Sticky notes

This invention, commonly used in offices and households throughout the world, came about as a result of a series of accidents. In 1968, Spencer Silver, who was working for a company then called 3M, was 【小题1】 to produce a super-strong adhesive (黏合剂), something that makes things stick together, to be used in the building of planes. This, however, wasn’t successful and instead he succeeded in creating an extremely weak adhesive that was 【小题2】 to pressure. The new adhesive had two advantages: it could be removed from surfaces easily and reused. Despite these two 【小题3】 properties, nobody could see any practical use for it. In the end, the invention was 【小题4】.

A few years later, Art Fry, a product development engineer working for 3M, decided to use this adhesive for 【小题5】 use. He stuck strips of paper in a book as bookmarks and a whole new concept was born. However, the idea still wasn’t without 【小题6】. The challenge was to make the glue stay on the sticky note itself, rather than peeling off and staying on the surface it was 【小题7】 to. Two more 3M employees were then brought in for the task of 【小题8】 a coating for the note’s paper so that the adhesive wouldn’t come off, and they managed that eventually. However, 3M bosses still believed that this invention wasn’t going to be 【小题9】 successful and people would continue to use scrap paper (散的便条纸) for their notes. That is why sticky notes were only tested within the company, where they became extremely popular. It wasn’t until many years later that 3M bosses finally decided to give out a vast number of free samples to other companies to see if anyone would be interested. To their surprise, 90% of the companies went on to order more. This went beyond anybody’s 【小题10】. Nowadays, sticky notes come in a variety of shapes and colours and are sold in more than 100 countries.

You must 【小题1】 common sports such as football and ping pong, whose purpose is exercising your body and mind, as well as 【小题2】 walls. These common sports 【小题3】 all around the world since their origins. However, there are people 【小题4】 rather unusual sports like sandboarding just for the adventure, whereas other sports are even regarded as a performance art. So, can you imagine combining the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt with the thrill of outdoor extreme activities? Extreme ironing can be this weird sport that 【小题5】 in mid-air, underwater, on a ski slope or in a forest. You may wonder whether it is merely invented to seek attention 【小题6】.

There is a particular amusing event called wife-carrying that 【小题7】 for its long history. The inspiration came from an event that once a Finnish man 【小题8】 a lady and carried her away. This sporting tradition 【小题9】 several hundred years ago and its modern version which is 【小题10】 two dry obstacles and a wet obstacle into a running course of 254 meters for the heavy lifting contestants.

For centuries, two of the most intriguing question about Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” were “Who?” and “When?” A discovery made at Heidelberg University in 2005 pretty much answered both. A note written in a manuscript in the library confirmed the 【小题1】 of da Vinci’s first biographer, Giorgio Vasari: that the sitter was a merchant’s wife, Lisa Gherardini. The note also helped 【小题2】 the masterpiece to between 1503 and 1506.

A third mystery—“Where?”—is still in dispute, But on June 3rd a French engineer, Pascal Cotte, declared that he and a collaborator had identified the landscape in the background of the painting. Arguments had once been made for 【小题3】 of countryside in the Marche region and between Milan and Genoa. During a presentation in Vinci, near Florence, Mr. Cotte argued that the artist was more 【小题4】 depicting a part of his native Tuscany-one that much interested him at the time. According to this theory, da Vinci 【小题5】 the area not as it was, but as, in an unrealized scheme, he intended it to be.

Mr. Cotte, who was asked by the Louvre (where the “Mona Lisa” hangs) to create a digital image of the painting, is the inventor of the multispectral (多光谱的) camera: a device that can detect not only the drawing below the surface of an oil painting, but also, where they exist, intermediate layers of work. It was among these, under what appears to be a 【小题6】 rock, that he found a preparatory sketch showing that da Vinci intended it to represent a castellated(城堡形的) tower.

The landscape of the “Mona Lisa” also includes a huge steep cliff. That is similar to one that da Vinci included in a sketch of a fortress(堡垒) 【小题7】 by Pisa and Florence in the war that broke out between them in 1503 (around the time he was painting Gherardini). The fortress with the nearby cliff—and a tower, known as the Caprona tower—all overlook the river Arno as it snakes from Florence to Pisa. All three also 【小题8】 in drawings made by da Vinci to illustrate a plan about which, says Mr. Cotte, he became “obsessive”.

Mr. Cotte argues that a channel that 【小题9】 through desolate countryside at the right of the “Mona Lisa” is too wide to be a road, as some have speculated, and is instead the dried-up bed of the Armo as da Vinci pictured it once his plan had been adopted.

It never was. But if Mr. Cotte’s theory is right, it might just explain why Gherardini, a Florentine, wears such a 【小题10】, if mysterious, smile.