near double the length. They’ll need to keep diving to beat that one.

【推荐1】Art is a universal language. Music is a universal language. Love is a universal language. Now, it’s the turn of sand to be mentioned in such terms. In her work, sand artist Kseniya Simonova mixes art, music and love to create her own medium which can be understood and appreciated by everyone.

According to Simonova, she fell in love with sand art “absolutely accidentally.” Her husband, a theatre director, advised her to give it a try. “I never thought I could perform; I was always a classical artist,” reveals Simonova. “I just started it as a hobby and I never thought it would turn out to be what it is now.” In 2009, Simonova won the “Ukraine’s Got Talent” TV contest. Since then her fame has skyrocketed, and she has become a real sensation (引起轰动的人).

The art Simonova creates is magical; however, the medium she uses is quite common. “It is ordinary river sand. There was a time when I did use the volcanic one, but actually it makes no difference,” says Simonova. “In sand art it is an idea and its visualisation that matters. What I do is create a theatre in my mind. The sand is a very convenient medium that is very flexible and responds to speed well. It can show what is going on in my head.”

The images created by the artist live only for a few seconds. However, Simonova is not in any way alarmed by the momentary aspect of sand art. “I know that my creations exist only for a while, but I believe that to be absolutely normal because art mirrors life. We live every moment of our life, but it’s not possible to repeat those. The same is the case with what I do,” Simonova concludes.

Sand art helps the artist to see the world in a new way, painting ever-changing life in every grain of sand.

【推荐2】Having lived together in the same city for thirty years, it is almost certain that Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Beethoven (1770-1827) must have met one another on some occasion. However, the surviving evidence cannot be proved and the related accounts disagree with each other. This can be partly explained by Schubert's natural modesty(谦逊)and shyness of character, as well as Beethoven's increasing social distancing in his later years because of his deafness.

Still, we have reason to believe that the admiration between the two great musicians was mutual. Around one month before his death, Beethoven was presented with handwritten copies of various Schubert songs. After looking into the works of the younger composer, Beethoven is said to have spoken excitedly: “Truly, in this Schubert there is a great talent(天赋)!”Schubert also visited Beethoven's sickbed, and on 29 March 1827, he went to his funeral(葬礼). Twenty months later, on 19 November 1828, Schubert would pass away at the age of thirty-one.

On his deathbed, Schubert expressed the wish to listen to one of Beethoven's works.   His friend and violinist Karl Holz along with other musicians from the composer's circle played one for him. Just days before Schubert's death, Holz, who had also been a friend of Beethoven, said: “The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding(请求)to the crossing.”

“Who can ever do anything after Beethoven?” These were said to be the words of Schubert while still at a young age. An admirer of Beethoven, Schubert was influenced by the great composer, whose towering figure had thrown a large shadow(阴影)over the whole of Vienna's musical world. At Schubert's own request, he was buried next to Beethoven in Vienna. Even though they hardly met in the physical world, the two great musicians would stay together in the hereafter.

【推荐1】This paragraph is not ordinary. Look at it. At first, it won’t look too odd. Just a normal paragraph — you may think. But look at it again and you might find it a bit unusual. Can you spot it? Is anything...missing?

What you’ve just read is a lipogram - a text without a particular letter. It is the hardest kind as it doesn’t contain the letter E - the most common letter in the English language. Try writing one yourself and you’ll imagine the task faced by the French writer Georges Perec, when a friend challenged him to write a whole novel without using E - a letter which is even more common in French.

Perec was a frighteningly clever writer, a lover of word games and puzzles and also a master of the Chinese board game Go. As well as writing crossword puzzles for Paris magazines, he had already written a 5,000-word palindrome, a text that reads the same forwards and backwards, like the well-known “A man, a plan, a canal - Panama.” But his friends thought this task would be beyond him.

Perec took up the challenge. He was unable to use more than 70% of the French words, including those most commonly used. Surprisingly, he discovered this “impossible” rule unlocked his imagination. He later claimed he wrote this novel faster than any of his other books. He was forced to think and fight for every sentence. He had no choice but to be original.

The result was La Disparition, a detective story about the mysterious disappearance of a character named A.Vowl. The only Es were the four in his name on the cover. Despite the dozens of clues about the fantastically difficult rule, many original reviewers failed to spot what was staring them in the faces — the missing letter. Embarrassing for the critics, but hilarious for the writer and his friends.

Fortunately, the game Perec was playing did not destroy the book itself. Every sentence seems twisted slightly out of shape, and the resulting style is unique.

【推荐3】Cubism of Pablo Picasso

Picasso and Braque worked together closely during the next few years(1909-1912)—the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—and they developed what came to be known as Analytical Cubism. Early Cubist paintings were often misunderstood by critics and viewers because they were thought to be merely geometric art. Yet the painters themselves believed they were presenting a new kind of reality that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of perspective and illusion. For example, they showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single limited illusionistic view.

As Kahnweiler saw it, Cubism signified the opening up of closed form by the “re-presentation” of the form of objects and their position in space instead of their imitation through illusionistic means; and the analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and shadow, and even colour was likened by Apollinaire to the way in which the surgeon dissects a cadaver. That type of analysis is characteristic of Picasso’s work beginning in 1909, especially in the landscapes he made on a trip to Spain that summer (Factory at Horta de Ebro). Those were followed in 1910 with a series of hermetic portraits (Ambroise Vollard; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler); and in his 1911-1912 paintings of seated figures, often playing musical instruments (The Accordionist, 1911), Picasso merged figures, objects, and space on a kind of grid. The palette was once again limited to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays.

Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture. Furthermore, the inclusion of abstract and representational elements on the same picture plane led both artists to reexamine what two-dimensional elements, such as newspaper lettering, signified. The inclusion of lettering also produced the powerful suggestion that Cubist pictures could be read coming forward from the picture plane rather than receding (in traditional perspective) into it. And the Cubists’ manipulation of the picture shape— their use of the oval, for example— redefined the edge of the work in a way that underlined the fact that in a Cubist picture the canvas provides the real space.