It would be wonderful to enjoy a literary work in its original form or to analyze seminal works from great philosophers in their own language. But oftentimes, we don't have the luxury of learning the original language of written works so we rely on translations of that piece.

But as we know, there are certain ideas or concepts that get lost in translation or cannot be fully expressed from one language to another, so we don't get the totality of what is being said.

Throughout centuries, many methods and philosophies of translation have emerged and have been used even until today. So how should we go about translating texts and other works? In this article, Tim Parks takes us through a few ideas on translation and where we are now as regards our concept of translation.

(Image credit: olilynch/Pixabay)

Extraordinary, amazing, super-human!!! Just when we think we’ve reached the limit of human endurance, someone shatters the records. Huge congratulations to Sarah Thomas on swimming the English Channel 4x continuously!!! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏊‍♀️🇫🇷 🏊‍♀️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏊‍♀️🇫🇷🏊‍♀️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 pic.twitter.com/kOa9QlereH

— Lewis Pugh (@LewisPugh) September 17, 2019

When you are given a second chance at life, you would most likely feel very invigorated, spirited, and enthusiastic to enjoy the fullness of life and never let any opportunity pass.

Sarah Thomas was a swimmer before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Even through her chemotherapy, she swam, only taking a break when she had to undergo radiation.

But after she survived her cancer, she went back to doing the thing she loved best, swimming. And with that, she was able to make the record of being the first person to swim the English Channel four times non-stop.

(Image credit: Lewis Pugh/Twitter)

When you look at statues, sculptures, or paintings of people, you can't help but wonder how they must have looked like when they were alive or if they were flesh and blood. Through the hyperrealistic works of Joongwon Jeong, you will be able to see some of these classical art come to life.

Joongwon Jeong is a Korean painter and a freelance illustrator who specializes in hyperrealism. This time the artist took inspiration from some classical pieces of art and recreated them as hyperrealistic portraits that almost look like photographs.

Check out more of his work on Instagram.

(Image credit: Joongwon Jeong)

Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind brought fame to the band and grunge music to the world. The cover image immediately captivated the public eye. It shows a baby, representing the human race, in instinctive and lifelong covetousness.

The photo was a challenging one for Kirk Weddle. To execute his premise, he called up a friend who was the father of a 4-month old baby. He had about 15 seconds to capture the baby before he started bawling. Flashbak describes the shoot:

“A 4-month-old baby was cast and I conducted the shoot with just his parents and a lifeguard present. I placed a camera with a motor drive , in an underwater housing, mounted on a tripod at the bottom of a pool. Since kids are always an unknown at shoots, I did several prelight and prefocus passes with a doll. Once I felt I had the framing, light, and exposure dialed in; the parents slipped the child into the water. I took seven frames on the first pass and four frames on the second. As expected, the baby started to cry, this had been the babies first time underwater, and we wrapped the shoot. The dollar bill and the fishhook were stripped in in post. The result was one of the most iconic album covers in the last 25 years. The music inside wasn’t too bad either; to date it has sold over 30 million copies.”

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “art installation”, the gold toilet “America” has been stolen from its wood-panelled room over the weekend. A report of the burglary at the Oxfordshire country house was received by the Thames Valley Police just before 5 A.M on Saturday, September 14.

“The piece of art that has been stolen is a high-value toilet made out of gold that was on display at the palace,” Detective Inspector Jess Milne said (in a statement she probably never expected to utter).

“Due to the toilet being plumbed in to the building, this has caused significant damage and flooding,” Milne added.

[...]

The toilet is reportedly worth £4.8 million (nearly $6 million).

More details on Geek.com.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Blenheim Palace/ Geek.com)

The image above shows us the entire contents of a firetruck in Geneva, Switzerland, sorted and categorized, including the crew. This is an example of a very popular Instagram meme called knolling.   

So knolling is a type of flat-lay photography, where different objects are arranged at 90-degree angles from each other, then photographed from above. The look is symmetrical and pleasing to the eye and allows people to see a variety of objects in a single picture; perfect for demonstrating equipment or an inventory, for example. The process has been further popularized through LEGO, where builders carefully arranged their bricks by shape, style and color before getting to work on construction.

Knolling of emergency service vehicles is also known as the Tetris Challenge. Here is a Boxer MRAV of the Royal Netherlands Army.



Considering how well-equipped modern emergency services are, a glimpse of what they have is intriguing, even if we don't understand most of what we are seeing. Once a few crews did this, everyone wanted to get involved. Below is a police van in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. We assume that they enlisted someone innocent to play the part of an arrestee.  



