For a 400-year-old art form, opera had a bad fame: overweight actresses singing the words which were hard to understand in one of those romance languages you were supposed to learn in high school. And with tickets costing as much as＄145 a performance, opera goers also had a certain appearance in people's mind: rich, well-dressed and old.

    But now opera companies around the country are loosening their ties and kicking off their shoes in an attempt to keep opera alive and take it to a younger and not so wealthy audience.

    Opera producers have found that to attract this crowd, they need to associate opera with common people. Because young people don't or won't come to the opera, companies are bringing the opera to them, giving performances in such unusual places as parks, libraries and public schools.

    The Houston Grand Opera's choice is the public library, where it performs “mobile operas”, shortened version(剧本) of child-friendly operas. This summer's production is Hansel &Gretel. By performing smaller versions of large productions, producers are able to make people interested while keeping costs at a reasonable level. The San Francisco Opera, which will be celebrating its 75^th anniversary this year, is staging Cinderella free of charge, keeping costs down by employing students from its Young Artists' Training Program.

    Stephen Hawking has said he believes brains could exist independently of the body after people die, but that the idea of a conventional afterlife（传统意义上的死后重生）is a fairy tale. Speaking at the premiere（首映）of a documentary film about his life, Stephen Hawking said: “I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death.”

    “However, this is way beyond our present scientific and technological level. I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.” The author of “A Brief History of Time”, who earlier approved of the right for the deadly ill to end their lives as long as safeguards were in place, suffered from motor neurone(运动神经元) disease at the age of 21 and was given two to three years to live.

    “All my life I have lived with the menace of an early death, so I hate wasting time,” Hawking said on Thursday night, using the computer-created voice he controls with a facial muscle and a blink(贬眼) from one eye. The documentary explores a brilliant schoolboy with unclear handwriting who enjoyed the life of Oxford University before illness led to a lifelong desire of discovery about the origins of the universe, which began as a graduate at Cambridge University and has shocked the world.

    Hawking's sister Mary says in the film that her brother was highly competitive and curious about everything in a household which friends described as very academic, and explains how she received a toy house as a present when they were children, to which Stephen immediately added electricity.

    She said that life with her brother was attractive and exciting. “It's a waste of time arguing with Stephen because he always manages to turn the argument round,” she said. The film goes back to his childhood and his student days and shows the scientist, who uses a wheelchair, at home with break. It also explores his family life with his first wife, Jane, and their three children, the breakdown of their marriage and his marriage to one of his carers.

    Jane appears on camera to explain how the pressures of caring for the children and the increasingly disabled Hawking became even worse once full-time nurses were brought into the home, destroying any privacy（隐私）. His second wife and former nurse, Elaine Mason, does not appear in the film, and Hawking introduces their 1995-2007 marriage with a few pictures and a brief description.

    Many people don't consider their breakfast without a glass of milk. Right now, cows, buffalos, goats and sheep provide most of the world's milk. But soon, people could get milk from roaches(蟑螂).

    That isn't as crazy as it might sound. New research shows this “milk” is super-nutritious. What's more, some scientists have already begun referring to a lot of insects as source of milk.

    In 2004, Subramanian Ramaswamy started studying milk crystals found inside the roach. At the time, he was teaching biochemistry at the University of Iowa City.

    To learn more about the milk crystal from roaches, the scientists used X-rays to look at the atoms in it. The data basically revealed the chemical recipe of the roach crystal. They showed that roach milk is a “complete food”. It contains sugar with a fatty acid stuck to it. Fatty acids are the building blocks of fats. The protein in the milk is also full of essential amino(氨基的) acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Since our bodies can't produce the “essential” ones, we need to get them from our food. And so do baby roaches.

    Barbara Stay, a biologist at Iowa University, also worked on the new study. She says the new data show that the roach milk is “three times more nutritious than cow's milk and four times more nutritious than buffalo's milk”.

    Ramaswamy would like to see roach milk turned into a protein supplement to feed hungry people. But not everyone is confident that it can be done.

    Marcel Dicke studies insects as a potential source of human food at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Dicke says this is a “sound study”. However, in his opinion, “Extracting(提取) milk from roaches can only likely be done in a destructive way with only small quantities”. That means you'd have to raise and kill many bugs to get even tiny quantities of the milk.

    Summer vacation is coming soon. To enjoy a relaxing holiday, here we'd like to share with you some of the best rock and jazz festivals. Although many Ukrainian(乌克兰的) music festivals were cancelled because of the bad financial condition, plenty remain for music lovers.

