People are always looking for lost cities and occasionally one is found: Borobudur in Indonesia, for example. But perhaps some of the places people look for never existed — or did they? Here are just a few famous mythical (传说中的) cities.

    El Dorado

    El Dorado is a story that began in 1537, when Spanish explorers found the Muisca people in the mountains of what is now Colombia. They heard the story of a man who covered himself with gold and dived into a lake. Then people began to talk of El Dorado — 'the golden man'. Soon people started to think of El Dorado as a place, too — a city of gold and amazing riches. Nowadays, the name 'El Dorado' is still used to mean 'a place where you can get rich quickly'.

    Atlantis

    There was once an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the mythical island of Atlantis. The people of the island were very rich, thanks to the natural resources (资源) on their island. For hundreds of years, they lived simple lives. But slowly they began to change. They started to want power. So the gods decided to destroy Atlantis. Suddenly, the island and its people were swallowed (淹没) by the sea and were never seen again.

    Shambhala

    In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Shambhala is a mystical (神秘的) country that is hidden somewhere behind the Himalayas. Shambhala is a word from an old language that means 'place of peace' or 'place of happiness'. It is said that there is no war in Shambhala, and in the future, when the world is full of war, a huge army will come out of Shambhala, destroy the world's bad rulers, and start a new Golden Age. Some people say this will happen in 2424.

    On a recent spring morning. Susan Alexander, a retired government intelligence analyst, left her Maryland home, climbed into her Volkswagen Passat and drove about three miles to pick up two strangers. She battled rush-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway and George Washington Memorial Parkway before dropping them off at Reagan National Airport. She didn't earn a cent for her trouble, and that was the point.

    Alexander is a member of the Silver Spring Time Bank-one of more than 100 such exchanges around the world trying to build community by exchanging time credits for services instead of dollars and cents. "I have time," she said. "I like giving the gift of time to other people."

    In Alexander's case, passengers Mary and Al Liepold were grateful for the ride, but it wasn't charity. Mary, a retired writer and editor for nonprofit organizations, used time credits she banked for editing work and baking. Senior citizens who don't drive, the Liepolds cashed in their credits to catch a flight to Montreal for a five-day vacation.

    Without money changing hands or shifting between virtual accounts, the airport drop-off was more like a coffee party than a taxi ride. Driver and passengers chatted about projects they've completed for the time bank, and no one raised an eyebrow when Mary said she likes "to avoid the conventional economy."

    "The beauty of this is that you make friends," Mary Liepold said. "You don't just get services."

    The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, l,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money. "You get to save that money that you would have spent," she said. "You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus that's part of an exchange."

    A deal performed partly to make friends would seem to go against classical economics and one of Benjamin Franklin's most memorable sayings: "Time is money." To those at the forefront of modem time-banking, that is the appeal.

Los Angeles Could Be One Of The Few Cities The Olympics Can't Ruin

    In just the past several years, six cities—Boston; Rome; Stockholm; Hamburg, Germany; Krakow, Poland; and Oslo, Norway—have decisively rejected the idea of hosting the Olympics.

    The games' high costs, damaging effects on poor communities in the places that have recently hosted them have turned cities, against them—fostering the belief that "nobody wants to host the Olympic Games anymore."

    But Los Angeles is different. And on Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council made final decision to try to get the chance to host the 2024 Olympics, taking the step Boston and many others never did. In LA, organizers promise they can hold an Olympics that stays within its $5.3 billion budget Organizers in every possible host city make the same promise. But when it comes to LA, where residents greatly support the plan, even people who doubt the Olympics believe that success in hosting the Olympics without any loss might be possible. "It's basically sound," said Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, who wrote the book on the financial risks the Olympics bring to cities and their taxpayers. "I think they'll be able to do it without any financial downside, although there is always some risk attached."

    There's another reason to believe LA could succeed: It's done it before. It last hosted the Olympics in 1984, when the Olympic turned a small profit. No host since has replicated that feat.

    The Los Angeles Coliseum, which was used for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, will again serve as the place of the games, along with a new NFL stadium set to open in Inglewood in 2019. There's no need for a new Olympic village, thanks to dorms at UCLA. When LA announced its final three stadiums this month, chairman Casey Wasserman said proudly that a Los Angeles Olympics won't require any new construction—instead, it will rely entirely on already planned or temporary (临时的) places.

    The problem of robocalls has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don't know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams(欺诈). We are finally waking up to the severity of the problem by supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, it's too little, too late. By the time these "solutions" become widely available, scammers will have moved onto cleverer means. In the near future, it's not just going to be the number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you're hearing is actually real.

    That's because there are a number of powerful voice manipulation (处理) and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year's I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a convincing human-sounding voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book a reservation without detection.

    These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason that robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than precision. A decade of data breaches(数据侵入)of personal information has led to a situation where scammers can easily learn your mother's name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they're able to carry out individually targeted campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller's, tricking you into "confirming" your address, mother's name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be the worst hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice manipulation technologies may weaken that gradually.

    We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone carriers and consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications — using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, which can be tied to your identity.

    Credibility is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going to get harder from here on out.

The coronavirus in China right now has really turned things upside down for a lot of people, but not even it can come between a marathon runner and his training.

Like many of his countrymen, Pan Shancu, an amateur marathon runner from Hangzhou, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, is trapped in his apartment because of the COVID-19，but he didn't let that small detail stop him from keeping in shape for his next race, whenever it may be. He has been using the small space in his apartment as a training track, jogging around two tables and the short length of a small hallway, and recently posted on social media.

"I could not bear siting around anymore," Pan wrote. "Let's run laps in the room! Yes, one lap is about eight meters (26 feet) and I ran 50 kilometers (31 miles), I did it in 4:48:44. I am sweating all over, feeling great!"

The runner, who has a marathon best of two hours and 59 minutes, also wrote that he considers his neighbors while jogging, trying to step as lightly as possible on the floor as not to disturb them. He completed 6, 250 circuits in one of his rooms in four hours, 48 minutes and 44 seconds, and his neighbors have yet to complain.

Pan Shancu's achievement spread rapidly like virus this week, with people praising his training spirit, and saying to adopting similar strategies to stay in shape.

"I start in the kitchen, go through the living room, turn into my daughter's room, the less than 20m-long racecourse has beautiful scenery and on my left, my husband's snoring is cheering me on," one commented on Pan's post. "This is a silent battle. My husband's opinion is that I have psychological issues.

Gorman is the youngest poet in U. S. history. She became the youth poet laureate (获奖者) of Los Angeles at age 16 in 2014 and the first national youth poet laureate three years later. She has recently completed her studies at Harvard University.

Her mother, Joan Wicks, teaches middle school in Watts. Shuttling among the neighborhoods gave Gorman a window to the world. Her like for poetry dates at least back to the third grade when her teacher read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine to the class.

Gorman is a lot better at it now, but still working on her confidence as a public speaker. "Until two or maybe three years ago, I couldn't say the letter 'r'. Even to this day sometimes I struggle with it. I'd want to say 'girls can change the world', but I can not say so many letters in that statement, so I'd say things like 'young women can shape the globe'."

For Gorman, writing became a cure. "I used writing as a form of self expression to get my word on the page. So the more I recited out loud, the more I was able to teach myself how to pronounce these letters which for so long had been my greatest impediment." Gorman said she also used a song from Miranda's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical Hamilton to help with her speaking. "But I don't look at my disability as a weakness," said Gorman. "It's made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be."

In September, Gorman will release Change Sings, the first of two children's books. The poet says she desires to publish a book "in which kids could see themselves as change-makers in history, rather than just observers".