Views: Rio De Janeiro – Southeast Brazil (4K)
Rio de Janeiro is a huge seaside city in Brazil, famed for its Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, 38m Christ the Redeemer statue atop Mount Corcovado and for Sugarloaf Mountain, a granite peak with cable cars to its summit. The city is also known for its sprawling favelas (shanty towns). Its raucous Carnaval festival, featuring parade floats, flamboyant costumes and samba dancers, is considered the world’s largest.
Walking Tour: Mainz – Western Germany (4K)
Mainz is a German city on the Rhine River. It’s known for its old town, with half-timbered houses and medieval market squares. In the center, the Marktbrunnen is a Renaissance fountain with red columns. Nearby, a distinctive octagonal tower tops the Romanesque Mainz Cathedral, built of deep red sandstone. The Gutenberg Museum honors the inventor of the printing press with exhibits, including 2 of his original bibles.
Science: Wooly Mammoth Tusks & Ice Age Extinction
A woolly mammoth that roamed Alaska 17,000 years ago covered enough ground in its 28-year lifetime to nearly circle the globe twice, an analysis of one of its tusks suggests.
Paris Walks: 10th & 11th Arrondissement (4K Video)
In the up-and-coming 10th arr., the quaint footbridges and bohemian cafes of Canal Saint-Martin give way to Indian restaurants along Passage Brady. The streets around Place de la Republique feature hip bars and restaurants, while Marché Saint-Martin offers gourmet food stalls. Rue Sainte-Marthe is a quiet street lined with art studios and global eateries. The area is also home to Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est.
Front Page View: Wall Street Journal – Aug 13
Morning News: China’s ‘Five-Year Plan’, Lithuania To Build A Border Wall
We assess China’s ‘five-year plan’ for its economy and ask what it means for the country’s private firms. Plus: the latest on Lithuania’s plans to build a wall on its border with Belarus, and Zürich’s Design Biennale.
Art Books: ‘Caravaggio – The Complete Works’
Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Today, he is considered one of the greatest influences in all art history.
This edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist’s ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio’s career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases.
The author
Sebastian Schütze was a longtime research fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome. He is a member of the academic board of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, and a member of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. From 2003 to 2009 he held the Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 2009 he was appointed professor of early modern art history at Vienna University.
Science: Vitamin D Trial In Asthmatic Children, Risks to Machine Learning
Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science, talks with host Sarah Crespi about a risky trial of vitamin D in asthmatic children that has caused a lot of concern among ethicists.
They also discuss how the vitamin D trial connects with a possibly dangerous push to compare new treatments with placebos instead of standard-of-care treatments in clinical trials.
Next, Birhanu Eshete, professor of computer and information science at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, talks with producer Joel Goldberg about the risks of exposing machine learning algorithms online—risks such as the reverse engineering of training data to access proprietary information or even patient data.
Boomers Daily 