    KrayinaMriy

    When and where: June 20－21, Kyiv, Pyrohovo folk museum

    Lineup (阵容): TNMK, Boombox, VopliVidoplyasova, Onuka

    KrayinaMriy is an annual(每年的) rock music festival that promotes modern music. Besides music, the festival will offer dances as well as literary and theatrical performances and also playing of a traditional music instrument.

    Alfa Fest

    When and where: June 26－28, Lviv

    So far all tickets have been booked, but a waiting list is available at www.alfajazzfest.com/buyticket. This yearly festival held in Lviv will be interesting for both experienced jazz lovers and jazz learners. The performers on the lineup come from Ukraine, Japan, Cuba and the U.S.

    Koktebel

    When and where: Aug.22－Sept.6,Zatoka village, Odesa Oblast

    Koktebel Jazz is the biggest outdoor jazz festival. The Cinematic Orchestra, ParovStelar, Nino Katamadze, Bonobo, Submotion Orchestra, Billy's Band were the GALA'S superstars in previous years. This year the list of festival's participants and tickets prices still remain unknown but the organizers revealed(透露) that apart from good jazz, the guests will be offered music lectures and movie screenings.

    Respublica

    When and where: Sept.4－7,KamyanetsPodilsky, Khmelnytska Oblast

    Folk music and street art festival Respublica will take place in Kamyanets, Podilsky, one of the most beautiful cities in the west. Kyiv Post staff writer NataliyaTrach can be reached at trach@kyivpost.com.Booking in advance can get a good discount.

    Spending money on time-saving services reduces stress and boosts(增进）happiness, according to a new research, but shockingly, few of us do it.

    Whillans, a professor at HBS said, "Buying time helps to protect us from the stress in our lives caused by time pressure, and the feeling that we don't have enough minutes in the day to complete our tasks."

    The effect was clearest in the Canadian experiment, in which 60 working adults were given $40 to spend in two different ways. One weekend, they were told to spend the money on a material purchase—a gift for themselves. The next weekend, they were instructed to spend the $40 on anything that saved them time, from paying the neighbor ' s kid to run errands (跑腿）to taking an Uber instead of a bus.

    〇n the day they made the time-saving purchase, they felt happier, in a better mood, and lower feelings of time stress than on the day they bought a material purchase," said Whillans.

    The biggest surprise to the researchers was how few people would spend money on time-saving services. When they asked 98 working adults how they would spend a "windfall" of $40, only two percent named a purchase that would save them time.

    "One reason," said Whillans, is that we're very bad at remembering how much we hate doing certain tasks once the suffering has passed. That makes us less likely to take active steps to avoid that overburdened feeling in the future. "But another possible cause is good old-fashioned guilt." If you feel guilty about getting someone to clean your house for you, then you might get less happiness from outsourcing (夕卜包）that task," said Whillans, "or you might just be less likely to spend your money in that way."

    Throughout history scientists have risked their health and their lives in their search for the truth.

    Sir Isaac Newton, the seventeenth century scientist, was very smart, but that didn't stop him from doing some pretty stupid things. In his laboratory in Cambridge he often did the strangest experiments. Once, while testing how light passes through lenses (晶状体), he put a long needle into his eye, pushed it to the back, and then moved it around just to see what would happen. Luckily, nothing long-lasting did. On another occasion he stared at the sun for as long as he could bear, to discover what effect this would have on his sight. Again he escaped suffering permanent damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes recovered.

    In the 1750s the Swedish chemist Karl Scheele was the first person to find a way to produce phosphorus (磷). He in fact discovered eight more chemical elements including chlorine (氯), though he didn't get any praise for them. He was a very clever scientist, but his one failing was a curious habit of tasting a little of every substance he worked with. This risky practice finally caught up with him, and in 1786 he was found dead in his laboratory surrounded by a large number of dangerous chemicals, any of which might have been responsible for his death.

    Eugene Shoemaker was a respected geologist. He spent a large part of his life studying craters (火山口) on the moon, and how they were formed, and later did research into the comets of the planet Jupiter. In 1997 he and his wife were in the Australian desert where they went every year to search for places where comets might have hit the earth. While driving in the Tanami desert, normally one of the emptiest places in the world, another vehicle crashed into them and Shoemaker was killed on the spot. Some of his ashes (骨灰) were sent to the moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft and left there — he is the only person who has had this honor.