HOLIDAY FUN AT THE POWERHOUSE

    Join in the holiday fun at the powerhouse this month linked to our new exhibition , Evolution & Revolution : Chinese dress 1700s to now . DON'T FORGET out other special event , the Club Med Circus School which is part of the Circus ! 150 years of circus in Australia exhibition experience !

◆ Chinese Folk Dancing : Colorful Chinese dance and musical performances by The Chinese Folk Dancing School of Sydney . Dances include : the Golden stick dance and the Chinese drum dance . A feature will be the Qin dynasty Emperor's court dance . Also included is a show of face painting for Beijing opera performances .

Sunday 29 June and Wednesday 2 July in the Turbine Hall , at 11:30 am & 1:30 pm.

◆ Australian Chinese Children's Arts Theatre : Well-known children's play experts from Shanghai lead this dynamic youth group . Performances include Chinese fairy tales and plays .

Thursday 3 to Sunday 6 July in the Turbine Hall , at 11:30 am & 1:30 pm .

◆ Chinese Youth League : A traditional performing arts group featuring performance highlights such as the Red scarf and Spring flower dances , and a musician playing Er Hu .

Sunday 6 to Tuesday 8 July in the Turbine Hall , 11:30 am to 1:30 pm .

◆ Kids Activity : Make a Paper Horse : Young children make a paper horse cut-out . ( The horse is a frequent theme in Chinese painting , indicating a kind of advancement . ) Suitable for ages 8-12 years .

Sunday 28 June to Tuesday 8 July in the Turbine Hall , 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm .

◆ Club Med Circus School : Learn circus skills , including the trapeze , trampolining and magic . Note only for children over 5 : There are 40 places available in each 1 hour session and these must be booked at the front desk , level 4 , on the day .

Tuesday 1 to Saturday 5 July at 11:30 am & 1:00 pm .

Enjoy unlimited free visits and many other benefits by becoming a family member of the Powerhouse . Our family memberships cover two adults and all children under the age of 16 years at the one address .

    Members receive Powerline , our monthly magazine , discounts in the shops and the restaurants , as well as free admission to the Museum . All this for as little as $50.00 a year ! Call (02)9217 0600 for more details .

Decision-making under Stress

    A new review based on a research shows that acute stress affects the way the brain considers the advantages and disadvantages, causing it to focus on pleasure and ignore the possible negative (负面的) consequences of a decision.

     The research suggests that stress may change the way people make choices in predictable ways.

    “Stress affects how people learn,” says Professor Mara Mather. “People learn better about positive than negative outcomes under stress.”

    For example, two recent studies looked at how people learned to connect images(影像) with either rewards or punishments. In one experiment, some of the participants were first stressed by having to give a speech and do difficult math problems in front of an audience; in the other, some were stressed by having to keep their hands in ice water. In both cases, the stressed participants remembered the rewarded material more accurately and the punished material less accurately than those who hadn't gone through the stress.

    This phenomenon is likely not surprising to anyone who has tried to resist eating cookies or smoking a cigarette while under stress –at those moments, only the pleasure associated with such activities comes to mind. But the findings further suggest that stress may bring about a double effect. Not only are rewarding experiences remembered better, but negative consequences are also easily recalled.

    The research also found that stress appears to affect decision-making differently in men and women. While both men and women tend to focus on rewards and less on consequences under stress, their responses to risk turn out to be different.

    Men who had been stressed by the cold-water task tended to take more risks in the experiment while women responded in the opposite way. In stressful situations in which risk-taking can pay off big, men may tend to do better, when caution weighs more, however, women will win.

    This tendency to slow down and become more cautious when decisions are risky might also help explain why women are less likely to become addicted than men: they may more often avoid making the risky choices that eventually harden into addiction.

    Spend any time in London, England's capital, and you'll quickly gather that it's a multicultural (多元文化的) community. Look around at your fellow passengers on the Tube（地铁）or the bus. They're of every skin color and dress differently to one another. Listen, and you'll hear many other languages besides English spoken. Some of these people, no doubt, will be tourists who are in London to see the sights. But others – in fact probably most – will be living their lives there, along with millions of others.

    Along with white British people, there are Britons from, or with parents and grandparents from, the Caribbean, India, China and most other places. This makes London a fascinating place in which to live. The reason is that when people settle in a place, they don't just buy a house and live there, but bring aspects of the culture of their “old country” with them.

