HOLIDAY FUN AT THE POWERHOUSE

500 HARRIS STREET ULTIMO·TELEPHONE

( 02 ) 9217 0111

    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 our other special event, the Club Med Circus School which is part of the Circus(马戏团)！150 years  of circus in Australia exhibition experience!

◆Chinese Folk Dancing: Colourful 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: Well­known 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 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 cut­out. (The horse is a frequent theme in Chinese painting, indicating a kind of advancement.) Suitable for ages 8～12 years.

    Saturday 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.

    Will it matter if you don't take your breakfast? A short time ago, a test was given in the United States. People of different ages, from 12 to 83, were asked to have a test. During the test, these people were given all kinds of breakfast, and sometimes they got no breakfast at all. Scientists wanted to see how well their bodies worked when they had eaten different kinds of breakfast.

    The results show that if a person eats a right breakfast, he or she will work better than if he or she has no breakfast. If a student has fruit, eggs, bread and milk before going to school, he or she will learn more quickly and listen more carefully in class. The result is opposite to what some people think. Having no breakfast will not help you lose weight. This is because people become so hungry at noon that they eat too much for lunch. They will gain weight instead of losing it. You will lose more weight if you reduce your other meals.

Life in the Clear

Transparent animals let light pass through their bodies the same way light passes through a window. These animals typically live between the surface of the ocean and a depth of about 3,300 feet—as far as most light can reach. Most of them are extremely delicate and can be damaged by a simple touch. Sonke Johnsen, a scientist in biology, says, "These animals live through their life alone. They never touch anything unless they're eating it, or unless something is eating them."

And they are as clear as glass. How does an animal become see-through? It's trickier than you might think.

    The objects around you are visible because they interact with light. Light typically travels in a straight line. But some materials slow and scatter (散射) light, bouncing it away from its original path. Others absorb light, stopping it dead in its tracks. Both scattering and absorption make an object look different from other objects around it, so you can see it easily.

    But a transparent object doesn't absorb or scatter light, at least not very much. Light can pass through it without bending or stopping. That means a transparent object doesn't look very different from the surrounding air or water. You don't see it you see the things behind it.

    To become transparent, an animal needs to keep its body from absorbing or scattering light. Living materials can stop light because they contain pigments (色素) that absorb specific colors of light. But a transparent animal doesn't have pigments, so its tissues won't absorb light. According to Johnsen, avoiding absorption is actually easy. The real challenge is preventing light from scattering.

Animals are built of many different materials—skin, fat, and more—and light moves through each at a different speed. Every time light moves into a material with a new speed, it bends and scatters. Transparent animals use different tricks to fight scattering. Some animals are simply very small or extremely flat. Without much tissue to scatter light, it is easier to be see-through. Others build a large, clear mass of non-living jelly-like (果冻状的) material and spread themselves over it.

    Larger transparent animals have the biggest challenge, because they have to make all the different tissues in their bodies slow down light exactly as much as water does. They need to look uniform. But how they're doing it is still unknown. One thing is clear: for these larger animals, staying transparent is an active process. When they die, they turn a non-transparent milky white.

    For years, there has been a prejudice against science among clinical psychologists (临床心理学家). In a two-year analysis to be published in November in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists charge that many clinical psychologists fail to “provide the treatments which are given the strongest evidence of effectiveness” and “give more weight to their personal experiences than to science.” As a result, patients have no guarantee that their “treatment will be informed by science.” Walter Mischel of Columbia University is even crueler in his judgment. “The disconnect between what clinical psychologists do and what science has discovered is an extreme embarrassment,” he told me, and “there is a widening gap between clinical practice and science.”

    The “widening” reflects the great progress that psychological research has made in identifying the most effective treatments. Thanks to strict clinical trials, we now know that teaching patients to think about their thoughts in new, healthier ways and to act on those new ways of thinking are effective against depression, panic disorder and other problems, with multiple trials showing that these treatments the tools of psychology bring more lasting benefits than drugs.

    You wouldn't know this if you sought help from a typical clinical psychologist. Although many treatments are effective, relatively few psychologists learn or practice them.

