Thailand has long been a strong hold for medical tourism in Asia, cashing in over $4 billion every year from patients from all over the world who come to seek treatment from leading specialists and doctors offering experimental and new procedures on the forefront of science and medicine. In cutting edge hospitals patients take advantage of new medical technologies in the lap of luxury where the comforts of Thai hospitality beckon them. Thailand is also blooming in a niche market fast becoming a leading gender-reassignment destination for many transgender people from all corners of the world. From small back end clinics to grand hospitals that look more like 5 star hotels, gender-affirming procedures are available to everyone on any budget. They say in Thailand, it is not about wanting to become beautiful it is a matter of saving someone’s life.

SingularityNet is currently working on creating an open source decentralized AI platform running on the blockchain. This network of AIs will provide AI as a service in an unprecedentedly diverse and open way. SingularityNet will serve as a platform for the self-organization and emergence of increasing levels of Artificial General Intelligence, via the collaborative activity of the AI developer and user communities and the AIs they build and use. We can imagine SingularityNET being a sort of an “AI app store” where apps can not only serve users’ needs, but invoke each other’s help to complete their tasks or projects. The first complex AI system to be realized on the SingularityNET will be an AI brain for Sophia Hanson the most sophisticated humanoid robot ever built. This Year Saudi Arabia granted the status of Citizen to Sophia, that became the first robot to be recognized as a citizen

An Aerotropolis is an urban form whose layout, infrastructure, and economy is centered on an airport, offering its businesses speedy connectivity to suppliers, customers, and enterprise partners worldwide. It is a city less connected to its land-bound neighbors than to its peers thousands of miles away. Popularized by the American academic Dr. John Kasarda, at the root of the Aerotropolis lays globalization with the transportation of not only goods but also intellect. An Aerotropolis is a model of a city driven by a combination of business needs and state control.These cities capture the breadth of themes running through civilization from the re-appropriation of the natural landscape to our unquestioning faith in technology on the backdrop of architecture refined in elegance and logic.

The Chinese have the ambitious goal to overtake Hollywood with large investments to expand the industry. One visible example is Hengdian World Studios, the world’s largest film studios, with a 1:1 scale reproduction of Beijing’s Forbidden City. China has become the second-largest market in the world and is expected to overtake the US by 2018. Hollywood has countered Chinese restrictions (only 34 foreign films are permitted each year) by making blockbuster co-productions with Chinese film companies. The country is the fastest-growing market for film in the world. The number of cinemas has doubled in four years, and the number of tickets sold increased by 30% per year.

Madagascar is home to some of the world's finest rich orange and red pods of cocoa, increasingly used today by Europe and America's finest chocolatiers. Raw cocoa beans, used to make premium chocolate, have never been in higher demand. A surge in appetite for high-end chocolate sourced from single-origin growers has created a frenzied rush for the "dark gold". For the island's cocoa farmers, the surging demand for chocolate should be transformative, especially after years of poverty, but their newfound livelihoods are under threat from armed bandits running rampant in remote areas, hijacking stores and road shipments of the precious beans that make chocolate. The cacao farmers in Ambanja are living in fear every day. A fear of theft prompts them to store their harvested crop as close to them as possible, with most keeping it in the same room as they sleep in. Gangs do as they please, stealing cacao from the farmers’ houses and from the fields. These gangs even steal unripe cacao from the field, then dig holes in which to ripen it underground. Owners of plantations are obliged to patrol their fields every day and evening to keep crops safe. Cacao is a luxury product, thus the existence of cacao plantations in Ambanja is a source of pride. Gangs make a significant profit from stealing cacao and they gain respect in their local communities because they can now help their families meet their daily needs. Police assaults on gangs are often callous, blistering attacks. They hunt down members of these theft rings from a list of wanted gangs. On the list was Rakotonirina Ferdinand, 33 years old, who was shot dead in his house in Matsaborilava, when he tried to prevent police from entering his house. Ferdinand’s family was shocked by the shooting, and significant tension now exists between the police and the family. The police continue trying to restore security, but the gangs are determined to continue stealing.

Five years in the making, I am on the last leg of my Ganges project this year. Exasperating at times it has been a huge struggle for me to decide what to communicate and what to leave out. Everything is happening at once along the Ganges. Climate change is visibly melting the glaciers up in the Himalayas, as the sea level rises and threatens to submerge the sundarbans; salination of the land is posing irreversible damage to fragile ecology along the river. Dams are being constructed to the detriment of the river and the communities that live on its banks. The constant polluting of the waters from domestic, industrial, chemical and biological waste makes disease and death a constant and often casual reminder of our fragility.  I have been challenged spiritually, emotionally and mentally on so many levels by these waters. Every time I return to the Ganges I have to force myself to use the physicality of the work as a way to push through and continue the internal dialogue I have with the world around me. India stirs many emotions within me, imperfect and conflicted my experiences have been beautiful and transient.   The Ganges is a goddess; moody and fierce at times she holds the human beast within her grasp. I have heard so many warnings of ecological disasters on the tip of the horizon and I have witnessed mans unforgiving greed for survival as more new cities cut through this holy river. As the water dances around my fingers, teasing me playfully, I stand within her and surrender. I wonder how long mortals can test the gods. 

Hengdian World Studios,The fi lm studio is the world’s largest and features a 1:1 scale reproduction of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

A devastating six-meter-high tsunami sweeps into the port city of Kamaishi in northeast Japan following an earthquake of up to 8.9-magnitude on March 11. Kamaishi famous breakwater was in the Guinness World Records as the deepest on the planet. It was a product of decades of research on wave dynamics and dissipation. But the tsunami made short work of it and destroyed half part of the city.

Somalia is facing a humanitarian crisis as the United Nations has offi cially declared the country’s food crisis to be a famine. Tens of thousands have died of malnutrition with thousands more fl eeing the country, seeking refuge at camps at the Ethiopian and Kenyan borders. Doolow in Southern Somalia is on the frontline of an Islamic insurgency and famine now facing the Bakool and Shabelle Districts of Somalia, the most lawless nation on earth, July 2011. Staggering across harsh desert with meager supplies women and children fl ee here on foot, walking for up to twenty days, towards the Ethiopian border where camps are already overfl owing with the victims of the fi rst famine of the 21st Century. UNICEF has set up here a malnutrition clinic and a drop camp, where refugees can register and after take to a proper refugee camp.