Men are spending more and more time in the kitchen encouraged by celebrity (名人) chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, according to a report from Oxford University.

    The effect of the celebrity role models, who have given cooking a more mainly picture, has combined with a more general drive towards sexual equality and men now spend more than twice the amount of time preparing meals than they did in 1961.

    According to the research by Prof. Jonatahn Gershuny, who runs the Centre for Time Research at Oxford, men now spend more than half an hour a day cooking, up from just 12 minutes a day in 1961.

Prof. Gershuny said, “The man in the kitchen is part of a much wider social trend. There has been 40 years of sexual equality, but there is another 40 years probably to come.”

    Women, who a generation ago spent nearly two hours a day cooking, now spend just one hour and seven minutes—a great fall, but they still spend far more time in the kitchen than men.

    Some experts have named these men in aprons as “Gastrosexuals (men using cooking skills to impress friends)”, who have been inspired to pick up a kitchen knife by the success of Ramsay, Oliver as well as other male celebrity chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White and Keith Floyd.

    “I was married in 1974. When my father came to visit me a few weeks later, I was wearing an apron when I opened the door. He laughed,” said Prof. Gershuny. “That would never happen now.”

    Two-thirds of adults say that they come together to share at least three times a week, even if it is not necessarily around a kitchen or dining room table. Prof. Gershuny pointed out that the family meal was now rarely eaten by all of its members around a table—with many “family meals” in fact taken on the sofa in the sitting room, and shared by family members. “The family meal has changed a lot, and few of us eat—as I did when I was a child—at least two meals a day together as a family. But it has survived in a different format.” 

    It was dangerously cold. A few drivers slipping and sliding off the road and back on again had cut deep ruts（车辙）in the mud. And the ruts became frozen solid. The drum of our truck's aging engine worried us.

    Trees and bushes heavy with snow bent to form an icy tunnel. We inched along the scary route as Howard grasped the steering wheel（方向盘）tightly, trying to keep the truck in the ruts. We were now riding through a nightmare with no going back. I kept praying the truck would not quit.

    However, the engine's coughing grew worse. We came to a bumping stop. Hot tears ran down my face. We noticed a small house off in the distance. “I will go for help.” Howard's words ruined my common sense and panic took over. We would take the children — we would walk to that house together!

    But the snow was deep, and our two children, asleep in the cab, were too heavy to carry. My husband convinced me to let him go alone. If no one was home or they didn't answer the door, he would come back and we'd try to hike out to a main road. For now, it was safer in the truck. I wish I could say I have faith, but when he walked away, I was mad at the world.

    It seemed as if hours had passed before I heard a familiar voice and a kind laugh of another man as they approached in the snow. The older fellow invited us to go up to the house where his wife was waiting. Two wide-awake kids moved across the seat, ready for adventure. Their voices and laughter carried in the cold night air. When we finally got close, a cheerful woman opened the door. Warm air and the smell of hot buttered popcorn and chocolate drew us in.

     Relieved, my prayers were heard!

    The Great War Exhibition

    When: Sun 10 Jan, 9:00 am- 6:00 pm

    Mon 11 Jan, 9:00 am- 6:00 pm

    Where: Dominion Museum Building, 15 Buckle Street, Wellington

    Restrictions: All Ages

    Ticket Information: Admission Free

    The journey is rich in personal stories which tell of the great experience of the battlefields and the hardships at home during war-time New Zealand. The visitors will experience the desperate horrors and the victories of the human spirit that were part of the Great War.

    Kaipara Coast Plants & Sculpture Gardens

    When: Sun 10 Jan, 9:00 am- 5:00 pm

    Mon 11 Jan, 9:00 am- 5:00 pm

    Where: 1481 Kaipara Coast Highway (SH16), Auckland

    Restrictions: All Ages

    Ticket Information:

    Adults: $10.00

    Children 5-13 (under 5, free):$ 5.00

    Groups 10: $ 8.00

    Over 60 & Students (with ID): $ 9.00

    Come and enjoy a relaxing art and garden experience. Sculptures are for sale and the display changes completely every 12 months with the new exhibition opening in December each year to give you a fresh experience each time you come.

