Four books that will inspire you to travel the world

    There's truly nothing like travel when it comes to gaining perspective(远景) and exposing yourself to other cultures. To get you in the adventuring mood, we asked Amazon Senior Editor Chris Schlep to help us come up with a list of books that transport readers to another time and place. Below, see his list of four books that will inspire you to travel around the world. For more information, please click Amazon.com.

SEATTLE: Where You d Go, Bernadette

Price: $16.73

    Maria Sample's first novel is not exactly a love story to Seattle, but if you read it, you just might want to come here to see if people are really as self-involved as the characters in her book. What really shines through is the strange storytelling and the laughs. Buy it on Amazon.

ITALY: Beautiful Ruins

Price: $16.29

    This book by the popular author Jess Walters is a love story that begins on the Italian Coast in the early 60s and eventually appears on the screen in Hollywood. With the settings of the background from Italy to Edinburgh to Los Angeles, you will find yourself longing to go as well. Buy it on Amazon.

ENGLAND: Wolf Hall

Price: $15.57

    You can't travel to Thomas Cromwell's England without a time machine，but reading Hilary Mantel's prize-winning novel is the next best thing. It will make you long to see the ancient buildings and green grass of the English countryside, much of which is still there. Buy it on Amazon.

NANTUCKET: Here's to Us

Price: $ 17.16

    Eli Hildebrand has built a writing career out of writing about her hometown island of Nantucket. Her latest is Here's to Us, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is a great beach read.

    Many kids don't drink enough water daily, according to a new study. The study's lead author, Erica Kenney, at first planned to look into the amount of sugary drinks kids were drinking in schools. However, during her research she found that many kids were simply not drinking enough water.

    Kenney and her team examined data from a group of 4,000 children, aged 6 to19. The data was taken from the National Health and Nutrition Survey, a study on the health of children in the United States done each year by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    While looking through the survey results, she noticed that more than half of the kids who took part in the study were dehydrated (脱水的). Of that group, boys were 76% more likely than girls not to have enough water in their system. Nearly one quarter of the kids in the survey reported drinking no plain water at all.

    “These findings highlight (突出) a possible health issue that wasn't given a lot of attention in the past,” Kenney said in a statement. “Even though for most of these kids this is not an immediate and great health risk, this is an issue that could really be reducing quality of life and well-being for many children and youth.”

    The United States-National Agriculture Library says average kids need between 10 to 14 cups of water every day. This water can come from a mix of drinks and foods that contain high amounts of water, such as celery, melons or tomatoes. It is also suggested that fluids (液体) come from water instead of sugary drinks that are high in calories and can lead to weight problems.

    A European Union program is letting blind people experience famous paintings for the first time. It uses three dimensional (3-D) printing to re-create famous paintings so they can be touched.

    One painting printed with the new technology is Gustav Klimt's “The Kiss.” It is a popular attraction at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria. The painting shows a man and a woman standing in a field filled with flowers. They are wearing gold robes and have their arms around each other. The man leans down to kiss the woman.

    Klimt finished the painting in 1908. Until now, people who had trouble seeing could not appreciate the artwork. But thanks to the reproduction they can touch the piece and feel the ridges and depressions. Andreas Reichinger started making 3-D versions of artwork in 2010. He said this reproduction was his most difficult project because the couple's robes are so detailed.

    Dominika Raditsch is a blind museum visitor. She touched the reproduction. As she moved her hands around it she said, ”Exactly, can you see these? There are so many details.“ Raditsch said she can imagine what the original painting looks like when she touches the reproduction. “It's somehow round. You can feel it. It comes with it. And in many places it's so smooth. And then I think to myself: it probably shines too!” Raditsch said.

    The Belvedere is not the only museum to have 3-D versions of its artwork. Some of the pieces at the Prado, in Madrid, Spain, have reproductions that can be touched. But the piece in Vienna has one special part: it is made with widely available 3-D printing technology. That means one day, blind art fans anywhere in the world could download the source files and print the reproductions themselves.

    For as long as we've known about it, humans have searched for a cure for cancer. Across the world, countless amounts of time and money have been spent on researching a way to stop this terrible disease. But now, it seems like the answer could have been inside our own bodies the whole time.

    Recently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US, a government agency that's responsible for healthcare, approved a new form of gene therapy (疗法) that could mean the end of a certain type of cancer.

    The therapy allows scientists to "train" the immune (有免疫力的) cells of sick patients to fight leukemia (白血病)—a form of blood cancer that mostly affects young people.

    The exciting new treatment works by removing healthy immune cells from the patient, known as T-cells, which are then changed to be able to "hunt down" cancer cells.

    The cells are then put back into the patient before they begin to get rid of the patient's leukemia over time, similar to how the body fights off other illnesses.

    "This is truly an exciting new day for cancer patients," Louis J. DeGennaro, president of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, said in a news release.

    Up until now, a long and painful marrow transplant (骨髓移植) was the only option for many leukemia patients.

    In this procedure, healthy blood cells are taken from a donator and placed into the sick patient, who also has to go through chemotherapy (化疗) to allow their body to adjust to the new cells.

    But with a recovery rate of around 83%—according to a news release published by the FDA—it's hoped that the days of painful trips to the hospital, or even death, are over for leukemia sufferers.

    "We're entering a new frontier in medical innovation (创新) with the ability to reprogram a patient's own cells to attack a deadly cancer," FDA representative Scott Gottlieb said in the release. "New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold the potential to transform medicine and our ability to treat and even cure many incurable illnesses."

After releasing a short video on April 27 about planting and cooking peas, Chinese food blogger Li Ziqi witnessed her followers on YouTube go beyond 10 million.

This puts Li, who shot to fame with short videos recording her traditional and peaceful lifestyle in China's countryside, among the ranks of the most popular Chinese-language content creators on the platform.

"It's really surprising. I didn't expect such a wide response," Li told Xinhua in an interview, noting she was surprised by how foreign fans were taken with her works. "What I present is just a lifestyle I've long followed and appreciated," she said. "Maybe it's also what many other people have valued."

Li's YouTube videos center on her life with her grandmother in the rural parts of Sichuan Province. In the videos, Li, often dressed in graceful traditional dresses, rises at sunrise, rests at sunset, plants seeds and harvests flowers, cooks Chinese dishes and crafts bamboo furniture. Unlike many other food bloggers, Li's videos set China's countryside as the stage and start with how the foods are planted and harvested on the farm. She rarely speaks in the process.

Li's overseas followers have praised her videos for showing the amazingly charming, simple and beautiful side of China's rural life, but back home, there have long been debates on whether her presentation is unrealistically poetic.

In response, Li, who was raised in the countryside, said she never needs special arrangements when shooting a video about rural life as "everything is in my mind." "In the countryside, planting flowers, vegetables and trees is not difficult. There are tough elements of rural life of course, but I didn't put them in my videos," Li said. "Most people today are facing much stress in work and life, so I hope they can feel relieved and relaxed when watching my videos."