1 . On many travelers’ lists of things to do before they die, you’ll find “See the northern lights” written down. Rightfully so these lights are one of nature’s most jaw-dropping views.

In Sweden, the northern lights usually appear from late March or early April. Your best chance of catching a glimpse of them is on cold winter nights when the sky is clear, dark with little to no moonlight, and cloudless. You need to be away from city lights and go to the countryside. For those willing to brave the cold on winter nights, here are some of the best locations.

Abisko National Park

Abisko Natinal Park is a main location. The scientifically confirmed “blue hole”, a piece of sky over the Tornetrask lake that usually remains clear despite cloudy weather nearby, gives Abisko its own microclimate (局部地区气候), which is suitable for catching the lights.

Jukkasjarvi

The village of Jukkasjarvi only has about 550 people. But don’t let the small population size fool you: Jukkasjarvi owns the world’s first ice hotel and is one of the best places to view the northern lights. The ice hotel organizes guided tours for guests to the Esrange Space Center. There you can eat at a camp outside and see the Arctic winter sky for aurora borealis (北极光). Or why not try to get closer to the northern lights and watch them through an aeroplane window? The ice hotel arranges flights for the amazing northern lights experience.

Gallivare

You can drive a snowmobile to the mountain top in Gallivare for a private light show, or head a few kilometers to nearby villages to watch those lights shining across the dark winter sky. But remember if you do get the chance to see the northern lights in person, never whistle to them. According to ancient Sumi fairy, it brings you bad luck.

2 . 2024 Arts Illustration Competition

Enter the competition most respected and admired in the industry for creativity in illustration, the Communication Arts Illustration Competition. Selected by distinguished professionals, the winning entries will be distributed worldwide in the Communication Arts Illustration Annual and on commarts.com, ensuring important exposure of the creations. Each winner will receive a professionalized Award of Excellence and an award certificate. Communication Art’s Award of Excellence is one of the most desired awards. If chosen, winning places you in the highest ranks of your profession.

What To Enter With

Any illustration first published or produced from Jan. 2023 to Jan. 2024 is qualified. Entries may originate from any country. Descriptions in English are necessary for the judges to read.

Entries Can Be Submitted In The Following Formats

Digital Images: RGB images in JPG format with a maximum file size of 2 MB. GIF images may be livelier, but would be turned down, and so would the PNG ones.

Motion Entries: In MOV, MP4 or MPG format, with a maximum file size of 500 MB.

Illustration Competition Categories & Entry Fees

For more categories, please download the category PDF.

Late Fees

Entries must be registered no later than Apr. 13, 2024. Entries registered after that date will be charged a fee of $10 each. No entries can be registered after Apr. 27, 2024.

3 . Many people have the habit of sleeping with a dim (昏暗的) light like a television or nightlight. Yet it is enough to the raise blood sugar and heart rates of healthy people, according to a new study. Light helps our body maintain an internal clock, but artificial light at night can have a negative impact on the rest and repair that should happen during the sleep. New research suggests that even when our eyes are closed, a small amount of light can disrupt the way our bodies normally keep our blood sugar within a healthy range.

In the study published in Sciences on Monday, scientists asked 20 participants aged 19 to 36 to spend two nights in their lab. On the first night of sleep, the volunteers slept in a very dark room. For their second night of sleep, half of the group slept with streetlights through a window, and half spent their second night in a dark room.

During the trial, all participants were connected to devices that measured different markers of their sleep quality. They were each connected through a special tube, allowing researchers to collect samples without waking the individual. Researchers also recorded participants’ heart rates and brain waves.

When the volunteers awoke in the morning, the team tested their blood sugar and found that participants that slept in rooms with a dim light spent less time in deep sleep. In addition to having slightly worse blood sugar control, the group exposed to dim light had a higher heart rate on average. By comparison, those that spend two nights in the dark room had little difference in their blood sugar control. “They thought they slept well, but your brain knows that the lights are on,” says Zee,“ you should clearly pay attention to the light in your bedroom. If you can’t give up your night light, keep it dim and at floor level.”