You can see 30 ranked images of emergency service knolling at Bored Panda. You can also explore more through the hashtag #tetrischallenge at Instagram.

-via Metafilter

There are still so many rare cases of diseases that we don't know which may be due to genetic mutations or alterations. One such case involved an infant who was less than a year old diagnosed with juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML).

Standard treatments had no effect while his body continued to deteriorate. When doctors conducted a new genetic test called the UCSF500 to identify the cause of his rare cancer, they found an alteration which were more common in adult cancers than in infants.

With this insight, they had wanted to try one last ditch effort of using the same type of treatment for the adult cancer to see if his body would respond in the same way.

While Quincy recovered from his splenectomy surgery, Stieglitz approached his parents about trying an oral medication called sorafenib, an FLT3 inhibitor that has been effective in treating many adult liver and kidney cancer patients whose cancers are driven by changes in FLT3.

The drug had never been tested in clinical trials for infants, so even the proper dosage was unknown. In fact, an earlier study even recommended against sorafenib for JMML because it had found no FLT3 alterations in a group of patients with the disease.

Thankfully, the drug worked. Quincy's white blood cell count normalized and when he was healthy enough, they performed a bone marrow stem cell transplant on him. Now, he is in complete molecular remission.

(Image credit: Barbara Ries)

Art can be a useful means to inspire people to take action for certain causes. And in the new art exhibit Arcadia Earth, we not only get some stunning displays of various natural scenery but also a call to action, reminding us of our responsibility to take care of our planet.

“Arcadia Earth” is an exhibit for the Instagram generation — it’s colorful, immersive, and just playful enough for phone-clad millennials to throw themselves at it. But it would be unfair to say that the exhibit is nothing but a pretty background for selfies.

The exhibit is, first and foremost, a show with a purpose: opening visitors’ eyes to the state of our planet through immersive art installations and giving them tips on how to reduce their impact.

And there’s truly nothing like walking into a coral-like tunnel made of 44,000 discarded plastic bags (the number used in New York City every minute) to make you think about our responsibility in the whole mess that is our planet currently.

(Image credit: Arcadia Earth)

While the music festival near Area 51 was canceled and substituted with a party in Las Vegas, that was a separate venture from the original Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” scheduled for this Friday, September 20. More than two million people have responded that they are going, but most of those responses came months ago. The military has no idea how many people will still try to get into Area 51, so they are instituting defense measures, including temporary flight restrictions (TFRs).

The TFR will be active from September 19th to the 23rd and range from the ground all the way to 18,000 feet. Only military aircraft are allowed overhead and even law enforcement and medical helicopters are subject to tight restrictions in order to enter the closed-off airspace. One can only imagine that the military will have plenty of airborne assets in place to tightly monitor the border with Area 51 in this area. The base already has a cadre of resident HH-60 Pave Hawks that run security operations over the base's sprawling territory and beyond.

The other TFR that has been posted is to the south, along the southern reach of the Nevada Test And Training Range where primary access to the Department Of Energy's Nevada Test Site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site, is located. It was just last week that a pair of Dutch Youtubers were arrested for trespassing beyond the site's perimeter. Another deeper incursion into the area last January ended with the driver being shot dead.

As you can see from the map above, Area 51 is completely surrounded by Department of Defense properties, with varying levels of access. So don't expect to see live aerial footage of whatever may happen on September 20th. Read more about the preparations for the possible storming at The Drive.   -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Finlay McWalter)

If you can’t see a trash can along the road, do you just throw away the peel of the banana you just ate on the ground? If you think to yourself that it’s fine and “it will just decompose anyway,” think again. While it does decompose, you might be wrong in assuming that it decomposes quickly. 

For this matter, Popular Mechanics interviewed Rhonda Sherman, an extension solid waste specialist at North Carolina State University’s Department of Horticultural Science. She also authored a book entitled “Backyard Composting of Yard, Garden, and Food Discards.”

Before we go any further, let’s take a look at the decomposition process. The first thing that happens after you toss your peel is that microorganisms start breaking it down by secreting enzymes that cause the decomposition, Sherman says. But because microorganisms don’t have mouths or teeth, this doesn’t happen quickly.

… while weather does play a role—things decompose more quickly in tropics than, say, a desert—when all is said and done, food waste can take years to decompose, not just a few weeks like many people may think.

