Last Thursday, the 18th-century Rhode Island farmhouse that inspired the 2013 horror movie The Conjuring     1     (sell) to a Boston house developer, Jacqueline Nunez, for $ 1. 525 million. Nunez and Jennifer Heinzen,     2    seller, jointly announced the sale on Facebook.

Nunez plans to continue the business     3     (start) by Heinzen. Guests will be able to continue the nightly explorations there. Day-time tours will resume (恢复) soon.

“This purchase is personal for me,” Nunez told The Boston Globe. “It’s around my own     4     (curious). Since I was a child, I     5     (be) in love with horror movies, like The Conjuring. I look forward to experiencing strange things in the house.”

However, one of the conditions in the contract is     6     the new owner will not live in the house year-round. “Because the energy is so powerful,” Heinzen told The Boston Globe later. “It is intended     7     (protect) the buyer.”

The Conjuring wasn’t filmed in the house but was based on the     8     (experience) of a few families that lived there in the 1970s.

“I’m not afraid     9     the house,” she said. “I don’t think the energy here is     10    (harm). Things that will happen here may frighten me, but will not hurt me.”

4 . Over the past century, science has made lots of advances in understanding the meanings of body language. Here are some of the most useful findings.

Open palm(手掌)

Have you noticed how someone swears to tell the truth in a court of law? He usually puts one hand on a religious book and raises the other hand into the air, palm facing whoever he is speaking to. He does this because an open palm has been associated with truth and honesty throughout our history.     1     . So we cannot be a threat to anyone.

Finger pointing

If someone is closing their palm and pointing with their index finger, then he is trying to display power, though it doesn’t always work out. Psychologists say, the pointed finger is used like a symbolic stick with which the speaker tries to beat his listeners.     2     .

Forced smile

Researchers say, smile is all about the lines around the eyes.     3     . If he is trying to force a smile, you won’t see the lines and the facial expression tends to be very awkward. Making a genuine smile-also known as a Duchenne smile-is nearly impossible to do on command. So look for a lack of lines around the eyes to detect a forced smile.

    4    

In the same way that real smiles shape the lines around the eyes, worry, shock or fear can cause people to raise their eyebrows in discomfort. So if someone praises your new hairstyle or clothes with his eyebrows raised, he or she may not be sincere.

Crossed arms

    5     While crossed arms typically indicate that someone is closed off, people are also more likely to cross their arms when it’s cold and when their chair doesn’t have an armrest. Be aware of the environment before making a decision or changing strategy based on these types of behaviors.

5 . Be it sugar or social media, the response in our brain is the same: It produces a “feel-good” chemical called dopamine. It first brings about pleasure, but it doesn’t last very long. It is then followed by pain so that we have to search for the pleasurable things again.

“This cycle of pleasure and pain made sense in the time of early humans when we had to constantly search for our basic needs-food, water, shelter,” says Dr. Anna Lembke, a Stanford Medical School researcher. “But our brains weren’t adjusted to put out the ‘fire of dopamine’ caused by pleasurable things that are so easily available in modern life.”

In addition, when we’re repeatedly exposed to pleasure-producing things, we’re not able to take joy in the same rewards. Instead, we need stronger and stronger stimulus (刺激) just to feel good. Otherwise, the cycle will lead us to anxiety, depression and many other problems.

“This is a universal problem—not one limited to those struggling with the disease of addiction. If we want to stay mentally healthy, we must rethink how to break the cycle in a dopamine-overloaded world,” says Lembke.

Her suggestions for the addicts?

Take a 30-day break from anything that we rely on for pleasure. This doesn’t mean going cold turkey forever. But this first month is key to breaking the pleasure-pain cycle and it’s a lot easier to cut out an addictive behavior entirely at first. Then re-introduce the pleasurable things little by little, like just a few bites of ice cream at a time or just one hour online a night.

Another strategy is to create physical distance between us and our addiction. That could mean just removing the addictive thing from our personal space. For someone who’s addicted to video games, that could mean a separate laptop for work and one for play.

“In a time of abundance, we have to strike a pleasure-pain balance, which means intentionally avoiding pleasure and seeking the kind of purposeful pain that keeps us healthy, such as exercise,” Lembke says. “By doing so, we will reset reward pathways and eventually be a lot happier. It’s not easy, but it’s well worth doing in the long term.”

6 . Humans have long been trying to make sense of our place in the universe. Waiting at a launch site in French Guiana? NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the latest step forward in that ancient quest (探索).

