2 . Van Gogh painted sunflowers for the first time in the summer of 1886. Two years later, his interest appeared again after he settled in Arles. After he had invited the French artist Paul Gauguin, whom he admired, to join his Studio of the South, he began painting sunflowers to brighten up the whitewashed walls of the yellow house he was living in, not far from the town’s railway station.

Gauguin accepted Van Gogh’s invitation. When he began dragging his heels, Van Gogh painted the last two of the four original Sunflowers for the modest bedroom where his guest would sleep following his arrival that autumn. “Van Gogh saw the Sunflowers for Gauguin’s bedroom as a way of attracting his friend to come from Brittany,” says Bailey.

According to Martin Gayford, “Gauguin was very surprised by the Sunflowers, which he repeatedly praised and asked for as a gift. Years later, Gauguin himself painted some sunflower pictures.”

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers stand for his relationship with Gauguin. “I think he painted them for the joy of it,” says Jansen. “Van Gogh was at the height of his powers in the summer of 1888,” explains Bailey. “He painted the Sunflowers quickly and with great energy and confidence.” Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in late August, “I’m painting quickly now, which won’t surprise you when it’s a question of painting large Sunflowers.”

Van Gogh recognized at once that he had created something important and that his sunflowers were so different. As he told Theo in January 1889, while other artists were known for painting other flowers, “The sunflower is mine.” This, in fact, explains the reason for the popularity of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers today.

3 . Reunions offer a chance to reflect on how much has changed. One happened in Hollywood when Here premiered (首映), bringing together the actors, director and writer behind Forrest Gump 40 years later for a new film. The stars were “de-aged” using new AI tools, making them more youthful in some scenes and enabling the filmmakers to see the transformation in real time while shooting.

With the use of generative AI in film making come things worth watching. The first is how AI will be used to tell new types of stories, as storytelling becomes more personalised and interactive. No one is quite sure how the nature of storytelling will change, but it is sure to. David Thomson, a film historian, compares generative AI to the advent of sound. “When movies were no longer silent, it changed the way plot points were made and how deeply viewers could connect with characters.” Cristóbal Valenzuela, who runs a company providing AI-enhanced software, says AI is like a “new kind of camera”, offering a fresh “opportunity to reimagine what stories are like”. Both are right.

Another big development to watch is how AI will be used as a time-saving tool. Generative AI will automate and simplify complex tasks like film-editing and special effects. For a glimpse of the future, watch Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2023. It featured a scene that used a “rotoscoping” tool to edit out the green-screen background and make a talking rock more believable. It shortened into hours what might have otherwise taken days of video-editing.

What is also noticeable is more dramatic conflicts between creators and those running AI platforms. This year is likely to bring floods of lawsuits (诉讼) from authors, musicians and actors about how their works have been used to train AI systems without permission or payment. Perhaps they can agree on some sort of licensing arrangement, in which AI companies start paying copyright-holders.

It will probably be a few years before a full-length film is produced entirely by AI, but it is just a matter of time.

4 . Kids everywhere love to play. And they know that a ball is a perfect thing to play with. Now scientists report bumblebees (大黄蜂) seem to know the same thing, making bumblebees the first insects known to play.

Lots of animals play. But the behavior is best known in mammals and birds. For many animals, playing is often seen as a kind of training for things they’ll have to deal with in later life. But before this, there were no reports of insects playing.

Dr. Lars Chittka did an earlier experiment, where he trained bumblebees to roll balls into a goal for food. He noticed some bees were rolling balls even when they weren’t rewarded. He wondered if they were playing.

To test the idea, he with other scientists set up a new experiment. First, they marked 45 young bumblebees, both male and female, between one and 23 days old. Then they set up a clear pathway from the bumblebees’ nest to a feeding area. On either side of the open pathway, small colored wooden balls were placed. On one side of the path, the balls couldn’t move. On the other side, the balls could roll around.

For three hours a day over 14 days, the scientists opened the pathway. The bumblebees never had to leave the pathway to find food, but they left anyway. They weren’t so interested in the side where the balls couldn’t move, but they made lots of visits to the side with the rolling balls.