    Dream Works Animation

    When: Sun 10 Jan, 10:00 am- 6:00 pm

    Mon 11 Jan, 10:00 am- 6:00 pm

    Where: Te Papa, 55 Cable St, Wellington

    Restrictions: All Ages

    Ticket Information:

    Adults: $ 15.00

    Children & Students 3-15 (with Student ID): $ 6.00

    Children under 3: $0.00

    The exhibition features over 400 items, including rare concept drawing, models, interviews, and original artworks. Adults and kids can get creative with real animation tools, and soar above the clouds in the Dragon Flight experience from How to Train Your Dragon.

    Balls, Bullets and Boots

    When: Sun 10 Jan, 9:00 am- 4:30 pm

    Mon 11Jan, 9:00 am- 4:30 pm

    Where: National Army Museum, 1 Hassett Dr, SH1, Waiouru

    Restrictions: All Ages

    Ticket Information: Door Sales Only

    The exhibition explores the impact the cruel reality of war had on colonial sportsmen and their loved ones as they were transplanted from the rugby fields of home to fight.

    A pretty face is never forgotten. Do you believe so? But maybe it is untrue! Psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face has particularly distinctive features, such as Angelina Jolie's.

    German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted (扭曲) by emotions. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered in a study that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people.

    For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia, the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not.

    The researchers were surprised by the result. “Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being considered as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces,” Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily proven. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which enhance the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers' idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings (脑电图记录) they used during their experiment which show the brains' electric activity.

    The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.” Dr. Wiese said.

    Americans wear black for mourning (哀悼) while Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters. Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities (对立)with the West, as though each stands at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University of California, Berkeley, a psychologist, has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and American cultures—polarities that go to the heart of how we reason and discover truth.

    His findings go far toward explaining why American cultures seem to be aggressive and Chinese cultures so passive, when compared to each other. More importantly, the research opens the way for the peoples of the East and the West to learn from each other in basic ways. The Chinese could learn much from Western methods for determining scientific truth, said Kaiping Peng, a former Beijing Scholar, who is now a UC Berkley assistant professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously from the Chinese tolerance for accepting contradictions in social and personal life, he said.

    "Americans have a terrible need to find out who is right in an argument," said Peng. "The problem is that at the interpersonal level you really don't need to find the truth, or maybe there isn't any." Chinese people, said Peng, are far more content to think that both sides have advantages and disadvantages, because they have a whole awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming of the individual than do Americans, he added.

    In studies of interpersonal (人际的) argument, for example, when subjects were asked to deal with contradictory information resulting from conflict between a mother and a daughter or a student and a school, Peng found that Americans were "non-compromising (折中), blaming one side—usually the mother—for the causes of the problems, demanding changes from one side to attain a solution and offering no compromise" in dealing with the conflict. Compared to this angry, blaming American method, the Chinese were paragons (模范) of compromise, finding fault on both sides and looking for solutions that moved both sides to the middle.

English businessman Richard Branson made history on July 11, 2021 as he and three other crewmates became the world's first space tourists. The flight was made by a spacecraft named VSS Unity that was built by Branson's company, Virgin Galactic. The flight lasted slightly more than an hour, and took Branson and crew to an altitude（海拔）of 53.5miles above the Earth, just a little above the boundary（边界）of space which lies 50 miles above the Earth.

At that height, the atmosphere turns into the black of outer space and the Earth becomes a bent ball of blue. Travelers also exhibit weightlessness as there is no gravity, the force that keeps our bodies walking on the Earth's surface. Therefore, Branson and his fellows were able to float around in VSS Unity while enjoying the views. They were able to do that for three minutes before the spacecraft began its downward journey. It landed back at Virgin Galactic's space port in New Mexico, United States, which is the same place from where it had taken off 90 minutes before.

On landing back, Branson said, "I have dreamt of this moment since I was a kid but honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of the Earth from space. It was just magical. I'm just taking it all in, and it's unreal."

July 11's flight is the start of space tourism for one and all. In early 2022, customers who can afford a ticket for a quarter of a million dollars can line up for a seat on a trip to space. And guess what—they will have a choice of spacecraft. Jeff Bezos, who owns a famous company, is all set to launch himself into space on July 20 on board a spacecraft built by his new branch company Blue Origin. Blue Origin will also carry tourists to space.