【推荐2】Looking for some fun activities to do as a family? Why not play games together with your relatives!     1     Here’s more on why you should consider organizing family game nights!

    2     By playing games together, parents can teach kids how to interact with others, how to deal with losing, how to resolve conflicts, and showcase teamwork, strategy, adaptability and perseverance.

Next to learning life skills, playing family games aids future academic performance.     3     These skills can later be used in math, languages or other classes and facilitate their academic success.

Playing family games together can prevent antisocial behavior.     4     They learn how to make healthy decisions during games. Through spending time together, people get a sense of belonging, contributing to reducing the need for violence and substance abuse.

Last but not least, playing games together is a fantastic way of spending time together! It helps to bond emotionally with your kids, parents, or siblings and strengthens the overall health of the family. People tend to build respect between each other when getting to know them better, adding to the family’s unity.     5    

【推荐1】What would it be like to live on the moon? Students in the 2021 Future City competition were challenged to find out. Nine middle school students from Houston, Texas, took the grand prize home in the international competition.

Middle school teams from 37 regions in the United States, as well as Canada, Nigeria and China, took part in the 29th annual competition, which began last fall. The students used their STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills to create a lunar habitat 100 years in the future.

“In our city, we make full use of our SLR-MAP system, which stands for Smart Lunar Resources Management and Processing System,” said Mohammad Ali Rizvi, one of the winning students.

Extracting minerals and other resources on the moon helped the team with organic solutions to maintaining life on the planet, including providing enough oxygen and water, as well as hydrogen for fuel. When asked if they would like to live in their lunar city in the future, the students were excited and passionate about the potential relocation from the earth. They state “Living on the Moon” was the theme of this year's Future City competition, an annual event designed to encourage middle-school students to develop STEM skills.

Syeda Batool, the team teacher, encouraged the students to use their brains and provided practical advice for their project. The students then elaborated on their ideas in a 1,500-word essay. They created a model of their city with recycled materials and a brief video presentation. They also took part in an online Q&A session with technical judges.

“The most important thing we learned from this experience was teamwork,” said Mohammad Hani Mirza, who is a seventh-grader. “That's one thing we were missing because we all came from different backgrounds with different ideas, and we worked together to create one beautiful city.”

【推荐3】My dad, Greg Newman, had wanted to be a race car driver, but things didn’t work out for him. So I guess having a son who could become a race car driver was the next best thing. Don’t get me wrong — Dad didn’t push me into racing. In fact, when I was about 10 years old, my dad was afraid that driving a car wasn’t my dream. So he took the racing away from me. I wasn’t very happy with that decision. It wasn’t long before Dad realized that racing was what I loved.

At four, Dad bought me my first Quarter Midget (袖珍赛车) and that’s really where it started for us. Back then, Dad coached me. He would stick out (伸出) his foot in the path of the race car, and then tell me to exactly hit his foot. By repeating this again and again, Dad believed that I would be faster and sharper on the race track.

Dad worked really long hours at his car repair business to make money so that I could race each weekend. I can remember that every night before he turned off the lights in the garage, Dad would tell me: “Don’t forget to kiss your race car good night.” He was trying to teach me that if I show respect, it’s returned. He wanted me to show thankfulness and respect for my race car and for all the hard work that we and many others had put into the dream.

My dad, my mom and my sister gave up a lot of things to help me race. For us, there was no better moment than winning the 50th running of the Daytona 500 in 2018. That evening in February 2018, I knew I had gotten a good push. I could hear the excitement. My father couldn’t speak a word, and when he got to Victory Lane (车道), he nearly knocked me over and gave me such a big hug.

【推荐2】Slobodchikoff, a biologist who has spent years working to better understand the calls of dogs, used that knowledge to help people who were having trouble with their pets.

A man reported his dog wanted to bite him. So Slobodchikoff went to the man’s house. He watched as the owner walked over to the dog, towered over the pet and then said, “Good dog!” in a low-pitched(音高) voice. “The dog ran into a corner,” Slobodchikoff recalled. The owner had scared the dog. Slobodchikoff recommended that the man should do the opposite. The owner took that advice—and ended up developing a great relationship with his pet.

Not everyone has the time to study dog communications or the money to bring in an expert. Slobodchikoff thinks tech could help. He thinks a cell phone app or device that you could point at a dog. This would record video and audio(音频) of a dog’s behavior and then upload it.An artificial intelligence(AI)system would later analyze it.

The AI “ would translate this for you into English or any other language,” says Slobodchikoff. The result, he explains, may be something like “‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I need to go outside to pee’ or ‘I want to go for a walk.’”

To train the AI system, Slobodchikoff planned to get data directly from pet dogs, but for some reason, he hasn’t yet restarted the project to date, but hopes to soon.

Search an app store for a pet translator and you’ll find plenty. Some are completely unscientific and silly. MeowTalk, however, is a cat-translation app based on an AI model. In 2021, its creators reported that the AI model achieved 90 percent accuracy at identifying nine different emotional states in meows. These included angry, happy, hunting, pain and rest. The app picks conversational phrases based on these emotions, like “nice to see you,” or “let me rest.”

People who have tried the app say it doesn’t always work well. But better translations of barks and meows may be just around the corner.

【推荐3】The announcement that Indhu Rubasingham is to be the artist director of the Royal National Theatre (NT) in 2025 has been met with cheers, within the industry and without.

Workmates at the Kiln theatre in Brent, where Rubasingham has been director since 2012, describe her as inspiring, risk-taking and tough. Rufus Norris has called her “an exceptional artist who I respect and admire hugely”.

Rubasingham may be the NT’s female artistic director and the first person of colour in the role, but her own achievements contribute to her position. From a theatre with just 292 seats, she has commissioned (委托) and created productions of international quality. There has been Florian Zeller’s trilogy The father, The Mother and the Son and her production of Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden. A recent success is Ryan Calais Cameron’s civil rights story Retrograde.

Rubasingham is not new to National Theatre: as Norris says, “it’s a place she knows well, having directed successfully in each of the three theatres”. However, it’s a big leap from the 292 seats of the Kiln to the challenges of NT, with 2,450 seats, plus outreach, educational and digital programs. All this has to be done against the worst financial (金融的) situations since the NT was founded in 1963．Today, any director of a national arts organization in the UK faces a hard time, with the financial black hole left by the pandemic (疫情).

Rubasingham, however, is all about the artists: the play-writers and actors and many other creative talents who make her theatre what it is. That’s the special talent she brings to this position. She herself has described it as “the best job in the world”.