The Allendale Cultural Center has expanded its arts program to include classes for young adults. Director Leah Martin announced Monday that beginning in September, three new classes will be offered to the Allendale community. The course titles will be Yoga(瑜伽) for Teenagers; Hip Hop Dance: Learning the Latest Moves; and Creative Journaling for Teens: Discovering the Writer Within. The latter course will not be held at the Allendale Cultural Center but instead will meet at the Allendale Public Library.

    Staff member Tricia Cousins will teach the yoga and hip hop classes. Ms. Cousins is a skilled choreographer(舞蹈指导) as well as an experienced dance educator. She is a Master of Arts in dance education from Teachers College, Columbia University. The journaling class will be taught by Betsy Milford. Ms. Milford is the head librarian at the Allendale Public Library as well as a columnist(专栏作家) for the professional journal Library Focus.

    The courses are part of the Allendale Cultural Center's Project Teen, which was organized by Leah Martin, Director of the Cultural Center. According to Martin, this project is a direct result of her efforts to make the center a more necessary part of the Allendale community. Over the last several years, the number of people who have visited the cultural center for classes or events has steadily declined. Project Teen is primarily funded by the McGee Arts Foundation, an organization devoted to bringing arts programs to young adults. The other members of Project Teen are two students at Allendale's Brookdale High School and three adults with backgrounds in education and the arts.

    The creative journaling class will be cosponsored by Brookdale High School, and students who complete the class will be given the opportunity to publish one of their journal works in Pulse, Brookdale's student literary magazine. Students who complete the hip hop class will be qualified to participate in the Allendale Review, an annual concert sponsored by the cultural center that features local actors, musicians, and dancers.

    All classes are scheduled to begin immediately after school, and transportation will be available from Brookdale High School to the Allendale Cultural Center and the Allendale Public Library. For more information about Project Teen, contact the cultural center's programming office at 988­0099 or drop by the office after June 1 to pick up a fall course catalog. The office is located on the third floor of the Allendale Town Hall.

    Winter sports tend to be more dangerous than summer sports — they take place mostly outside at the mercy of ice or snow, involving (牵涉) metal edges, extreme speeds and crashes. Skeleton (俯视冰梭), however, stands apart as one of the most difficult and least accessible of all the winter sports. Adam Edelman, Israel's first Olympic skeleton athlete, would like to change that.

    Edelman was the 10th athlete named to the 2018 Israeli Olympic Team. Qualifying for the Olympics in any sport is impressive. But it's more impressive if you qualify for the Olympics after only four years in the sport — and without a coach.

    Edelman was first introduced to skeleton watching the game on television in late 2013. Sports have always been a part of his life. He grew up playing football and was a goalkeeper on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology football team. Ready for a new challenge, he set his sights on the Olympics.

Without a coach, Edelman learned to drive by watching endless hours of YouTube videos and taking more runs than anybody else on the track. “When everybody else would take three runs per day, I would take six to eight.” he recalled.

    Succeeding in skeleton takes a large amount of athletic ability and technical skill, but there's one more element (因素) required, one that can't be taught. “These tracks but built in the middle of nowhere, and it's gray and cold. You haven't seen your family in seven months and you really just want to give up. To continue, it takes tenacity.” Edelman said.

    Edelman is already looking beyond Pyeongchang. The 2022 Olympics could be in his future, but whether he continues to compete or not, he promises to stay in Israeli sports as long as possible-as instructor or as a coach.

    Here is a record of the discussion about AI (artificial intelligence) conducted by several scientists:

    Scientist A: I would say that we are quite a long way off developing the AI, though I do think it will happen within the next thirty or forty years. We will probably remain in control of technology and it will help us solve many of the world's problems. However, no one really knows what will happen if machines become more intelligent than humans. They may help us, ignore us or destroy us. I tend to believe AI will have a positive influence on our future lives, but whether that is true will be partly up to us.

    Scientist B: I have to admit that the potential consequences of creating something that can match or go beyond human intelligence frighten me. Even now, scientists are teaching computers how to learn on their own. At some point in the near future, their intelligence may well take off and develop at an ever-increasing speed. Human beings evolve biologically very slowly and we would be quickly substituted. In the short term, there is the danger that robots will take over millions of human jobs, creating a large underclass of unemployed people. This could mean large-scale poverty and social unrest. In the long term machines might decide the world would be better without humans.

