In agrarian(农业的), pre-industrial Europe,“you'd want to wake up early, start working with the sunrise, have a break to have the largest meal, and then you'd go back to work,”says Ken Albala, a professor of history at the University of the Pacific.“Later, at 5 or 6, you'd have a smaller supper.”

    This comfortable cycle, in which the rhythms of the day helped shape the rhythms of the meals, gave rise to the custom of the large midday meal, eaten with the extended family.“Meals are the foundation of the family,”says Carole Couniban, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, “so there was a very important interconnection between eating together and strengthening family ties.”

    Since industrialization, maintaining such a slow cultural metabolism has been much harder, with the long midday meal shrinking to whatever could be stuffed into a lunch bucket or bought at a food stand. Certainly, there were benefits. Modern techniques for producing and shipping food led to greater variety and quantity, including a tremendous increase in the amount of animal protein and dairy products available, making us more energetic than our ancestors.

    Yet plenty has been lost too, even in cultures that still live to eat. Take Italy. It's no secret that the Mediterranean diet is healthy, but it was also a joy to prepare and eat. Italians, says Counihan, traditionally began the day with a small meal. The big meal came at around 1 p.m. In between the midday meal and a late, smaller dinner came a small snack. Today, when time zones have less and less meaning, there is little tolerance for offices' closing for lunch, and worsening traffic in cities means workers can't make it home and back fast enough anyway. So the formerly small supper after sundown becomes the big meal of the day, the only one at which the family has a chance to get together.“The evening meal carries the full burden that used to be spread over two meals,”says Counihan.

    Joseph Francis Charles Rock (1884–1962) was an Austrian-American explorer, botanist, and anthropologist(人类学家). For more than 25 years, he travelled extensively through Tibet and Yunnan, Gansu, and Sichuan provinces in China before finally leaving in 1949.

    In 1924, Harvard sent Joseph Francis Rock on a treasure hunt through China's southwestern provinces—the Wild West of their day. But gold and silver weren't his task: Rock, a distinguished botanist, sought only to fill his bags with all the seeds, saplings, and shrubs he could find. During his three-year expedition, he collected 20,000 specimens for the Arnold Arboretum(阿诺德植物园).

    Botany, though, was just one of Rock's strengths. As an ethnologist(民族学者), he took hundreds of photographs of the Naxi, a tribe in Yunnan province, recording their now-lost way of life for both Harvard and National Geographic, and took notes for an eventual 500-page dictionary of their language. His hand-drawn map of his travels through China's “Cho-Ni” territory, in the Harvard Map Collection, includes more than a thousand rivers, towns, and mountains indicated in both English and Chinese, and was so well made that the U.S. government used it to plan aerial missions in World War II.

    Scientist, linguist, cartographer, photographer, writer—Rock was not a wallflower in any sense. Arrogant and self-possessed, he would walk into a village or warlord's place “as if he owned the place,” said Lisa Pearson, the Arboretum's head librarian.

    In declaring his successful return under the headline “Seeking Strange Flowers, in the Far Reaches of the World,” the Boston Evening Transcript ran a large photo of the daring explorer wearing in a woolly coat and fox-skin hat. “In discussing his heroism including hair-raising escapes from death either from mountain slides, snow slides and robber armies, he waves the idea away as if it is of no importance.”

    The Arboretum and Rock parted ways after 1927, mainly because his trip cost Harvard a fortune—about $900,000 in today's dollars. Fortunately, many of his specimens, many of his amazing photos, and his great stories remain.

    "A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smart phone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website" is the definition of "selfie" in the Oxford English Dictionary. In fact, it wasn't even in the dictionary until August of last year. It earned its place there because people are now so obsessed with (对……痴迷) selfies—we take them when we try on a new hat, play with our pets or when we meet a friend whom we haven't seen in a while.

    But is there any scientific explanation for this obsession? Well, you should probably ask James Kilner, a neuroscientist(神经系统科学家) at University College London.

    Through our lifetime we become experts at recognizing and interpreting other people's faces and facial expressions. In contrast, according to Kilner, we have a very poor understanding of our own faces since we have little experience of looking at them—we just feel them most of the time.

    This has been proved in previous studies, according to the BBC.