    The most visible sign of this is the number of restaurants offering dishes from different parts of the world. In a city in which it's estimated 250 different languages are spoken, you can expect a similarly wide range of foods to be available. You would expect in one of the world's leading cities to encounter(遇到) French, Italian, Chinese and Indian eateries. But in London you'll also find Polish, Patagonian and Palestinian restaurants.

    However, London's multiculturalism isn't just about food. Many types of people are gathered in one space, but the way they live differently shows in that space. They worship(崇拜)differently, for one thing. Alongside the famous old English churches by Nicholas Hawksmoor and Christopher Wren – responsible for one of the capital's most famous landmark, St Paul's Cathedral—you'll find mosques(清真寺), temples and synagogues (犹太教堂).

      London even speaks its own special kind of English. Language experts created the term “Multicultural London English” to identify the dialect of English that appeared at the end of the last century.

    All of this makes London a very surprising and varied place to call your home. But, in a way, this has long been true. In the 18^th century, the compiler(编纂者) of the first English dictionary, Samuel Johnson, once said: “ He who is tired of London is tired of life.”

    All over the world people enjoy sports. Sports help to keep people healthy, happy and help them to live longer.

    Sports change with the season. People play different games in winter and summer.

    Games and sports often grow out of people's work and everyday activities. The Arabs use horses or camels in much of their everyday life; they use them in their sports, too.

    Some sports are so interesting that people everywhere go in for them. Football, for example, has spread around the world. Swimming is popular in all countries near the sea or in those with many rivers.

    Some sports or games go back to thousands of years, like running or jumping. Chinese boxing, for example, has a very long history. But basketball and volleyball are rather new. Neither one is a hundred years old yet. People are inventing new sports or games all the time.

    People from different countries may not be able to understand each other, but after a game they often become good friends. Sports help to train a person's character(性格). One learns to fight hard but fight fair, to win without pride and to lose with grace(体面).

    When she first started learning about the climate change from one of her elders, Fawn Sharp was invited on a helicopter flight over the Olympic Mountains to survey the Mount Anderson glacier(冰川). But the glacier was gone, melted by the warming climate. Sharp had a deep sense of loss when she discovered the glacier wasn't there anymore.

    Loss is a growing issue for people working and living on the front lines of climate change. And that gave Jennifer Wren Atkinson, a full-time lecturer at the University of Washington Bothell, US, an idea for a class.

    This term, she taught students on the Bothell campus about the emotional burdens of environmental study. She used the experiences of Nalive American tribes (部落) , scientists and activists, and asked her 24 students to face the reality that there is no easy fix -- that "this is such an intractable problem that they're going to be dealing with it for the rest of their lives.”

    Student Cody Dillon used to be a climate science skeptic (怀疑论者) . Then he did his own reading and research, and changed his mind.

    Dillon wasn't going into environmental work--he was a computer-science major. Yet, the potential for a worldwide environmental catastrophe seemed so real to him five years ago that he quit his job and became a full-time volunteer for an environmental group that worked on restoration (恢复) projects.

Six months into the work, he decided that Alkinson's class was just what he was looking for 一 a place where he could discuss his concerns about a changing climate.

Atkinson said she hopes the class helped her students prepare themselves for the amount of environmental loss that will happen over their lifetimes.

    “We are already changing the planet - . so many species are going to be lost, displaced or massively impacted (巨大影响的) ,”she said. “The future isn't going to be what they imagined.”

Below is a list of women who changed the world when they were young girls and teens.

Mary Shelley

English author Mary Shelley was just 18 years old when she wrote Frankenstein, which many credit as the origin of science fiction. Thus, Shelley has been called "the teenage girl who invented science fiction."

Alexandra Scott

Alexandra Scott was diagnosed with a form of cancer shortly before her first birthday. When she was just 4 years old, she set up her first lemonade stand in her front yard to raise money for childhood cancer research. Inspired by her story, people around the world set up their own lemonade stands to raise money for her cause. By the time she died in 2004, she had raised SI million. Her family continues her legacy (遗志) through Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation.

Yuanyuan Tan

Chinese ballet dancer Yuanyuan Tan started representing her country in international competitions as a young teen. At 17, she became the youngest ever principal dancer at the San Francisco Ballet, as well as the first Chinese dancer to earn that title in a major Western company. She gives talks around the world, inspiring young dancers to follow their artistic dreams.

Bindi Irwin

Bindi Irwin carried on her father Steve Irwin's conservation legacy following his death in 2006. When she was 8 years old, she launched "Bindi the Jungle Girl" to encourage more kids to get interested in animals and wildlife conservation. She has continued to make TV appearances, published books and furthered her father's causes.