1 . The British Museum is filled with some of the world’s most famous historical items. If you love history, it’s a good place to visit. It is said to be the top museum in London. The museum has millions of objects, making you worry about your first visit.

If you need help in exploring the museum’s displays, about 80,000 objects from a total collection of 8 million items, try joining a guided tour. There are various free tours. You can also rent audio guides.

Entry to the museum is free, but access to some exhibitions will charge you. The museum limits the number of people in the museum to ensure there’s room for you to safely enjoy your visit. You’re advised to book a free ticket to guarantee the entry. Self-led groups of 10 or more people will need to book a group ticket. School groups should contact the box office to book their visit to the museum.

Daily: from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm (Fridays: 8:30 pm)

Last entry: 4:00 pm (Fridays: 7:30 pm)

The museum is closed from 24 December to 26 December.

Cafes and restaurants

Court Cafés: from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm

Great Court Restaurant: from 11:30 am to 5:00 pm

Bicycle racks are available inside the gates of the main entrance on Great Russell Street. If you’re planning to visit by car, please be aware that the museum doesn’t offer parking facilities. There is a taxi rank on Great Russell Street at the museum’s main gates. Going to the museum by bus or subway is very convenient, which can be your first choice.

For more information, visit the British Museum’s website.

2 . Family vlogging — the frequent recording and uploading of personal videos of the family, usually on video sharing website — has become big business nowadays, especially among parents of young children. The more viewers such videos can get, the more money the family can make. At first thought, it does seem like an easy way to make money. However, are we doing right by putting their lives up for public attention?

For one thing, as the children grow up, they increasingly become aware that what they do needs to be admirable enough for the public to enjoy — Being young children, they also would want to do whatever it takes to please others. They then feel the pressure to be perfect, and as that is something not always possible, they become anxious and stressed. Comments from viewers and the expectations of sponsors (赞助者) can also affect the parents’ reactions towards their children.

Another problem is the lack of privacy in the children’s lives. As the children reach adolescence, there is a greaser need for personal space. At 12 or 13, very few children would appreciate being filmed while eating or having a conversation with their friends. Teenhood is a time of significant change in an individual, both physically and emotionally, and is a time when parents need to protect their children and guide them, instead of exposing them to the eyes of the public.

Family vlogging can be irresistible, given how it allows parents to bring greater fun to their family lives. There is also the easy money and the fame to look forward to. Indeed, all would probably go well, but only as long as parents keep in mind that, if not managed well, making their children live their lives in the unforgiving eyes of the public could prove to be a big mistake.

3 . Camping tips: Which overnight wilderness experience is right for you?

If you’re an experienced backpacker, read no further. This article is for camping rookies, those who have never slept beneath the stars or haven’t pitched a tent since their youth but are seriously thinking about overnighting in the wilderness.

Car camping

At its most basic, car camping involves packing a tent, sleeping bag, fold-up chair, cooler and camp stove into your vehicle and staying at a drive-up campground. Nearly every national park, and many state and county parks and private facilities, offer drive-up campgrounds with restrooms, potable water, fire rings or pits, and maybe even hot showers. So there are lots of choices.

The downside of car camping is the fact that these campgrounds are often packed with other campers. Not a lot of privacy, they can be noisy, and possibly hinder your quest of communing with nature.

Backpacking

No vehicle required; just your feet and a good pair of hiking boots or shoes to get you to the next overnight spot. A multi-day hiking trip is without doubt the most immersive way to experience the great outdoors.

Different from maybe car camping, it requires the least expense and equipment. All you really need are a backpack, sleeping bag, water bottle, small first-aid kit, enough food to last the entire travel. It can be done just about anywhere on the planet.

Boat Camping

While this does involve owning or renting a watercraft or using a ferry or water taxi service to reach the overnight site, camping via canoe, kayak, raft or boat offers a similar get-away-from-it-all adventure as backpacking.

Experienced paddlers and boaters usually prefer to camp on their own along a secluded shoreline. But many adventure or wilderness outfitters offer guided trips that can last anywhere from a couple of days to two or three weeks. With a boat, you can sometimes camp places that not even backpackers can reach.

4 . Born in an unknown village in Huarong county, Hunan province, Yi had few opportunities to play instruments when he was young.

At the age of 6, when most performers have already begun studying the piano at music academies, Yi learned the traditional stringed instrument the erhu from a group of people lodging at his home. It was not until much later that he first saw a piano when he visited his cousin’s house in Huarong.

“My family was too poor to buy a piano for me, so I often used to visit my cousin, even though it took about an hour to travel the 20 kilometers to his home over rocky roads just for the opportunity to sit at the keyboard,” Yi said.

Yi first arrived in Shenzhen 19 years ago and worked in factories, on construction sites and in kitchens. He had not played a piano for nearly 30 years.

The public pianos in Huaqiangbei offered him a fresh start. On a hot summer’s day, while   taking a break from work at a nearby construction site, Yi and his son passed one of the instruments. Encouraged by his son, Yi decided to give it a try.

He rubbed his hands nervously on his clothes, but the moment he placed his fingers on the keys, he felt more comfortable and his confidence returned. Although his masterly performance at the piano keyboard quickly made him an online sensation in China and overseas, Yi is not the only one to benefit from the pianos in Huaqiangbei.

