【推荐1】Look at the center circles of Diagram A and Diagram B. Which of the center circles looks larger? In Diagram B? In fact, they are exactly the same size.

Then look at the picture on the right. What do you see? A vase? Or two faces？Does the picture change quickly from one to the other again and again? Maybe or maybe not, but you can never see them at the same time.

“What’s happening? Is something wrong with my eyes?” You may wonder at what you see.

Don’t worry. Here is how it goes:

When we look at things, our eyes send messages to our brains and then our brains interpret the information. However, sometimes our brains interpret the received information in a wrong way. It seems that our eyes are playing a joke on us. This often happens and we call it “visual illusion (错误)”.

【推荐3】We all know that water is tasteless. But it happens from time to time: you pick up the bottle of water you didn’t finish yesterday, and it tastes strange. Most often, you tend to drop the bottle in the trash bin, believing that the water has gone bad. But is it true?

According to Time, of course not, taste has little to do with quality of water.

As is mentioned in Time, when water is exposed to the air for 12 hours, carbon dioxide interacts with the H₂O in the water, and the pH value lowers slightly. As a result, the water has a different taste.

“But it’s most likely safe to drink,” Norwegian expert Truls Krogh told Science Nordic. “If the water is covered and of good quality to start with, in principle it can last a thousand years. That’s because when water is fresh, it contains little organic matter. As long as water is held in clean glasses or bottles, no pollutants will enter it to harm our health.”

People in countries like the US, the UK and Australia usually drink tap water. According to Time, if tap water is drunk within six months, the chlorine (氯气) in the water will be enough to kill any bacteria and keep it safe to drink.

However, there are also some exceptions. If you accidentally put your fingers into water or store water in unclean containers day after day, microorganism (微生物) will enter the water.

With the help of surrounding temperature, and sunlight streaming through windows, these microorganisms multiply quickly. Sooner or later, the water will be full of the unfriendly bacteria. And if you drink the water too often, then you’re more likely to be ill.

And what about water in plastic bottles? Heat and plastic are a bad combination, US researcher Kellogg Schwab stresses. When plastic bottles are used at high temperatures, they produce a chemical called BPA. BPA is something that affects hormones (荷尔蒙) and research has tentatively linked it to “several health damage, including heart disease and cancer”, Time reported.

Schwab suggests replacing disposable (一次性的) plastic bottles with the refillable containers made of metal or glass to deal with BPA.

ART & TECHNOLOGY

Think “art”. What comes to your mind? Is it Greek or Roman sculptures in the Louvre, or Chinese paintings in the Palace Museum? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a dancing pattern of lights?

The artworks by American artist Janet Echelman look like colourful floating clouds when they are lit up at night. Visitors to one of her artworks in Vancouver could not only enjoy looking at it, they could also interact with it—literally. They did this by using their phones to change its colours and patterns. Exhibits such as these are certainly new and exciting, but are they really art?

Whatever your opinion, people have been expressing their thoughs and ideas through art for thousands of years. To do this，they have used a variety of tools and technologies. Yet Michelangelo and others have been labelled as “artists” rather than “technicians”. This means that art and technology have always been seen as two very separate things.

Today, however, technological advances have led to a combination of art and technology. As a result, the art world is changing greatly. Now art is more accessible to us than ever before. Take for example one of China’s most famous paintings from the Song Dynasty, Along the River During the Qingming Festival. As this artwork is rarely on display, people have sometimes queued up to six hours for a chance to see it. Once in front of the painting, they only have limited time to spend taking in its five metres of scenes along the Bian River in Bianjing. Thanks to technology however, millions more people have been able to experience a digital version of this painting. Three­dimensional(3D) animation means that viewers can see the characters move around and interact with their surroundings. They can also watch as the different scenes change from daylight into nighttime.

The art-tech combination is also changing our concepts of “art” and the “artist”. Not only can we interact with art, but also take part in its creation. With new technological tools at our fingertips, more and more people are exploring their creative sides. The result has been exciting new art forms, such as digital paintings and videos.

However, the increase in the amount and variety of art produced has also raised questions^⑰ over its overall quality.Can a video of someone slicing a tomato played in slow motion really be called “art”?

Similarly, such developments are making the line between art and technology less distinct. Can someone unfamiliar with traditional artists’ tools really call themselves an “artist”? And is the artist the creator of the art itself, or the maker of the technology behind it? A recent project used technology and data in the same way that Rembrandt used his paints and brushes. The end result, printed in 3D, was a new “Rembrandt painting” created 347 years after the artist’s death. These advances are perhaps bringing us closer to a time when computers rather than humans create art.

Where technology will take art next is anyone’s guess. But one thing is for sure—with so many artists exploring new possibilities, we can definitely expect the unexpected.

【推荐2】A study of art history might be a good way to learn more about a culture than is possible to learn in general history classes. Most typical history courses concentrate on politics, economics, and war. But art history focuses on much more than this because art reflects not only the political values of a people, but also religious beliefs, emotions, and psychology. In addition, information about the daily activities of our ancestors — or of people very different from our own — can be provided by art. In short, art expresses the essential qualities of a time and a place, and a study of it clearly offers us a deeper understanding than can be found in most history books.

In history books, objective information about the political life of a country is presented; that is, facts about politics are given, but opinions are not expressed. Art, on the other hand, is subjective; it reflects emotions and opinions. The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya was perhaps the first truly “political” artist. In his well known painting The Third of May, 1808, he criticized the Spanish government for its misuse of power over people. Over a hundred years later, symbolic images were used in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to express the horror of war. Meanwhile, on another continent, the powerful paintings of Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros — as well as the works of Alfredo Ramos Martines — depicted these Mexican artists’ deep anger and sadness about social problems.

In the same way, art can reflect a culture’s religious beliefs. For hundreds of years in Europe, religious art was almost the only type of art that existed. Churches and other religious buildings were filled with paintings that depicted people and stories from the Bible. Although most people couldn’t read, they could still understand biblical stories in the pictures on church walls. By contrast, one of the main characteristics of art in the Middle East was and still is its absence of human and animal images. This reflects the Islamic belief that statues are unholy.

【推荐3】Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change-to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.

Landscape (风景) is another unchanging clement of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th century Dutch painters to the 19h-century romanticists and impressionists. In the 1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change motions and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of colour photography (摄影术) to help both the eyes and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.

Besides, all art begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists scenes, and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.

Over thousands of years, the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western. the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Variety and diversity are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.