A German fisherman named Konrad Fischer found the brown bottle near Kiel, Germany. He said he nearly threw the bottle back into the water after pulling it out of a fishing net. Then he noticed something inside.

    The bottle in good condition contained a Danish postcard with two German stamps, dated May 17, 1913. Although dampness had made most of the writing illegible（字迹模糊的）, the readable part of the message asked whoever found it to return it to an address in Berlin. It even contained two stamps to pay for postage.

    From the address, researchers found that the postcard was written by a man named Richard Platz, who was 20 years old when he wrote the message. While he was hiking on the Baltic coast with a nature appreciation group. he threw the bottle into the sea. Then the researchers began a search for any living relatives of his. Sure enough, they were able to find his 62-year-old granddaughter, Angela Erdmann, who still lives in Berlin.

  “It was almost unbelievable,”Erdmann said upon being presented with her grandfather's bottle and message.“That was a pretty moving moment. Tears rolled down my face."

    Erdmann never knew her grandfather，who died in 1946，but says that the discovery of the bottle has made her want to learn more about him.

    The bottle remained on display at the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg until May 1st. After that, the researchers examined the postcard and tried to figure out the meaning of the rest of the message.

    Previously, the oldest message found in a bottle spent nearly 98 years at sea and was discovered in April 2012, according to Guinness World Records.

    Can technology improve your trip? Meet Judy Williams. When she and her husband recently checked into Blu Hotel in Zurich, a clerk asked them to sign the dotted line on a room rate hundreds of dollars higher than their online offer.

    “It was not a cheap stay,” says Williams, a lawyer from Billings, Mont. But it became more of one after her husband fired up the Booking.com app he'd used to book their room on his smart phone. “As soon as we showed him the cost, he honored it,” Williams says.

    Technology may create challenges for travelers but it can also solve them. It's more than making sure of a hotel cost. The latest Booking.com can help users select hotels by location, make a secure booking and view the confirmed (已确认的) cost so they never need to re-discuss their hotel price.

    Another pain point for travelers is traffic that eats away precious vacation time. There's a new app called Commute which is aimed at users who have to make the same trip every day. But if you're headed to Los Angeles or Honolulu, where visitors can easily get stuck in hours of heavy traffic, Commute can help.         

    Just input basic information about your destination and expected leaving time, and the app will start sending you traffic information 15 minutes before you leave. Testing Commute proved to be a challenge for me, because my home address is about 900 miles from my place of work. But if you have only a short distance to travel through a heavily populated area, you can use Commute to avoid traffic jams.

    Another source of travel-related problems is money. That's particularly true when you're dealing with a foreign currency. The latest Travel Money Tracker helps travelers prevent currency mix-ups. It immediately changes a country's native currency to yours, so you know exactly how much that Espresso (浓咖啡) in Milan costs in dollars. It can also warn you when you're overspending, which can sometimes be a problem when you're on vacation. The only catch, of course, is that you have to remember to record all your purchases.

    Taken together, these apps solve some of the most common travel problems. But not all of them. Some things, no smart phone can fix, which means I get to keep my job – for now at least.

    My motivation for starting our family tradition of reading in the car was purely selfish: I could not bear listening to A Sesame Street Christmas for another 10 hours. My three children had been addicted to this cassette on our previous summer's road trip.

    As I began to prepare for our next 500-mile car trip, I came across a book Jim Trelease's The Read Aloud Handbook. This could be the answer to my problem. I thought. So I put Roald dahl's James and the Giant Peach into my bag. When I began to read aloud the tale of the boy who escapes the bad guys by hiding inside a giant peach, my three kids argued and wrestled in their seats. But after several lines, they were attracted into the rhythm of the words and began to listen.

    We soon learned that the simple pleasure of listening to a well-written book makes the long miles pass more quickly. Sometimes the books we read became highlights of the trip. I read Wilson Rawls's Summer of the Monkeys as we spent two days driving to the beach. We arrived just behind the power crews restoring (恢复) electricity after a tropical storm. The rain continued most of the week, and the beach was covered with oil washed up by the storm. When we returned home, I asked my son what he liked about the trip. He answered without hesitation, “The book you read in the car.”

    Road trips still offer challenges, even though my children now are teenagers. But we continue to read as we roll across the country. And I'm beginning to see that reading aloud has done more than help pass the time. For at least a little while, we are not shut in our own electronic worlds. And maybe we've started something that will pass on to the next generation.

