If you don't think technology can improve your trip better, meet Judy. When she recently checked into the Biu Hotel in Zurich, a clerk asked her to pay hundreds of dollars higher than the online offer. It was not a cheap stay, but it became more of one after she fired up the Booking. Com app she'd used to purchase her room on her smartphone. “As soon as I showed him the rate, he honored it,” Judy says.

    Technology may create challenges for travelers-indeed, it may have led to Judy's rate confusion in the first place-but it can also solve them. The solutions go beyond making sure of a hotel rate. The latest version of Booking.com is among the most feature-rich booking programs. Users can select hotels by location, make a secure booking and view the confirmed rate.

    Another pain point for travelers is traffic that eats away precious vacation time. There's a new app for that, called Commute. As the name implies, it's aimed at users who have to make the same trip every day. Just input basic information about your destination and expected leaving time, and the app will start sending you traffic data 15 minutes before you leave.

    Another source of travel-related conflict and confusion is money. That's particularly true when you're dealing with a foreign currency. The latest version of Travel Money Tracker helps travelers prevent currency mix-ups. It instantly converts(兑换) a country's native currency to yours, so you know exactly how much that Espresso(浓咖啡) in Milan costs in dollars. One extra feature is the ability to set up an alert that tells 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.

    World Expo 2010 will be held in Shanghai. It will last from May 1st to October 31st, 2010. The Expo site covers a total area of 5.28 km². It spans(横跨) both sides of the Huangpu River, with 3.93 km² in Pudong and 1.35 km² in Puxi. There are five functional zones marked A, B, C, D and E. Each of them has different functions.

    Zone A will host the national pavilions(国家馆) of Asian countries except southeast Asian ones.

    Zone B will be home to the China Pavilion(中国馆) and Oceania (大洋洲的) countries, Pavilions for International Organizations, Theme Pavilions(主题馆), Expo Centre, and Performance Centre etc.

    Zone C will host the national pavilions of European, American and African countries. A large public amusement park will be built at the entrance of this zone.

    Zone D is home to Corporate Pavilions(企业馆), the land is one of the original places of modern China's national industry. So some of the old industrial buildings will be kept and renovated(修复) into Expo pavilions.

    Zone E will host stand-alone(独立的) Corporate Pavilions, Urban Civilization Pavilion (城市文明馆), and Urban Best Practices Area.

    The number of accidents involving pedestrians (行人) wearing headphones is on the rise, a report suggests, causing fresh warning from road safety groups in Britain.

    A US-based study found a total of 116 reports of death or injury to pedestrians wearing headphones between 2004 and 2011, jumping from 16 in 2005 to 47 in 2011.

    Most victims were men (68%) and under the age of 30 (67%), with around one in ten of all cases (9%) under the age of 18.Some 89% of the cases occurred in urban areas and more than half (55%) of the victims were struck by trains .

Eighty-one of the 116 accidents (70%) resulted in the person's death—even though a warning was sounded in around a third of the cases.

    The study concluded, “The use of headphone may be a safety risk to pedestrians , especially in environments with moving vehicles（cars）. Further research is needed to determine if and how headphone use threatens pedestrian safety.” British road safety groups warned pedestrians to be careful.

    Floor Lieshout, director of Youth For Road Safety, said,“ This study shows once more the importance of using all of our senses while we are near traffic. It is important that we find an attractive way to make youth learn about the risks of wearing headphones in traffic.”

    Andrew Howard, who is the head of road safety at the Automobile Association, added that some pedestrians can be “so focused in their own little world they forget the world going on around them”. That can include headphone wearers, Howard said, but also people talking on phones.

    However, Howard said that more researches needed to be done.

    Earlier studies have shown that people wearing headphones or talking on phones can suffer “inattentional blindness” which makes them isolated (孤立) from the world around them .

    Ian Harvey, at the charity Civic Voice, said that “ to defeat isolation and to help build a civic(文明的) society, people need to interact(交往) with each other .

    He said,“ A basis for any civilized society is communication—Surfing the web, listening to MP3s, reading blogs or sending e-mail is not interacting with a person; it's interacting with a machine.

    “If people feel socially isolated, they need to have more face-to-face interactions with other human beings and in time, will begin to feel happier and more connected to the world and place they live in.”

    China has become the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. The Chang'e-4 probe (探测器) has also made the first lunar landing since 1972. It has the task of exploring the side of the moon that never faces the earth. The dark side of the moon is older and has a thicker surface than the visible side. It takes the moon as long to go around on its own axis (轴) as it does for one complete orbit around the Earth.

    The Chinese probe landed in a huge crater 2500 km in diameter and 13 km deep. The crater is one of the oldest parts of the moon and our solar system.

    Scientists hope to learn more about the geology of the far side of the moon. The craft has two cameras on board which will send images back to earth. It will also attempt to send signals to distant regions of space, something that cannot happen on earth because of too much radio noise.

    Chang'e-4 also has instruments on board to examine minerals as well as a container with seeds which will try to create a miniature (微型的) biosphere (生物圈).

Communication with the spacecraft is not easy. Images and other data must be transmitted to a separate satellite because no direct communication with the earth is possible.

    For China the Chang'e-4 mission is an important achievement, because the country has successfully done something no other nation on earth has. It wants to become a leading power in space exploration and has announced plans to send astronauts to the moon and set up its own space station.

There's a useful concept from psychology that helps explain why good people do things that harm the environment: the false consensus effect. That's where we overvalue how acceptable and prevalent（普遍的） our own behavior is in society. Put simply, if you're doing something （even if you secretly know you probably shouldn't）, you're more likely to think plenty of other people do it too. What's more, you likely overestimate how much other people think that behavior is broadly OK.

This bias（偏见） allows people to justify socially unacceptable or illegal behaviors. Researchers have observed the false consensus effect in drug use and illegal hunting. More recently, conservationists are beginning to reveal how this effect contributes to environmental damage.

In Australia, people who admitted to poaching（偷猎） thought it was much more prevalent in society than it really was, and had higher estimates than fishers who obeyed the law. They also believed others viewed poaching as socially acceptable; however, in reality, more than 90% of fishers held the opposite view. The false consensus effect has also shown up in studies examining support for nuclear energy and offshore wind farms.

Just as concepts from psychology can help explain some forms of environmental damage, so too can they help address it. For example, research shows people are more likely to litter in areas where there's already a-lot of trash scattered around; so making sure the ground around a bin is not covered in rubbish may help.

Factual information on how other people think and behave can be very powerful. Energy companies have substantially reduced energy consumption simply by showing people how their electricity use compares to their neighbors. Encouragingly, stimulating people's natural desire for status has also been successful in getting people to "go green to be seen", or to publicly buy eco-friendly products.

As the research evidence shows, social norms can be a powerful force in encouraging and popularizing environmentally friendly behaviors. Perhaps you can do your bit by sharing this article!