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)

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)

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)

Many people in history have tried to make connections between the climate and humans. Some of them were quite bizarre but then again, they didn't have the equipment or scientific instruments which we use to predict weather and make observations about trends and patterns in the climate. Here are some weird claims people made about the climate.

(Image credit: NASA/Unsplash)

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)

Witnessing the calamities that are laying our world to waste can be heartbreaking and emotionally draining. It will take its toll on us and we will find ourselves not having enough energy and strength to take on the bigger issues we are facing like climate change.

But when the source of stress is the thing that bogs us down and keeps us discouraged, how then can we cope and find solutions to our problems? One way is to turn our emotional energy into a source of power.

Like a wind turbine taking in all of the wind—whether it passed over a manured field or a lavender meadow—all of these negative and positive emotions can be harnessed by our minds and expressed in positive, effective ways that help us take on climate conflict from a position of inner strength.

Even denial can be harnessed, if we take a little time to understand it with a compassionate lens.

We’ve come to know denial at its worst, the passive resignation we experience as wildfires spread and species disappear. Denial is also a powerful coping mechanism for releasing ourselves from the stress that comes with anger, grief, or overwhelm, with feeling like the problem is just too big. However, as clinical psychologist at Columbia University Wendy Greenspun is careful to point out, “the very thing that protects us also prevents us from taking action.”

She suggests that to break down our defense mechanism, we should connect with others and take on self-care strategies.

(Image credit: Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

We need energy to live every day. From the cars that we drive to the appliances we use to make our food and do things around the house, energy powers everything we use. But what happens when one source of energy, say oil, suddenly runs out?

Of course, there are other sources of energy, but that's going to leave a big dent on the energy supply which would make it more difficult to meet global energy demand. That means prices will go up and economies will struggle to find ways to meet those needs.

Recently, the oil market had quite a shock when Saudi Arabia's production was affected by attacks on its infrastructure. No matter where we are in the world, we will feel the effects of that shock as many economies depend on oil and other fuels. And the only way to avoid that is to be energy independent. But is that even possible?

(Image credit: Flcelloguy/Wikimedia Commons)

People say that benefits can be reaped from taking medical marijuana but there are still reservations on whether it is actually safe as regards one's cognitive performance, mental stability, and psychological functioning.

Harvard associate professor of psychiatry Staci Gruber shares some insights on what constitutes marijuana and how these components affect our brain. Listen to the podcast here.

(Image credit: 7raysmarketing/Pixabay)

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)

When I was younger, I thought dyslexia only meant that a person had trouble reading because they mix up the letters in words. But I found out later on that it was much more complicated than that.

People with dyslexia struggle not just to read words but also to identify speech sounds and to associate those with words and letters. So it's not just about having a hard time reading. It can hinder someone's communication and absorption of ideas and concepts.

But there's still more that we don't know about dyslexia, so through a research alliance between UC San Francisco and UC Berkley with the support of Charles Schwab, dyslexia and other learning disabilities will be further examined so that we might know how it starts, which parts of the brain it affects, and so on.

The new center, with clinical and research efforts at both Bay Area campuses, will break down barriers between disciplines such as medicine and education, and create and provide the best evidence-based interventions in the clinic, classroom, workplace, and home.

Known as the UCSF-UC Berkeley Schwab Dyslexia and Cognitive Diversity Center, the new initiative will draw on the deep and diverse strengths of both campuses – in child and adolescent psychiatry, psychology, neurology, neuroscience, education and public health – to accelerate research; develop and implement better screening and assessment tools; test new interventions; and reduce the social stigma surrounding dyslexia and other learning disorders.

(Image credit: E. Caverzasi & R. Bogley/UCSF Dyslexia Center)

Apart from warming our oceans and killing coral reefs, climate change can also affect the spread of diseases. Researchers say that there is a possibility for valley fever to expand its range of affected states and spread quicker.

“The range of valley fever is going to increase substantially,” said Morgan Gorris, a former UCI PhD student in Earth system science and lead author of the new study.

“We made projections out to the end of the 21st century, and our model predicts that valley fever will travel farther north throughout the western United States, especially in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains and throughout the Great Plains, and by that time, much of the western U.S. will be considered endemic.”

(Image credit: Brittany Colette/Unsplash)

It has been more than 60 years since the first Waffle House opened and it is still going strong with more than 2,000 restaurants all over the country. But the successful restaurant chain actually started out as just a side hustle.

(Image credit: Waffle House)

Deciding who needs urgent care and attention in hospitals can usually become a subjective choice. Oftentimes, people with life-threatening conditions or those with very serious injuries get treated first since it's a matter of life and death.

However, what about others who aren't necessarily fighting for their lives but still have serious illnesses? How can we decide who gets prioritized and what measures will we use to make that decision so that it would be fair to all? A team of researchers may have the answer to these questions.

Our research group has developed an evidence-based tool that aims to help clinicians with these difficult decisions. The Responding to Urgency of Need in Palliative Care (RUN-PC) Triage Tool is expected to change practice internationally.

We conducted a foundational qualitative study with Victorian health professionals to better understand which factors clinicians use to assess the urgency of palliative care needs and the ethical aspects of their decision-making.

We used these results as the basis for an international online discrete choice experiment to determine how each of these factors should be weighted. We then developed a scoring system for the final Responding to Urgency of Need in Palliative Care (RUN-PC) Triage Tool.

(Image credit: Adhy Savala/Unsplash)

The arts are one way of exercising cultural influence on a global scale. Though we would often think of pop music as the top cultural export which any country could have, other means are emerging which could help countries exert some influence. One example is through museums.

Museums around the world in the 21st century are no longer solely dependent on government funding to operate internationally. Museums today build new branches in different countries, collaborate with global brands, and even generate their own profit.

Since the 2000s, when the Guggenheim Museum successfully implemented its global expansion, franchised museums have multiplied around the globe. Interestingly these strategies aren’t limited to Western museums.

Chinese and Russian initiatives are already making use of museums as a way of spreading their cultural influence abroad. Some examples being the K11 Art Mall which started in Hong Kong and the State Hermitage Museum from Russia.

These museums and foundations are using the same model that the Guggenheim implemented which was to franchise museums in different parts of the world along with collaboration as well as art programs and international exchange programs.

These cases from China and Russia do more than offer captivating examples of how the Guggenheim’s global expansion museum models have been successfully adopted and further transformed by museums beyond the western world.

They are evidence of emerging new alternative avenues of museum diplomacy that no longer depend on government commissions directed at serving immediate geo-political interests.

(Image credit: Baycrest/Wikimedia Commons; CC by SA 2.5)

Though the Amazon rainforest is a quite popular natural landscape in Brazil, there are many other places aside from it that offer a rich diversity of life. One such place can be found in southern Brazil, known as the Cerrado.

Within this savanna lies what Luciano Candisani describes as an underwater garden because of its clear waters teeming with a variety of species, the Serra da Bodoquena.

Such beauty—and scientific insight—is only possible because of the astounding water quality in the Serra da Bodoquena, a swell of mountains and plateaus in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Water that filters through the porous limestone of the Bodoquena emerges with such purity that the rivers seem to glow.

At the same time, the water erodes the limestone, creating a wonderland of waterfalls, caves, and turquoise pools that offer habitat for giant river otters, tapirs, caimans, snakes, subterranean cave worms, enormous varieties of fish, and so many colorful aquatic plants that Candisani calls the region an “underwater garden.”

(Image credit: Cassia Desbesel/Wikimedia Commons)