We took a rare family road trip to the Adirondacks in late August，and it was as refreshing and exhausting as family vacations tend to be．Toward the end of our long drive home, even the kids were leaning forward in their seats urging my lead foot on．At that point in a road trip，even sixty-five miles per hour feels slow. We have become numb to our speed and numb to the road signs flashing by.

    My family lives on the edge of Lancaster County. Only thirty miles from home，I hit the brakes，and we began to roll，slowly，behind a horse-drawn carriage. We began to open our eyes again．We saw familiar green hills and the farm with the best watermelons. I rolled down the windows, and we breathed again．Just-cut hay and a barn full of dairy cattle．

    At five miles per hour，you remember what you forget at sixty-five．You are thinking about a place，even when you are moving from place to place．

    I am a placemaker. A homemaker, too. I am a mother of a young kid at home，and also a writer and a gardener．But，for me，those roles are wrapped up with the one big thing I want to do with the rest of my life：I want to cultivate a place and share it with others．

    The place I make with my family is a red-brick farmhouse built in l880. It has quite a few nineteenth-century bedrooms and a few acres of land，and we love nothing more than to fill them with neighbors and friends. We grow vegetables and flowers，keep a baker's dozen of egg—laying chickens，and，since we moved in three years ago，we have planted many，many trees．

    Living with my life's purpose does not allow for much travel. I need to be here，feeding the chickens and watering the tomatoes. Any extra in the budget，and we spend it on trees．

    But I learned something at the end of our family road trip．Travel can help me in the task of caring for my own place．When I slow down and pay attention to the road between here and there，travel tells me the connections between my place and all the other places．

    Eye Health Care

    Daily

    Healthy habits mean healthy eyes. Here are some daily tips for eye health.

    P Clean your eyes with pure cold water regularly. This is one of the best ways to keep eyes healthy and disease free.

    Avoid looking directly at the sun

    Roll your eyes up and down, then side to side. Then move your eyes in a circular motion（圆周运动） Exercise5tol0 times a day to relax your eyes

    Keep a good distance from the computer screen-sit about 22-28 inches away from it.

    Visit your eye doctor on a regular basis

    There are also some tips for healthy contact lens（隐形眼镜）wear and care to help prevent eye infections (感染). Please visit CDCS healthy contact lenses website and you can also follow them on social media(www.cdc.goy/contactlenses).

Prague VS Vienna: Which One to Visit?

    Prague and Vienna are both wonderful and exciting cities with modern cosmopolitanism and ancient history and culture. But if you've got a European vacation planned and are trying to decide which one of these amazing cities to visit, it can be daunting(困难)for sure.

    Sightseeing

    While both cities are rich in sightseeing adventures, Prague is definitely more beautiful as a city. You can walk along the Danube River for breathtaking views, sit in one of the many cafes that dot the urban landscape, and breathe in the amazing architecture  both old and modern that makes up this Central European metropolis(都市).Vienna is a hotbed of history, home to such great sites such as The Hofburg, Schonbrunn Palace and Gardens, and St. Stephen' S Cathedral.

    Shopping

    You most likely didn't travel all the way to Europe just to go shopping. But, if you happen to be a shopaholic, Vienna is definitely better. But be warned: fine goods you buy in Vienna will sometimes be three times more expensive than what they are in the United States or Canada.

    Cuisine

    When it comes to great dining, both cities are equally fascinating. Austrians are known for their love of sweets and pastries(糕点), which is reflected in the many bakeries, cafés, and restaurants scattered around Vienna. Some restaurants in either city offer local cuisine, though you're more likely to be eating a combination of Western European or even Americanized food. Bear in mind that Prague(being that it is in Central Europe)will be far less pricey than Vienna.

    Culture

    What do you hope to see on your trip? Palaces? Medieval Cathedrals? The Opera? How about museums? If you do happen to visit both cities, you'll find that culture equally as enriching. However, Vienna has more world—class museums which display the rich history of the area.

    A few days ago I was sitting in a Thai restaurant enjoying a meal when I got a phone call from a friend I hadn't spoken to for a long time. Full of enthusiasm and excitement I talked slightly louder than usual and in Spanish, my mother tongue.