Grabbing the balls with their legs, the bumblebees would beat their wings to pull on the balls, causing them to roll. The 45 marked bumblebees did this 910 times during the experiment. Though some only did it once, others did it a lot. The scientists found the younger bumblebees spent more time rolling balls, and that males seemed more likely to play than females.

The scientists say it’s not clear why the bumblebees roll the balls or whether they enjoy it. But the experiment raises important questions about how the insects’ minds work and whether they have feelings.

5 . Adding to the achievements of a remarkable year, Taylor Swift has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2023.

Already a superstar before 2023, Swift’s career has reached new heights thanks to the beginning of her Eras Tour that brought her 3.5-hour performance to 66 shows in 23 cities across North America, Argentina and Brazil. Promoted by her tour, Swift has been named the most-streamed female artist in the history of Spotify and Apple Music. According to Billboard, the tour made about $900 million (about 6.4 billion yuan) in 2023. In addition, the tour’s movie Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became the biggest concert movie of all time, taking more than $250

As she was declare a billionaire by Bloomberg in November, a hidden “Taylor Swift economy” also promoted sales for business owners across the US. From soaps to a cruise inspired by her different “eras”, interest in Swift-related products went way up.

Apart from her financial contributions, Swift made a significant cultural impact by taking back control of her music. In 2019, her old record label, Big Machine, sold the master tapes of her first six albums (专辑) to Scoot er Braun. The sale meant that she didn’t have the rights to the albums. In response to this, Swift began re-recording her first six albums, tagging (加标签于) them “Taylor’s Version”. This move stressed her belief that artists deserve to own their work. “It’s all in how you deal with loss,” she told Time. “I respond to extreme pain by resisting.”

Heading into 2024, Swift will start the Eras Tour again in Japan and Australia. As USA Today noted, “Her current top has been a long time coming, but it may also be just beginning.”

7 . In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well occurring. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality (道德) and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified trend. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk-tuks, are rapidly replacing gas-powered ones on the streets. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.

Yet a glance under the hood (引擎盖) of these vehicles shows a poisonous secret: each tuk-tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries (铅酸电池), containing almost 300 pounds of lead (铅) in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leaks into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated factories, is a highly profitable (高利润的) but deadly business.

Lead is dangerous, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an unexpected scale. The numerous ways lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world and the enormous damage it does to human health, wealth, and welfare cause one of the biggest environmental problems in the world yet receives little attention.

The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5.5 million people per year, making it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of the shocking deaths, the social burden of lead poisoning is heavy, as is its contribution to global inequality — our research on the cognitive (认知的) effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.

But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that can be resolved through financial investment (财政投入). Better monitoring, research, and rules can help protect children all over the world from the unpleasant effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it brings.

10 . Time and how we experience it have always puzzled us. Physicists have created fascinating theories, but their time is measured by a pendulum (钟摆) and is not psychological time, which leaps with little regard to the clock or calendar. As someone who understood the distinction observed, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours it seems like a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove, a minute seems like two hours.”

Psychologists have long noticed that larger units of time, such as months and years, fly on swifter wings as we age. They also note that the more time is structured with schedules and appointments, the more rapidly it seems to pass. For example, a day at the office flies compared with a day at the beach.

Expectation and familiarity also make time seem to flow more rapidly. Almost all of us have had the experience of driving somewhere we’ve never been before. Surrounded by unfamiliar scenery, with no real idea of when we’ll arrive, we experience the trip as if lasting a long time. But the return trip, although exactly as long, seems to take far less time. The novelty of the outward journey has become routine.

When days become as similar as beads (小珠子) on a string, they mix together, and even months become a single day. To counter this, try to find ways to interrupt the structure of your day — to stop time, so to speak.

Learning something new is one of the ways to slow the passage of time. One of the reasons the days of our youth seems so full and long is that these are the days of learning and discovery. For many of us learning ends when we leave school, but this doesn’t have to be.