Rock climbing, one of the fastest growing sports, not only builds physical strength and mental focus, but also leads you to some beautiful places. Here are some climbing spots for climbers.

Acadia National Park, Maine

This popular New England park is one of the few places where you can climb seaside rocks. The granite (花岗岩) is good for climbing. In some areas, you need to start when the sea is at its lowest level. The area has guides, instructors and climbing schools, making it particularly welcoming for beginners.

More information: nps.gov/acad

City of Rocks, Idaho

This national reserve near the Utah border is worth a trip for the scenery alone. Named by gold miners heading to California in 1849, its granite looks like skyscrapers, towering 600 feet above the ground. It’s a fascinating area from a geologic and geographic angle. Many visitors come for August’s Idaho Mountain Festival, a celebration of climbing with top athletes in attendance.

More information: nps.gov/ciro

Red River Gorge, Kentucky

This geological area in Daniel Boone National Forest is prized for its climbing routes and rock scenery. The park, located an hour’s drive southeast of Lexington, is well known in the climbing world for both beginner-friendly terrain（地形）and more challenging sections. It’s a place where you can find a lot of fellow climbers.

More information: fs.usda.gov/recarea

Earth Treks Englewood, Colorado

While you can find climbing gyms across the country, this one just south of Denver is worth a special trip. With 53,000 square feet, the massive facility has a special rock climbing area, a group of guides and even extras like childcare and yoga.

More information: earthtreksclimbing.com/englewood

Soon, you’ re going to have to move out!” cried my neighbor upon seeing the largest tomato plant known to mankind, or at least known in my neighborhood.

One tiny 9-inch plant, bought for $1. 25 in the spring, has already taken over much of my rose bed, covering much of other plants, and is well on its way to the front door.

Roses require a good deal of care, and if it weren’t for the pleasure they give, it wouldn’ t be worth the work. As it is, I have a garden full of sweet-smelling roses for most of the year. Bushes must be pruned (剪枝) in early spring, leaving ugly woody branches until the new growth appears a few weeks later. It was the space available in the garden that led me into planting just one little tomato plant. A big mistake.

Soil conditions made just perfect for roses turn out to be even more perfect for tomatoes. The daily watering coupled with full sun and regular fertilizing (施肥) have turned the little plant into a tall bush. The cage I placed around it as the plant grew has long disappeared under the thick leaves.

Now the task I face in harvesting the fruit is twofold. First, I have to find the red ones among the leaves, which means I almost have to stand on my head, and once found I have to reach down and under, pick the tomatoes and withdraw (缩回) my full fist without dropping the prize so dearly won. I found two full-blown white roses completely hidden as I picked tomatoes in June. But they were weak and the leaves already yellow for lack of light.

Here I am faced with a painful small decision: To tear up a wonderful and productive tomato plant that offers up between ten and twenty ripe sweet tomatoes each day or say goodbye to several expensive and treasured roses. Like Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, I’ ll think about that tomorrow.

Dreams, according to Carl Jung, reveal a certain amount of reality hidden during waking consciousness. In Jungian philosophy, the conflict and chaos experienced in dreams finally bring order to our lives. While Jung’s mystical theories are debatable, he was not mistaken about the importance of dreaming. A growing number of reports show that a continuous lack of dreaming is damaging our waking hours in many ways.

This trend is causing damage to our immune and metabolic (新陈代谢的) systems, let alone the electronic products that keep us up late at night are ruining our sleep patterns, which has long-term consequences on our memory system. One study showed that not allowing mice to have adequate amounts of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the stage in which we dream, the mice couldn’t strengthen memories.

You might think this is just a sleep problem, but dreaming is inseparable from our night-time rest. We sleep in cycles, each lasting about 90 minutes; in a sleep cycle, we go through non-REM sleep before hitting REM. As the night progresses, REM sleep periods increase in length while deep sleep (one of the stages of non-REM sleep) decreases. The longer we sleep, the more time we spend in REM, which is why we are often dreaming when waking up in the morning. If we sleep less than seven hours, however, it becomes harder to achieve this level of REM.

The combination of sleeping and dreaming acts as an emotional stabiliser. We recover from emotional hurt faster when we sleep and dream properly. However, we’re not getting enough sleep to cycle through the stages to take advantage of this natural circadian anti-depressant (抗抑郁剂) — dreams. Instead, we get depressed and turn to alcohol or medicines to get to sleep, which only makes things worse because even one drink leads to late REM while anti-depressants promote deep sleep at the expense of REM.

We’re paying for this lack of dreaming in many ways. For example, a 2021 study stated that compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM promoted the formation of associative networks and the integration (整合) of unassociated information. Volunteers that experienced more REM sleep were better equipped for solving problems requiring creative solutions.

Rowan Hooper, the managing editor at New Scientist, writes that dreams that include an “emotional core” appear to be a main function of REM sleep and that we should look at sleep patterns as seriously as we do diet and exercise habits.

For the past five years, Paula Smith, a historian of science, has devoted herself to re-creating long-forgotten techniques. While doing research for her new book, she came across a 16th-century French manuscript（手稿）consisting of nearly 1,000 sets of instructions, covering subjects from tool making to finding the best sand.

The author's intention remains as mysterious（神秘）as his name; he may have been simply taking notes for his own records. But Smith was struck mainly by the fact that she didn't truly grasp any of the skills the author described. "You simply can't get an understanding of that handwork by reading about it," she says.

Though Smith did get her hands on the best sand, doing things the old-fashioned way isn't just about playing around with French mud. Reconstructing the work of the craftsmen（工匠）who lived centuries ago can reveal how they viewed the world, what objects filled their homes, and what went on in the workshops that produced them. It can even help solve present-day problems: In 2015, scientists discovered that a 10th-century English medicine for eve problems could kill a drug-resistant virus.

The work has also brought insights for museums, Smith says. One must know how an object was made in order to preserve it. What's more, reconstructions might be the only way to know what treasures looked like before time wore them down. Scholars have seen this idea in practice with ancient Greek and Roman statues. These sculptures were painted a rainbow of striking colours. We can't appreciate these kinds of details without seeing works of art as they originally appeared-something Smith believes you can do only when you have a road map.

Smith has put the manuscript's ideas into practice. Her final goal is to link the worlds of art and science back together: She believes that bringing the old recipes to life can help develop a kind of learning that highlights experimentation, teamwork, and problem solving.

Back when science—then called “the new philosophy”—took shape, academics looked to craftsmen for help in understanding the natural world. Microscopes and telescopes were invented by way of artistic tinkering（修补）, as craftsmen experimented with glass to better bend light.

If we can rediscover the values of hands-on experience and craftwork, Smith says, we can marry the best of our modern insights with the handiness of our ancestors.