If your banana peel is just laying on the ground for two years, it’s not good for the environment. Plain and simple.

So where do we throw our banana peels, or any kind of food waste? We throw it in the trash bin. Or even better, we can compost it.

Find out more about this topic over at the site.

(Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos/ Pixabay)

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a disease that starts to alter and damage the brain years or even decades before symptoms in a person appear. Being able to identify early if a person is at risk of having this disease would be of great help for the person, as he or she can prepare for the disease, and probably prevent it.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in a new study recently published online in the Neurobiology of Aging, state that, with further developments, measuring how fast an individual’s eyes dilate while he or she takes a cognitive test might be a “low-cost, low-invasive method” that can help in screening individuals at increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s Disease, even before the cognitive decline begins.

In recent years, researchers investigating the pathology of AD have primarily directed their attention at two causative or contributory factors: the accumulation of protein plaques in the brain called amyloid-beta and tangles of a protein called tau. Both have been linked to damaging and killing neurons, resulting in progressive cognitive dysfunction.

The new study focuses on pupillary responses which are driven by the locus coeruleus (LC), a cluster of neurons in the brainstem involved in regulating arousal and also modulating cognitive function. Tau is the earliest occurring known biomarker for AD; it first appears in the LC; and it is more strongly associated with cognition than amyloid-beta…

The LC drives pupillary response — the changing diameter of the eyes’ pupils — during cognitive tasks. (Pupils get bigger the more difficult the brain task.) In previously published work, the researchers had reported that adults with mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor to AD, displayed greater pupil dilation and cognitive effort than cognitively normal individuals, even if both groups produced equivalent results. Critically, in the latest paper, the scientists link pupillary dilation responses with identified AD risk genes.

(Image Credit: Skitterphoto/ Pixabay)

This is the Great White Spot of Saturn (see top left of the image), which began as a “fluffy white storm cloud” in the northern hemisphere of Saturn back in 2010. Now, it has spread across the entire planet, which, if scaled to a storm system on the Earth, would be comparable to “a storm system that covers all of North America but wraps around the entire planet.”

Pictured here in false colored infrared in February, orange colors indicate clouds deep in the atmosphere, while light colors highlight clouds higher up. The rings of Saturn are seen nearly edge-on as the thin blue horizontal line. The warped dark bands are the shadows of the rings cast onto the cloud tops by the Sun to the upper left. A source of radio noise from lightning, the intense storm was thought to relate to seasonal changes when spring emerges in the north of Saturn. After raging for over six months, the iconic storm circled the entire planet and then tried to absorb its own tail -- which surprisingly caused it to fade away.

(Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA)

Albert Einstein, in his theory of general relativity, hypothesized that a black hole, formed from two cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, would ring in the aftermath. This ring would produce gravitational waves that, like a struck bell, would reverberate sound waves. Einstein predicted that this particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves would indicate the mass and the spin of the newly formed black hole.

Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have "heard" the ringing of an infant black hole for the first time, and found that the pattern of this ringing does, in fact, predict the black hole's mass and spin -- more evidence that Einstein was right all along.

The findings, published today in Physical Review Letters, also favor the idea that black holes lack any sort of "hair" -- a metaphor referring to the idea that black holes, according to Einstein's theory, should exhibit just three observable properties: mass, spin, and electric charge. All other characteristics, which the physicist John Wheeler termed "hair," should be swallowed up by the black hole itself, and would therefore be unobservable.

More details of this news on Science Daily.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Alex Trebek of Jeopardy! is of French Canadian origin. He's a native French speaker and can switch between French and English easily.

So when he pronounces a French word or an English loanword from French, he very carefully uses a French accent. "Genre" comes up a lot on Jeopardy! Here is a compilation of him saying it so deliciously on that show.

-via AV Club

Forensic investigators in Australia ran a grisly experiment for more than a year and came up with some fairly weird conclusions. They observed (and photographed) a corpse as it decomposed at a body farm for 17 months. A picture was taken every half-hour during daylight for that entire time. They discovered that a dead body can move for a long time after death- more than a year.

"What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body," Alyson Wilson a medical scientist at Central Queensland University told the ABC.

Some movement after death is expected, but the fact that it continued for such a long time was a complete surprise, Wilson said.

The results of the study could have implications for forensic investigations. We can no longer assume that the position in which a long-dead body is found is the same position the deceased was in at death. Read the story at Interesting Engineering. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user projectexploration)