1 . Every week in China, millions of people will sit in front of their TVs watching teenagers compete for the title Character Hero, which is a Chinese-style spelling bee(拼写大赛). In this challenge, young competitors must write Chinese characters by hand. To prepare for the competition, the competitors usually spend months studying dictionaries.

Perhaps the show’s popularity should not be a surprise. Along with gunpowder and paper, many Chinese people consider the creation of Chinese calligraphy(书法)to be one of their primary contributions to civilization. Unfortunately, all over the country, Chinese people are forgetting how to write their own language without computerized help. Software on smart phones and computers allows users to type in the basic sound of the word using the Latin alphabet. The correct character is chosen from a list. The result? It’s possible to recognize characters without remembering how to write them.

But there’s still hope for the paint brush. China’s Education Ministry wants children to spend more time learning how to write.

In one Beijing primary school we visited, students practice calligraphy every day inside a specially decorated classroom with traditional Chinese paintings hanging on the walls. Soft music plays as a group of six-year-olds dip brush pens into black ink. They look up at the blackboard often to study their teacher’s examples before carefully attempting to reproduce those characters on thin rice paper. “If adults can survive without using handwriting, why bother to teach it now?” we ask the calligraphy teacher, Shen Bin, “The ability to write characters is part of Chinese tradition and culture,” she reasons. “Students must learn now so they don’t forget when they grow up.” says the teacher.

2 . People realize that, although animals may not have the same intelligence as human beings, they are clever enough to learn certain things.

Dogs are extremely useful as companions for blind people. When a dog has been properly trained, he will always lead his blind master in the right direction and keep him out of danger. For example, seeing-eye dogs learn never to cross a busy road when cars are coming, even if their master ordered them to do so.

Horses are also able to learn many things. Horses that are used for guard or police duty must learn never to be frightened of noises and traffic. Racing horses are able to run much faster than other horses, but they are also quite tense. Therefore, it is necessary for those people who train them to be very patient and understanding.

The movie and television can use trained animals too. Some animals, such as monkeys and foxes, are easy to film. All you have to do is make a trail in front of the camera by putting something that smells good to the animals over the ground. Big animals, such as lions and tigers, can be photographed as they come happily back to their families or dinner. If a movie actor is nearby, the well trained animal will pay no attention to him. However, the audience may imagine that the actor escaped a terrible death.

Food waste is one of the greatest challenges of our time, and fruit and vegetables are especially problematic, as about 52% of them go bad before     1    (eventual) reaching consumers. But one Malaysian company has come up     2     a simple solution to this problem — a tiny sticker (贴纸) that keeps fruit from     3    (go) bad for up to weeks.

You’ve probably seen stickers on fruit before, but not like the ones created by the Malaysian company. Those common stickers are typically     4    (use) only to provide consumers with     5    (inform) about the growers and how the fruit was grown,     6     Stixfresh has a completely different purpose. It contains something special and all-natural that slows down the ripening (成熟) process, keeping the fruit fresh and juicy for much     7    (long).

Stixfresh founder Zhafri Zainudin says that he thought of the idea for the stickers after visiting a friend     8     ran a fruit store. The man was worried about losing money every day because of bad fruit, but he knew that there was no way to stop nature from taking     9    (it) course. The Malaysian businessman worked with many     10    (university) to develop and test his sticker.

At first, Stixfresh stickers were only used to lengthen the shelf-life of mangoes, but the company later worked on other fruit, like dragon fruit, star fruit, apples and pears.

5 . Monet: The Immersive Experience

Monet: The Immersive (沉浸式) Experience in Liège invites you to step into the world of the French painter Claude Monet, one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the nineteenth century!

Explore some of the most breathtaking paintings by Claude Monet with the help of a digital 360-degree presentation. The unique exhibition concept is staged with state-of-the-art multimedia technology, which shows very large images of Monet’s paintings on the walls and floors of the building. It has music, the smell of flowers, and voice-over in several languages to make the paintings come alive in a way never seen before.

To fully get into the world of the French painter, visitors are guided through three experience rooms. Each room is a highlight on its own and provides visitors not only with an insight, but also with new experiences and new viewpoints on Monet’s life, his work and his masterpieces.

·Date: from March 2024

·Opening hours:

Wednesday, Thursday: 10: 00 am-7: 00 pm

Friday: 10: 00 am-8: 00 pm

Saturday: 9: 00 am-8: 00 pm

Sunday: 9: 00 am-7: 00 pm

Monday and Tuesday: Closed

·Duration: the visit will take around 60 to 75 minutes

·Location: Eglise Saint-Pholien, Rue Saint-Pholien, 4020 Liège

·Please consult the FAQs of this experience here

8 . John Kerr and his 86-year-old grandma, Sandy Kerr, are nearing the finish line on a goal they once thought was impossible: Visiting all national parks together.

They kicked off their _________ in September 2023, when John was looking for a way to spend a two-day weekend. He said the idea _________ from a conversation he had with “Grandma Sandy” about his past adventures on the Appalachian Trail. “I felt sorry that she was always _________ vicariously (间接感受到地) through my stories,” John said. “And so just knowing that she had never seen _________ and mountains and the oceans and these _________ wild places on Earth, it just felt like a _________ that I had to her to make sure that she had some memories to take away in her life story as well.” John began _________ their adventures on the social media in 2019, and they quickly _________ a large number of followers.

“You don’t assume your grandma going with you on a camping trip is going to be anything but _________,” John said. “That was my __________. That was my misunderstanding of what age means.” More __________, her spirit was good enough for her to go traveling. “It’s been a __________ adventure; it really has,” Grandma Sandy said. “It’s really been a beautiful time. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything,”

As for __________ from John and Grandma Sandy, they encourage everyone to __________ opportunities for exploration. “We realize that not everybody is going to be able to travel to every national park,” John said. “But there is some adventure to be found in every __________ of the country and we hope that people will go out and seek that adventure.”

10 . An artificial intelligence can decode (解码) words and sentences from brain activity with surprising accuracy. Using only a few seconds of brain activity data, the AI guesses what a person has heard. It lists the correct answer in its top 10 possibilities , researchers found in a primary study.

Developed at the parent company of Facebook, Meta, the AI could eventually be used to help thousands of people around the world who are unable to communicate through speech, typing or gestures.

Most existing technologies to help such patients communicate require risky brain surgeries to put in electrodes (电极). This new approach “could provide a possible path to help patients with communication problems, avoiding the use of surgeries,” says neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King, a Meta AI researcher.

King and his colleagues trained a computational tool, also known as a language model, to detect words and sentences on 56, 000 hours of speech recordings from 53 languages. The team applied an AI with this language model to databases from four institutions that included brain activity from 169 volunteers. In these databases, participants listened to various stories and sentences, while the people’s brains were scanned by magnetoencephalography (MEG) (脑磁图).

Then with the help of a computational method that helps account for physical differences among actual brains, the team tried to decode what participants had heard using just three seconds of brain activity data from each person. The team instructed the AI to match up the speech sounds from the story recordings with patterns of brain activity that the AI computed as corresponding to what people were hearing. It then made predictions about what the person might have been hearing during that short time, given more than 1, 000 possibilities. Using MEG, the correct answer was in the AI’s top 10 guesses, the researchers found.

“The new study is decoding of speech recognition, not production,” King agrees, “Though speech production is the final goal, for now, we’re quite a long way away.”