A busy public square in the Chinese city of Nanjing is home to an unusual experiment.

    For almost two months, the country's first “honesty bookshop” has occupied（占据） a sidewalk on HanZhong Road in the city's Gulou District.

    With no cashier or other staff, the store relies on trust for payment.

    Making money isn't the company's main goal and they don't punish those who take books without paying.

    “If they can really finish the books, it doesn't matter if they took the books for free,” Zhu Yu, the marketing director of the company says.

    “In fact, we are really happy to witness so many people taking books from the honesty bookshop.” After browsing the four wooden bookshelves, customers must drop their money in a locked box.

    Prices are set at 30% of the usual cover price. Zhu hopes that his sidewalk store, which sells, on average, 60 books a day, will make more people interested in reading. Like elsewhere, e-books are affecting sales of traditional books, and traditional books and many independent booksellers are struggling.

    Zhu got permission from the city government to use the sidewalk and says he's determined to make it a long-term project.

    He says the store is open every day, except when it rains, and it's locked up each night.

    In September last year, the company laid out 1,000 books and reading lamps on the ground and encouraged people “to go on a date” with a book.

    “Independent bookshops represent the well-being of the city.” Zhu told CNN in 2013, “when a city is losing its bookshops, it's actually losing something in its soul.”

If the success of the Honesty Bookstore is any guide, Nanjing's soul is in pretty good shape.

    An autonomous vehicle designed for making local commerce deliveries was unveiled by Nuro. The vehicle is about the height of an SW but far narrower than a typical car. The electric car features four exterior compartments (暗格) — two on each side — to hold separate deliveries. Each compartment can be tailored to a specific use, such as cooking a pizza or refrigerating a package.

    “We can use self-driving technology to deliver anything, anytime, anywhere for basically all local goods and services,” Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said. “Consumers used to be okay with two-week paid shipping. It became two-week free delivery, followed by one week, two days, and the same day. Now same-day delivery isn't fast enough for some customers.”

    Nuro isn't alone in building robots for local commerce deliveries. Earlier this month, Toyota, a Japanese car company, unveiled a concept vehicle that could be used for package delivery. A handful of startups — including Starship Technologies, Marble and Dispatch — are testing small robots for deliveries on sidewalks.

    Nuro's vehicle will likely face legal hurdles. Fully autonomous vehicles without a test driver aren't legal in California today, and many companies have shifted testing to states where regulators are more welcoming of autonomous vehicles, such as Arizona.

    Nuro expects to face fewer challenges because it doesn't carry passengers. Nuro's narrow size may also be helpful when navigating streets and avoiding pedestrians. The vehicle isn't equipped with any special features to communicate with pedestrians or other road users. Some companies have tested and patented solutions such as digital screens that signal the car's next move. Ferguson said his team conducted studies and found that such techniques could confuse people. Nuro believes it's better to make sure the car performs predictably, so that human drivers know what to expect from it.

    “We feel by creating this new technology that's going to enable this last mile delivery, we're going to be creating new markets and doing things that previously weren't possible,” Ferguson said. “This is not swapping out Jobs with robots. It's creating new markets. There will definitely be new employment opportunities.”

    Amsterdam is most famous for its artistic heritage. This tradition is proudly on display in the Rijksmuseum (translates as State Museum). Once you've taken in all that has to offer, artists, history fens, and families shouldn't pass up the chance to visit the Van Gogh Museum —containing around 700 paintings and drawings by Vincent and other artists, including Gauguin, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

    Amsterdam is also home to the Anne Frank Museum, where Anne hid with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. On a lighter note, taking a canal cruise through its extensive waterways is a rewarding way to see the Dutch capital.

Art lovers get their tickets at:

    The Van Gogh Museum Rijksmuseum Museum het Rembrandthuis

Food and drink

    Cheese lovers love Amsterdam. You can find an excuse to eat cheese at any time of the day here. Gouda is Holland's favorite, developing a more intense flavor the longer it's aged. Find a selection at the markets, try a cheeseboard at dinner time, or just order cubes with mustard for dipping to accompany a drink. When you're hungry for non-cheese food groups, you'll find Michel in-starred restaurants, vegetarian, and organic restaurants that accompany an array of global cuisine. For old-fashioned and modern Dutch food, try these Amsterdam restaurants: Moeders, Haesje Claes, Loctje, Greetje, and De Silveren Spiegel.

Don't leave without tasting:

    Patat (hot chips with toppings), Stroopwafel (waffle cookie), Chocomel (chocolate milk)

    Amsterdam Fast Facts

    Approximate flight times:

    NYC/ New York 7 hours 20 minutes, Philadelphia 8 hours, Boston 7 hours

    Miami 9 hours 45 minutes, Los Angeles 10 hours 15 minutes

    I'm a student in my fourth year of a biomedical science degree at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, but I also work 38 hours a week at Sainsbury's to make ends meet. I do three night shifts a week, plus overtime if I can get it. Monday is the most occupied day for me — I work from 10 pm until 8 am on Saturday and Sunday nights, earning just over £100 a night, and then I have to be at my first lecture at 9 am on Monday. By the time I finish lectures, at 2 pm, I'm exhausted, but I know I have to be back at work by 10 pm.

