Art lovers know that traveling is an excellent way to get a great look at works of art of all different styles. Plenty of cities are full of museums and galleries, it can be hard to know where you want to visit first. But you can choose one according to its ranking.

In order to rank the best cities for art, the factors taken into consideration included the number of museums, galleries, sculptures, street art, and highly rated art colleges and universities.

Venice

It surely won't come as a surprise that Venice came in first place, with a score of 6. 81 out of 10. The UNESCO World Heritage Site is famous for its lagoon（湖）and incredible architecture that adorns（装饰）the entire city. It also has an impressive share of museums（183.3 per million people）and monuments as well as statues（94 per million people）.

Miami

Located in Florida, Miami was in second place. Most people associate with its beaches, but it is a great art destination as well. It has 113.1 museums per million people, 30,391 street art searches per million people, as well as 130, 949 Instagram posts per million people. It is home to many impressive museums including the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Florence

Another Italian city took third place： Florence. The Tuscan city, known as the Cradle of the Renaissance, is home to many incredible museums that house iconic Renaissance art as well as monuments and statues all over the place. There are 204.5 museums per million people there.

Several United States cities made it in the top 10, including San Francisco, coming in 5th place, as well as Sante Fe（number 7）and Seattle, which came in 8th place. European cities that made the list include Vienna in fourth place, Berlin in 9th, and another Italian city, Milan, rounding out the list in 10th place.

At just 19 years of age, the young Belgium-British pilot, Zara Rutherford, aims to be the youngest woman to fly around the world solo in a single-engine aircraft. If she succeeds, she will overtake Shaesta Waiz’s world record to become the youngest woman to fly around the globe solo.

Zara has been on the plane her whole life. Her mother is an amateur pilot, and her father is a professional one. Over 80 hours of flight recorded and countless more in the future, she received her pilot's license in 2020.

To pay for her two-month journey, Zara has sold her car and sought out different sponsors (赞助商). Also concerned about the environmental effects of her trip, she plans to spend $710 on tree projects to make up for her carbon footprint (碳排放量). Her small, single-engine plane is customized for her needs and includes radio and satellite communications.

Zara has faced challenges such as bad weather, being forced to fly low over the ocean, and failing radio contact. “I’m really happy to be on the ground, to be honest,” she says in a video posted after her arrival in Kulusuk, Greenland. “The first little bit was fine, but then suddenly the clouds were getting lower and lower. At one point I was 600 feet above the ocean, which was pretty scary.” She lost radio contact 30 minutes into that trip and had two hours without communications.

While setting a world record is Zara’s aim, her main purpose is to inspire others. She said, “Growing up, I was really into aviation (航空), science, tech, engineering, and mathematics. But I didn’t see many other girls in those fields.” So, with this flight, she hopes to encourage and motivate other girls and young women to pursue their dreams and reduce the gender (性别) gap in STEM.

Scientists from the University of Tsukuba designed a text message mediation (调节) robot that can help users control their anger when receiving upsetting news. This device may help improve social interactions as we move towards a world with increasingly digital communications.

While a quick text message apology is a fast and easy way for friends to let us know they are going to be late for a planned meeting, it is often missing the human factor that will accompany an explanation face-to-face, or even over the phone. It is likely to be more upsetting when we are not able to notice the emotional weight behind our friends’ regret at making us wait.

Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have built a robot that they called OMOY, which was equipped with a movable weight driven by mechanical parts inside its body. By shifting the internal weight, the robot could express simulated emotions (模拟情绪). The robot was designed as a mediator for reading text messages. A text with unwelcome or frustrating news could be followed by a suggestion by OMOY to not get upset, or even sympathy for the user.

“With the medium of written digital communication, the lack of social feedback shift focus from the sender and onto the content of the message itself, ” author Professor Fumihide Tanaka says. The mediator robot was designed so that it can control the user's anger and other negative motivations.

The researchers tested 94 people with a message like “I’m sorry, I am late. The appointment slipped my mind. Can you wait another hour?” The team found that OMOY was able to reduce negative emotions. “The mediation robot can relay (播放) a frustrating message followed by giving its own opinion. When this speech is accompanied by the appropriate weight shifts, we saw that the user would feel the ‘intention’ of the robot to help them calm down,” Professor Tanaka says.

Thanks to their ability for introspection (反省), human beings are able to estimate how long their actions last. When they perform a task, especially a time-based task, they can evaluate their performance and correct themselves in order to do better next time. This ability is not unique to the human species. New research has just attested for the first time that the rat can also do so!

Scientists developed a task in which rats were taught to press a lever (杠杆) for at least 3.2 seconds. In a second stage, two feeders distributed a reward according to the animal’s performance: if it completed the task with a small error, just above 3.2 seconds, it received food in the left feeder, and in case of a larger error, in the right feeder. The rats thus learned that the location of the reward depended on their accuracy.

In a third stage, the rats were given a choice of both feeders, but the reward was only distributed after they chose one feeder. The result was that the rats chose the correct side, i.e. the one in keeping with their temporal error — “precise” for the left-hand feeder or “not precise” for the right-hand one — and, confident in finding food there, they did this all the more quickly.

The research team explains this behaviour by the animals’ past experience (track record of rewards obtained), but also by the rats’ analysis of their performance: during each trial, the rats evaluated the precision with which they had carried out the task requested and were able to engage in “error monitoring”.

Demonstrating this ability in rats opens doors to new kinds of animal research to better understand these behaviours in humans. And future research will be able to deepen fundamental knowledge on brain structures involved in our internal representation of time.