Plenty of people dream of traveling to other planets. But “Star Wars” fans can actually visit locations where many of the films' most famous scenes were shot. Here are some of the places where “Star Wars” comes to life.

Hotel Sidi Driss, Matmata, Tunisia

    Perhaps the most famous "Star Wars" landmark in the world, this is where the interiors of Luke Skywalker's childhood home on planet Tatooine were filmed. Centuries ago, Berbers built the underground structure as a real home. Eventually it became a hotel, which George Lucas used to film the first "Star Wars" film. The set decorations came down when the crew left, but were rebuilt in 2000 for "Attack of the Clones." Since then, they've remained, so guests can eat at the table where young master Luke did.

La Grande Dune, outside Nefta, Tunisia

    The igloo(冰屋) outside of Luke's house was filmed about 300 kilometers away on the dried-up salt lake of Chott El Jerid. The igloo is still there, reachable with a decent car at the GPS coordinates 33"50'34. 42"N, 7"46'44.48"E.

    The surrounding hotels are man-made, to create the illusion (幻觉)that the underground house is next to it. The igloo from the 1977 movie was taken apart, but again rebuilt for "Attack of the Clones," and later restored by a fan. Nearby is La Grande Dune, site of the Dune Sea. About 30 minutes from the igloo is the set of Mos Espa, the spaceport town where Anakin was discovered as a young slave.

Redwood National and State parks, California

    Endor, the forest moon home of the furry Ewoks, was filmed among California's giant redwoods. Most of the well-known scenes were shot on private land owned by a lumber company. Since the cast and crew worked on "Return of the Jedi" in 1982, heavy logging has left most of the landscape unrecognizable. But driving through the parks still gives a feel for the set, especially along the Avenue of the Giants highway.

    In Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park and the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, plates were filmed for some chase scenes.

    Phyllis Ramberg,85,lives alone in Hyattsville,Maryland,in the same house for many decades.“Children keep asking me,‘When are you going to move to one of those retirement villages?'I say,‘No,no.My friends are here, my church is close,'”Ramberg said."I've got everything I need,right in this neighborhood."A year ago,Ramberg was able to take care of her backyard.This year,she just can't do it herself."When illnesses happen,you just don't have the capability that you thought you had before,"she said.

    That's where "Aging in Place",a non-profit organization,comes in.Founder Lisa Walker says she and her friends are among the seven percent of Hyattsville residents who are 65 or older."A number of my neighbors are also around my age,"Walker said."We started talking about some of the concerns we had.Several of us had had issues with parents that were getting older and they were far away from them and didn't know how to take care of them or get support."

    Seniors can call Walker's organization with a request,for example,asking for someone to shop for groceries,do small chores around the house or drive them to the doctor.Then a volunteer is assigned to provide the help.Most of the calls are for rides to the doctor."They take me to all my medical appointments,"said Louise Battiste,who is almost 90.

    Aging in Place volunteer Sally Middlebrooks says that a review of new volunteers' background,such as driving records and any criminal history is just as important as the training they receive.“We want the seniors,people we call neighbors,to be assured that they are with safe,reliable people who are also caring people,”Middlebrooks said.

    The volunteers also gain some benefits."I've learned how to stay connected to people,your family and friends," Walker said."Do I stay close to them?Do I try to keep myself devoted to the community,relating to people younger than I am?"Middlebrooks said."I'm learning a lot about this whole process of aging,and I'm learning,to my alarm,that it's very difficult.But I'm also meeting people who amaze me with their flexibility and their sense of humor and their ability to stay very much alive despite aches and pains."

    Not all volunteers are retired.Courtney Wattai,24,is a graduate student at American University in Washington who studies care giving and plans to have a career working with seniors."That's kind of what I want to do because I want to make sure I'm able to improve their lives,"Wattai said.“I want to be involved in their lives,not just sitting at a desk doing things.I thought this would be a good way to give tribute to my grandparents and what they had done for me and my brother."

    It makes Walker happy to see the younger generation stepping up.She hopes that's how residents in her neighborhood will always care for each other.

    Norman Garmezy, a development psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence.” The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as “resilience”.

    Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity (逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

    Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal lens of control(内控点)”. They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

    Ceorge Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. “Stressful” or “traumatic” events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways--to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.