    Why in the world not? For one thing, says Baker from the University of Wisconsin, clinical psychologists are “very doubtful about the role of science” and “lack solid science training”. Also, one third of patients get better no matter what treatment (if any) they have, “and psychologists remember these successes, believing, wrongly, that they are the result of the treatment.”

    When faced with evidence that treatments they offer are not supported by science, clinical psychologists argue that they know better than some study that works. A 2008 study of 591 psychologists in private practice(诊所) found that they rely more on their own and colleagues' experience than on science when deciding how to treat a patient. If they keep on this path despite the fact that insurance companies demand evidence-based medicine, warns Mischel, psychology will “discredit itself.”

    When HarmonyOs, the Chinese self-developed operating system for Huawei mobile devices, was released on Aug 9, it quickly became a hot topic on social media. Many believe it not only represents the rise of the country as a tech power, but also shows respect to classical Chinese culture by naming the system "Hongmcng" in Chinese.

    "Hongmeng" is a classical word from Zhuangzi. In the ancient times of Chinese legend and myths (神话),"Hongmeng" was used to describe the original state of the universe before matter existed. For HarmonyOS, "Hongmeng" indicates the developers' aim to make an innovative operating system, unlike any other.

    Besides "Hongmeng'", Hunwei has also registered many of its products under the names of legendary creatures from Chinese myths. For example, the company's Kirin mobile chip got its name after a lucky monster called "Qilin". And its server chip is calked "Kunpeng", a creature that changed from a fish into a giant bird.

    Many Chinese Internet users and media have praised Huawei's use of these names," as they stand for Chinese wisdom and ancient people's imagination and spirit of exploration", Global Times noted.

    In fact, Huawei is not alone in using traditional culture for modern ventures. Ne Zha, the new film, also portrays traditional culture in a modern context. The movie is loosely based on the well-known work of classical Chinese myth The Investiture of the Gods. Earlier this month it became the biggest animated movie in China and was called "the glory of domestic anime (国产动漫)".

    Indeed, the long history and splendid classic works have given China a profound culture. Myths and legends are the creative works of tremendous imagination. As Global Times put it, today by revisiting a modern context, "ancient myths has the power to inspire imagination in young people". After all, imagination is the beginning of creation.

We are currently experiencing an unprecedented era in the realm of space exploration, marked by a surge in the retrieval and study of celestial samples. This "golden age" is characterized by the active efforts of global space agencies to gather and analyze material from various celestial bodies, including asteroids, moons, and planets.

China's Chang'e 5 mission stands out as a recent triumph in this endeavor. On December 17, the Chang'e 5 lunar probe successfully concluded its journey by landing in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, as reported by China Daily. This mission, the first lunar sample-return endeavor since 1976, managed to secure an impressive 1,713 grams of lunar rocks and dust, utilizing advanced drilling technology and robotic arms.

Similarly, on December 6, Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe achieved a remarkable feat by returning a capsule filled with samples from the asteroid Ryugu. This marks the second instance of asteroid samples being collected and brought back to Earth, following the original Hayabusa spacecraft's accomplishment in 2010.

The momentum in this field is set to continue, with NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft anticipated to return to Earth in 2023, carrying samples from the asteroid Bennu. Additionally, Russia's Lunar-25 mission is poised to launch in 2021, with the objective of collecting lunar samples.

The significance of these sample-return missions cannot be overstated. They hold the potential to shed light on long-standing mysteries that have baffled scientists, such as the origins of life and the emergence of water on Earth. As Ann Nguyen, a NASA planetary scientist, emphasizes, "I cannot emphasize enough how valuable return samples are for increasing our understanding of the origin and evolution of our solar system and our place in the universe, and how we came to be."

Upon arrival on Earth, these celestial samples undergo meticulous analysis using sophisticated instruments. These analyses can yield more detailed insights than what can be gleaned from photographs or robotic rovers alone.

In the case of the Chang'e 5 lunar samples, scientists will employ a variety of analytical methods, tests, and experiments to determine the composition, structure, and physical properties of the lunar material. This comprehensive understanding will contribute to a deeper comprehension of the moon's history and, by extension, the broader history of our solar system.

Though we have only begun to explore the surface of these celestial bodies, both in a literal and figurative sense, the knowledge we have gained is already substantial. The journey of discovery is far from over, with a wealth of mysteries still waiting to be unveiled.