【推荐1】Last month, my husband and I completed what some of our friends considered a foolish task: a 32-day, 5, 232-mile camping trip with children in our Volkswagen van, without ''high-tech'' to occupy the children.

It was the screen less journey that showered me with doubts. But is ''boredom'' senseless? My friend Renee, who has driven cross-country with her three kids eight times, calls boredom the mother of creativity. She's not the only one who sees virtue in blank time. In a recently published paper, researchers at East Anglia University in England concluded that the trance like (发呆的) state helps recharge the mind and is ''central to learning and creativity''. I wasn't trying to make my kids smarter. Neither do I dislike high-tech. But I understand too well the power of mini screens to transform our kids into zombies (木讷的人) .

On Day 1, our 7-year-old son announced ''Texas is so boring!''. The next day, struggling against his seat belt, he yelled he couldn't take much more of this. His 5-year-old sister was better at the long hours playing make-believe with the stuffed animals. On Day 3, he began count mountains and see pandas and dolphins in distant clouds in the Texas sky. I often joined the kids in the back, where we did thumb-and-toe wrestle. With well-known mountains ahead, my husband told the children the past legends of them. ''Arizona is not as boring as Texas,'' our son declared.

I hope the trip gave kids some lazy, unstructured time to learn something about valuing the trip instead of looking for the fastest way to burn it up. I don't always make the right call as a parent but I know that in banning the small screen we made the right choice this time.

【推荐3】Mark Bertram, 46, lost the tips of two fingers at work in 2018 when his hand became trapped in a fan belt. “It's life-changing but it's not life-ending,” he says. “Doing work is harder now. Everything is just a little different.”

After two surgeries and occupational therapy, Bertram decided to make light of his condition by asking Eric Catalano, a tattoo (纹身) artist, to create fingernail tattoos. The idea made everyone in the studio laugh—until they saw the final result. “The mood changed,” Catalano recalls from his Eternal Ink Tattoo Studio. “Everything turned from funny to wow.”

When Catalano posted a photo of the tattoos, a pair of fingernails that looked so real that no one could believe their eyes, he had no idea the image would eventually be viewed by millions of people around the world.

The viral photo pushed Catalano, 40, further into the world of paramedical (辅助医疗的) tattooing. Now people with life-altering scars come from as far away as Ireland to visit his shop. They enter Eternal Ink looking for the artistic healing they saw online. Using flesh-toned (肉色的) inks and a needle, Catalano transforms his clients' view of themselves.

Leslie Pollan, 32, a dog breeder in Oxford, was bitten on the face by a puppy in 2014. She underwent countless surgeries to correct a scar on her lip.

“Plastic surgery gave me no hope,” she says. “So I looked for other options.” She ultimately traveled six hours to meet with Catalano. He hid Pollan's lip scar, giving her back a piece of her confidence.“ You don't understand until you've been through it,” Pollan says. “It made me have a different look on life.”

Catalano performs up to eight reconstructive tattoos. While he charges $100 per regular tattoo, he doesn't charge for paramedical tattoos. “Financially, it doesn't make sense,” Catalano says. “But every time I see that emotion from my customers, I'm 100 percent sure this is something that I can't stop doing.”

Writing in the late 1800s, Jules Verne was remarkably successful in his 10 guesses about future technologies of air conditioning, automobiles, the Internet, television, and underwater, air, and space travel. Unbelievably, of all places from which to choose, Jules Verne guessed Tampa, Florida, USA as the launching site of the first project to the Moon, which was only 200 kilometers away from the actual 1969 location at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

One of the best-known science fiction books is Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Published in 1949, it was not meant as a prediction, but as a warning: Orwell was describing what he saw as the outcome of the ideas, trends, and emerging technologies of his time. Many invented terms from this novel have become common in everyday use, such as “big brother” and “doublethink”. Even the author’s name has been made into an adjective—Orwellian—and has become a warning descriptor for situations where privacy is lost and the individual has no power and is completely controlled by the government. Nineteen Eighty-Four was translated into sixty-five languages within five years of its publication, setting a record that still stands.

What helps bring science fiction into being is usually a new discovery or innovation. The author creates an analysis of the potential influence and consequences and then wraps it in a pleasant story. For example, the beginning of space exploration was followed a few years later by the Star Trek television program and movie series. The science fiction author’s self-determined role is search the world of future possibilities upon the road which we are traveling.

【推荐2】I arrived home from work, my mind racing. I was scheduled to perform an experiment using a pricey piece of equipment, but I had spent the whole day worrying about the experiment which was on the top of my agenda, and I amazingly longed to shut off my anxious thoughts. So after dinner, I made a cup of hot chocolate, stretched myself on my sofa, and opened a page. Almost instantly, my mind left behind the details of experimental design and stepped into a land of monsters, magic dust, and man-like bears comprising a wonderful world distinct from my daily life. It was exactly what I needed.

Growing up, I was virtually never a big fan of novels. My classmates would be crazy about the latest Harry Potter book, while my copy sat collecting dust on a shelf. Instead, I would choose to read through the reference books related to my disciplines for better grades. After I started graduate school, extracurricular reading didn’t appeal to me at all but I spent most of my time on campus digesting research papers and textbooks and my mind couldn’t handle processing fact-filled nonfiction books at home, too. So I knew that I needed to find a way to enjoy reading again.

To help me stick with it, I made a New Year’s resolution: I would read two fiction books per month for the entire year. The result was an almost instant appreciation of fiction, along with many unexpected results including ones that have benefited my schoolwork.

What surprised me the most was how much I learned. Some of the best books I read were historical fictional stories happening in a realistic historical setting. I learned about life in different countries as well as struggles people there faced during difficult periods in their histories. The books have helped me build sympathy and understanding, with an unexpected benefit: I’ve started to think more deeply about the diversity of issues in the scientific community and could serve it, heart and soul.