    The American dream is the faith held by many people in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, creativity and determination, they can achieve a better life for themselves. More specifically, they agree on how to get ahead in America: get a college education, find a reliable job, and buy their own house. But do Americans still believe in that path, and if they do, is it attainable?

    The most recent National Journal poll(民意测验，投票) asked participants about the American dream, what it takes to achieve their goal, and whether or not they felt the control over their ability to be successful. Obviously, the results show that today, the idea of the American dream and what it takes to achieve it looks quite different from it did in the late 20th century. By the large, people felt that their actions and hard work — not outside forces — were the deciding factors in how their lives turned out. But the participants had definitely mixed feelings about what actions make for a better life in the current economy.

    In the last seven years, Americans have grown more pessimistic about the power of education to lead to success. Even though they see going to college as a fairly achievable goal, a majority 52 percent think that young people do not need a 4-year college education in order to be successful.

    Miguel Maeda, 42, who has a master's degree and works in public health, was the first in his family to go to college, which has allowed him to achieve a sense of financial stability(稳定) his parents and grandparents never did. While some, like Maeda, emphasized the value of a degree rather than the education itself, others still see college as a way to gain new viewpoints and life experiences. Sixty-year-old Will Fendley, who had a successful career in the military and never earned a college degree, think “personal drive” is far more important than just go to college. To Fendley, a sense of drive and purpose, as well as an effective high-school education, and basic life skills, like balancing a checkbook(支票簿), are the necessary elements for a successful life in America.

    A home science experiment recently took the world by storm. Two teens from Toronto, in Canada, sent a Lego man rising above the Earth and captured their tiny astronaut's trip on film.

    Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, used a weather balloon to launch their plastic lego model 16 miles above the Earth. This is inside a part of Earth's atmosphere.

    The two teens were inspired by a similar project performed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). The MIT students had launched a weather balloon with a camera into near space and taken many unusual images of the Earth. Mathew and Asad then spend four months figuring out how to launch their own spacecraft into the space.

    Travelling to space is expensive for NASA, but Mathew and Asad worked hard to keep their costs down. They bought much of their equipment used and even sewed the Lego man's parachute by hand. In total, the project cost only$400.

    "We had a lot of anxiety on launch day because there were high winds when we were going up," Mathew told reporters. They had to pump extra helium(氦)into the balloon so that it would rise quickly and avoid being blown too far off course by the strong winds.

    The toy astronaut's journey lasted 97 minutes before the balloon broke and he fell back to Earth. Mathew and Asad then spent two weekends looking for their spacecraft. It had landed 76miles away from the launch site.

    The student scientists are currently finishing up their final year of high school and applying for colleges. They are also looking into more do-it-yourself space projects.

    "I guess the sky is not really the limit anymore," Mathew told reporters. "We never knew we'd get this far. It's been a lesson for us that hard work pays off."

Beethoven is a giant of classical music. And the most influential, too—at least, when it comes to piano compositions. That's according to a study in the journal EP J Data Science.

If you're wondering how data analysis could determine something as abstract as cultural influence, it's worth remembering this: Music is the most mathematical of the art form, a lot of which is symbolic. The music is written in symbols that are connected in time.

Juyong Park is a theoretical physicist in South Korea. Park and his colleagues collected 900 piano compositions by 19 composers from 1700 to 1910. Then they used that mathematical quality to their advantage by dividing each composition into what they called "code words", in other words, a chord. They then compared each chord to the chord or note that came after it, which allowed them to determine how creative composers were at coming up with novel transitions.

The composer with top marks for novelty was Rachmaninoff. But when the researchers looked at those chord transitions across all 19 composers, it was Beethoven who was most heavily borrowed from—meaning at least among the composers in this analysis, his influence was the largest.

Their study comes with some drawbacks. For example, the researchers only considered piano compositions in this work, and by only studying chord transitions, so their conclusions wouldn't relate to artists who were influential in other ways like Bach or Mozart. Park explained, "It's well understood that Mozart's contribution to music comes from the musical forms that he designed. That was not very well reflected by our mathematical modeling."

As for Park, the results convinced him he has some listening to do. "Of course I listen to music. I like Rachmaninoff's music, but I have to say I have listened to Beethoven way more than Rachmaninoff. So after this work came out, I ended up buying his whole complete collection.