Visiting Joshua Tree National Park, California

    Joshua Tree National Park is nearly 800,000 acres (英亩) large and surrounds parts of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts in South-central California. Although deserted at first sight, the park is full of wildlife and provides a variety of entertainment activities from hiking to climbing. Within a three-hour drive, Joshua Tree National Park takes at least a full day to visit.

Things to do

    Hiking opportunities within the park include several choices, from 12 self-guided nature routines to all-day back-country hikes.

    Joshua Tree NP has nine camping grounds, and back-country camping is also allowed.

    Rock climbing is a popular activity in the park, which has 10 mountains greater than 5, 000 feet in height.

When to visit

    Joshua Tree NP is open 365 days a year, although the best time to visit is October through April, when temperature is milder. The peak season is when the wild flowers bloom, and the summer months are the least crowded.

What to bring

    In addition to your camera and telescope, be sure to carry lots of water. Park and guiding maps can be picked up at any of the three visitor centers.

Fees

    Parking fees: You can buy a seven-day vehicle permit (周票) for $ 15, a single entry permit for $ 5, or Joshua Tree National Park annual (每年的) pass for $ 60.

    Camping fees: They vary by camping ground

    Finding true love can be pretty tough for a lot of people, but a lady from a fairly well-known San Francisco advertising agency seems to think money helps. She is offering $10,000 to any of her friends who can introduce her to her Mr. Right. She wants to find her future husband through this way.

    The unnamed husband seeker who sent out the email had just finished reading the best-selling book named Lean In. It was 11 p. m. on a Sunday night and she realized this was the second self-help book she had read in the month. She was still single. Things were not looking fine, but there was hope for her still. If the book had taught her anything, it was that she needed to take a more positive role in finding love. After all, if she wanted to get a better job, she wouldn't just sit outside an employer's building and wait for someone to offer it to her, so why should finding a husband be any different? But instead of going out and meeting new people she decided to write an email to all her friends, offering to give them $10,000 on her wedding day if any of them managed to introduce her to her future husband.

    “I am writing you today because I've decided to make an aggressive action plan on finding the man that I get to hang out with forever,” the woman writes in her email. “Introducing me to my husband is just not high on your to-do list. But I think I have an idea that might change that…” You guessed it, and this is where she offers to reward her “closest friends” with cold hard cash.

    “I will personally give ten thousand dollars to the friend who introduces me to my husband.

    Here is how the program works:

    Step 1: You set me up on a date with a man.

    Step 2: I marry that man.

    Step 3: I give you $10,000 on my wedding day.

    I know you're thinking that this is nuts. Just plain crazy. 'You can find a husband without giving $10,000.' Well for starters, thank you! I'm happy.”

    A young woman sits alone in café sipping tea and reading a book. She pauses briefly to write in a nearby notepad before showing her words to a passing café waiter: "Where are the toilets please?" This is a familiar scene in Tokyo's so-called "silent cafes", where customers are not allowed to speak, and only communicate by writing in notepads.

    The concept rises by a desire to be alone among youg Japanese, a situation brought by economic uncertainty, a shift in traditional family support structures and the growing social isolation(隔离). The phenomenon is not limited to coffee shops but covers everything from silent discos, where participants dance alone wearing wireless headphones connected to the DJ, to products such as small desk tents designed for conversation-free privacy in the office. One Kyoto company even offers single women the opportunity to have a "one woman wedding" – a full bridal affair, complete with white dress and ceremony, and the only thing missing is the groom. The trend has its own media expression – "botchi-zoku", referring to individuals who consciously choose to do things completely on their own.

    One recent weekday afternoon, Chihiro Higashikokubaru, a 23-year-old nurse, travelled 90 minutes from her home, to Tokyo on her day off in order to enjoy some solo time. Speaking quietly at the entrance of the café, Miss Higashikokubaru said: "I heard about this place via Twitter and I like the idea of coming here. I work as a nurse and it's always very busy. There are very few quiet places in Tokyo, and it's a big busy city. I just want to come and sit somewhere quietly on my own. I'm going to drink a cup of tea and maybe do some drawings. I like the idea of a quiet, calm atmosphere."

