Not everyone knows that Mogao Caves in China has a “little sister”—Yulin Caves, which is smaller but better preserved than Mogao Caves. This “little sister” has the most brilliant murals (壁画) which are large in scale and diverse in forms and skills, with much art value. Here is some information lo refer to when planning your tour here.

Daily Itinerary (行程)

DAY 1: Visit Mingshashan in the middle afternoon when it is not very hot and sunburn is low.

DAY 2: Visit Yulin Caves. You can visit up to 6 caves. After that, drive about 30 minutes to Suoyangcheng.

DAY 3: Visit the newly opened Mogao Caves Digital Exhibition Center. You will watch two short but well-produced educational documentary movies about Mogao Caves. After the movies, take the interzonal bus to Mogao Caves.

Highlights of This Tour

●In-depth tour of Mogao Caves and Yulin Caves

●Visiting Suoyangeheng—an ancient ruined city 2,000 years ago

●Private tour package covering airport pick-up, accommodation, sightseeing and private tour guide

Basic Information about Price

●$ 380 per person

●This price is based on a group of 2 adults sharing one standard double-bed room in 4-star hotels and traveling with our private tour in low seasons.

●This price is subject to change according to your traveling season, group size, hotel class, etc. ... If you want a lower price, you can get more people to join you, or use economy class hotels.

Imagine driving behind a huge truck shooting clouds of smoke into the air while your new fully electric vehicle cleans up its carbon emissions (排放). This dream may soon be a reality. A team of students in the Netherlands has created an electric car that not only doesn’t produce carbon dioxide when driving, but actually pulls it out of the air.

The two-seater sports car was designed and built in less than a year by a team of 32 students at Eindhoven University of Technology. Called “ZEM”, which stands for “zero emission mobility”, the car is equipped with special devices that remove carbon dioxide from the air as it drives. The team says if ZEM is driven about 32,000 kilometers, it can remove 2 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the air. That’s not a huge amount. The team calculates that 10 ZEM cars on the road for a year would remove as much carbon dioxide as a typical tree does during that time. However, they also point out that there are over a billion passenger cars in the world that could be using this technology. And if a billion cars were removing carbon dioxide instead of producing it, the result would be huge.

ZEM also has several other innovations that help to make it more capable of being sustained: the car’s frame and panels (面板) are 3D printed to reduce waste; it was built using recycled and recyclable materials; and it can be easily taken apart so that many of its parts can be reused. ZEM’s battery is also reusable, and has another handy feature: it can be charged with solar panels on the car’s roof—and can even be used to provide power to your house when the car isn’t on the road.

According to the statistics, transportation was responsible for over 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2020—and of those emissions, cars were responsible for 41%. The Eindhoven team says its goal is to challenge the electric car industry: If 32 students can build a car like this in less than a year, then surely car manufacturers (生产商) are expected to adopt these innovations, too.

The researchers drew a conclusion that orphaned (成为孤儿) elephants would be more stressed out than non-orphans. There’s a lot of evidence that the mother-child bond helps reduce stress in animals, which has been demonstrated previously in rats and birds, says the study leader Jenna Parker. Elephants have complicated social structures and deep family bonds. Because orphaned elephants in the same region die at a higher rate than elephants with living mothers, it seemed like a no-brainer that surviving orphans would be stressed out.

The team, however, made an unexpected finding: There really wasn’t a difference in the stress hormone (荷尔蒙) levels of orphaned and non-orphaned elephants, as long as they lived with family members, such as aunts, cousins, or brothers and sisters. Elephants — even the orphans — that lived in groups with fellows of their own age turned out to be under less stress than those that didn’t.

Parker recalls two orphans in the study, Frida and Rothko. “Frida had a non-functional left ear and Rothko had a non-functional right ear,” and they were inseparable, she says. “It was as though they had at least one good set of ears as long as they were together!” The findings also fit with previous social research in African elephants, Parker says. “Orphans increase interaction with their age mates after their mother’s death.” She notes that dominance is structured by age in elephants: Older elephants may outrank younger elephants when it comes to food, for example, but elephants of the same age are generally equals.

With human-wildlife conflict and drought threats to elephants in the region, the findings published today in Communications Biology offer a new insight into how having a strong fellow group may contribute to elephants’ survival. This information could also help recovery facilities that take in orphaned elephants set the animals up for a successful future in the wild — releasing them in large groups of bonded fellows, for example. “The bottom line here is that elephants need elephants,” says Parker. “And when the worst happens, like losing a mother, some find new ways to survive and grow happily.”