    I constantly have to force myself to stay awake, and to be alert, whatever it takes. A packet of Skittles and a Red Bull usually helps. The work I do at Sainsbury's is very physical like stacking shelves. I'm lucky because I'm an active person and the amount I lift at work is nothing compared with the weights I lift in the gym. I know I have the strength to bear it.

    I'm originally from Nigeria. I came here when I was seven, growing up in Croydon, south London. Money was tight. My parents gave me everything I needed, but there was no money to spend on luxuries. I worked hard at school though and, with the help of GT Scholars, I got some of the best A-level grades in my class.

    Unfortunately, though I had applied for “settled” British residential status when very young, the Home Office waited until I was in sixth form to approve my application. That meant I wasn't eligible for a student loan. The only way I could afford to go to university was that if I got a job that would pay for all my living costs and my parents, who work in market research, paid for my tuition fees. In Scotland, that's about £7,000 a year.

    I don't have much time to socialize because of my job. Ideally, I would also like to have more time to study so I can excel at my course. Yes, I have a lot on my plate, but working hard isn't new to me. Growing up, my parents and my mentors in the church and at GT Scholars cultivated in me the importance of working hard for what I want in life.

    My dream is to do an MA in physiotherapy next year and then get a job working for the NHS. But right now, I'm just focused on trying to get the best grades I can. Whenever I find life hard, I tell myself this is about my future. I don't need much, but I would like to worry less about money and have more free time. That is what I look forward to the most.

    You know the feeling that you have left your phone at home and feel anxious, as if you have lost your connection to the world. “Nomophobia” (无手机恐惧症) affects teenagers and adults alike. You can even do an online test to see if you have it. Last week, researchers from Hong Kong warned that nomophobia is infecting everyone. Their study found that people who use their phones to store, share and access personal memories suffer most. When users were asked to describe how they felt about their phones, words such as “hurt” (neck pain was often reported) and “alone” predicted higher levels of nomophobia.

    “The findings of our study suggest that users regard smartphones as their extended selves and get attached to the devices,” said Dr. Kim Ki Joon. “People experience feelings of anxiety and unpleasantness when separated from their phones.” Meanwhile, an American study shows that smartphone separation can lead to an increase in heart rate and blood pressure.

    So can being without your phone really give you separation anxiety? Professor Mark Griffiths, psychologist and director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, says it is what is on the phone that counts-the social networking that creates Fomo (fear of missing out).

    “We are talking about an internet-connected device that allows people to deal with lots of aspects of their lives,” says Griffiths. “You would have to surgically remove a phone from a teenager because their whole life is rooted in this device.”

Griffiths thinks attachment theory, where we develop emotional dependency on the phone because it holds details of our lives, is a small part of nomophobia. For “screenagers”, it is Fomo that creates the most separation anxiety. If they can't see what's happening on Snapchat or Instagram, they become panic-stricken about not knowing what's going on socially. “But they adapt very quickly if you take them on holiday and there's no internet,” says Griffiths.

    More than 40 percent of the species that help with pollination (植物传粉) are under threat due to the polluted environment. So some researchers have been searching for ways to protect the bees and other crucial pollinators while some engineers have thought perhaps an army of robotic pollinators could keep humans well-supplied in these foods. A team of researchers has recently designed a small drone capable of pollinating flowers. They tested their device on the large, pink flowers of lilies. And it worked.

    Exciting as this success was, it is only the first step. The team has yet to figure out how to apply the concept on the massive scale. Could a fleet of robo-pollinators replace the bees?

    “Although the answer isn't a straightforward no, it would be a challenging leap to go from this one little drone pollinating one large flower to an army of drones spreading across fields of crops,” says Scott Swinton, an agricultural economist at Michigan State University.

    “The successful pollination was fascinating,” Scott Swinton says, “but the device itself might damage the flowers. I wonder how you make sure you're not doing more harm than good to flowers when you have a drone.”

    “Furthermore,” he points out, “a lily is a particularly easy flower for a drone to pollinate. To make this more broadly applicable for smaller and more complex flower structures, the drones would need to be particularly agile.”

    Still, Joshua Campbell, an expert at the University of Florida, says “Pollination systems are extremely complex and will always require insects. There is no substitute for bees.”

    “As for the technology itself, it is a promising new development in existing drone technology,” he added. Yet he still sees some hurdles ahead before drones can be applied on a large scale.