4 . Top Theme Parks and Amusement Parks in Australia

Magic Mountain Merimbula

Located in the town of Merimbula, this small theme park is situated on the Sapphire Coast. There are multiple attractions in this place including Kiddie Splash Pool, Magic Carpet Slide and the Diamond Pyth on Roller Coaster. You can buy souvenirs from the gift shops for friends and family back home.

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 10 am to 4 pm

Price: $90 per person

The Big Banana Fun Park

The Big Banana Fun Park is located in the city of Coffs Harbour and it boasts a large walk-through banana. Guests can go roller skating at the ice-skating rink, enjoy water slides and play golf.

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 9 am to 5 pm

Price: $25 per adult (age 13-99); $15 per child (age 1-12)

Wet Wild Gold Coast

Owned and operated by the Village Roadshow Theme Parks, this park features 17 water slides, 4 pools, and 2 children’s areas. If you are traveling during the winter season, there is nothing to worry as the pools and slides are heated according to your convenience.

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 10 am to 5 pm

Price: $24 per person

Big Splash Waterpark

Featuring nine slides, a 50-meter (164 feet) pool, and kiddie pools, this park is a perfect spot to chill when the sun is out. Being one of the oldest theme parks in Australia, it boasts the famous Jammo Pool.

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 10 am to 6 pm

Price: $150 per adult (age 13-99); 40% discount per child (age 1-12)

Enjoy with your kids at one of the theme parks in Australia.

5 . Four Inventions That Changed the World

The course of human evolution has been filled with inventions. The following inventions changed the world in one way or another.

Many of us wonder what life was like before matches. We can thank a British pharmacist and his dirty mixing stick. In 1820s, John Walker noticed a dried lump on the end of a stick while he was stirring a mix of chemicals. When he tried to scrape (刮掉) it off, flames appeared. The initial matches were made of cardboard but soon the matches came in a box equipped with a piece of sandpaper for striking.

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 when a young bacteriologist, Alexander Fleming, was tidying up his lab. After having been on vacation, he returned to work to find that a dish of Staphylococcus bacteria had been left uncovered, and he noticed that mould (霉菌) on the culture had killed many of the bacteria. His further research found that it could kill other bacteria.

Of all the sci-fi kitchen appliances, the microwave oven really relieves the load on housewives. It was discovered in the 1940s. When Percy Spencer, an engineer, was working on a magnetron (磁控管), he noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had started to melt due to the microwaves. Spencer found that indeed, when food was placed in the box with the microwave energy, it cooked quickly.

The first plastic was invented in 1907 by Leo Hendrik Baekeland. His initial quest was to invent a ready replacement for shellac (虫胶), an expensive product got from lac beetles. Baekeland combined formaldehyde (甲醛) with a waste product of coal, and heated the mixture. Rather than a shellac-like material, he created a substance that didn’t melt under heat and stress.

6 . The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines (疫苗), a crucial tool in holding back the spread of COVID-19.

Karikó,68, is from Hungary. In the 1970s, she began studying a new area of research: messenger RNA (mRNA). mRNA is a special molecule (分子) which carries instructions that tell cells what proteins to make. Proteins are one of the building blocks of life. They’re involved in almost every process in living things, from fighting diseases to building muscles to helping our bodies work. Karikó was excited about the idea that mRNA could be used to help the body fight many different diseases.

In 1985, Karikó moved to America to continue her research. In 1989, she joined the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in Philadelphia as a scientist. But as time went on, the initial excitement surrounding mRNA research started to disappear, and other scientists thought it was too financially risky to fund. Karikó had trouble getting money for her research. She even got a pay cut from the school. What’s worse, at this time, she suffered from cancer. But she stuck at it.

Karikó got to know another UPenn scientist, Drew Weissman in the late 1990s while photocopying research papers. He was hoping to find a way to create a vaccine for a disease known as HIV. The two began talking and soon decided to work together.

One of the biggest problems in using mRNA as a medicine was that the human body saw mRNA as an enemy and fought it off. Together, they came up with an approach to treating mRNA．In 2005, they published their key discovery: mRNA could be changed and delivered effectively into the body to activate (激活) the body’s protective immune system. Thanks to their work, companies were able to develop mRNA vaccines far more quickly than ever before, which have saved millions of lives around the world.

7 . In 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford conducted a famous study of creativity known as the nine-dot puzzle (九点谜题). He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. All the participants limited the possible solutions to those within the imaginary square. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the confinement (束缚) and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots.

The fact that 80 percent of the participants were effectively blinded by the boundaries of the square led Guilford to jump to the sweeping conclusion that creativity requires you to go outside the box. The idea went viral. Overnight, it seemed that creativity experts everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box. The concept enjoyed such strong popularity that no one bothered to check the facts. No one, that is, before two different research teams-Clarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisberg-ran another experiment.

Both teams followed the same way of dividing participants into two groups. The first group was given the same instructions as the participants in Guilford’s experiment. The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box. Guess what? Only 25 percent solved the puzzle. In statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement is insignificant as this could be called sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at the surprising result. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and clear instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless should effectively have killed off the much widely spread — and therefore, much more dangerous — metaphor (比喻) that out-of-the-box thinking boosts creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a misunderstanding.