“Soon, you're going to have to move out!” cried my neighbor upon seeing the largest tomato plant known to mankind, or at least known in my neighborhood.

    One tiny 9-inch plant, bought for $1.25 in the spring, has already taken over much of my rose bed, covering much of other plants, and is well on its way to the front door.

    Roses require a good deal of care, and if it weren't for the pleasure they give, it wouldn't be worth the work. As it is, I have a garden full of sweet-smelling roses for most of the year. bushes must be pruned(剪枝) in early spring, leaving ugly woody branches until the new growth appears a few weeks later. It was the space available(可用的) in the garden that led me into planting just one little tomato plant. A big mistake.

    Soil conditions made just perfect for roses turn out to be even more perfect for tomatoes. The daily watering coupled with full sun and regular fertilizing(施肥) have turned the little plant into a tall bush. The cage I placed around it as the plant grew has long since disappeared under the thick leaves.

    Now the task I face in harvesting the fruit is twofold; First, I have to find the red ones among the leaves, which means I almost have to stand on my head, and once found I have to reach down and under, pick the tomatoes and withdraw(缩回) my full fist without dropping the prize so dearly won. I found two full-blown white roses completely hidden as I picked tomatoes in June, but they were weak and the leaves already yellow for lack of light.

    Here I am faced with a painful small decision: To tear up a wonderful and productive tomato plant that offers up between ten and twenty ripe sweet tomatoes each day or say goodbye to several expensive and treasured roses. Like Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, I'll think about that tomorrow.

    When Luke went to university he thought he would be on a new journey in life and getting his own place. In the UK, it's common to fly the nest at a fairly young age. Many choose a flat-share; others make plans to get on the property ladder.

    But the current economic situation forced Luke back to his mum's house at the age of 27. And he's not alone: a quarter of young adults in the UK now live with their parents. The Office for National Statistics said more than 3.3 million adults between the ages of 20 and 34 were living with their parents in 2013.

    Lack of jobs and the high cost of renting accommodation made Luke change his plans. He's upset. "There's something very difficult about being an adult living in an environment where you're still a child," he says. "It limits me socially; sometimes I feel it limits me professionally."

    Indeed, many young people have no choice but to stay at "the hotel of Mum and Dad".

    Krissy had to return home after a year away and now lives in rather terrible conditions, sharing the family's three-bedroom house with her sisters. She says they end up getting on each other's nerves when it's time to use the bathroom in the morning.

    Of course, living with your parents is not unusual in some countries. Economic conditions, culture, or family traditions mean many young people stay at home until they get married. Even then, it can be too expensive to rent or buy a house and the married couples continue to live at one of their parents' homes.

    But some parents seem to enjoy having their kids back at home. Janice's daughters are part of what's being called "the boomerang generation". She says, "I get to share their lives with them, and I've got to know them all as adults. We have the sort of conversations that good friends do."

    So for some it's a win-win situation — spending time with your families, and saving money.

    Rainforests, it turns out, are not created equal. Take the Amazon rainforest, an area that covers about 7 million square kilometers. But within that huge expanse are all kinds of ecological zones, and some of these zones, says Greg Asner, are a lot more crowded than others.

    “Some forests have many species of trees,” he said, “others have few. Many forests are unique from others in terms of their overall species composition…” And all of these different small areas of forest exist within the giant space that is the Amazon Rainforest.

    So Asner, using the signature technique called airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, began to map these different zones from the air. “By mapping the traits of tropical forests from above,” he explains, “we are, for the first time, able to understand how forest composition varies geographically.”

    The results show up in multicolored maps, with each color representing different kinds of species, different kinds of trees, the different kinds of chemical they are producing and using, and even the amount of biodiversity, the animal and plant species that live within each zone.

    Armed with this information, Asner says decision-makers now have “a first-time way to decide whether any given forest geography is protected well enough or not. If not, then new protections can be put in place to save a given forest from destruction.”

    Asner says the information is a great way for decision-makers to develop a “cost-benefit ratio type analysis.”  Conservation efforts can be expensive, so armed with this information, government leaders can ensure they are making the most of their conservation dollars by focusing on areas that are the most biologically diverse or unique.

    The next step, Asner says, is to take his project global, and to put his eyes even higher in the sky, on orbital satellites. “The technique we developed and applied to map Peru is ready to go global.” Asner said. “We want to put the required instrumentation on an Earth-orbiting satellite, to map the planet every month, which will give the best possible view of how the world's biodiversity is changing, and where to put much needed protections.