Using telescopes, astronomers have seen many galaxies (星系) such as the Andromeda Galaxy and the NGC 3227 Galaxy. So far, the most distant galaxy ever discovered, GN-z11, was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope. To the untrained eye, it looks like a red blob (小点点), but it’s basically like looking back in time about 13.4 billion years ago. That’s just about 0.4 billion years after the Big Bang.

“Hubble is limited in how far back in time it can look, so finding this one was just a lucky break,” says Marusa Bradac, an astronomer at the University of California. “Astronomers only spotted it because decades of using Hubble have let them cover much of the sky, and this particular early galaxy is surprisingly bright although it is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way Galaxy and has just one percent of its mass.”

Already, with that one galaxy, we’ve started to question some of our assumptions about how galaxies grow. The powerful, $ 10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has technology that should let it see back to 0.1 ~0.2 billion years after the Big Bang, the period when the very first galaxies possibly formed.

“If all go well, the James Webb Space Telescope will help us to build up the story of how the first galaxies ever formed and how they grew into galaxies we see today and we live in today,” says Bradac. “But the chances of seeing those first born stars with the new telescope are small. There’s maybe even more of a chance that we might see some of those stars explode. Such information can help us understand how galaxies formed and changed into the familiar shapes and structures seen today. That’s what’s amazing about the new telescope.”

7 . There is a curious love triangle that sits at the center of the new documentary Fire of Love. It’s between a man, a woman and a volcano. Well, all of them are volcanoes.

Their names might not be especially well-known today, but in the 1970s and ‘80s, French scientists Katia Krafft and Maurice Krafft were very famous for their photographs and writings about the volcanoes. When they died in 1991 on Mount Unzen in Japan, their deaths were covered globally. But their story has somewhat faded in the public memory in the past three decades? though Werner Herzog did spotlight them in his 2016 documentary Into the Inferno.

The Kraffts? who first bonded over Mount Etna and Mount Stromboli and were married in 1970, witnessed about 140 eruptions on every continent except Antarctica and won an Emmy for their National Geographic documentary Mountains of Fire. They would famously drop everything to get to an active volcano, and were often the first on site. They were also known for their willingness to get dangerously close.

Filmmaker Sara Dosa once met the Kraffts while making an earlier film about Iceland many years ago. In 2020, with the help of Image’ Est, a French museum, and Maurice Krafft^’s brother, Bertrand Krafft, Dosa and her team were able to get access to over 180 hours of footage shot by the Kraffts. So Dosa decided to make something about the Kraffts in the true spirit of the Kraffts.

“We wanted to let them play themselves. We see them as the authors of their own story,“ Dosa said. ”This is a co-creation, shot by them and starring them. We’re just stringing together the pieces of their life for the audience to connect with.”

However, Fire of Love is anything but a filmed Wikipedia(维基百科)page. Dosa and her team have drawn on the techniques of French New Wave films to help shape the style of their film, including playful multiple screens.

8 . We did a quick survey of New Year traditions around the world, and couldn’t help but notice that the traditions might reflect cultural varieties? but the meanings behind them are pretty universal.

Philippines

In Philippines? families hold traditional dinner parties called Media Noche to greet the New Year. Circle-shaped fruits are their favorites, such as grapes, oranges and melons, since they look like coins, you know. Filipinos actually try to choose 12 different kinds of fruit to put on the table—one for each month in the New Year.

Make sure you leave some food in your plate. It’s bad luck to start the New Year off as a hungry wolf.

Spain

Many Spaniards will eat 12 fresh grapes at midnight—one with each strike of the clock. Each grape represents a wish for happiness and good luck for every month in the coming year. This “12 grapes in 12 seconds“ custom came from a grape farmer in the Alicante region who wanted to promote his produce about a century ago. The tradition has spread to other countries too? with a few adjustments. In Portugal? they eat 12 dried grapes. In Peru? they eat a thirteenth grape.

Denmark

In Denmark_? they eat kransekage, a big horn-shaped cake, on New Year’s Eve. When they’re finished with the cake, it’s Danish custom to throw the used plates against the front doors of their friends and neighbors. It’s actually a sign of friendship.

Italy

Pork sausages are usually served on New Year’s Eve in Italy. Italians choose pork because they think pigs are fat and keep moving forward, while other animals, such as chickens or cows, move backward or stand still.

But whatever you eat into the New Year in Italy-pork, fish or chicken-make sure you stay at home. Italians throw old possessions out of the window after midnight as an out-with-the-old, make-room-for-the-new gesture.