There is no better way to enjoy Scottish traditions than going fishing and tasting a little bit of whisky (威士忌) at a quiet place like the Inverlochy Castle. When Queen Victoria visited the castle in 1873 she wrote in her diary, “I never saw a lovelier spot.” And she didn't even go fishing.

    Scotland is not easily defined. In certain moments, this quiet land of lakes and grasses and mountains changes before your very eyes. When evening gently sweeps the hillside into orange light, the rivers, teeming with fish, can turn into streams of gold. As you settle down with just a fishing pole and a basket on the bank of River Orchy, near the Inverlochy Castle, any frustration (烦恼) will float away as gently as the circling water. It's just you and purple, pink, white flowers, seeking a perfect harmony. If you are a new comer to fishing, learning the basics from a fishing guide may leave you with a lifetime's fun. For many, fishing is more than a sport; it is an art.

    Scotland offers interesting places where you can rest after a long day's fishing. Set against a wild mountain and hidden behind woodland, the beautiful Inverlochy Castle Hotel below the Nevis is a perfect place to see the beauty of Scotland's mountains. Ben Nevis is the highest of all British mountains, and reaching its 1343-metre top is a challenge. But it's not just what goes up that matters; what comes down is unique. More than 900 metres high, on the mountain's north face, lies an all-important source of pure water. Its name comes from the Gaelic language “usquebaugh” or “water of life”; and it is the single most important ingredient (原料) in Scotland's best known drink: whisky.

    The Lumière Brothers had their film shows, taken over 100 years ago, to 100 paying customers on December 8, 1985. One of their earliest films was a 30-second piece which showed a section of a railway platform. As the train approached, panic started in the theatre: people jumped and ran away. In their confusion, the audiences feared that a real train was about to crush them. That was the moment when cinema was born.

    Early cinema audiences often experienced the same confusion. In time, the idea of films became familiar, the magic was accepted — but it never stopped being magic. Film has never lost its unique power to embrace its audience and transport them to a different world.

    One effect of this realism was to educate the world about itself. Cinema makes the world smaller. Long before people travelled to America or anywhere else, they knew what other places looked like and how other people worked and lived. Undoubtedly, in the lives recorded in film people knew more about American life. Hollywood has dominated the world film market. American imagery — the cars, the cities, the cowboys became the primary imagery of film. Film carried American life and values around the globe.

    And, thanks to film, future generations will know the 20th century more familiarly than any other period. We can only imagine what life was like in the 14th century or in classical Rome. But the life of the modern world has been recorded on films. We shall be known better than any preceding generations.

    The “star” was another natural consequence of cinema. The cinema star was effectively born in 1910. Because everybody in the world seems to know who they are, they appear more real to us than we do ourselves. The star as magnified human self is one of cinema's most strange and enduring legacies(遗产).

    Cinema films originally were planned as short stories, because early producers doubted the ability of audiences to concentrate for more than the length of a reel. Then, in 1912, an Italian 2-hour film was hugely successful, and Hollywood settled upon the novel-length narrative that remains the dominant cinematic convention of today.

    And it has all happened so quickly. Almost unbelievably, it is only 100 years since that train arrived and the audience screamed and fled, perhaps, suddenly aware that the world could never be the same again — that, maybe, it could be better, brighter, more astonishing and more real than reality.

    When I got home after dropping out of college in my junior year because of depression, I didn't want to get out of bed. But my parents wanted me to, so I just transferred myself to the couch in the living room. Sometimes I would turn on the TV and watch marathons of Chopped, but mostly I just sat there, lost in thought.

    One day when I was lying on the couch, not knowing what to do, I wondered since I had been out of school for a long time, I might as well do something productive with my life. I looked at my options. I could attend some kind of online college class, go to in-person events just to get out of the house, or take up a hobby. But none of these things made me happy, and my depression seemed to keep me drowning under the waves.

    There was something that was my thing—entrepreneurship. No matter what kind of day I'm having now, the mere mention of start-ups still perks me up. I have been starting business in some kinds of forms ever since I was a kid, and despite everything, this passion has never changed.

    So I started thinking of ideas, seeing which one could become practical business. I spent my days glued to a wide purple notebook, a pen in hand, sometimes moving from the couch to the table on our back porch in the mornings. If I got up early enough, I'd watch the sun come up. It was there, in the still mornings, that I learned about life and started to look back on mine.

    With time going on, the depression started to lift. I was making more progress in my recovery, and the good days were more frequent than the bad. I started a couple of different businesses, eventually settling on a web design business, and did a lot of experiments and changed my ideas, and after a while, things started to work.

