【推荐2】ONLINE EXHIBITS AND TOURS

The coming of International Museum Day on 18 May this year is a timely reminder that even when wonderful collections are closed, many have become more accessible than ever—online.

See the Mona Lisa like never before

Among the Louvre’s online resources are in-depth pieces on three of its leading ladies, including the Mona Lisa. Get close enough to see the fine cracks in the paint, and learn some secrets on the way. focus.louvre.fr/en.

Take a close look at the Met Museum

Get a feel for New York’s culture with the Met 360° Project, videos where you can turn the camera as it tracks through different galleries, or set the kids loose on an interactive illustrated map of the museum. metmuseum.org/online-features.

Go back to old Las Vegas at the Neon Museum

Enter the password ‘Neon’ (霓红灯) to access a virtual Las Vegas Strip’s worth of salvaged signs, including Aladdin’s lamp and a giant Hard Rock Cafe guitar containing three-quarters of a mile of neon tube. neonmuseum.app/guide.

Roam with dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum

Online offerings at London’s terracotta temple of nature include skeletal (骸骨的) dinosaur, game-changing scientific discoveries and a tour of the tank room, which is normally open only for specially booked visits. artsandculture.com/museum.

【推荐3】A new app will soon help more than 50,000 Israeli students learn English through popular music.

“There is so much research out there that shows how music can help students learn,” says Michael Peled, founder and CEO of Singit.“Getting kids to interact (互动) with words in real life through music is a very useful learning tool, and we are finding that it also works for dyslexic (朗读困难的) and special education students.”

Students can listen on their phones or computers to music from a sea of songs and follow along with the lyrics a on the screen. When they see a word that they don’t recognize, they can click (点击) the word. With the help of AI and Machine Learning technology, Singit offers other songs with the words they didn’t know. After hearing the song, students are given a test that tests them for the words they clicked on. Meanwhile, teachers can send students customized grammar tests.

“We work with a company called LyricFind that provides more than five million songs. Most schools won’t want to have many types of songs due to educational considerations, but that will still leave more than 100,000 songs they can hear,” Peled says.

“The first version (版本) of the app we built in 2017 was bad, but by 2019, we had a new version, and we tested it throughout 2020,” Peled says. Pilot tests show that the app increased students’ interaction with the English language by 62%.“ Singit was recently recognized by the Ministry of Education. Many schools, including ten special education schools, have already chosen the app,” Peled adds.“ By the end of the year, we will have about 53,000 users around the countr.” Peled has big plans for Singit.“ We are going to introduce Singit to Asia, Brazil, and other places where they teach English as a second language.”

【推荐2】If you’re not at least a bit terrified by the climate and ecological breakdown unfolding before our eyes, you haven’t grasped the scale of the crisis. Eco-anxiety, defined as “a chronic(长期的)fear of environmental doom”, is on the rise. But redirecting this anxiety into anger and collective action might just pull humanity back from the brink.

We don’t yet know how deeply eco-anxiety affects people, but we can learn not to repeat the mistakes of long-gone societies lost to environmental collapse. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed uncovers the common driver that led to the fall of ancient civilizations such as the Central American Mayan, the remote Pacific Easter Island, and the Mycenae: People accidentally destroyed the environmental resources on which their societies depended.

Today, we are living in a new climate and ecological age. The new normal is one that humans have never before experienced on earth, and that has occurred within a single generation. We can’t claim ignorance. Numerous scientific reports show: unprecedented(空前的)wildfires in the Arctic, heatwaves annually breaking records, the Amazon shrinking and drying, and species extinction rates accelerating. Nature’s dangerous decline is unprecedented.

So, it’s not surprising that eco-anxiety is on the rise. Anxiety is often a private emotional state: We feel alone, stuck inside our own heads, and our emotions stop us from doing the things we want. But anger, directed appropriately, can fuel powerful collective action for change.

We are on a pathway to destroy the global conditions for human survival. Unlike previous civilizations, we have the science and technology to understand our danger and chart a new pathway. This is a moment for all of us to channel our eco-anxiety, fear and anger into energy for change.

【推荐3】Charles Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. His father, a doctor, had high hopes that his son would earn a medical degree at Edinburgh University in Scotland, where he was admitted at the age of sixteen. It turned out that Darwin was more interested in natural history than medicine. While he continued his studies at Cambridge, it was his focus on natural history that became his passion.

In 1831, Darwin set out on a voyage as a naturalist aboard a ship of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Beagle. The main purpose of the trip was to survey the coastline of South America and chart its harbors to make better maps of the region.

Darwin spent much of the trip on land collecting samples of plants, animals, rocks, and fossils. He explored regions in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and remote islands such as the Gal á pagos. He packed all of his samples into large wooden containers and sent them back to England aboard other large ships.

Upon his return to England in 1836, Darwin’s work continued. Studies of his samples and notes from the trip led to groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Fossils he collected led to advances in the understanding of the processes that shape the Earth’s surface. Darwin’s analysis of the plants and animals he gathered led him to question how species form and change over time. This work convinced him of the insight that he is most famous for — natural selection. The theory of natural selection says that individuals of a species are more likely to survive in their environment and pass on their genes to the next generation when they inherit traits from their parents that are best suited for that specific environment. In this way, such traits become more widespread in the species and can lead eventually to the development of a new species.

In 1859, Darwin published his thoughts about evolution and natural selection in On the Origin of Species. The book convinced many people that species change over time — a lot of time — suggesting that the planet was much older than what was commonly believed at the time: six thousand years.

Charles Darwin died in 1882 at the age of seventy-three. He is buried in Westminster Abbey in London, England.