    Not all think laughter is the best medicine, but it seems to help. So scientists carried on a new study of diabetes (糖尿病) patients who were given a good dose of humor for a year to prove it.

    Researchers divided 20 high­risk diabetic patients into two groups. Both groups were given standard diabetes medicine. Group L viewed 30 minutes of humor of their choice, while Group C. the control group. did not. This went on for a year of treatments.

    By two months into the study. the patients in the laughter group had lower level of the hormones epinephrine (肾上腺素), considered to cause stress. which is known to be deadly. After the 12 months. HDL cholesterol rises 26 percent in Group L but only 3 percent in Group C. In another measure. C­reactive proteins, a maker of heart disease. drop 66 percent in the laughter group but only 26 percent in the control group.

    “The best doctors believe that there is a physical good brought about by the positive emotion, happy laughter. ”said study leader Lee Berk of Loma Linda University. And other research has found that humor makes us more hopeful. Still, more study is needed, Berk said. The research by Berk found that humor can bring about similar changes in body chemistry. which was proved in the new study. The research result will be presented this month at the meeting in the US. Research at the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that laughter causes the inner lining of blood vessels to expand. increasing blood flow in a way thought to be healthy.

    “Lifestyle choices have an important effect on health and these are choices which we and patients should pay attention to. rather than prevention and treatment,”Berk said in a statement this week.

    British chemist David Evans has become an overnight celebrity on Chinese social media. His chemistry experiments have attracted over 2 million followers in just a few months. Evans is a chemistry professor at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology. The 60-year-old always wears a white lab coat, a pair of safety goggles (护目镜), and smiles often. Some web users say he looks just like the “grandpa of KFC”.

    Evans has posted videos of various experiments. His most popular experiments have attracted millions of hits on video-sharing apps. Excited children's cheers and shouts can be heard in his videos. “I hope my experiments can arouse people's interest in science,” he says.

    Evans has been interested in China since childhood. In the early 1970s, before the reform and opening-up, he viewed it as a “country full of mysteries”. He first visited the Chinese mainland in 1987 to attend a chemistry conference in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. He quit his job in the United Kingdom and moved to Beijing in 1996. Many of his friends thought he was crazy. But Evans says they just saw China's challenges but not its potential.

    Since 2011, Evans has turned to the Internet to popularize science. He learned short-video apps are also popular in small cities and rural areas. And he realized this enables him to reach more students, who lack opportunities to perform fun experiments. But even a one-minute video requires a considerable amount of work. Still, he thinks it's worth it to fulfill his responsibility to popularize science.

    His experiments always fill schools' lecture halls with laughter. Some viewers call him “a Harry Potter-like magician”, but he disagrees. “A magician never tells the secrets behind his tricks, but a scientist always gives an explanation.” He sees himself as a teacher. He performs experiments to spread knowledge, inspire thinking, remove misunderstandings and show that science can create change. Evans says he looks forward to more “chemical reactions” with China.

What gives your life meaning? It is an important and natural practical question that we all ask ourselves at times. It circles around the notion of having a purpose and a reason to wake up and move forward in our lives. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Is it time to bring it back on track? Here's how to get started.

Treat your depression

Your depression empties your energy and damages your motivation. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Therefore, the key here is taking action no matter what you start with: tackling the depression directly through taking medicines or consulting doctors to get you moving forward. What the action is matters less than taking action itself.

Get out of your head into your emotion

If you are heavily driven by what you should do, you need to start rewiring your brain to use your emotions as information. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Once you notice them, do something concrete with them - again, act. That is how you learn to trust your emotions and use them to guide you, and how you rewire your brain.

Explore, experiment

You can't figure out your sense of purpose by sitting on the couch and thinking it over. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} You also need to focus on doing different experiments with being bold, and taking acceptable risks.

The path to discovering or reigniting your sense of purpose is not about making a new decision but focusing on the process that leads to that decision. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. Hence, your emotions are your source of passion, desire, and energy.

B. It may be caused by physical or emotional limitations that take away joy.

C. However, for many, that sense of purpose has been absent for long stretches.

D. Without them, you don't make the changes that can pull you out of the depression.

E. Instead, you need to explore, try things and see what sticks, what works, what doesn't.

F. Start by focusing on those slightest feelings telling you what you want and don't want.

G. Therefore, you need to clear away obstacles that keep you from acting and moving forward.