Whether you’re travelling to the islands or the mountains of Thailand, you’re likely to spend at least one night in its capital city on the way. Bangkok might be noisy and polluted but it’s also an exciting city with plenty of things to see and do. Why not make it a longer stay?

Where to stay

The Khao San Road was a famous traveller spot even before Leonardo di Caprio’s character in the film The Beach stayed there. But it’s noisy, not very pretty and not very Thai. For something more authentic, Phra Kanong offers an alternative place to stay, with its fantastic street markets where everyday Bangkok people eat, work and live. It’s not as convenient for the main tourist sites, but it has a Skytrain station so you can be at the Grand Palace in 20 minutes.

How to get around

Bangkok’s traffic can be a nightmare. Sure, you can easily take a taxi – if you want to spend hours stuck in traffic jams – but there are two much better ways to get around the city. To explore the temples and historical sites, catch an express boat river taxi or a longtail boat along the Chao Phraya river and the canals. For the modern part of the city, the Skytrain is a fast, cheap way to travel from the river to the shopping malls and nightlife of Sukhumvit, and the famous Chatuchak street market.

Where to eat

The simple answer is: everywhere! Thai street food is among the best in the world, and for around $5 you can eat a filling and delicious meal. Some food stands have little plastic seats where you can sit and eat and they cook the same dish over and over, like fried chicken on rice or Pad Thai noodles. Head for Chinatown – Yaowarat Street – and choose whatever looks most interesting from the many excellent Chinese and Thai restaurants and food stands.

Within 30 minutes of finding out a little boy named Bodie needed a kidney transplant (肾移植)，Taylor Pikkarainen signed up to try and be his donor(捐献者).

Bodie Hall, from St. Michael, Minnesota, was born with a rare kidney disorder. Neither of his parents could donate their kidney to him and he needed a kidney transplant badly. “It’s like, how do you ask somebody to donate a kidney?” Bodie’s mom Gloria Hall said.

Dad, Brandon Hall, wasn’t a match, and Gloria had already donated a kidney to Bodie’ s older sister who had the same condition. “This was outside of our control,” Brandon said. He was placed on a kidney transplant list, but doctors advised them to go on social media to spread the word to find a donor.

Nurse Taylor Pikkarainen, is a friend of a friend. She said, “It’s definitely part of my calling, helping people. Even just reading his story and seeing his picture on the Facebook page made me think he was the cutest thing ever.” Pikkarainen, a traveling nurse from Minnesota, was working with COVID-19 patients in New Jersey when she heard about Bodie. She filled out the paperwork right then.

Doctors say it is hard to find a well-matched donor, but physicians at M Health Fairview concluded that Pikkarainen was the best match for Bodie out of several possible kidney donors.

The transplant happened on July 9, which was Pikkarainen’s birthday as well. “There’s no way to express how grateful we are, really,” Bodie’s mom said.

“We just told her ‘Thank you’,” his dad said. “We just couldn’t believe that she was willing to do something like that for us.”

Bodie is taking anti-rejection (抗排异药）medication, which will last for the rest of his life. Fortunately, the two of them have recovered and are doing well. In fact, Bodie’s mom said he looks healthier than ever - and even took his first steps not long after the operation!

Humans take first place when it comes to making long-term changes to the earth, but we aren’t the only species to make a mark with infrastructure(基础设施）．A new look at an 1868 map has shown that beaver dams (河狸坝）in Michigan have been holding strong for at least 150 years.

The map is the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, who first traveled to Michigan in the late 1850s for his railroad work and started studying the beavers in what is now the city of Ishpeming. The resulting book, 1868’s The American Beaver and His Works, had a map that included 64 beaver dams and their ponds (池塘）．It was Carol Johnston of South Dakota State University who realized the value in Morgan’s map to modern ecologists (生态学家）. She created an updated version using air photos and compared the two, discovering that about 72 percent of the dams and ponds still exist.

While not all of the dams are still in active use, the findings show the unusual engineering abilities of the North American beaver. The fact that so many structures are still standing after all this time is truly impressive; they are even older than many of humankind’s most beloved structures, including the Eiffel Tower. “The findings prove that beaver works have been changing the North American landscape for centuries,” Johnston says.

For more, check out Morgan’s work in full on the Internet Archive, which includes lovely passages like this one, “As the dam is not a necessity to the beaver, his normal living place being rather natural ponds and rivers, and holes in their banks, it is an amazing fact that he should have voluntarily worked himself, by means of dams and ponds of his own construction, from a natural to an artificial way of life.”

On that note, don’t forget that International Beaver Day is April 7. These guys deserve some serious praise.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. That seems to be the case when it comes to the issue of wind turbines (涡轮机）killing birds.

According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade(叶片）on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

In the past few years there has been a huge increase in global wind power, with more than 60 GW of new generating capacity(发电量）added worldwide in 2019. If the turbines are placed correctly, wind power is cheaper, cleaner and more sustainable(可持续的). Not to mention that a turbine farm is easier on the eye than a huge power plant.

But these farms aren’t good for everybody - especially not for local bat and bird populations. The US Fish and Wildlife Service calculated that nearly 300,000 birds were killed by wind turbines in 2015, which is a lot fewer than those that die as a result of hitting electrical power lines each year. Yet it still remains an environmental issue, even as bird deaths from turbines seem to be going down as the industry moves to larger turbine blades that move more slowly.

Studies have suggested that birds may not be skillful at noticing obstructions to their flight path, and adding different colored fan blades can increase birds’ chances of spotting a rapidly turning fan.

At the Smøla wind farm, regular checks of four particular wind turbines found the four turbines killed 18 birds that flew into the blades over six years. In 2013, on each of the turbines in the test group, a single blade was painted black. Over the next three years, only six birds were found dead due to hitting the wind turbines.

Researchers said the results are a step in the right direction toward better, more sustainable treatment of our flying friends.