The Best Time to Visit These Pricey Destinations

    If you're going to shell out on a vacation, then you might as well do it right. With that in mind, we've asked a few experts for tips on when to visit some of the most expensive places across the globe. Here's what they had to say.

    Botswana

    Hotels in Botswana are second only to Dubai in terms of average cost per person, per night, at around $257. To make the most of your time there, consider an autumn visit, suggests Sarah Faith of Responsible Travel. “The heat peaks in October—this is the best time to go and see wild animals as they gather around in the Okavango Delta”, says Faith. While wildlife viewing is incredible in Botswana, there's much to enjoy away from the wilderness, too.”

    New York City

    New York is the second-most expensive holiday destination overall and the most expensive place to dine out, with an average meal for two costing around $67. Garrett, the CEO of Discover New York, suggests, “October and June have gorgeous weather, so outdoor activities are a good choice, with sailing, in-depth neighborhood walks and biking.” For great value, she advises traveling in January and February, when the city offers tons of indoor activities, from art galleries and Broadway shows to indoor sports events and thousands of dining options.

    Sydney

    With its incredible surfing beaches, dining scene and friendly locals, Sydney is always a favorite of travelers. It's also expensive. Generally, the shoulder seasons (fall and spring in the U.S.) have the most comfortable weather and fewer crowds than the December-to-February high season. But some months have particular appeal, according to Stuart Rigg, Australian travel specialist for Southern Crossings. April, for example, falls into the low season, which means you'll find hotel deals along with weather that's typically “very pleasant,” Rigg says. “Sydney also has some great events during this low season period,” he adds.

    London

    Petulia Melideo, who runs Context's London walking tours, advises booking well in advance for lower hotel rates, and suggests a wintry visit. “November is a great time for London. The weather is still tolerable—and if it gets too chilly, there are plenty of cozy pubs to pop into,” she says. Other good times to visit include June, which means fewer tourists.

    We have a problem，and the strange thing is that we not only know about it, but also celebrate it. Just today, someone boasted (自夸) to me that she was so busy she's averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn't complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone.

    Why are rational (理性的) people so irrational in their behavior? The answer is that we're in the midst of a bubble (泡沫). I call it “The More Bubble”.

    The nature of bubbles is that something is overvalued until—eventually—the bubble bursts, and we're left wondering why we were so irrational in the first place. The thing we're overvaluing now is the opinion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all.

    This bubble is being enabled by a combination of three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism (消费主义). The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we should be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we boasted about being busy—it's code for being successful and important.

    And our answer to the problem of more is always more. We need more technology to help us create more technologies. We need to move our workload to free up our own time to do yet even more.

    Luckily, there is a solution to asking for more: asking for less, but better. A growing number of people are making this change. I call these people Essentialists.

    These people are designing their lives around what is essential and removing everything else. These people arrange to have actual weekends (during which they are not working). They create technology-free zones in their homes. They trade time on Facebook with calling those few friends who really matter to them. Instead of running to different meetings, they put space on their plans to get important work done.

    So we have two choices: We can be among the last people caught up in “The More Bubble,” or we can join the growing community of Essentialists and get more of what matters in our one precious life.

    Most people who fly on passenger planes in the United States do not lose their luggage. Even if the luggage is lost, usually it is only delayed. Most "lost" luggage is found in a few days. Airlines search for the owners of unclaimed(未认领的) bags for up to three months. But when the owners cannot be found or the bags are not claimed, they are sold to a store in the small city of Scottsboro, in the southern state of Alabama.

    About one-half of one percent of all luggage passing through US airports is unclaimed. Many of the missing bags, and what is in them, are sold at the Unclaimed Baggage Center. Seven thousand items arrive at the store every day. Tom Barnes, who was shopping at the store said, "I can go into any of the large shopping centers, like the international malls. I can walk through there for an hour and come out with three items. But I come into this store, and then I come out with my car full of stuff."

    Brenda Cantrell, who works at the store, said, "The Unclaimed Baggage Center is the only store in America that buys and resells unclaimed baggage from the airline industry. You would be surprised at all the jackets, eyeglasses, neck pillows, blankets, laptops, Kindles, iPads, and you know, all kinds of expensive electronics."

    The store says it once sold a container for flowers for $80 that was found to be worth $18,000. And it says a painting it sold for $25 was later found to be worth $25,000.

    The store buys the luggage from the airlines. It does not examine the things inside them before buying them. Only about half of the items in the bags are suitable for sale at the store.

    Some people say it is not fair to the owners of the lost passage to sell their goods. Customer Daniel Martin is not one of them, saying, "I feel the airport may try to find the people that lose the things. If they've tried and they can't get a hold of them, it's better than throwing them away or just letting them rot in a warehouse somewhere."