    Kilner found that most people chose the more attractive picture. This suggests that we tend to think of ourselves as better-looking than we actually are. To further test how we actually perceive our own faces, Kilner carried out another study. He showed people different versions of their own portrait—the original, one that had been edited to look less attractive and one that was made more attractive—and asked them to pick the version which they thought looked most like them. They chose the more attractive version.

    But what does it say about settles? Well, isn't that obvious? Selfies give us the power to create a photograph—by taking it from various angles, with different poses, using filters (滤色镜) and so on—that better matches our expectations with our actual faces.

    "You suddenly have control in a way that you don't have in non-virtual(非虚拟的) interactions," Kilner told the Canada-based CTV News. Selfies allow you "to keep taking pictures until you manage to take one you're happy with", he explained.

    Bored? Lonely? Out of condition? Why not try the SPORTS CENTER?

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    SKIING

    Gentle slopes. 3 levels instructors at weekends and Fridays. Daytime practice.

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    Women: Tuesday and Thursday.

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    9 hole practice course. Professional Coaching. Lessons must be booked in advance in daytime. Evening practice. Minimum age — 9 years.

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    Maximum age —18 years.

    Children aged 5-10. Mondays and Wednesdays. 4:00-6:00 p.m.

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    Table Tennis, Snooker (台球), Darts (标枪), Café (all day), Bar (lunch time and evenings), Nursery (weekdays and weekends, not evenings).

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    Interested? More details, call 800-1234-5678.

    Being able to take advantage of truly unlimited data is a smartphone user's dream, but everyone I've talked to about 5G is more excited about the usage unlocked by next - generation wireless devices. From smart home security to self - driving cars, all the Internet - connected equipment in your life will be able to talk to each other at lightning - fast speed with reduced delay.

    "5 G is one of those forerunners, along with artificial intelligence, of this coming data age," said Steve Koenig, senior director of market research for the Consumer Technology Association. "Self - driving vehicles are emblematic in this data age - they show application of data completely. With one single task, driving, you have large amounts of data coming from the vehicle itself, and a variety of sensors (传感器)are collecting a lot of information to model its environment as it moves. It's pulling in data from other vehicles about conditions down the road. There's lots of data behind that task, which is why we need the speed and lower latency ((延迟).

    AR glasses and virtual (虚拟的)reality headphones haven't yet been inside the mainstream, but tech companies are joyfully saying that such equipment will eventually replace our smartphones. With 5G, that could actually happen. This is notable because companies such as Apple are reportedly developing AR glasses to improve - or even replace - smartphones.

    Ericsson showed at February's Mobile World Congress in 2019 how smart glasses could become faster and lighter with a 5G connection, because instead of being weighed down with components, the glasses could rely on outside equipment for processing power.

    But don't get too excited. There's still a lot of work to be done in the meantime, including some necessary testing to make sure the radio plays nicely with basic systems and service construction so that 5G isn^'t concentrated only in big cities.

Candy comes in many flavors. Some taste like fruit. Some taste like flowers. Some are chewy, like taffy (太妃糖) and gum. Hard candies are, well. hard! So, they last a long time.

But, in spoken English, there are some types of candy that you cannot eat. For example, you can't eat eye candy. Eye candy is a person-man or woman-who is very good-looking. So, looking at this person is a treat for the eye, just like candy is a treat for the taste buds.

Do you hear of candy coat? Of course it is not a coat made of candy. But you can say I don't candy coat the truth. What does candy-coating something mean? Well, some pills are covered with a coat of thin, sweet candy. The coating makes swallowing the pill easier, and it may hide a bad taste. So, candy coating a difficult truth or situation means you don't directly discuss its bad parts.

After talking about candy you may want to eat some candies. However, some people dislike things that are very sweet, especially adults. But even if you do not like candy, you can still be called a kid in a candy store. This expression means a person is very happy to do something or to simply be somewhere. Imagine a child going from one candy display to the next, not knowing which candy to choose!

Talking about children brings us to another expression: as easy as taking candy from a baby. Think about a small, helpless baby holding a piece of candy. Taking it would be very easy—mean, but easy. So, use this expression when you are talking about something that may be simple to do, but probably not right.