The D.C. area is home to many outstanding Chinese restaurants, but diners willing to travel outside the city limits will also be rewarded.

This not-so-hidden-anymore fine restaurant for cuisine is inside the Days Inn off New York Avenue. Dandan noodles and mapo tofu are sure bets. Panda Gourmet offers online ordering for takeout, and delivery is now an option. Open from 11:00am to 9:45pm. Closed on Tuesday. Address: 2700 New York Ave NE, Washington, DC 20002

Shanghai Taste offers arguably the best soup dumplings in the area. It also serves a variety of chef's specials, beef with rice cakes, and more. The restaurant is open from 11:00am to 9:00pm Tuesday through Sunday, offering call-in orders and pickups. Address: 1121 Nelson St, Rockville, MD 20850

The spacious dining room is regularly filled with customers enjoying dumplings and a variety of noodle and rice dishes. Customers can also place pickup orders online for lunch or dinner until 8:00pm six days a week. Closed on Tuesday. Address: 2646 University Blvd W, Silver Spring, MD 20902

This nice Cantonese restaurant in Columbia Heights quickly became a destination for chef Henji Cheung's Hong Kong-style cooking and co-owner Sarah Thompson's natural wine list that earned her a Michelin nod. Reserve a spot indoors, at its chef's counter, or covered dog-friendly patio, with creative wine tastings in the mix. Dinner hours: Tuesday through Thursday 5:30pm-9:00pm (last seating); Friday and Saturday 5:00pm-9:30pm (last seating). Closed on Sunday and Monday. Address: 3410 11th St NW, Washington, DC 20010

Roland Reisley turned 101 years old in May and is in remarkable health. But that's not the thing he prides himself on. "I am the last original client of Frank Lloyd Wright, still living in the home he designed for me," Reisley said, sitting in the bright open living room of the home designed by the famous architect.

The house where Reisley has lived for 73 years is located in the woods of Westchester County, New York, just 30 miles north of Manhattan. It's one of 47 that make up the peaceful mid-20th-century modern village of Usonia.

Back in 1951, Reisley was just 26, newly married and ready to put down roots. He and his wife began looking for a place in Manhattan. But what they liked, they couldn't afford on his sound engineer's salary and what they could, they didn't like. Then they heard about Usonia. On their first trip out, they were greeted with such enthusiasm from the 10 families who'd already established homes there that they decided to join.

The house has signature Wright features. It is made with local materials, has a flat roof, wood paneling, concrete floors and custom-made furniture. Over the decades, Reisley has opened his doors to visitors. The house is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Reisley said he's tried his best to be a good steward not just of the Wright creation he lives in, but all others as well. He co-founded the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an organization engaged in the preservation of all of Wright's remaining buildings. Reisley believes that his devotion to the home and the community are what have kept him in such good health all of these years.

The peak of Mount Comolangma, 8,849 meters above sea level. Chimborazo, 6,263 m; Mont Blanc, 4,806 m; Pradalìl hut, at the foot of the Pala group in the Dolomites, 2,278 m. It is common practice to provide the elevation of a place. Simple readings are now readily available on our phones and wearables. But elevation is necessarily relative: only the choice of a reference point allows us to express numerically the height of an object or a location.

The idea of sea level as a reference point for elevations has by now been around for so long as to go essentially unnoticed — we mention it without even considering what it means. That the concept has a history is easily ignored. We tend to forget that sea level is a product of technically and culturally determined assumptions. In this book I tell a story of these assumptions.

Appropriately, the book took shape during a summer spent between sea and mountains. A month after visiting the French Riviera and enjoying the sandy beaches of Nice and Menton, I went hiking with friends in the Pala group. Resting on a pass near the Pradalìl hut, we began discussing the readings offered by our altimeters. Why did they vary ever so slightly from one instrument to the next? This sense of uncertainty led me to think about the meaning of zero. This is how I began my search for the conceptual history of sea level.

In this book I examine three crucial stages in the history of mean sea level. These stages mirror the development of human conceptions of the sea. Since I began thinking about this project in August 2011, the issue of sea-level rise and the need to place it historically have only become more urgent: between then and the end of 2022 the global sea rose by almost 5 centimeters, about half of the overall rise recorded by satellites since 1993.

The Barcelona subway pulls into the station, the doors slide open and passengers pour out to go about their daily business. Little do they know that as they do so, a burst of energy is sent up to street level to help charge an electric car.

Barcelona has put together a package of clean energy technologies to help public transportation go greener, while also doing its part to tackle climate change and aid Europe's difficult shift to the privately owned electric vehicle market.

Sixteen stations of Barcelona's subway system are part of its new MetroCharge project, whereby the energy from the underground trains' brakes is used to power the trains and the stations themselves, while the remainder is sent snaking through cables to the surface to power plug-in stations for privately owned vehicles.

Bernardo Espinoza, an engineer who takes the subway every day, owns an electric car. "I am pleasantly surprised, because I am always looking for where to plug it in," Espinoza said before catching the subway in a working-class area of southern Barcelona. "And if it is from energy from the trains' brakes, then even better."

Regenerative brakes have been in trains for decades and are also used in some cars. They consist of an electric motor which collects energy used in the braking action that would be lost as heat by conventional brakes. That energy can be immediately used to accelerate the vehicle or, in the case of the Barcelona subway system, sent along cables to supply electricity for the station or for electric car chargers.

Alvaro Luna, a professor of electrical engineering, said that the system is innovative in so far as it allows for recycled energy to be redirected to specific local uses — in this case powering electric cars parked nearby. That, he said, boosts efficiency.