What would you miss most and least if you were stuck on a desert island? For me, it would be the changing seasons , especially the fall in New England. Sure, it would be fantastic to have non-stop sun, but I’d miss the color of the seasons. I guess this will sound stupid but I’d probably miss the rain too. I wouldn’t miss getting up at six every day to go to work, though! What about you?

Good question, Steve, I think I’d miss the pastries and different types of bread, and shopping at the local markets, and sausages, although I suppose I could try and make my own. So, yeah, the food. I’d miss the food most. What would I miss least? My mobile phone---I’d like to be completely uncontactable --- at least for a little while.

I would miss the company of people because I know I’d like to have someone to share experiences with. For instance, if there was a fantastic sunrise I’d want someone to be there to enjoy it with me. I’m a sociable sort of person and I’d go mad on my own. And I definitely wouldn’t miss junk mail --- I hate coming home every evening and finding a pile of junk mail in my post box.

Hi, I would miss Manga cartoons, the internet and Japanese food, like nori, sushi and Japanese beef. I’d also miss TV shows and shopping for clothes…and my two dogs. In fact, I’d miss everything.

I would miss my daily newspaper and listening to the news on TV and radio. I’d feel very cut off if I didn’t know what was happening in the world. If you gave me a radio, then I’d be perfectly happy to live on a desert island for the rest of my life. What I’d miss least would be traffic jams in the city, particularly my journey to work.

After bouncing my rental car across several miles of red-dirt roads I walked for nearly another mile down the beach to a deserted valley. It was comforting to think that at the very least I was finally out of cell-phone range.

However, even on Kauai, Hawaii’s ‘Garden Island’, complete escape wasn’t all that easy to achieve. Noisy helicopters full of tourists flew overhead like so many dragonflies. Every 20 minutes or so the comforting sounds of wind and water were broken by the noise of a speeding tour boat racing to complete another lap around the island. Worst of all, not more than five minutes by car from the resort where I was staying, the Atomic Clock Internet Café signaled with promises of instant email.

I felt uncomfortable every time I drove by the Atomic Clock Café. I am a technology reporter for an online magazine—my life is driven and dominated by email. I’m drowned in it, usually 400 or 500 messages a day. The main reason for my visit to Kauai was to unplug, disconnect, log off, and get away from it all. No cell phone, no electronic organiser, no laptop. And definitely, no email.

Yes, my plan was to lie on the beach and not check my email. My friends and family were outraged as they could not understand how I could bear to live without email. But they didn’t understand. In my job, I am online, permanently. Cyberspace is more familiar to me than my backyard. While I am awake, my email is always on. I don’t like to be without it for too long. A few hours away from it, and I start to tremble. I am, however, no stranger to beaches and their relaxing qualities and so I knew, even when arriving well after dark at the comfortable cottage in the town of Waimea, that the island of Kauai gave me a good chance of beating my addiction to electronic devices.

Maybe it was full moon lighting the black-sand beach not 10 metres from my door. Or the mango trees casting shadows across the veranda ( 阳 台 ). Or the driftwood piled in loose heaps for as far as I could see along the shore. Without question, the long, slow sound of the waves rolling in calmed my restless soul, and I found I could, in fact, log off.

Elizabeth wouldn’t walk or talk as an infant. Angela’s left leg was so enlarged that it hurt to stand. Emma needed a breathing machine just to sleep. Their suffering may take different forms, but their stories share a common thread: Neither they nor their families knew what was actually causing these issues.

Undiagnosed diseases are more common than you might think. Tens of millions of Americans likely suffer from disorders they cannot name. For many, the symptoms are minor. But in some cases, patients come to their doctors with serious problems caused by diseases that challenge medical knowledge.

Those cases are precisely where the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) steps in. Established in 2008, the UDN’s mission is to provide answers for patients with diseases that doctors are unable to diagnose. Anyone can apply to the program and the UDN works hard to screen every application it receives.

Today, the UDN covers 12 clinical sites around the country, and has evaluated over 1,400 patients. More than 400 of those patients have received a diagnosis thanks to the UDN. In some of these cases, the network is able to match a patient with an already known condition. In others, UDN researchers must work to describe an entirely new disease and enter it into the medical dictionary. The program has added at least 25 entirely new diseases in this way. Additionally, the UDN covers the cost of the tests, meaning patients aren’t burdened with crushing medical debt.

This kind of groundbreaking work helps more than just the patients themselves. Insights from studying rare diseases offer new knowledge about the human body that can benefit all of us. For example, the discovery of statins, a class of drugs commonly recommended today to help regulate high blood pressure, arose from the study of a rare genetic disorder.

“I think they’ve really advanced and changed the whole model for how we approach many of these illnesses,” says Anne Pariser, director of the Office of Rare Diseases Research. She says the UDN’s multidisciplinary approach — bringing different specialists together to talk about challenging cases — has helped advance the field of rare disease research, especially when it comes to genetic diseases.

Living with a disease without a name can be its own kind of suffering. “You grow up feeling like, I’m in this, crazy, all by myself, and no one really understands me,” says Angela Moon, a UDN participant. For patients like her, the UDN offers hope for treatment, but also for finally being seen.

Space exploration has always been the province of dreamers: The human imagination readily soars where human innovation struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the decade's end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated(共鸣) with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous dream speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had turned out concrete results and transformed American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up conflicting with each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely practical and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is actually unrealistic in its aims.

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised（妥协） space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no successor. The endless argument is that funds are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Among the current concerns about the federal deficit (赤字), reaching toward the stars seems an unnecessary luxury---as if saving one-thousandth of a single year's budget would solve our problems.

But human innovation struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic devices that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, mapping out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are designing a bottom-up attack on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within reach of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us---not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed on each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can get over what were once considered inborn limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, healthcare. Tomorrow we will overcome these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is capable of greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.