Experience the ultimate wellness retreat for your mind, body, and soul amidst the breathtaking landscapes of Iceland. Across the country are world-class spa s that tap into Iceland's abundant, sustainable and mineral-rich waters from geothermal(地热的) sources. Iceland is a true destination, attracting tired travelers from across the globe.
Secret Lagoon
Secret Lagoon natural hot springs are located in the small village called Fludir. In the whole area there are several geothermal spots and a little Geysir which erupts every 5 minutes, showing off for the guests relaxing in the hot spring. During winter, the northern lights are often giving a great lightshow above Secret Lagoon.
The Blue Lagoon
The Blue Lagoon is a health and geothermal spa on the Reykjanes Peninsula. For ten consecutive years Blue Lagoon has been awarded the Blue Flag environmental recognition granted to natural beaches and hot springs. The lagoon holds nine million liters of geothermal seawater.
Laugarvatn Fontana
Laugarvatn Fontana is the place for relaxation and an authentic Icelandic experience. Soak in the warm geothermal pools and get energized in the natural steam rooms, with the hot spring bubbling right below you. Be sure not to miss a visit to taste the delicious rye bread that grandmothers of the area have been baking in the hot spring s of Laugarvatn for decades.
Mývatn Nature Baths
Located in the heart of north-east Iceland about 105 kilometres (65 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, Lake Mývatn and its surroundings are one of Europe's greatest natural treasures. Containing a unique blend of minerals, silicates and micro-organisms, the warm soothing water of Myvatn Nature Bath benefits both skin and spirit alike.
Finland's system for returning drink containers started in the 1950s, and today almost every bottle and can is recycled. Convenience is the cornerstone of the system's success.
Nowadays there are almost 5,000 container-return machines across Finland. Most of them are located in the same shops that sell drinks, making returning them a convenient part of people's routine. Hotels, restaurants, offices, schools and event organizers return containers through their drink providers.
The return machines are easy to use. You place a bottle or can on a set of mini conveyor belts at the front of the machine. They carry it past a scanner and out of sight. The machine sorts the bottles and crushes the cans. When you're done, you press a button and the machine gives you a receipt. Plastic bottles are worth 20 to 40 cents, depending on their size, while glass bottles are worth 10 to 40 cents and aluminium(铝) cans are 15 cents. The returned containers are recycled or the materials are reused. Across Finland, on average, every Finn returns 373 items in a year: 251 aluminium cans, 98 plastic bottles and 24 glass bottles.
The government has entrusted this function to the private agency. "Palpa is completely nonprofit and receives no government funding," says Tommi Vihavainen, Palpa's director of producer services, ICT and communication.
Russia, the UK and other countries have shown interest in the Finnish system. "Most visitors want to see how the return system works in Finland," says Vihavainen. "We don't act as consultants, but we're proud to present our system."
July was the world's hottest month on record. Wildfires this summer destroyed a Hawaiian city and caused excuations(疏散) in Canada. Greece, and Thailand. Floods devastated towns in Vermont in July and killed thousands of Libyans in September.
John Vaillant's new book Fire Weather aims to shake us out of this with a tale of terror from a climate change frontline: the city of Fort McMurray, in northern Canada's vast forest, where an uncontrollable wildfire during an exceptionally warm spring in 2016 flooded entire communities within days.
Vaillant tells his story at disaster-movie pace, starting with the glimpse of smoke on the horizon and assurances from the authorities that all will be fine. Mounting misfortune follows as the flames lick golf courses on the city's edge. By the end, 90, 00 people had been evacuated, 2,500 structures destroyed, another 500 damaged. The energy generated by the fire created its own weather system, with hurricane force winds and lightning strikes.
What attracts me most is the book's central irony. The story takes place in Fort McMurrary, which is the industrial centre of northern Alberta's tar sands, one of the world's largest fossil fuel deposits. It is a city whose existence depends on the hydrocarbons whose burning caused climate change; but whose existence almost ended in a climate-caused burning.
Fire Weather isn't a typical disaster book. Vaillant's references to Nassim Taleb, Lucretius, Seamus Heaney, The Lord of the Rings, Xerxes, and Moby-Dick can grant. But Vaillant's theme is also catching my eyes. Our industrial world is releasing carbon at a rate 10 times faster than scientists can find in the geological record for the past 250mn years, he writes. "Thanks to fire and our appetite for boundless energy, we have evolved into a geologic event that will be measurable a million years from now."
The past few months have brought electrifying news that, for the first time, a gene treatment has provided some hearing to children born with deafness.
Eli Lilly announced this week, for example, that a profoundly deaf boy from Morocco given its treatment as part of a clinical trial in Philadelphia can now hear. And five children in China treated similarly at younger ages gained hearing with some able to verbally communicate without their cochlear implants(人工耳蜗). Their hearing recovery, first covered by the press in October 2023, is described in de tail this week in The Lancet.
"It's an enormous achievement," says geneticist Karen Avraham of Tel Aviv University. Otolaryngologist(耳鼻喉科专家) and gene therapist Lawrence Lustig of Columbia University, whose lab was among the first to test the same approach in mice, agrees. "Other than cochlear implants, we haven't really had any successful treatment s to treat deafness," he notes.
The various efforts from companies and academic centers each use a virus to insert the same gene, OTOF, into the children's inner ear so the so-called hair cells there can sense sound and transmit it to the brain.
