Spring is here. From vibrant tulips(郁金香) to delicate cherry blossoms(樱花) to surprisingly hardy orchids(兰花), flowering plants cover the planet. Here are some places to celebrate abundance and beauty in the natural world.

Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina

Travellers can find a wealth of plant species in North Carolina’s mountains—the most in any similarly sized area in North America. The most famed may be the rosy rhododendrons(杜鹃花) that blanket the slopes(斜坡) of the Blue Ridge Mountains in summer. Numerous hiking trails leading to floral sights are just 30 miles from downtown Asheville, via the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway.

Lisse, Netherlands

The Netherlands produces nearly 90 percent of the world’ s tulips, making it the ultimate destination for a typical spring experience. Cycle along the 25-mile Bollenstreek Route (also known as the Bloeman Route, or Flower Route), where flower fields paint the countryside in dazzling colour. Travellers can also visit Keukenhof Gardens, a 79-acre stretch located 16 miles southwest of Amsterdam.

Akureyri, Iceland

Just 50 miles outside of the Arctic Circle, this town in northern Iceland is home to the Arctic Botanical Gardens, one of the world’s northernmost botanic gardens. Nearby, travellers find short hiking trails and bird watching sites in the Kjarnaskógur Forest, daring ski slopes, and a local obsession with junk food. The most popular is a massive burger stuffed with French fries, called the Akureyringur.

Carmona, Spain

Carmona is one of many pueblos blancos(白色村庄), villages painted with whitewash made of slaked lime(熟石灰), that cap hilltops in Andalusia(安达卢西亚), in southern Spain. During spring, sunflowers bloom across more than 74,000 acres around the city. The best time to see them is from May to June, and you don’t need a car to get there. Buses from Seville take 40 minutes.

An artificial skin is even better than human skin at sensing objects, because it can detect and identify items that it hasn’t touched yet.

Even without touching an object, Wang and his colleagues’ artificial skin can sense if it is close by and can also figure out some clues about the type of material it is made of.

The skin is made up of two outer layers of conductive fabric(导电织物) covered with nickel(镍) to serve as electrodes(电极). These surround a porous sponge(多空海绵), soaked(浸泡) in ionic(离子) liquid, which acts as a conduit(导管) for electricity. The two layers act as a capacitor(电容器), storing electrical energy in an electric field.

The sensing performance of the capacitor, which W ang claims is between 10 and 100 times more sensitive than a standard capacitor, means it is also able to detect very minor changes in the electric field around the skin, allowing it to sense when objects are near. What’s more, those subtle changes can help it identify what type of material a nearby object is made of.

“The process is relatively simple. As the component comes close to contact, it enters the edges of the electric field of the capacitive structure,” says Jonathan Aitken at the University of Sheffield, UK. “There are several interesting future routes,” he says, but at present the skin relies on machine learning techniques to identify how the object it detects compared with data on known materials.

Wang thinks the skin could work on a robotic finger to allow factory robots to better understand which objects to pick up and which to leave without having to grasp them, as well as being useful for prostheses(假体).

In 2016, Luncz and her colleagues realized that Brazilian capuchins (卷尾猴) produced stone flakes (小薄片) from the rocks they used to pound (击打) food and dig without necessarily meaning to. It made the team wonder whether the artefacts (人工制品) really reflected any technical planning by those early humans.

Since then, Luncz and her colleagues have been studying tool use in long-tailed macaques (猕猴) on the islands of Phang Nga Bay in Thailand (泰国的攀牙湾). The team set up motion-activated cameras (动作感应摄像头) to study the behaviour of the wild macaques. During 100 hours of footage (镜头)，the team witnessed monkeys accidentally creating flakes as they struck nuts between two stones and then leaving the broken stones to find new, whole stones.

This is almost exactly what the capuchins did in the earlier study. The team then compared 1119 stone flakes from the macaques’ nut-cracking sites with artefacts found at hominin (古人类) sites in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. The monkeys’ thin, flat, wide stone flakes—ranging from 1.3 to 7.9 centimetres in length—were “almost the same” with flakes that were associated with ancient humans up to 3.3 million years ago, says Tomos Proffitt, another member of the research team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The findings could challenge the current understanding of early stone technology, says Proffitt. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all of the old material is not intentional,” he says. “But what our study shows is that we can’t be 100 per cent certain that every single flake in the early Stone Age archaeological record was intentionally made. There may be a component within that record that’s unintentional.”