    A few minutes into the call the lady sitting beside me got up, seemingly upset, and asked the restaurant staff to relocate her to a table as far away as possible from "this man who won't get off his phone"

    I sank in my seat out of embarrassment. I ended the call soon afterwards and felt the urge to go over and apologize. Before getting up I looked around to see where she was and I found she was, indeed, at the table furthest away from me. I noticed that the lady was alone and staring out of the window, looking a bit sad.

    Right then I quit my plan for a conventional apologetic gesture and decided to conduct an experiment. Seeing those funny smile cards in my wallet, I took one out. When signing my check I asked the waiter to secretly charge the lady's meal to my credit card instead of her bill.

    I left the restaurant, letting the waiter know I would be back in a few hours to pick up my credit card. I returned later as promised, excited to learn the result.

    To my pleasant surprise, things turned out the best possible way. A group of restaurant staff approached me with joy, telling me that the lady had dined there many times, but they had never seen her smile and laugh like she did upon receiving the smile card and the $0 check.

Inventor, physicist, surveyor, astronomer, biologist, artist... Robert Hooke was all these and more. Some say he was the greatest experimental scientist of the 17th century. In the course of his work, he cooperated with famous men of science like Isaac Newton, and the great architect, Christopher Wren.

Hooke's early education began at home, under the guidance of his father. He entered Westminster School at the age of 13, and from there went to Oxford, where he came in contact with some of the best scientists in England. Hooke impressed them with his skills at designing experiments and inventing instruments. In 1662, at the age of 28, he was named Curator of Experiments at the newly formed Royal Society of London — meaning that he was responsible for demonstrating new experiments at the society's weekly meeting. Hooke accepted the job, even though he knew that the society had no money to pay him!

Watching living things through a microscope was one of his favourite pastimes. He invented a compound microscope for this purpose. One day while observing a cork under a microscope, he saw honeycomb­like structures. There were cells — the smallest units of life. In fact, it was Hooke who invented the term "cell" as the box­like cells of the cork reminded him of the cells of a monastery．

Another achievement of Hooke's was his book Micrographia, which introduced the enormous potential of the microscope. It contains fascinating drawings of the thing he saw under the microscope. The book also includes, among other things, ideas on gravity, light and burning that may have helped scientists like Newton when they were developing their own theories on these phenomena.

Hooke made a valuable contribution to astronomy too. A crater on the moon is named after him in honour of his services to this branch of science.

Sugar-free cookies, sugar-free candy, and diet soda – are these better for you? After sugar became a no-no in the nutrition and wellness world, sugar-free food and drinks acted as a replacement for once beloved sweet drinks and snacks. Being claimed to be ZERO sugar means the food and drinks are healthier, better for diabetics, and help you slim down… Right? Wrong. Sugar-free products aren't better for you. In fact, they are worse. For most sugar-free products, it means that artificial sweeteners (甜味剂) are used instead of real sugar. The problem is that these sweeteners do not come from natural sources and they can do you more harm than good.

Let's get into what these artificial sweeteners actually are. Sugar-free sugar sounds wrong because there is no such thing as sugar-free sugar. Some of these sugar-free alternatives even contain sugar and the ones that have chemicals your body often does not know how to process. Most artificial sweeteners are a lot sweeter than sugar so only a small quantity of them are needed. That's why they can market sugar-free alternatives as "low-calorie" or "no-calorie". It also means that you get no nutritional value from consuming them, which is why so many sugar-free replacements are classified as "non-nutritive". These artificial sweeteners tend to hide under some names. Actually, they are 200-600 times sweeter than sugar.

When you eat sweet stuff, your body continues to desire it and, even though your body cannot metabolize (代谢) these sugar-free alternatives, your brain does not know the difference. In turn sugar-free alternatives relate to weight gain and Type-2 diabetes. Besides, artificial sweeteners also damage your gut's ability to break down sugar which impacts everything you eat. In other words, your body doesn't know how to handle artificial sweeteners because they have nothing real to process.

Here is a good rule of thumb: stay away from artificial sweeteners and look for non-sugar, natural sweeteners like stevia (甜叶菊) or date sugar. In the war against artificial sweeteners and real sugar, both lose. Satisfy your sweet tooth with natural sugar that comes from fruits and stay away from products claimed to be sugar-free.