    Scientist C: I'm a member of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Forget the movie image of a terrifying Terminator stamping on human skulls and think of what's happening right now: military machines like drones, gun turrets and sentry robots are already being used to kill with very little human input. The next step will be autonomous “murderbots” following orders but finally deciding who to kill on their own. It seems clear to me that this would be extremely dangerous for humans. We need to be very cautious indeed about what we ask machines to do.

    Growing up in the mountainous Sierra de Penamayor, in Asturias, northen Spain, Aladino Montes had been shooting deer ever since he was a child, but his life as a hunter came to an abrupt end 10 years ago, when he met Bambi, an adorable deer that has remained by his side ever since. Aladino has never shot an animal since.

    53-year-old Aladino recalls driving through the mountains in his little jeep, ten years ago, when he saw a couple of cows being followed by a skinny little deer. Deer don't usually hang out with cows, so he approached the animals for a closer look. That's when he noticed that the deer had several wounds and would have probably died without proper medical care. He put the injured animal in his car and drove back to his house when he nursed it back to health. But instead of running back towards the forests, the deer stayed by Aladino's side. They've been best friends ever since.

    He always loved animals, but his father had taught him to hunt deer as a child. He did it for food, not sports, but ever since he adopted Bambi, he hasn't shot a single animal.

    Aladino's cabin sits at 1,140 meters above sea level, offering tourists a beautiful view of the surrounding mountainside. On clear days, one can see all of central Asturias all the way to Gijon, but most people don't travel to Les Praeres for the view, they come to see Bambi, the friendly deer.

    Sometimes, Bambi will elk straight into the bar in search of Aladino and leave everyone with their mouth open, or even let people pet her. But she's always most comfortable at the side of her rescuer. She's so relaxed around him that she makes other deer feel safe as well.

    We walked in so quietly that the nurse at the desk didn't even lift her eyes from the book. Mum pointed at a big chair by the door and I knew she wanted me to sit down. While I watched, mouth open in surprise, Mum took off her hat and coat and gave them to me to hold. She walked quietly to the small room by the lift and took out a wet mop (拖把). She pushed the mop past the desk and as the nurse looked up, Mum nodded and said, "Very dirty floors."

    "Yes, I'm glad they've finally decided to clean them," the nurse answered. She looked at Mum strangely and said, "But aren't you working late?"

    Mum just pushed harder, each swipe of the mop taking her farther and farther down the hall. I watched until she was out of sight and the nurse had turned back to writing in the big book.

    After a long time Mum came back. Her eyes were shining. She quickly put the mop back and took my hand. As we turned to go out of the door, Mum nodded politely to the nurse and said, "Thank you."

    Outside, Mum told me, "Dagma is fine. No fever. "

    "You see her, Mum?"

    "Of course. I told her about the hospital rules, and she will not expect us until tomorrow. Dad will stop worrying as well. It's a fine hospital. But the floors! A mop is no good. You need a brush. "

    Laughter is part of the universal human vocabulary. All members of the human species understand it. Unlike English or French or Swahili, we don't have to learn to speak it. We re born with the capacity to laugh.

    Very little is known about the specific brain mechanisms responsible for laughter. Contrary to folk wisdom, most laughter is not about humor; it is about relationships. To find out when and why people laugh, I went with several assistants to local malls and recorded what happened just before people laughed. Over a 10-year period, we studied over 2, 000 cases of naturally occurring laughter.

    We found that most laughter does not necessarily follow jokes. People may laugh after a variety of statements, such as, "Here comes Mary," "How did you do on the test?" or "Do you have a rubber band?" These certainly aren't jokes.

    We believe laughter evolved from the panting (喘气的) behavior of our ancient ancestors. Today, if we tickle (使发痒) chimps, they don't laugh. But, instead, they produce a panting sound. That's the sound of ape laughter, and it's the root of human laughter.

    Apes laugh in the kinds of situations that lead to human laughter, like games that involve chasing. Other animals produce sounds during play, but they are so different from laughter. Rats, for example, produce high sounds during play and when tickled, but these are very different in sound from human laughter.

    Laughter is often positive, but it can be negative too. There's a difference between "laughing with" and "laughing at". People who laugh at others may be trying to drive them out of the group.

    No one has actually counted how much people of different ages laugh, but young children probably laugh the most. At ages 5 and 6 we probably laugh more than at any other times. Adults laugh less than children, probably because they play less.

    Work now underway will tell us more about the brain mechanisms behind laughter, how it has evolved, and why we're so susceptible to tickling.