Earlier work has linked exposure to light during sleep to an increased risk of obesity (肥胖) in women. Zee recommends, “Make sure that you start dimming your lights at least an hour or two before you go to bed to prepare your environment for sleep.”

6 . Whether you feel like taking a trip, or you just need some fun, you’ll enjoy this list of popular tourist attractions.

Alabama: Alabama Gulf Coast Beaches

If Alabama wasn’t the location for your next summer beach vacation, you may want to reconsider. There are 51 kilometers of white sand beaches made almost entirely of quartz grains (石英颗粒) washed down from the Appalachian Mountains thousands of years ago. That’s probably why over six million people visit Alabama’s Gulf Coast Beaches every year. Ten dollars per person.

Alaska: Kenai Fjords Wildlife Cruise

Alaska is the place to go for spotting breathtaking (令人惊叹的) wildlife. In fact, the number of visitors who travel to Alaska to see wildlife has increased by 45 percent. The Kenai Fjords Wildlife Cruise will bring you up close to whales, sea lions and sea birds. It is a five-hour trip that starts at noon and covers 88 kilometers of sea, and it will be the best $98 you ever spent.

Arkansas: Hot Springs National Park

Skip the beach and choose a new type of relaxation at Hot Springs National Park. It’s America’s oldest national park. It is also the only urban national park. You don’t need to make reservations (预订). Doors open at 8 a. m., so get there early!

Connecticut: Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History

Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is a must stop if you’re travelling nearby Yale University. It attracts plenty of people and has many collections including New England birds, dinosaurs, Greek and Roman antiquities (古董), and even an Egyptian mummy (木乃伊). Adults pay $13 for entry, but if you want to visit for free, go on a Thursday.

7 . When robots and humans interact in the same environment, it is important for them to move in techniques that monitor an environment, predict the future actions of humans, identify secure track for a robot and control its movements accordingly.

Predicting human behavior and movements, however, can be incredibly challenging. Determining the future movements of a robot, on the other hand, could be far easier. If human users could anticipate the movements of robots and the effects these will have on the surrounding environment, they should then be able to easily adapt their actions in order to avoid accidents.

With this in mind, researchers at Kyushu University in Japan recently created a near-future perception system named Previewed Reality that allows human users to forecast future changes in their environment, which could then inform their decisions and guide their actions. This system compiles (编译) a data-set containing information about the position of objects, humans and robots within the same environment, to then produce simulations (模拟) of events that could take place in the near future. These simulations are presented to human users via Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) headsets.

To collect information about the position of different objects, robots, and humans in the same environment, the researchers used a number of strategically placed sensors, including optical trackers that monitored the movements of objects or robots, and a RGB-D camera which mainly tracked human actions. The data gathered by the sensors was then fed to a motion planner and a dynamics simulator. Combining these two system components allowed the researchers to forecast changes in a given environment and synthesize (合成) images of events that are likely to occur in the near future, from the viewpoint of a specific human. Human users could then view these synthesized images simply through a VR headset or an AR display.

“This system provides human-friendly communication between a human and a robotic system.” the researchers explained. In their next studies, they plan to expand and simplify the perception system, for instance by creating a lighter and more affordable version that can operate on smart phones or other portable devices.

8 . Spain is a country that lies in southwestern Europe. It’s surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the south and the east, while to the north and northeast of Spain lie France, Andorra and the Bay of Biscay. The west and northwest of Spain are surrounded by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean.

The official name of the state is the Kingdom of Spain. Madrid is the capital city, which is also one of the famous places in Spain. Spain, which covers 505，925 square kilometres, is one of the largest countries in Europe.

The weather in Spain differs from one area to another. Most of the rain that happens in Spain is in the mountainous areas. The plains hardly receive any rainfall.

