Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony (和声) is learnt and not based on natural ability, a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found. The researchers said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical functions of sound, the ear itself and a born ability to hear harmony.

    The study shows that musical harmony can be learnt, and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds. So if you thought that the music of some foreign culture (or Jazz) sounded like the crying of cats, it's simply because you haven't learnt to listen by their rules.

    The researchers used 66 volunteers with a range of (一系列的) musical training and tested their ability to hear combinations (组合) of notes (音符) to determine if they found the combinations familiar or pleasing. They found that people needed to be familiar with combinations of notes. If they couldn't recognize the notes, they found the notes dissonant. This finding put an end to centuries of theories claiming (声称) that physical functions of the ear determine what we find attractive.

    The study found that trained musicians were much more sensitive (敏感的) to unpleasant notes than non-musicians. When they couldn't find the note, the musicians reported that the sounds were unpleasant, while non-musicians were much less sensitive. This shows the importance of training or nurturing (培养) the brain to like particular sound of combinations of notes, like those found in jazz or rock.

    Depending on their training, a strange chord (和弦) sound was pleasant to some musicians, but very unpleasant to others. This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical note is learnt.

    To confirm (证实) this finding, they trained 19 non-musicians to find the notes of a random (随机的) selection of western chords. Not only did the participants' ability to hear notes improve rapidly; the chords they had learnt sounded more pleasant—regardless of (不论) how the chords were played.

    The question of why some combinations of musical notes are heard as pleasant or unpleasant has long been debated. “ We have shown in this study that for music, beauty is in the brain of the beholder(观看者),” a researcher said.

    Reading Oktoberfest

    Palmer Park is the perfect place to host the first Reading Oktoberfest, which takes place 15—18 September 2017.

    You can experience everything that makes Oktoberfest, held in a huge Beer tent. We'll have live music and DJs and thousands of people going crazy.

    Opening hours:

    Thursday 15 September 17:00-23:30

    Friday 16 September 17:00-23:30

    Saturday 17 September 12:30-23:30

    Sunday 18 September 12:30-19:00

    Ramsbottom Festival

    With its riverside location, Ramsbottom Festival is one festival which can truly be called beautiful. Here you can enjoy a mix of music, great arts and family shows, as well as a variety of Great British and international food.

    Ramsbottom Festival takes place 16—18 September 2017 at Ramsbottom Cricket Club. Bury, easily reachable by public transport from Manchester city centre.

    The Willow Festival Dorset

    The Willow Festival—the world's largest festival showing new and undiscovered live music bands and artists is coming to Dorset. Fun for all the family, the event also has a shopping area, a world food village, and plenty of activities for kids.

    Tickets are just £10.00, which covers a come-and-go attendance (出席) for all three days.

River Cottage Festival

    It's our first ever family-friendly music festival, right here at River Cottage HQ in Devon. On 17—18 September 2017, the farm will be filled with live music from popular bands in the UK. In between all that dancing you'll be able to watch shows from local craftspeople (匠人) and make your own piece of jewelry (珠宝).

    Tickets will cost you just £35, or £l0 for children under 12 (babies under 2 go free).

    The University of Waikato is a good choice for those who want to be a success. The university is internationally recognized for its excellence and achievements. It will help you develop advanced research skills. As a university student you can get first-class research facilities (设施) with trained teachers to help, support and advise you in your study. We pride ourselves on our high standards, our research success and our international recognition. For further information: inf@waikato.ac.nz.

    Degree

    We offer a wide choice of bachelor's degrees(学士学位) for international students, which includes: Arts, Communication Studies, Social Sciences, etc. Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Education are only for New Zealand citizens, for further information: deg@waikato.ac.nz.

    Tuition Fees(学费)

    Tuition fees are different from department to department, generally from $5,000 to $6,000 a year. For further information: tui@waikato.ac.nz.

    Accommodation(住宿)

    You can have a room in a 4-bedroom flat, which will cost about $100 a month with other regular living costs of about $150 a month for one person. For further information: acc@waikato. ac.nz

    Health

    The Student Health Service provides excellent medical services for students. The Medical Centre is open five days a week, including student holidays with four doctors and nurses to meet your medical needs. For further information: heal@waikato.ac.nz.

    Sports

    The Centre is a great place to have sports activities. Trained exercise teachers can help you work out a training plan and keep you active. The sports hall has volleyball, basketball and indoor football courts and a swimming pool as well. There are also a large number of sports clubs at Waikato. For further information: sport@ waikato.ac.nz

    However exciting space exploration sounds, there's a necessary and important point about it that needs to be considered: food supplies. Right now, astronauts typically rely on dry food in airtight bags and cans, since there are strict weight limits on items taken into space. Foods that we take for granted, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, are out of the question for space explorers.

    For those who've made an effort to try to grow food during space flights, they've faced many difficulties, including the absence of gravity, and a lack of soil, air and humidity (湿度). However, growing food to add and minimize (最小化) the food that must be carried to space will be increasingly important on long-duration flights into space. Great efforts have been made to explore the concept (idea) of space farming. Recently, a team led by Federico Maggi at the University of Sydney in Australia have worked out how plants can absorb nutrients from human urine (尿), as was reported by New Scientist on March 27.

    After over 20 years of experiments, the results suggested that human urine could supply three to four out of the six nutrients that plants need. The researchers also found out that urine-fertilized plants produce no harmful by-products, such as carbon dioxide or ammonia.

    According to New Scientist, human urine is 95 percent water, with the other 5 percent made from nutrients which are harmful to the human body but not to plants. The advantage of this urine-fueled life support system is obvious: By recycling liquid waste and producing food, an efficient cycle will be created.

    And most importantly, said New Scientist，the duration of space flights will be greatly extended to “20 years of flight”, meaning we may be soon sending astronauts on flights to Mars, or even beyond.

    In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified(木乃伊化的) and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. "Not one or two here and there", reported English Illustrated Magazine, "but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep. " Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer. One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.

    Those were the days of generously funded explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the estates and museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

    In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites' wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.

    "They're really displays of daily life," says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After peering beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection — a bridge between people today and those of long ago. "You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us."

    Floating on the surface of the seas of the world are billions of tons of small plants and animals called plankton. Most of these plants and animals are too small for the human eye to see. They move about lazily with the currents, providing a basic food for many larger animals. Plankton has been described as the equivalent (相等的东西) of the grasses that grow on dry land, and the comparison is an appropriate one. In potential food value, however, plankton far outweighs that of land grasses. One scientist has estimated that while grasses of the world produce about 49 billion tons of valuable carbohydrates(碳水化合物) each year, the sea's plankton produces more than twice as much.

    Despite its enormous food potential, little effort was made until recently to farm plankton as we farm grasses on land. Now scientists have at last begun to study this possibility, especially as the sea's resources appear even more important as a means of feeding an expanding world population.

    No one yet has seriously suggested that “planktonburgers” may soon become popular around the world. As a possible farmed supplementary food source, however, plankton is gaining considerable interest among scientists.

    One type of plankton that seems to have great harvest possibilities is a tiny creature called krill(磷虾). Growing to two or three inches long, krill are a major food source for the giant blue whale, the largest animal ever to live on the Earth. Realizing that this whale may grow 100 feet and weigh about 150 tons, it is not surprising that each one swallows more than one ton of krill daily.

    Krill swim about just below the surface in huge schools sometimes wide, mainly in the cold Antarctic. Because of their pink color, they often appear as an entire reddish mass when viewed from a ship or from the air. Krill are very high in food value. If krill can feed such huge creatures as whales, many scientists reason, they must certainly be competitors among possible new food sources for humans.