With the winter holiday coming up, you may have a trip in mind. But no matter which destination you choose, chances are that you' 11 see people with Lonely Planet guidebooks on your travels.

Lonely Planet is one of the world's largest travel guide brands, publishing more than 500 different guides in eight languages. The popular brand produces television shows, websites and podcasts.

Some people praise Lonely Planet books because they make traveling easy and affordable. They save you time and keep you from missing the best things in a place. And of course, the reviews of hostels （招 待所）,hotels and restaurants in the guides, in addition to ticket information about destinations, are useful.

This can be great if you are a nervous traveler, or if you haven't traveled by yourself before. If you a re in a country where you don't speak the language, being able to show a guidebook to a taxi driver can be a great help. You can be sure to get yourself to a hostel that's cheap and clean, with friendly staff and cold beer.

But others criticize Lonely Planet and other travel guide publishers. They say guidebooks take the fun out of traveling, and that part of the charming of travel comes from the fact that anything can happen.

They also think that if you follow a guidebook, you'll end up doing the same things and having the same experiences as everyone else. You might end up seeing the same group of people over and over, because everyone is reading the same book and following the same trail （路线）.

Another criticism of travel guides is that they have an overly large impact on local communities. For example, some locals devote their lives to behaving in ways that attract tourists. They pretend a traditional lifestyle, wear traditional clothes and live in traditional houses just to attract tourists' dollars.

Humans have sailed the oceans’ surfaces for millennia, but their depths remain effectively uncharted. Only about a quarter of the seafloor has been mapped at high resolution. Maps of most regions display only approximate depths and often miss entire underwater mountains or canyons (峡谷).

So researchers have introduced some deep-diving experts: Elephant Seals. Scientists have been placing trackers on them around Antarctica for years, gathering data on ocean temperature. For a new study, the researchers compared these dives’ location and depth data with some of the less detailed seafloor maps. They spotted places where the seals dove deeper than should have been possible according to the maps meaning the existing depth estimates were inaccurate.

In eastern Antarctica’s Vincennes Bay, the diving seals helped the scientists find a large, hidden underwater canyon of more than a mile in depth. An Australian research ship called the RSV Nuyina later measured the canyon’s exact depth using sonar (纳),and the researchers have proposed naming their find the Mirounga-Nuyina Canyon — honoring both the ship and the involved Elephant Seals, genus Mirounga.

But seals can’t chart the entire ocean floor. The trackers used in the study could pinpoint a seal’s geographical location only within about 1.5 miles, which allows for useful but not exactly high-resolution data. Plus, because the seals don’t always dive to the bottom of the ocean, they can reveal only where the bottom is deeper than in existing maps- not shallower. Deep-sea research experts suggest improving on these data by using more precise GPS trackers and analyzing the seals’ diving patterns to determine whether they have reached the seafloor or simply stopped going down.

The potential use of the current seal-dive data is to gather information about the deep ocean around Antarctica, specifically regarding the location and depth of sea-floor canyons. This data can be valuable for predicting how Antarctica’s ice will melt. By understanding the presence and characteristics of these canyons, scientists can better assess how warmer water from the deep ocean flows towards the ice along the continent’s coast, This knowledge is crucial for accurately modeling and predicting the future behavior of Antarctica’s ice sheets and their contribution to sea-level rise.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, yes, and drink all of them. Then you're ready for an adventure.

Researchers from the University of Sussex in England say they have found for the first time experimental evidence that sour tastes lead to more risk-taking behaviour in a paper published on 7 June, 2019.

In the study, 168 volunteers from the UK and Vietnam were given a 20ml solution representing one of the five main taste groups: bitter, salty, sour, sweet and umami. The tasters then took part in a computerized test that measures risk-taking: they got paid to blow up a digital balloon. The more air in the balloon, the more money they could get; they could cash out whenever they wanted. But if the balloon popped or exploded? Bye   bye , potential winnings.

When the researchers studied the performance of the volunteers, they found the people who'd tasted sour were much more likely to keep pumping up the balloon compared with people who'd gotten a taste of the other solutions. On average, sour tasters were 39% more likely to push the balloon to its limits than sweet tasters, 20.50% more than bitter, 16.03% more than salty and 40.29% more than umami.

This finding makes a degree of sense—without taking risks, we don't learn anything new. And it is obvious that people with disorders such as anxiety and depression are unwilling to take risks. So, the researchers argue, if you have these disorders, maybe adding more sour foods into your diet could help keep that aversion in check. Then you'd be more likely to take chances, like talking to a stranger, and that will lead to self-improvement.