Inspired by the British artist Luke Jerram, who has placed more than 2,000 street pianos in over 70 cities worldwide since 2008 with the words “Play Me, I’m Yours” printed on their sides, the public piano project in Huaqiangbei was launched by the local government in 2018.

Zhang Chen, deputy director of the Huaqiangbei subdistrict office, said: “Huaqiangbei is located in the commercial district in the center of Shenzhen. We have been trying to provide diverse facilities to bring high-quality public cultural services to the area. We are surprised that the public piano project has attracted so many people to play the instruments, and others to watch them perform.”

5 . Pleasanton Partnerships in Education Foundation (PPIE) was started in 1987 to raise money by organizing running events for local schools. Based in Pleasanton, California, a suburb of San Francisco, the non-profit organization recently hosted a family-focused fitness event for the community. “Our event helps to bring the community together,” said Mindy Louie, events and outreach manager for PPIE. “We have more than 3,000 participants, hard-working volunteers and viewers.”

This year’s fitness event took place on April 30 at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. It featured races of two miles, five kilometers and ten kilometers. A new Kids Challenge consisted of a quarter-mile run to encourage younger children to participate. When asked to describe the run, 11-year-old Jeremy Louie said, “Fun, exciting and enjoyable.” Jeremy added that he was happy to help support his school.

PPIE supports all 15 schools in the Pleasanton Unified School District, which include more than 14, 500 students and 800 teachers and staff. The nonprofit organization tries to fund programs affected by budget cuts, while encouraging fitness and athleticism. To date, the PPIE has raised over $1 million for the school district.

A local runners’ group called the BURN Youth Development (B. Y. D.) participated in the fundraising. The B.Y.D. has since grown to more than 100 youth members, 30 of whom ran in April’s PPIE event. Jerry Wu, the group’s founder and lead coach, explained that the B.Y.D. was born to keep kids running. “Watching them running strongly and happily makes me smile every time,” Jerry said.

Jerry encourages teamwork and teaches the students valuable running techniques. As a B.Y.D. member, Ollie Gu, an eighth grader, was one of the top finishers in the ten-kilometer run. He completed the race in 40 minutes and 46 seconds and won first place in the 12-to-15 year-old age group. “The race was extremely rewarding,” Ollie said. “I’m looking forward to it next year.”

9 . Artificial intelligence (AI ) has been increasingly good at fooling people. A series of photos showing former US president Donald Trump being aggressively arrested by police have caught people’s attention. They were fake but very convincing.

Created by the AI program Midjourney, the photos were highly realistic, from the characters’ movements to the surroundings. However, many details can give away the fact that they are made by AI. The Washington Post’s technology writer Shira Ovide shared her tips. The main idea is to spot the problems anything that would look strange in a photo.

AI software has a history of generating human hands incorrectly. It sometimes can create hands with more than five fingers. This is because AI isn’t sure what a “hand” exactly is, according to Popular Science. The data AI uses to learn often show hands and fingers in various gestures, which can be very confusing for AI.

AI-generated images also usually contain details that are against reality. To spot this, focus on items like accessories. For example, people in an image may be missing earrings or one part of their sunglasses. If there’s text in an image, such as a newspaper or poster, it’s usually garbled (篡改), even though the text may look realistic from a distance.

Another thing AI is terrible at handling is the background. If there’s a crowd in the image, people’s faces in the background are usually blurry - or they don’t have faces at all!

The development of AI-generated art also raises alarm bells about how these fake images could be used to spread misinformation. “I think misinformation is going to hit an all-time high,” Jamie Cohen, a digital culture and AI expert in the US, told New York Post. Generating an AI artwork is to “create reality”, Cohen argued, adding that, being able to tell whether the work is real or not requires high media literacy(素养) skills. “The world may not be ready for how realistic the images have become,” Shane Kittelson, a US researcher, told The Washington Post.

10 . The Mogao Grottoes were a center of Buddhist life and some of the world’s great cultures for hundreds of years. However, by the late Qing Dynasty they had been abandoned and nearly forgotten and many of the caves had become damaged by the elements. Around 1900, with the discovery of a library of thousands of ancient documents, the caves received new interest from Chinese and foreign researchers. Unfortunately, this resulted in tens of thousands of items from the caves being taken to foreign museums

In the 1940s, many researchers and artists visited the area to study traditional Chinese art. Copies of some of the artwork painted by respected artists such as Zhang Daqian and GuanShanyue helped people all over the country learn about Dunhuang. These artists were also inspired by the artwork they saw in the caves and it began to influence their painting styles. Others staved in the desert for much longer, Chang Shuhong stayed for the rest of his life — struggling to record the cultural treasures and protect them from the weather. As a result of their efforts the Dunhuang Academy was formed to protect and study the Mogao Grottoes.

In 1987, the Mogao Grottoes were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While the caves are open to the public, access is now limited in order to protect the artwork. However, the caves can be seen online in digital form so that people around the world can study and enjoy them.

Despite its remoteness, the Mogao Grottoes continue to draw visitors. And just as the sand and desert have survived largely unchanged through the centuries, this small art gallery in the desert has also survived largely unchanged providing an amazing look at a world long ago past.