China is starting to blacklist poorly-behaved tourists as it seeks to rescue the image of its citizens as holidaymakers.

    According to a regulation by the China National Tourism Administration (NTA) that entered effect this week, tourists will be blacklisted for offences including acting antisocially on public transport, damaging private or public property, disrespecting local customs, damaging historical exhibits on purpose or engaging in gambling or pornographic activities. Records will be kept in a two-tired system: provincial-level tourism authorities are responsible for cases under their jurisdiction（管辖区域）while the NTA will be in charge of a nationwide register. People will be .blacklisted for two years after they offend, according to the regulation.            

    The NTA said tourism authorities will inform blacklisted tourists and “propose correction measures in order to mitigate the negative impact”. It also said that tourism authorities reserve the right to report such violations to public security, customs and transport authorities as well as the central bank's individual credit department.

    The regulation comes amid (在……之中) growing concern about the ill manners of Chinese tourists both at home and abroad. In 2013, a Chinese tourist wrote his name on a relief carving in Luxor, Egypt. In December, a Chinese passenger threw a cup of hot instant noodles at a flight attendant on an international flight. Chinese tourists have been fined or put into prison for carrying prohibited items or purchasing wild animal products.

How Super Are Supermarkets?

    Buying e week's groceries is tiring. You want to get it over and done with quickly, so you head for the nearest supermarket, you find everything you need under one roof, and you feel glad that those days of going in and out of different shops in the high street are over. Supermarkets seem to be a big plus. There is a downside, though.

    In the UK 90% of all the food people consume is bought at 5 different supermarket chains. This makes these companies extremely powerful, which lets them use their huge buying power to squeeze small suppliers to get the best deal. Milk is a good example. Supermarkets like to use things like milk, which is the top of almost everyone's shopping list to attract customers. To offer the lowest price possible to the consumer, the supermarkets force dairy farmers to sell milk at less than the cost of production. Supermarkets guarantee their good profits while farmers are left struggling to make ends meet, and the taxpayer pays to support the system without even knowing it.

    It would be nice if local grocers supported local agriculture. But for the big supermarkets this just doesn't make sense. Supermarkets don't want little farmers thinking they can decide prices. So supermarkets have started a global search for the cheapest possible agricultural produce. In many supermarkets it is difficult to find anything which is produced locally.

    UK farmers used to grow a lot of apples. Not anymore. In 1999 36% of apples were imported. By 2015 the figure had risen to 80% and the domestic production of apples had fallen by two thirds. The consumer might just be happy to get a reasonably priced meal made up of foods from Thailand, Spain, Italy and Zambia, but we should also bear in mind the Influence on local producers.

    Then there's packaging. Supermarkets like everything to be packed and wrapped so it can be piled neatly on shelves. Supermarkets produce nearly 10 million tons of waste packaging in the UK every year, of which less 5%is recycled. Some supermarkets make sure that large recycling bins are obvious in their car parks, showing that they are environment-friendly. But that is just an image.

    When a new supermarket is planned there are claims about the number of new jobs that will be created. Unfortunately, the number of jobs lost in the area is larger than the number of new positions in the supermarket. On average each new supermarket leads to the loss of 276 jobs.

    However, the modern world is all about shopping, and the freedom to buy whatever you what, so it would be impossible to stop people shopping at some particular kind of shop. But some measures do need to be taken when small suppliers lose profits, local producers suffer, sea levels rise and jobs are lost, anyway, we can't just care about a free car park and special offers.

    In the United States, when one becomes rich, he wants people to know it. And even if he does not become very rich, he wants people to think that he is. That is what “keeping up with the Joneses” is about. It is the story of someone who tried to look as rich as his neighbors.

    The expression was first used in 1913 by a young American called Arthur Momand. He told this story about himself. He began earning $ 125 a week at the age of 23. That was a lot of money in those days. He got married and moved with his wife to a very wealthy neighborhood outside New York City. When he saw that rich people rode horses, Momand went horseback riding every day. When he saw that rich people had servants, Momand and his wife also hired a servant and gave big parties for their new neighbors.

    It was like a race, but one could never finish his race because one was always trying to keep up. The race ended for Momand and his wife when they could no longer pay for their new way of life. They moved back to an apartment in New York City.

    Momand looked around him and noticed that many people do things just to keep up with rich lifestyle of their neighbors. He saw the funny side of it and started to write a series of short stories. He called it “Keeping up with the Joneses” because “Jones” is a very common name in the United States. “Keeping up with the Joneses” came to mean keeping up with rich lifestyle of the people around you. Momand's series appeared in different newspapers across the country for over 28 years.

    People never seem to get tired of keeping up with the Joneses. And there are “Joneses” in every city of the world. But one must get tired of trying to keep up with the Joneses because no matter what one does, Mr. Jones always seems to be ahead.

    After finishing my teaching for a school year, I thought that I should go back to Montreal, Quebec, my hometown for a visit. My main goal was to relax in preparation for the challenges of my retirement in the coming year.

    Through my stay in Montreal, I met lots of Chinese who are struggling to succeed and then lead a better life in Canada.

    Some travelled thousands of miles to get knowledge. When I spoke with some of them about the major barrier they had to face after they arrived in Canada, they all talked about the two official languages of Canada. But I was impressed by their ability to express their ideas while switching between English and French.

    Almost all of those people said they often felt homesick. They miss their families and friends. Though Montreal has lots of Chinese restaurants, they long for a home-cooked meal.

    I met some tourists who were trying to realize their childhood dreams of experiencing the life in a developed country. When I asked them if Montreal had lived up to their expectations, they hesitated. They said that reality never agrees with fantasies. However, they were glad to have the opportunity to visit Montreal and didn't regret taking the trip.

    Not all the Chinese people I met were happy. I once met a young lady who met with a gentleman through the Internet. However, to her disappointment, he disappeared after he promised to marry her in Montreal.

    I was served by another Chinese person who could not handle the challenges of studying in an English environment and ended up working in a restaurant with minimum pay.

    Exploring different parts of the world, without any doubt, is an amazing experience. However, one should be realistic when it comes to leaving his hometown to set up a new life in a foreign country. One should take the time to examine the advantages and the shortcomings of the venture before they decide to chase an uncertain dream of achieving success or leading a better life.

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.