The deal struck between Iran and six world powers over its nuclear program should see sanctions against the country beginning to ease by next year. Iranians are hoping the 41 of travel restrictions could prompt an influx of international tourists. Travel agencies have already seen an increase in demand. With its ancient architecture, 42 landscapes and warm people, tour companies describe Iran as one of the unexplored jewels of the Middle East. 

    But the country’s 43 since the 1979 Islamic Revolution has seen visitor numbers from the West fall. The latest 44 show only 90,000 arrivals from North America and the European Union in 2013. Former diplomat Mehrdad Khonsari said there’s a lot of work to do. “The difficulties we’ve had in Iran have definitely hurt the tourist industry in the sense that people are afraid to go. But those people that 45 and overcame these considerations and visited Iran were never sorry,” said Khonsari.

   Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around longer than most people realize. The intent behind much of AI is to free us from mundane repetitive tasks, giving us more time to grow our intellects and businesses, with more interesting, evolving actions. AI offers us that access with speed and accuracy when we need it.

   In London, self-driving robots deliver food. In Pasadena, California, a robot named Flippy can cook. Last fall, an autonomous train made its way across the Australian outback for the first time, and Zhuzhou, China, began testing a trackless and driverless train that navigates city streets by means of lines painted on the road. Artificial intelligence is everywhere. And its adoption is rapidly becoming necessary for businesses to stay competitive.

   How does this affect human employees? Those low-skilled jobs are most likely to be affected and most chances of being automated. White collar jobs are also at risk though with AI taking a bigger role in the financial industry.

   But despite all this, the future for human employees may be much brighter than many recent predictions. While AI destroys jobs, it also creates them. And according to a report from the research firm Gartner, artificial intelligence is currently creating more jobs than it destroys. This includes not only the obvious jobs such as software engineers but also low-level jobs such as training AI to recognize objects or human activity and many others.

   AI may destroy jobs and it may create them, but it's not always about man versus machine. AI can be at its best when it helps humans to perform jobs. For example, Walmart announced it was beginning tests of shelf scanning robots at 50 locations. These robots are not intended to replace human workers but to make them more efficient. The robots scan the condition of shelves, and workers may focus their time on filling the shelves, replacing items left in the wrong place and fixing problems that the robots notify them of.

      Popular music varies between cultures and generations. In the past century, there has been an explosion of popular music styles in the West. Three of them are reggae, punk, and rap. 

     Reggae developed from a kind of Afro-Caribbean music called “mento,” sung and accompanied by guitars and drums. Initiated on the Caribbean island of Jamaica in the 1960s, it spread throughout the world in the 1970s. Some musicians changed “mento” into a music style called “ska” by adding a hesitation beat. Later, other musicians changed “ska” to introduce “reggae.”

      Punk is a style of rock music composed to react against previous forms of rock. Punks felt that rock music no longer represented the counterculture from which it had sprung and had sold out to the mainstream, conventional culture. Through their clothing and hairstyles, punks intended to shock society. The “punk look” included spike hairdos, ripped clothing, body piercing, and jewelry made from objects such as razor blades and safety pins. Their onstage behavior was aggressive and provocative. Punk music is simple, but its message is anti-government, anti-authority, and anti-conformity. 

     Rap, or hip-hop, is a type of dance music in which the performers—rappers—speak in rhythm and rhyme, but not sing. This art originated in Africa, then, transferred to America via Jamaica, where it was known as “toasting.” In America, during the 1970s rap appeared in the discos of New York’s black neighborhoods. It was mainly about dancing, partying, and the romantic adventures of the rappers, but, later, politics became its important theme.

With the increasing water shortages and growing water conflicts, some people start to ask: why don’t we get our drinking water from the ocean? The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy. Salt dissolves very easily in water, forming strong chemical bonds, and those bonds are difficult to break. Energy and the technology to desalinate water are both expensive. There are environmental costs of desalination as well. Sea life can get sucked into desalination plants, killing small ocean creatures, and upsetting the food chain. Also, there’s the problem of what to do with the separated salt. Pumping this super-salty water back into the ocean can harm local aquatic life. Reducing these impacts is possible, but it adds to the costs. Despite the economic and environmental hurdles, desalination is becoming increasingly attractive as we run out of water from other sources. We are over-pumping groundwater, we have already built more dams than we can afford economically and environmentally, and we have tapped nearly all of the accessible rivers. Far more must be done to use our existing water more efficiently, but with the world’s population escalating and the water supply dwindling, the economic tide may soon turn in favor of desalination.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University decided to find out how intelligent various animals are. To rightly compare brainpower in species, it isn’t enough to weigh brain tissue. You must take into account the brain relative to the organism’s size. But this may fall short of evaluating actual intelligence.

Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel said, “I believe the absolute number of neurons an animal has determined the richness of their internal mental state and their ability to predict what is about to happen in their environment based on past experience.” She and her colleagues found that meat eaters have about the same number of neurons as plant eaters.That means plant eaters need as much brain power to escape from predators as meat eaters need to catch them.How do cats and dogs measure up? Previous findings had cats ahead at 300 million neurons to dogs roughly 160 million. In this latest study, however, dogs were on top, with 530 million neurons to cats 250 million. Just for comparison, humans have around 16 billion such neurons. Even so, dogs were way above other meat eaters in the brainpower department.

Having a bigger brain has a downside, researchers have found. “Meat eating is largely considered a problem-solver in terms of energy,” Herculano-Houzel said, “but in retrospect, it is clear that meat eating animals must impose a delicate balance between how much brain and body a species can afford.” This may be why you often see large predators like lions and bears dozing.

        Cosmetic surgery is not just for adults wanting to look younger and thinner. It is also helpful for correcting birth defects in children. A charitable organization called Operation Smile provides reconstructive surgery to poor children all over the world. Its goal is to repair a birth defect or disfigurement from an accident such as a fire.

        Volunteer doctors and nurses provide their expertise and labor to correct major birth defects in children.They often treat cleft lip and cleft palate. Children with cleft lip have an opening from the top of their lip to their nose. Cleft palate is an opening in the roof of the mouth.

        Operation Smile was founded in 1982 by an American doctor, Dr. William Magee, and his wife, Kathleen Magee, a registered nurse. Their goal was to improve the lives of children by improving their appearances.They believe that appearance can affect a child’s self-esteem and sense of dignity.Operation Smile surgeons have performed over 20,000 operations worldwide. In 1999, the couple launched “World Journey of Hope ’99,” a surgical mission dedicated to correcting facial deformities among the world’s poorest children. It was a nine-week mission and was the first of its kind in the world. Operation Smile’s volunteers treated more than 5,000 children in that year alone.