Qatar, a tiny Middle East country, almost entirely surrounded by the turquoise warm waters, offers plenty of beaches to enjoy a refreshing dip. From family-friendly sands to an emerging kitesurfing destination, get ready to dive in.

Katara Beach

If you want to swim in the ocean but don’t want to adventure beyond the capital of Doha, Katara Beach is the place to go. It is a pleasant sandy stretch with lounge chairs, shaded areas ideal for sheltering kids from the hot sun, water sports ground and a wide children’s play area. With food vans and restaurants just steps from the sand, you don’t need to go far to find lunch.

Fuwairit Beach

The soft white sands of Fuwairit Beach on Qatar’s northeast coast, about an hour’s drive north of Doha, are surrounded by shallow, crystal-blue waters appropriate for diving. The kitesurfing season runs from January to June, and with a kitesurfing resort due to open in late 2022 on this undeveloped beach, it’ll be easier than ever to arrange relevant lessons and transport.

AI Shamal Beach

For constant views of the sun setting over the ocean, head to Qatar’s north coast. The super shallow and rocky beaches up here aren’t the best for swimming, but when the sun goes down, AI Shamal Beach is a fine spot to take in the scenery. You’ll find public bathrooms and seats along the Corniche. Several simple dining options can be found in the neighboring villages.

Simaisma Beach

North of Doha, Simaisma Beach is Qatar’s most developed public beach after Katara Beach, with plenty of family-friendly facilities. With calm, shallow waters and mangroves to explore at the northern end of the beach, it’s great for kids, but the soft, muddy sand may be imperfect for building sandcastles.

Sharon Taylor has no firsthand memories of her father. The fighter pilot was shot down over Germany in April 1945, when Taylor was just three weeks old. One day when Taylor was seven, her grandmother shared stories about their fallen hero, her eyes welling up as she remembered her late son. “Nana, it’s OK,” Taylor assured her, “I’ll find him and bring him home.”

It was a promise Taylor, now a 77-year-old retired professor, would keep. Promoted by clues she pieced together from her parents’ wartime letters—with help from military historians, eyewitnesses, and an excavation(发掘)team—Taylor concluded a multi-decade mission to recover her father’s remains and bring him home.

In 1989, Taylor visited the potential crash site and connected with DPAA, which agreed to sent a recovery team to find and identify any human remains. In 2005, the DPAA team, accompanied by Taylor, led a three-week excavation. Taylor says that from the moment she set foot on the site, she could feel that her dad was there. DNA analysis confirmed that the remains were his.

On October 6, 2006, Taylor and her family buried her father’s remains at Arlington National Cemetery. Beyond fulfilling her swear to her grandmother, Taylor said her mission had been to get closer to her father and his legacy. “I wanted to know the truth,” she said. “I wanted his memory and what he did to never be forgotten.”

She came to realize that she’s not alone in her pursuit to know the truth about her father’s death. There’s an entire population of Americans who’ve lost loved ones in military conflicts overseas. Taylor shares her story widely, raising attention to soldiers who never return from war and the importance of recovery efforts. “Our reality was never.” Taylor says. “Our rights have been deprived(剥夺). I think it’s hugely significant.”

Taylor will never know exactly what her father’s final moments were like. But as she viewed the Expressions of America exhibition and saw his loving words to his “Angel Girls”, she felt, in a way, that he had finally come home.

In the 16th century, it was not unusual to see armed men standing guard outside Britain’s dovecotes (鸽舍). They were not there to protect the pigeons living inside, but rather to prevent thieves from breaking in and stealing something far more valuable—the birds’ waste.

Chemists in mid-1500s Nuremburg had discovered that the birds’ waste was a rich source of saltpetre, a vital ingredient in the making of gunpowder. As a consequence, for several decades pigeon droppings were almost as valuable as silver. Moreover, waste gathered from the dovecotes was a rich fertiliser, particularly sought after by those with vineyards and orchards (果园).

The dovecote was not only a source of food and revenue in medieval times, but also a status symbol. The privilege of building or owning dovecotes was reserved for the upper class. The right was granted by the king. Those who were allowed to build a dovecote usually placed it in some conspicuous places, so that passersby could behold it.

However, the abundance of dovecotes across the British countryside was not universally welcomed. Even a small dovecote had nesting holes for 500 birds. Each day they flew off to stuff themselves on other people’s crops. By the middle of the 17th century, the disaster of pigeons was so great that poet John Milton voiced his fears that the dangerous doves would turn England into a desert.

Later, vast quantities of natural saltpetre were discovered in Chile and California, destroying the value of pigeon waste as a chemical resource. Keeping pigeons was no longer necessary nor profitable, nor even fashionable. During the 18th and 19th centuries, around 95 per cent of Britain’s dovecotes fell into disuse and were demolished.

Now homeless, the tens of thousands pigeons that had once lived in the dovecotes flew off to find somewhere else to live. A species that in the wild had nested on cliffs, the birds discovered that Britain’s rapidly growing towns and cities were full of the sort of rock-faces they liked to root into—humans called them “buildings”. And so these once noble and attractive birds settled there. Over time they’d become the wild urban pigeons that we know today.

Mindfulness—a focus on the here and now through awareness of the present moment—can be both practiced and, importantly, measured by simply counting your breath, according to new studies led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

The practice of mindfulness has recently gained popularity in the US. Studies show it can reduce stress, improve student academic performance, and more. But researchers have lacked a scientifically rigorous(严谨的)way to measure it, sometimes influencing its credibility, says study leader Richard Davidson.

To measure mindfulness precisely, participants in the study were asked to keep track of nine breaths in sequence by striking one computer key at each breath and a different key on the ninth breath in each sequence. To do so accurately, a person must be aware of each breath as it happens.

While others—including new hands and long-term meditators(冥想者)—were trained in a distraction task where they were paid to correctly identify a colored object on a screen, followed by a test where they were asked to identify different colored objects. During the test, the subjects were no longer paid, but they were “distracted” with the presence of the original colored object.

The findings show that mindfulness as measured through breath counting is associated with more self-awareness, less mind wandering and distraction caused by financial temptation. Long-term meditators were better breath counters than new hands, and performed better in distraction tasks and participants trained in breath counting completed test tasks more accurately than those not trained in breath counting.

Davidson says that when people are off-count, they’re unaware of it roughly two-thirds of the time. “The cool thing is we are always breathing, so we can do this anytime, anywhere,” Davidson says. The researchers hope their findings will help push mindfulness into the mainstream. He wants to see more people using it as a tool to promote well-being and to engage in common conversation around mindfulness. He is hopeful this measure can help.