    Of all the mountain gorillas that veterinarian Mike has treated in the past 18 years, a gorilla named Ijabo stands out the most. When Ijabo was three days old, an examination showed that one of his legs was badly damaged. Mike removed Ijabo's leg below the knee. Five years later, Mike says Ijabo is doing well. “I still see him every now and again,” Mike told TFK. “It's heartwarming.”

    Mike is a co-director of Gorilla Doctors. The organization provides medical care to ill and injured mountain and Grauer's gorillas. Its 16 veterinarians work in national parks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. For years, the apes have fallen victim to habitat loss, poaching, and disease. According to their website, Gorilla Doctor's task is to save the apes “one gorilla at a time”.

    The doctors treat mostly gorillas that are accustomed to humans. Trackers, guides, and veterinarians check on habituated gorillas in the field several times each week. Sometimes, a gorilla has a medical problem that requires treatment.

    That calls for an intervention. A helper shoots the animal with a dart(飞镖). If the gorilla appears to have a serious but treatable illness, the dart contains antibiotics to fight off infection. If it appears to need surgery, the dart contains a drug that leaves the gorilla unconscious and unable to feel pain.

    Although the gorillas are critically endangered, there are signs of hope, thanks in part to Gorilla Doctors. The mountain gorilla is the only great-ape species whose population is growing.

    “Habituated mountain gorillas are increasing by 4% each year, which is as fast as the human population is growing globally,” Mike says. He notes a recent study that credits the work of Gorilla Doctors for 50% of that growth. He is proud of the role his team has played in making it happen.

Photographic self-portraits have existed for as long as cameras have been in human hands. But what about selfies in space? On Twitter last year, NASA astronaut Edwin Aldrin, who famously became the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969, laid claim to a spaceflight first: taking the first selfie in space during the Gemini XII mission in 1966.

"For me, it needs to be digital to be selfie," argues Jennifer Levasseur, a director at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to Levasseur, the concept of a selfie is directly linked to internet culture. "The thing that makes a selfie is sharing it," she says.

Still, astronauts have been carrying cameras aboard space vehicles since the 1960s. In 1966, Aldrin used a Hasselblad camera designed specifically for space. Hasselblad also painted the first camera in space a matte(磨砂) black to reduce reflections in the orbiter window. But cameras used in space need to survive extreme conditions, like temperature swings from -149° to 248°F, so Hasselblad painted later model silver.

Astronauts visiting the moon then had to take out the film and leave their camera bodies behind when they returned to Earth, because early space missions were limited by a weight limit on the returned trip. Then a big change in space camera technology came after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on its return to Earth in 2003, Levasseur notes. "Fear that they'd never be able to bring film back from space and lose all that hard work accelerated the push for digital," she says.

Today, astronauts also have access to internet and social platforms in space and can post true space selfies made using digital cameras. Similarly, space robots are participating in selfie culture, capturing remote pictures of themselves in space or on other planets and sending them back to Earth.

If any New Yorker of Asian descent( 血统) needs a safe way to get around, Madeline Park has got their back. Park created an Instagram account called “Cafemaddycab” amid a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes across the US. The account has one goal: to pay the Uber or Lyft fee for any woman or elderly individual of Asian descent in New York in order to help them get to their destinations safely if they feel “unsafe taking the train in NYC".

Park, who had spent a majority of her decade in New York as a “broke student”, knew all too well what it was like to have to take the train or walk home rather than calling a cab because it was too expensive.

Now, she's using money from her own pocket, as well as from other donors, to make sure the cost isn't preventing anyone else from getting a ride. She decided to do so after fearing for her own safety just the other week.

“That's it. I took the train to work last week and every minute of the ride I was stressed," Park said in an Instagram post.“I was afraid that someone was going to walk up and start attacking me.”

One incident still on Park's mind was when “someone set a 29 year -old Asian woman's backpack on fire in the train around Ktown". Park said she was done taking the train while these hate crimes were going on and so should you.

Park started out with $ 2,000 of her own money, which she used to help reimburse(报销) any Lyft or Uber ride up to $ 40 per person. Within two days, donors collectively poured in over $ 100, 000 to help with her efforts. Park started accepting more donations and she expected other cities to start their own cab initiative(倡议).However, it's no small task.

“You have to have the TIME to commit to this and preferably a few people you trust to work with you, and a big heart for our community # StopAsianHate,” Park wrote in an Instagram post.