Tiny homes have been popular as home prices have climbed to new heights and people have looked for creative ways to downsize. We've seen many design concepts, including storage units and buses, but Jim Dotzenrod and his daughter Danielle recently came up with a unique one. The pair worked together on the family project to transform a 1973 train caboose (乘务员专用车厢) into the sleeper car.

The CR Station Train Caboose, as it's known on Airbnb, which has become somewhat of its own tourist destination in the small town that houses it, is available to rent for $124 a night, and has an excellent rating of 4.86 out of 5 from more than 300 guests on the booking website.

According to Insider, the project began when Jim saw a bunch of train cabooses along the side of the road during a drive out of town. He said he wondered if he could change one of them into a place where people could live or stay. So, he bought the 52,000-pound caboose for $8,000. Getting the caboose to its final home took some creative thinking and some heavy-duty equipment.

Danielle said the work was challenging, especially since she and her dad both have day jobs. But their schedules didn't stop them from finishing the project. "My dad can do anything he sets his mind to—like, absolutely anything—but my dad is so low maintenance himself," Danielle told the website. "So when we built this together it was a good combination because he could build whatever and have me pushing him like, 'Hey, let's make this as cool as we can.'"

This caboose also has Wi-Fi, air-conditioning, a refrigerator, a shower and more. So, if you're ever traveling in Iowa and want to experience something special, book a stay at the CR Station Train Caboose!

We have long been attracted by quick solutions that could increase our intelligence. Today, people's hopes lie in brain training apps, some of which claim to result in smarter minds". But is this quick solutions all that it is said to be?

There are plenty of brain training apps, but they all share the same characteristics: they turn mental exercises like simple arithmetic, memory tests and logic and pattern-matching problems into quick games. The more you play these mini-games, the smarter you will get — or so some apps tell us. It is really a big promise.

Many of the apps say they are backed by "science", a claim I found surprising as a former neuroscientist. The concept that increasing intelligence would be as simple as practicing a few mini-games every day goes against what we have discovered about how humans think and learn.

After surveying a diverse spread of thousands of users across wide variety of apps, researchers at Western University in Canada discovered that "brain training has no appreciable effect on cognitive functioning in the ‘real world', even after extensive training periods". The positive effects that have been found are limited to the very specific mini-games and tasks that users are trained on, such as the ability to memorize lists of words or numbers, or perform mental arithmetic, with little benefit to other skills.

If you are expecting them to improve your ability to write novel or construct a complex spreadsheet, I am afraid you will want to look elsewhere.

Puzzle video games such as "Baba Is You" and "Returno the Obra Dinn" see players apply their skill at logic, memory and concentration in a far more complex way than any brain training mini-game.

A rare wild flower is being re-established in Devon fields thanks to some four-legged helpers. A conservation charity called Planflife has employed donkeys as "ecosystem engineers" to encourage the return of the endangered small-flowered catchfly.

The catchfly was once found all across Britain but now it only grows in small areas of Wales and the south and west of England. Experts blame its decline on modern farming practices. The flower flourished around the edges of sandy fields where farmers grew their crops, but because of weedkillers that were used to remove "unwanted" plants, and fertilisers to boost crop yields, its habitat has largely disappeared.

Plantlife teamed up with the Donkey Sanctuary, a charity that looks after donkeys in the UK and around the world. It owns several farms across Devon and the UK, where it takes care of hundreds of rescued donkeys, as well as maintaining habitats for other wildlife. More than 20, 000 seeds have been scattered on fields at the sanctuary's main Devon farm, and it is hoped that many will grow into plants this summer. They will provide food for threatened bird species such as linnets, yellowhammers and skylarks. Plantlife then aims to get the donkeys themselves involved, testing whether catchfly seeds benefit from being trampled into the ground as the donkeys take their exercise. Many plants have seeds that must be pressed into the soil in order to germinate.

"We're incredibly grateful to partners like the Donkey Sanctuary who are helping these fantastically rare wild flowers come back from the edge of extinction, "Cath Shellswell of Plantlife told The Guardian newspaper. "We look forward to seeing small-flowered catchfly return and we are working with the sanctuary to ensure that this tiny plant has a thriving future. "