    Air travel can be annoying. But research now suggests global warming could make it much worse. To get off the ground in really hot weather, planes may be forced to carry fewer passengers. That might mean a little more space, which would be good. However, it also would make the passengers pay more.

    Average air temperatures around the world are rising because people are polluting the air with an increasing number of greenhouse gases, which, such as carbon dioxide, are a byproduct (副产品) of burning fuels. Those warmer temperatures can influence an airplane's ability to fly because air molecules (分子) spread out more as the air warms. This produces less lift under a plane's wings, so a plane must be lighter to take off in hot weather than on cooler days.

It can even prove too dangerous for some planes to attempt a take-off. A record of June heat wave in the American Southwest, for instance, caused flight cancellations in Phoenix, Ariz. One airline's planes were cleared to operate only up to 47.8 degree Celsius. On June 20, Phoenix reached 48.3℃!

    Radley Horton is a climate scientist at Columbia University. Two years ago, he and his graduate student Ethan David Coffel studied the impact of warming at four U.S. airports and found that warming of track could triple (使成三倍) the number of days when planes face weight restrictions. Later, they explored the impact of rising temperatures on live types of commercial planes flying out of 19 of the world's busiest airports. In the coming decades, as many as one to three out of every 10 flights that take off during the hottest time of day could face weight. That would be equal to taking a dozen people off the plane, the researchers calculated.

    Drug companies have spent billions of dollars searching for therapies to reverse or significantly slow Alzheimer's disease, but in vain. Some researchers argue that the best way to make progress is to create better animal models for research, and several teams are now developing mice that more closely imitate how the disease destroys people's brains.

    The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the UK Dementia Research Institute and Jackson Laboratory (JAX) - one of the world's biggest suppliers of lab mice - are among the groups trying to genetically design more suitable mice. Scientists are also exploring the complex web of mutations(突变) that influences neurological (神经学的) decline in mice and people.

    "We appreciate that the models we had were insufficient. I think it's sort of at a critical moment right now." says Bruce Lamb, a neuro-scientist at Indiana University ~ho directs the NIH-funded programme.

    Alzheimer's is marked by cognitive impairment(认知损伤) and the build-up of amyloid-protein plaques (淀粉样蛋白块) in the brains of people, but the disease does not occur naturally in mice. Scientists get around this by studying mice that have been genetically modified to produce high levels of human amyloid protein. These mice develop plaques in their brains, but they still do not display the memory problems seen in people.

    Many experimental drugs that have successfully removed plaques from mouse brains have not lessened the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in people. One focused stumble came last month, when three companies reported that their Alzheimer's drugs had failed in large, late-stage clinical trials. Although the drugs successfully blocked the accumulation of amyloid protein in mice, they seemed to worsen cognitive decline and brain shrinkage in people.

    The drive for better mouse models comes as genomics studies are linking the most common form of Alzheimer's to dozens of different genes. This diversity suggests that each case of the disease is caused by a different combination of genetic and environmental factors. "There is no single Alzheimer's disease," says Gareth Howell, a neuro-scientist at Jackson Laboratory (JAX) in Bar Harbor, Maine.

    Howell argues that scientists' reliance on lab mice with only a few genetically engineered mutations might have limited research. His own work suggests that in mice, just as in people, genetic diversity plays a part in determining how Alzheimer's develops.

    College graduation brings both the satisfaction of academic achievement and the expectation of a well-paid job. But for 6, 000 graduates at San Jose State this year, there's uncertainty as they enter one of the worst job markets in decades. Ryan Stewart has a freshly-minted (新兴的) degree in religious studies, but no job prospects.

    "You look at everybody's parents and neighbours, and they're getting laid off and don't have jobs," said Stewart. "Then you look at the young people just coming into the workforce... it's just scary."

    When the class of 2003 entered college, the future never looked brighter. But in the four years they've been here, the world outside has changed dramatically.

    "Those were the exciting times, lots of dot-com opportunities, exploding offers, students getting top dollar with lots of benefits," said Cheryl Allmen-Vinnidge of the San Jose State Career Center. "Times have changed. It's a new market."

    Cheryl Allmen-Vinnidge ought to know. She runs the San Jose State Career Center, sort of a crossroads between college and the real world. Allmen-Vinnidge says students who do find jobs after college have done their homework.

    "The typical graduate who does have a job offer started working on it two years ago. They've postured (定位) themselves well during the summer. They've had several internships (实习)," she said. And they've majored in one of the few fields that are still hot, like chemical engineering, accounting, or nursing, where average starting salaries have actually increased over last year. Other popular fields (like information systems management, computer science, and political science) have seen big declines in starting salaries.

    Ryan Stewart (he had hoped to become a teacher) may just end up going back to school. "I'd like to teach college some day and that requires more schooling, which would be great in a bad economy," he said.

    To some students, a degree may not be a ticket to instant wealth. For now, they can only hope its value will increase over time.