    Three men have had a big influence on modern sound and communication technologies. We started with the beginnings of computer-generated music.

Max Vernon Mathews

    Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music. He created electronic tools so that people could use computers, as musical instruments. He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played. In 1957, Max wrote the first: computer program, Music, to enable a computer to create sound and play it back. The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in seventeen seconds. For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed.

    Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program. He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios. The Groove program he developed was the first computer program made for live performances.

Norio Ohga

    Sony Corporation official Norio Ohga helped to develop, the compact disc in the late 1970s.

    He pushed for CDs to be larger, and with a longer playing time. He wanted them to hold seventy-five minutes so that they could store all of Bcethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. This way, listeners could enjoy the musical work without any break. The compact disc changed the electronics industry and the way people listened to music.

Hubert Joseph Schlafly

    Hubert Joseph Schlafly was an electrical engineer who helped change the way actors, politicians and other people speak on television. In 1950, he and two other men developed the teleprompter. One co-worker, Fred Barton, was an actor. He had an idea for a tool that would help television actors read their lines without having to memorize them. The first teleprompter involved a person who turned a long piece of paper printed with tall letters. As the actor read the lines, another person would, move the paper ahead on the device. Later versions used television screens to show the words that were to be read.

    Reading books and looking at pictures is great, but nothing facilitates (促进) learning like travel, especially for teenagers. Not only do they get to see a world beyond their neighborhood, they also get to experience it, feel it, taste it, hear it and better understand the world around them.

    After nearly four decades in the classroom and traveling the world, Phyllis Duvall Bailey knew this perhaps better than anyone else.

    Becoming involved in the work in AKA Sorority Inc in US, she worked to educate children about the United Nations. There was no doubt in Bailey's mind that the lessons would mean so much more if the students could see things for themselves.

    Starting in 2015, Bailey, 82, set out to take her students to the UN Headquarters in New York City to give them a "Window Seat to the World", and thus transformed them into global citizens.

    Indeed, it is a great opportunity to give students national and international exposure. Since Bailey saw the students as future leaders, she was desperate to expose them to the UN, its mission, its agendas (议程) and its supporting organizations.

    She decided to give $10, 000 of her own money to pay for the late June trip, enough to take 10 students aged 14-17 on a four-night stay in New York. There, they had guided tours of the UN Headquarters and the New York City Harbor (海港).

    It was Quenyaun Payne's first trip to the city and Taylor Sappington's second. Payne, 17, is a senior at Mceachem High School in the state of Georgia, US. Sappington, 15, is a junior at Therrell High School in Atlanta, Georgia, US. Both said their visit to the UN was inspiring.

    "I like not only how countries are working together but they're focused on common goals like global warming and keeping peace," Sappington said.

Payne commented, "The trip was amazing. I'm so thankful Mrs. Bailey made it possible."

    Actually, there are a lot of people grateful for the retired teacher's effort. The United Nations Association of Atlanta recently gave Bailey its Humanitarian Award, and the United Nations Association of the US-awarded her with the National Education Award.

    But Bailey wasn't looking for recognition or even gratitude. Over those four days in New York, she'd already felt it and seen it in the eyes of those 10 teenagers, Payne and Sappington included, who made the trip.

    "It has been a real joy to get to see and watch their reaction to new experiences," she said.

Singapore researchers say they have developed a form of electronic skin that can create a sense of touch. They hope their invention will give people with prosthetic hands (假肢手) the ability to identify different objects.

The skin device measures 1 square centimeter. The system contains 100 small sensors that attempt to recreate things like texture (质地), temperature and even pain. The researchers call the device Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin, or ACES, which can process information faster than humans' nervous system. Machine learning methods trained the device to recognize 20 to 30 different textures. It can even correctly read Braille letters most of the time, the researchers say.

The system does not require the users' movement to work. Humans need to slide to feel texture. But in this case the skin, with just a single touch, is able to detect textures of different roughness.

A demonstration showed that the device could identify the difference between a soft ball and a solid plastic one. "When you lose your sense of touch, you essentially become numb and prosthetic users face that problem, " said Benjamin Tee, leader of the research team. "So by recreating an artificial version of the skin, for their prosthetic devices, they can hold a hand and feel the warmth and feel that it is soft."

Tee said his idea for the device came from the movie Star Wars, when character Luke Skywalker loses his right hand and it is replaced with a robotic one. In the film, the new hand is able to experience touch sensations just like the real one.

The artificial skin technology is still going through experiments and development. But Tee said there had already been a lot of interest in the system, especially from the medical community. Tee said similar inventions that his team has developed include see-through skin that can repair itself when torn and a material for wearable electronic devices that gives off light.