Best Subscription (订阅) Boxes for Families to Enjoy Together

When we’re all busy with school, work, this, that and the other, we all desire more family time. We’ve got some of the best subscription boxes that can bring family fun for all age groups and gather the whole family together for screen-free fun.

Reading Bug Box

Price: Starts at $18.00/month

Designed for newborns on up to 13 years old, the mix of 3-4 children’ books has been personalized to every child’s age, reading level, and interests. Allow some of the finest book-loving experts to fill your home library with colorful tales.

Craft (手工) + Boogie Box

Price: Starts at $24.95/month

Designed for kids aged 3-8, every box brings a mini party in the mail, sending themed boxes packed with holiday fun for the whole family. Celebrate popular and less-known holidays with a mix of stress-free DIY craft projects, a Boogie music playlist, snack recipes, party supplies and a game for everyone to enjoy.

We Craft Box

Price: Starts at $25.00/month

As one of the best subscription boxes of the year, each box is designed for kids aged 3-9 and centers around a children’s storybook. No need to spend your time planning and shopping! Just open craft boxes filled with high quality materials and supplies, and get straight down to making memories.

Terra Create Craft

Price: Starts at $34.00/month

The Terra Create Craft can help you get hands-on experience with your teens for a little creative crafting. Every month brings all you’ll need to make a fashionable, gender-neutral (中性的) project, including materials, illustrated (图解) steps and high quality tools.

An 84-year-old Kansas woman, Genie, last month auctioned (拍卖) off her Ford truck for $16,000 — that’s not unusual. What is unusual is that her Ford has been in her family since before she was born in 1937.

The truck was originally bought by Genie’s father back when horses and carriages were still the main form of transportation. Genie said her father got it before he got her and he was pretty proud of this truck because he had farmed with horses. But sometimes horses were not quite up to farm work. For a farmer, going from horses to a new truck was a big deal in those days.

What’s so amazing about the old truck, though, is how well it’s preserved. And it amazingly still ran although the motor, the only part that isn’t original, was remade and replaced. It still has its original paint job, with just a little rust (锈迹). The same sideboards which once increased its room to load more grain are still in place. And the truck still has its documentation from July 1937. It is interesting to see that, at that time, it was titled using the engine number worthy to be seen in a museum.

After twenty years of working the fields, the truck was parked in a barn in 1957 after Genie’s mother replaced the tires during the hard time of World War Ⅱ. Her mother even had a hard time getting a tire for it. She hadn’t got angry very much, but she sure did that time. And it’s hardly seen the light of day since then, some 64 years ago.

Old vehicle owners will agree that this Ford truck is not only unique but also exceptional. This truck is not perfect. However, it’s original, and you can’t find original very often.

We’ve had weather forecasts for years. Forecasting our near-term health is far harder. Yet knowing early that we may be coming down with the flu could be greatly helpful. Wearable technology, such as smart watches, is beginning to provide just such early warnings.

A research team asked 49 volunteers to wear wristbands with sensors before and after they received a cold or flu virus. At least once per second, there wristbands recorded heart rates, body movements, skin temperatures and more. In nine out of every ten participants, these data showed signs of developing illness at least a day before symptoms(症状)appeared.

This early warning can help stop infections (传染) in the beginning. It may head off serious symptoms that otherwise would send weak people into hospital, allowing them to get some rest, reduce their stress and perhaps take drugs. And knowing you’re sick before you have symptoms can warn you to lay low so you can reduce the chance of spreading your disease.

However, these systems aren’t yet ready for the real world. One challenge is that many viral infections have similar symptoms. In fact, many things other than viruses cause the same symptoms. Examples include food poisoning, asthma or seasonal allergies. Similarly, heart rates respond to things that have nothing to do with infections, such as exercise and scary movies. What’s more, in real life, we don’t know who was exposed (暴露) to some virus and when, so that post-exposure time window won’t be known. Potentially infected people might be those whose data go beyond a certain value in any two-hour window. But the team has not yet tested how well the prediction model would work in this setting.

The study sounds exciting, but much work is left to do. Future systems will likely include other types of bodily changes that pinpoint developing illness. And researchers will be fine-tuning (微调) those systems by analyzing how well they predict effects in thousands of people.

180 Toronto buildings have given up energy intensive (密集的) air-conditioning in favor of cooling by pumping cold water from the depths of Lake Ontario through pipes in the walls and floors. These include City Hall, Toronto General Hospital, hotels, data centers, and the Scotiabank Arena, home to the Raptors basketball team — altogether the 54 million square feet of real estate (房地产) saves 90,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually, which is enough to power 25,000 homes.

The Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC) system of Toronto is the largest of its kind on Earth. It relies on three pipes lying 3.5 miles south of the city, 280 feet below the lake, which bring in the 4°C water before pumping it to a central station that then sends it through to the buildings. Warm water running out of the buildings is pumped back into the lake to make up the difference, taking the heat it takes in with it.

A big project related to DLWC in Toronto is called The Well. It is a thermal storage system using a two-million gallon tank of cold water from the lake which can store energy at night during off-peak times, easing (缓解) the pressure on the electricity net and reducing costs. This will open the door to another 17 million square feet of real estate.

DLWC isn’t the only method of cooling buildings with water; the other involves evaporating (蒸发) water using large tanks as a means of getting rid of heat. However, this leads to mass water usage, and DLWC can keep 220 million gallons of water in the lake, in the pipes, or in the ground, compared to evaporative cooling.

DLWC isn’t something every city or building can use, but some buildings, like the million square foot HSBC Headquarters in Hong Kong, are cooled with seawater instead.