    The desire to be isolated is not a new concept in Japan, home to an estimated 3.6 million "hikikomori" – a more extreme example of social recluses（隐士）who withdraw completely from society.

    83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the trend. As Brazilian landowners cut down rainforests to make room for profitable plantations(种植园) and cattle grounds, he struggled to bring the jungles of his childhood back to life.

    "When I was a child, the peasants cut down the trees to make grasslands and charcoal, and the water dried up and did not come back," he told the reporters, "I thought: 'Water is valuable, no one makes water and the population will not stop growing. What is going to happen? We are going to run out of water.'"

    With only some donkeys and a small team of hired workers, Antonio Vicente set about bringing back the forest to his land. What started out as a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life, and Antonio recalls often spending whole days and nights in his young jungle, surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Over the last 40 years, he has planted an estimated 50,000 trees on his 31-hectare land, which now make up a small but unique area of rainforest, and a haven for wildlife.

    As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there are now over 20 water, sources on his land that were no longer there when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there. Today, the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.

    "There are toucans(巨嘴鸟), all kinds of birds, squirrels, lizards, and even the boars are returning," 83-year-old Vicente says, "If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed."

Smart Cameras to Help You Take Better Photos

    Google Clips

    One of the latest to launch is Google Clips. It is designed to be put somewhere in a room to take pictures by itself. It can also be attached to an object or a person's clothing.

    Google says machine learning helps the camera choose the best times and situations for taking pictures and videos. Interested buyers can join a waiting list to be informed when it is on the market.

    GoPro Hero

    GoPro also uses machine learning to power its QuikStories characteristic. This tool takes existing photos and videos and automatically creates a finished video piece, complete with music and effects.

    Snap Spectacles

    Messaging app Snapchat sells a pair of sunglasses with a built-in camera that can record short videos with the push of a button. Snap Inc. says the product, called Spectacles, is designed to "catch the moment, without taking you out of it."

    The glasses can record short video clips that can be shared with Snapchat users. Snap Inc. has started selling its Spectacles sunglasses online in the United States.

    Apple iPhone X

    Apple's new iPhone X is being launched with its new Face ID system that it says will unlock the phone just by having the user look at it. This replaces the Touch ID on previous ones that used a fingerprint to unlock the phone.

    Apple says the system works by projecting more than 30,000 dots on the face to create a kind of map. Apple says its facial recognition is even secure enough to allow payments through its Apple Pay service.

    If you ask most people what water tastes like, they'll probably tell you that water has no taste and they may give you a funny look. But if you were a fruit fly, asking another fruit fly, that question might have a different answer.

    To a fruit fly, water has a taste. Scientists want to know how the fruit fly knows water because this information may help in learning how other animals — or even individual cells — manage to use water in the right way. Water is vital to life, but too much or too little can be deadly to a living creature. So by understanding how the fruit fly tastes water, researchers may learn more about other living things.

    According to the new study, a protein(蛋白质) called PPK28 makes it possible for a fly to taste water. Proteins build cells and tissues, fight disease and carry messages between cells. It's not surprising that a protein is responsible for the fruit fly's ability to taste water.

    The PPK28 protein is part of a larger family of similar proteins. One of these related proteins is used by mammals (including humans) to taste salt. Scientists have not found a protein that enables humans to "taste" water.

    In the experiment, Cameron and his team compared normal fruit flies with fruit flies whose taste cells had been disabled. The fruit flies were given a special chemical that would glow(发光) when the fly used the PPK28 protein. Then the scientists led the flies to water. When the normal flies tasted the water, the PPK28 protein lit up — showing that it was in use.

    The fruit fly in particular is so interesting that some scientists are hard at work creating a complete map of the fruit fly brain. This map will show all of a fly's neurons and help scientists understand how the neurons work together.