Do you ever get to the train station and realize you forgot to bring something to read? Yes, we all have our phones, but many of us still like to go old school and read something printed. 

Well, there's a kiosk（小亭）for that. In the San Francisco Bay Area, at least. 

"You enter the fare gates（检票口）and you'll see a kiosk that is lit up and it tells you can get a one-minute, a three-minute, or a five-minute story," says Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit - known as BART. "You choose which length you want and it gives you a receipt-like short story."

It's that simple. Riders have printed nearly 20,000 short stories and poems since the program was launched last March. Some are classic short stories, and some are new original works. 

Trost also wants to introduce local writers to local riders. "We wanted to do something where we do a call to artists in the Bay Area to submit stories for a contest," Trost says. "And as of right now, we've received about 120 submissions. The winning stories would go into our kiosk and then you would be a published artist."

Ridership on transit（交通）systems across the country has been down the past half century, so could short stories save transit? 

Trost thinks so. 

"At the end of the day all transit agencies right now are doing everything they can to improve the rider experience. So I absolutely think we will get more riders just because of short stories," she says. 

And you'll never be without something to read. 

This year sees the third edition of Zhu Yujie's group female art exhibition, a project hosted annually with the aim of offering more opportunities to women artists. The exhibition Metaphor and Gaze opened in Shenzhen's La Vie Art Center, on Feb 27.

"Women artists still have relatively fewer opportunities to show their works at art museums and galleries, and few group exhibitions concentrate on female topics, " Zhu says, "Only by constantly exhibiting works by female artists and writing about these artworks, can they be known by more people and be written into art history. "

The exhibition contains videos, paintings, and performance by 17 female artists. According to Zhu, the title Metaphor and Gaze is about artists expressing women's real desires, confusion and anxieties from different perspectives, and exploring the love, healing and growth shared by humans.

"In these unique times of the pandemic (疫情), we have had new life experiences and understandings, and I increasingly realize that art is the best medium to break down barriers and to bring people together. And for artists, their creation and thinking never stop," Zhu says. "In art history, the images of women are often just objects to be gazed at. In our exhibition, women are the subject of creation. "

Zhu says that she feels an increasing amount of people are supporting female art. While she overcame various difficulties hosting previous exhibitions with a limited budget, this year she was invited by Xiao Yu, founder of La Vie Art Center, who provided the place.

The art center is an industrial space with rough concrete walls, which, according to Zhu, contrasts with the fixed impression of women being frail, and allows the artists to communicate with the viewers through powerful artworks.

The exhibition also features a reading room section entitled Writing Her Power- Women's Situation and Writing, displaying books from 20 publishing houses on themes including female power, self-identity and relationships. Zhu says that books have played a major role in her learning.

More plants are growing and expanding around Mount Everest (local name Mount Qomolangma) as the area continues to experience the consequences of global warming, researchers have found.

Scientists from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom used satellite data to establish increases in subnival vegetation-plants that grow between the tree line and the snow line.

Using NASA Landsat satellite data from 1993 to 201& scientists measured "small but significant" increases in vegetation cover between 4, 150 and 6, 000 meters above sea level.

''There are now more areas that are covered in plants than there were in 1993, " said Karen Anderson, a remote sensing scientist who led the research.

"We don't know what the impact is. It may be that plants trap snow and might cause it to melt more slowly. It might be that the plants cause the snow to melt more quickly, " she added.

1.4 billion people depend on water collected in the region, and changes to water cycles and supplies could have far reaching impacts, their research, published in the Global Change journal, said.

"We know that plants and the water cycle are coupled?" Anderson explained. "Wherever you have plants growing, it changes the way the water cycle behaves in those areas. "

"This is particularly important in the Himalayas because glaciers are receding (后退), and we know from lots of scientific work that this is already affecting water supplies in this region, " she added.

Climate change is already having an impact on Himalayan communities. A 2019 study from Columbia University found that Himalayan glaciers have been losing almost half a meter of ice each year since the start of this century. This is already resulting in flooding for local communities, and could ultimately result in drought.

Last year, an assessment from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development found that at least a third of the ice in the region could melt by the end of the century.