Soccer is an important part of life in Spain. It’s said that Spanish children learn to walk and play soccer at exactly the same time. Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are two Spanish soccer teams, which are respected by soccer fans not only in Spain, but all over the world. The popularity of the sport can be judged from the fact that three major soccer teams, which are Real Madrid, Atletico de Madrid, and Rayo Vallecano, were born in Madrid.

If you are a tourist, then you will want to know about the driving rules in Spain. If you’re not from the European Union, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, or Liechtenstein, then for you to drive you’ll have to carry your international driver’s license. Bad news if you haven’t celebrated your 18th birthday. If you want to rent a car, then you must have completed 21 years of age. If you’re driving, make sure you take all the documents at all times during your stay in Spain.

9 . Hiring processes can be thought of as a battle between integrity and dishonesty. You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves tend to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.

Start with the obvious wrongdoers: job applicants. When it comes to writing the resume (简历) , they tend to massage reality into the most appealing shape possible. Everyone beyond a certain level of experience is a transformational leader personally responsible for generating millions income; the world economy would be about 15 times bigger than it actually is if all such claims were true. The average British spends four and a half hours a day watching TV and online videos. But each average job candidate is an enthusiast for public welfare, using their spare time only for worthy purposes, like volunteering in soup kitchens.

But the tendency to stretch the truth infects companies as well as applicants. The typical firm will write a job description that invariably describes the work environment as fast-paced and innovative, and then lays out a set of improbable requirements for the “ideal candidate”, someone who almost by definition does not exist. Sometimes, the requirements include an ability to go back and change the course of history.

Too few firms offer an accurate account of what a position actually involves in their job previews, which are supposed to give prospective employees a genuine sense of the negatives and positives of the job, as well as a clear idea of the company’s corporate culture. One effective strategy is to lay out in text or video, what a typical day in the role would look like.

Such honesty can be its own reward. Research has long suggested that realistic job previews lead to lower turnover and higher employee satisfaction. A paper in 2011 by David Eamest of Towson University and his co-authors concluded that favourable perceptions of the organization’s honesty are the best explanation for why. So a process designed to uncover the truth about job applicants would run a lot more smoothly if firms were also honest about themselves.

10 . The apparent complexities of the TikTok algorithm(算法)may actually be as simple as a bag of chips. In a video with more than 700,000 views, creator Celeste Aria laid out her “Dorito theory”, which she uses to explain the addictive nature of endlessly-scrolling social media feeds.

Everyone has a topic they just can’t stop thinking about, and Aria’s Roman Empire is Doritos. In her popular video, she expresses that TikTok scrolling is so addictive because it is never fully satisfying. Like a Dorito, a scrolling session on the For You Page is most stimulating during the first few bites. The end of the chip or video brings a desire to start consuming another one, thus returning to that first-bite feeling.

Essentially, the Dorito theory suggests that activities like eating Doritos, which provide a quick burst of pleasure but lack lasting satisfaction, can be highly addictive. Aria compared it to consuming foods that offer deeper satisfaction, like a hearty steak, where the feeling of fullness and contentment lasts longer.

The theory can apply to a lot of different experiences, but it’s particularly well-suited as a metaphor for the dopamine (多巴胺) boosts that occur while scrolling through social media feeds. Dr. Jamie Sorenson, a board-certified psychiatrist, said that the Dorito theory is consistent with existing ideas regarding addiction. “The more immediate the reward is, the more likely we are to repeat that behavior, whether it’s eating Doritos or scrolling on social media.”

Aria may not be a licensed medical professional, but she treats junk food the way any nutritionist would. “I’d recommend just trying to remove anything that you think falls into the Dorito category,” she says in her video.

The Dorito theory trend has led to reflections on the nature of addiction and the pursuit of instant satisfaction in today’s society, resonating (共鸣) with many TikTok users who recognize similar patterns in their own lives. So, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before Doritos responds to Aria’s theory.