Studies have shown most people fail to realise how much time they spend on their smartphones each day.

Frank and Amelia’s family were put to a test, using a free app called “Moment-Screen Time Tracker”. The Vascellaros—Frank, Amelia, 14-year-old twins Frankie and Joe, and 17-year-old Sam—all said they did not really know they were spending so much time on their phones each day.

“Honestly, I don’t feel like I’m on my phone a lot,” Amelia Vascellaro said. Amelia was on her phone far less often than Frank, according to the app. While Amelia spent about an hour per day on the phone, Frank spent closer to four hours on his phone, which came as a shock to him. The children’s times varied but they often spent more than a couple of hours on the phone as well.

Minneapolis-based Dr. Kirsten Lind Seal sees phone usage come up lot among families. Lind Seal said many family members’ phone use has become problematic.

“If we hear more than once, ‘Do you have to be on your phone right now? Can you please put your phone down? Did you hear what I said?’ it may be sign that it is negatively (消极地) influencing our family relationships and our daily lives,” she said.

Lind Seal said actually paying attention to how much time one spends on the phone is a good first step in deciding when to put it down.

She asks parents to encourage more face-to-face communication for teens and young adults as they continue developing their social and emotional skills. “What we find is that we are really losing out on empathy—the ability to understand other people’s feelings and problems—when we spend a lot of time on our smartphones to communicate with other people,” she said.

On the International Day for Monuments and Sites, China Daily’s digital employee Yuanxi and Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes’ official virtual car to on figure “Jiayao” together introduced an interactive (交互式的) digital platform that hosts a virtual copy of the Mogao Grottoes’ Library Cave to the world.

The platform was developed jointly by the Dunhuang Academy and the Chinese tech firm Tencent. It uses gaming technologies to show the historical scenes of the Library Cave in the digital world.

The Library Cave in Mogao Grottoes was discovered in 1900, with more than 60,000 cultural relics unearthed. It was one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the 20th century.

On the platform, visitors can role-play and “time travel” to ancient dynasties and talk with eight historical figures. The public can enter the platform through the Digital Dunhuang website and its WeChat mini program.

“In the digital age, the model of ‘culture+technology’ has been introduced to promote the development of Chinese culture. The digitalization rate of China’s precious cultural relics is over 70%,” according to iResearch.

Institutions such as the Palace Museum have also started online digital services of their own. AI technology allows the public to view the interior of the buildings through the Palace Museum’s WeChat mini program.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has also encouraged the development and transformation of culture by digital means. The CCTV has created a series of digital collections with different Dunhuang themes, such as the divine deer, Youyou. It was created based on the image of the nine-colored deer from Dunhuang murals (壁画).

“Digital collections are welcomed among young people, who grow up in the information age. They not only protect the cultural intellectual property (知识产权) but also bring the public closer to China’s ‘excellent traditional culture’,” noted Dunhuang Art Institute.

Su Bomin, director of the Dunhuang Academy, told Xinhua that more efforts will be made to explore new forms for showing cultural relics and offering the public greater cultural experience s in the future.

It is practically inevitable: sometime around the age of 40 people start to need reading glasses. Try as they might, there’s no avoiding it. One mobile app creator claims that practicing with their technology can train your eyes to see better.though some eye doctors are not sure.

The reason why many people eventually need reading glasses is that the lens (晶状体) of the eye loses   flexibility with age, and has trouble focusing on nearby objects. The condition is called presbyopia (老花眼), which is just a natural side effect of aging.

The first app claiming to work out the solution is called GlassesOff. First you take a test given by the app, and then follow its customized training course. Three days a week, for 12-15 minutes, you’ll go through a series of visual exercises, such as recognizing small gray letters on a gray screen. After two or three months, it claims that you can kiss your reading glasses goodbye.

“We wanted to develop an application that can help people improve their reading ability by improving the way that the brain processes information.” says GlassesOff CEO Nimrod Madar. Until recently it wasn’t possible because scientists did not understand how the image processing capability of the brain actually works. “GlassesOff comes up with the idea of neuroplasticity (神经可塑性). Studies have shown that through training new connections can be made in the brain So that it can continue adapting to the world around us. In terms of vision, this means that through training, the brain may be able to form new connections that allow it to clearly process text even when the text is blurred by aging eyes.

In a 30-person study published in Scientific Reports in February, some participants were able to read letters 1.6 times smaller after using the app. Adults aged 40 to 60 years old had the most success. The study also found that the users’ eye health improved by an average of 8.6 years.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, it probably is. “Human vision quality is determined by the physical eye and the way he brain reads the information that the eye captures,” says Rhee, a doctor from Harvard University. “To think that we can reverse (逆转) presbyopia only by neuroplasticity is just not accurate.” It might not make a huge difference in terms of fighting presbyopia, but brain training could make a difference for younger people whose eyes are still more flexible.