The new deafness treatments add to a string of recent successes for the gene treatment field, but also raise questions. The ear's hair cells don't divide, so the new copies of OTOF they contain should persist and continue to instruct the cells to make OTOF. Gene expression could drop off over time or the ear could mount an immune response that shuts it off.
But Lustig is optimistic that the various challenges will be overcome. "Now that we've got one success story, there's going to be more money coming in to fund some of these other projects," he says.
Plogging is a great way to make your little area of the world a little cleaner, brighter, and safer while boosting your own health, fitness, and mood. This up and coming environmental activity began in Sweden in 2016. . It is quite a common scene across other European countries, as well as the United States, Mexico, and other areas.
Definition of plogging
. It is a term made by combining "jogging" with "plocka upp," which is Swedish for "pick up." Therefore, the plogging definition is an emerging fitness that involves picking up litter or trash while you run.
Benefits of plogging
Because plogging typically involves jogging or running, there are many health benefits to this eco-friendly fitness trend. However, the benefits extend beyond just improving heart health. . First, it improves mood and makes you feel good about yourself. What's more, it gives back to your community and connects you online and builds social connections with other ploggers.
How to get started
Before you start, you'll need to outfit yourself with the right gear to get the job done. If you're already running or jogging, you should have a good pair of running shoes and running apparel(装备). . Otherwise, broken glass and sharp and dirty litter items you may pick up will hurt you. A trash bag of some sort for collecting what you pick up is a must as well.
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Theoretically, you can go plogging almost anywhere you have permission to be. Depending on where you live, you may encounter trash along the side of the roads, parks, school playgrounds, trails, parking lots, town squares and bike paths.
A. How to do plogging
B. Where to go plogging
C. It has since spread around the world
D. Here are some of the top benefits of plogging
E. It's important that you have the right footwear
I. Beyond that, you'll need a good pair of gloves to protect your hands
G Plogging is not, in fact, a compound word of "plodding" and "jogging"
When my son Reace celebrated his sixth birthday two years ago, he made a wish that I would get a transplant. Less than a week later, his wish came true when I received new 1 .
Born with a breathing disease, I was able to manage my 2 without a hospital visit until I was 23. At 30, 3 , it steadily worsened and I was 4 for a transplant. I started having check-ups once a year, then every six months, then every three months until I was 5 living at the hospital and reliant on oxygen to survive. Everyday 6 like having a shower or brushing my hair became 7 .
After four months on the list, I 8 the call to say a pair of lungs was available. The transplant was successful and the 9 was noticeable. Before my transplant I had been so 10 , I couldn't even walk from the couch to the front door without 11 my breath—and it was only six paces. 12 . I was so used to being breathless that I didn't know any difference. I had 13 what it would be like to be a 14 person and now I know. I can do everything an ordinary mum would do: housework, workout, or taking Reace to basketball.
I am extremely grateful to my 15 and his family.
It is a beautiful drone(无人机) shot, popular kind of video you might see in a travel video. However, there is no drone camera, and you needn't travel in person because the video was generated by AI, which is from a new tool programmed by Open AI called Sora.
It's not perfect, but it's a large step up from what we've seen before. What most people don't know is Sora can do more than just create videos from scratch. It can combine separate videos into one scene. And its videos can be up a minute long and in 1080p resolution.
(compare) with Runway ML, the difference with Sora is that it's coherent. Previous system have a (character) morphing(图像渐变) quality as the video (program). With Sora, that's vastly reduced or gone altogether. The (object) remain stable even when covered by things in the foreground. We've seen something similar to this in research since 2019, but what is new is the ability (combine) two videos together in one scene. It can also make up different camera angles of a single scene with just one prompt.
Sora, like digital audio workstation (envelop) recording studios several years ago, must be a trend soon.
It had been a challenging week, marked by a sudden large increase in oil prices coinciding with a sharp drop in temperatures in Boston. It was nearly below zero degree. With three missed workdays under my belt, my upcoming paycheck was going to be lower than normal. The stress weighed heavily on me as I carefully sought for every conceivable opportunity to save pennies, ensuring that I could afford both groceries and keep the house warm.
My eight-year-old son didn't understand when I told him we were struggling that week. He had his heart set on a particular brand of yogurt, but I didn't have the extra three dollars to buy it for him. It was the kind of yogurt decorated with a cartoon child skateboarding on its packaging, containing a mere two spoonfuls per cup. Such products, designed to lure children with their flashy marketing, only served to make me hate advertising.
However, a bunch of parental guilt gripped me as his innocent eyes met mine, silently questioning, "Why is yogurt such a big deal?" Determıned to sweep his disappointment, I made a sacrifice typical of single mothers. I returned an item needed to the shelf, ensuring that he could enjoy his favorite yogurt.
On the journey back from the grocery store, a sight caught my attention—a homeless man, holding a sign by the roadside. My heart ached, and I turned around, observing passers-by purposefully steer(绕开) clear of him, avoiding any meaningful interaction. Even my son didn't seem to care much. either. Yet, upon closer inspection, I noticed the man—bare hands grasping a piece of cardboard, snot frozen to his face, a worn-out jacket. And there I was struggling because I had to buy oil and groceries. But I decided to help. I pulled over to the man and handed him a five-dollar bill.
注意：
1）续写词数应为150左右；
2）请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Seeing this, my son became confused and surprised.
On that day, my son performed an act that most adults wouldn't have done.
