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.

    Everyone is welcome to visit our city Los Angeles (LA). I am sure you can do many things in Los Angeles with your kids.

    Fun at the Beach

    Thanks to its almost perfect weather all through the year, a visit to the beach is one of the best things to do when in Los Angeles with your kids. While they enjoy themselves nearby, you can simply lie back and have a good rest in the sun.

    Trip to Disneyland

    A trip to the City of Angels with your little angels is incomplete (不完整的) without a visit to the Magic Kingdom. The joy they'll feel from being around all those Disney characters that they know and love will light up your day, too.

    Visit to the Museum

    If you want to turn your stay in LA into an educational one for your kids, you should visit the museum. Starting with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to the California Science Center, or even the Kidspace Children's Museum in Pasadena, you have many choices. I'm sure a visit to all these places will make your kids smarter.

    Visit to the University Studios Hollywood

    Your kids could get to see interesting things from some of the most popular movies ever. From the theme park of Jurassic Park to Wisteria Lane from the TV play Desperate Housewives, the Universal Studios Hollywood is a place that we all find wonderful.

    You know those nutrition guidelines the government issues every few years? It turns out that following them isn't just good for your health. It's good for the planet, too.

    " What we found is that impacts vary across nations, but in the high­impact nations, in general, you can see that, if you follow a nationally recommended diet, despite the fact that these diets don't mention explicitly—or most of them don't explicitly mention—environmental impacts, that you are going to have lower environmental impacts due to that. So that's sort of fairly clear across all the high­income nations." said Paul Behrens, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

    The food we eat takes a big toll on the environment. A third of the ice­free land on Earth is used for agriculture, and according to some estimates, producing food accounts for roughly a fifth of all human­caused greenhouse gas emissions. Fertilizer runoff also leads to other problems, like the algae blooms in Lake Eerie and the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

    However, following dietary guidelines would reduce those impacts, especially in wealthy countries like the US. "Most of the reductions come from meat and dairy," which have an outsized impact on land use and pollution, and are a major source of greenhouse gases.(That's partly due to cow farts. Seriously.) Following the suggestions would also mean eating fewer calories, since many people here eat more than they need.

    Overall, in high­income countries, Behren's team estimates that following the rules could result in as much as a 17 percent reduction in land use, a 21 percent reduction in nutrient pollution, and a 25 percent drop in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting down on how much food we waste—which is roughly a third in the US—could help even more. The results are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Of course, people are notoriously bad at following diets. But: "These nationally recommended guidelines do actually have a knock­on effect on other areas of policy making. So if I'm developing a new healthy­eating­for­schools program then that's going to be based off a lot of detail that I get from the nationally recommended guidelines. So while it might not necessarily be the case that people follow directly …they actually are quite influential on the preparation of other advice."

    It seems that a smaller environmental footprint and a healthier lifestyle could go hand in hand.

    On a flight from Dallas, Texas, to Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit a friend in 2013, event planner Paige Chenault daydreamed about the grand birthday parties she'd throw for her daughter one day. (Paige was five months pregnant at the time.) Then, flipping through a magazine, she saw a photo of an impoverished Haitian boy, skinny. "I thought, this kid has nothing," Paige says.

    The image stayed with her, and she resolved to do something to help. "I decided I would use my talents to throw birthday parties for homeless kids," Paige says. For the next four years, Paige and her husband, Colin, took time out from parenthood to visit shelters to determine how best to pull off the parties.

    Finally, in January 2017, Paige launched the Birthday Party Project, a nonprofit organization, and recruited friends and family to help decorate Dallas's 75- occupant Family Gateway Shelter with balloons and streamers, celebrating the birthdays of 11 boys and girls, with 60 more homeless kids in attendance. "That first party was better than I could have ever imagined," says Paige.

    Now Paige and her staff of three paid employees work with regional volunteers to plan monthly themed parties at 15 shelters across the country, some of which house abused or abandoned kids. Each child celebrating a birthday that month gets a $30 gift, a decorative place mat, and an individual cake or cupcake.

    One of Paige's favorite parts of each party is when the kids make a wish and blow out the candles. "They rarely get a chance to dream big," says Paige.

    Her daughter, Lizzie, now seven, often helps out at the parties. Paige says, "The one thing I've always wanted is for my kid to be generous."

    Anyone wanting to throw away their mobile phone can do it in style（时尚地）and may even win a medal－at the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship.

    Originally a local event in a small town close to the Russian border, the fifteenth annual contest drew many throwers from as far as Canada, Russia and Belgium.

    Founder Christine Lund describes the event as a good source of light exercise with an environmentally-friendly activity. "There are a lot of mobile phones on the second-hand market, and we are recycling them（before they become poisonous waste）," she said.

    The inventive Finns had already given the world the Sauna World Championships and the Wife Carrying Competition before coming up with a new way to make mobile phones even more mobile.

    This year's gold medal went to Finland's Lassi Etelatalo, who threw a waste Nokia unit a forceful 89.00 meters. "I prepared by javelin（标枪）throwing, I haven't really practiced throwing mobile phones,"Etelatalo said.

    Lund says competitors all have their favorite throwing brand. "People choose by size, by color or by how it fits in the hand……Some believe a heavy model will ensure a long throw, some want a light one."

It was a fine day. Jeffrey Del Monte was driving With his friend late Friday afternoon along the beach near Ramp 49 in Friso when they heard the screams of children. They surveyed the water trying to locate the screams and, two young girls were spotted apparently struggling while being swept out in a rip current(激流).

Del Monte then swam out into the ocean and helped one of the girls who were caught in the rip current, passing her to his friend for the lengthy swim back to shore. He then went back to search for the second girl and found her in great pain before he swam back to shore, bringing the child to the beach from nearly 100 yards out.

After both girls were safe on the beach, Del Monte and his friend attended to them until Dare County Emergency Medical Services and a Cape Hatteras National Seashore Ranger arrived on the scene. The children's parents also arrived and expressed their thanks to Del Monte and his friend.

"Jeffrey Del Monte's heroic, selfless and quick actions were key to saving these two girls from a very dangerous situation," National Parks of Eastern North Carolina Superintendent David Hallac said in a statement. "His courage and expertise allowed him to perform this successful ocean rescue."

Park officials said the incident was a reminder of how quickly ocean conditions could change, even on what appeared to be a perfect clay.

"A perfect clay on the beach doesn't always mean that it's a perfect day in the ocean, so it is important that all visitors check the beach forecast for danger and rip currents before heading to the beach and always use something that floats when in the water. If individuals do find themselves caught in rip currents, please don't swim against the currents, instead swimming out of the currents and then to shore," David Hallac said.