An estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate from U.S. high schools each year.

Youth at a rally in front of the White House demand for the end of deportation by Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement.

Following a mock graduation ceremony, undocumented youth activists, as well as supporters of the contentious bill, make their way to Capitol Hill.

Rosario Lopez (right), an undocumented "Dream University" student from North Carolina, had been involved with the unsuccessful movement to get the DREAM Act passed by August 4, the day Congress went out of session.

Dozens of undocumented students are arrested for refusing to leave their sit-in in the Hart Senate Office building.

Diana Martinez, 18, an undocumented student, was one of 12 arrested after refusing to leave the sit-in.

Yahaira Carrillo consoles her fellow activist, Andrea, after she backed out of being arrested inside the Hart Senate Office building.

Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), one of the biggest champions of the bill, at a rally near the White House, demands the passing of immigration reform.

Student activists rejoice after some of the arrested have been let go by Capitol Police.

Francisco Curiel (who is undocumented) and Jessica Sanchez blow off some steam after a long day of actions and activities in downtown Washington, D.C.
 

Many of these undocumented youth didn't decide to immigrate to the United States—they came at an early age with their parents. Without a pathway to citizenship many would have studied and lived in the country with little opportunity for future success.

Manuel Guerra Casas, 26, a Floridian who would benefit from the Dream Act, says he wants to become a priest and would be willing to serve in the armed forces. The DREAM Act would provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth after they have received a higher education or served honorably in the military.

Protestors in Congressman Paul Ryan's office (R-WI) are read a message by his aide saying that he "does not condone illegal behavior." Ryan, once onboard with the bill, is currently against it.

Tensions run high in Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-WI) during a symbolic sit-in during the lame duck session in Congress following the midterm elections of 2010.

"The human cortex is the most complex object in the universe," writes Jonah Leher in the introduction to Carl Schoonover's Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. "Before we can speculate about it, we need to see it, even if we don't know what we're looking at."

Photograph by Eszter Blahak/Semmeleis Museum. A human skull inscribed by a 19th century practitioner of phrenology. According to this now discredited theory, bumps on the skull betray the volume of the brain areas beneath each one, and thus can be employed to divine a subject's cognitive or moral strengths and weaknesses. 

Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes (2007). Image taken from a transgenic “Brainbow” mouse that enables neuroscientists to distinguish between neighboring, densely packed neurons by illuminating them in different colors. This photomicrograph shows presynaptic terminals in the cerebellum, which are called rosettes because of their flowerlike appearance.

Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman (2004). Photomicrograph of different components of the rat cerebellum, including Purkinje neurons in green, glia (non-neuronal cells) in red, and cell nuclei in blue.

Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman (2009). Photomicrograph of a neuron’s cell body (top, center) and its dendrites radiating out of it, obtained with a scanning electron microscope.

Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes (2005). Photomicrograph of a mouse hippocampus, an area of the brain critical for learning and memory.

Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes (2007). Image taken from a transgenic "Brainbow" mouse that enables neuroscientists to distinguish between neighboring, densely packed neurons by illuminating them in different colors. This photomicrograph shows a few of the many neurons that are found in the neocortex.

Henning U. Voss and Nicholas D. Schiff (2008). Diffusion MRI image of a patient who has suffered a stroke in the thalamus. This has resulted in major disruptions to certain axon tracts, some of which are visible at the bottom of the figure. 

Alfonso Rodríguez-Baeza and Marisa Ortega-Sánchez (2009). Photomicrograph of microscopic blood vessels that carry nutrients to neurons in the brain, obtained with a scanning electron microscope. This sample, from Human cerebral cortex, shows a large blood vessel at the surface of the brain (top), which sends down thin, densely branched capillaries to deliver blood throughout the entire cortex.

At a time when America's roads are in disrepair and its rest stops are being shuttered, here is an object lesson from what is arguably Scandinavia's most beautiful country. In Norway, the government takes public art and architecture seriously. Through its National Tourist Routes, which zigzag the country, highlighting its natural splendor with high-design rest stops and other structures, Norway is showing what an investment in design can look like.

All photographs were taken by Steve Delahoyde from Coudal Partners on a trip to Norway in early June.

This is the interior of a freestanding room at Juvet Landscape Hotel, a stunning retreat outside of Alesund. Designed by JSA Architects, each curtainless room faces mountains striped with waterfalls, and many of the rooms are propped on stilts over the rushing Valldøla river.

The legendary Sverre Fehn designed the Norwegian Glacier Museum in Fjaerland, where there is currently a stirring exhibit about climate change. The glass mimics the nearby glaciers, and, although you can't see the landscape in this picture, the structure lines up perfectly with it from every vantage point.

The Canadian-born, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders designed this structure. It's hard to believe, but it's a public restroom on the side of the road, overlooking a fjord and, in the distance, a tiny town.

Adjacent to the Glacier Museum is this charming, design-forward-and-design-backward outhouse, also by Sverre Fehn. It's open to the public and lines up playfully with the snow-capped peak in the background.

The public toilet a couple of slides ago sits beside this stunning lookout at Aurland. Designed by Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen, it's a rest stop for drivers and tourists, and it was commissioned by the Norwegian Highway Department. The way it slopes down the mountain mirrors a waterfall across the fjord.

The Trollstigen, in rural Norway, is a deathly narrow mountain road with 11 hairpin turns. Overlooking it is this stunning lookout by Reiulf Ramstad Architects, which enhances the natural surroundings without distracting from the main act, which is nature. The government paid for this one, too.

The architects behind the stunning Juvet Hotel are also in the process of finishing this restaurant in a relatively unpopulated area nearby—surely a design destination to come. Its modernness somehow complements the surrounding wilderness.

Also at the Trollstigen lookout, these pods were commissioned by the Norwegian public roads administration. Designed by Reiulf Ramstad Architects, they will house roadside concession shops for travelers.

As part of the government's investment in its highways and rest stops, the National Tourist Routes feature charming design oddities like this one-person picnic table, designed by Jensen & Skodvin Architects.

This is a viewing platform that blends into the side of the river overlooking Gudbrandsjuvet. The viewpoint was designed by the JSA Architect team, and is part of a public walking area near their in-construction restaurant.

Estonia is a complicated place. Ruled by foreigners for nearly its entire history, it gained independence in 1920, only to be invaded by Germany during World War II and subsequently ceded to the USSR.

In 1991, Estonia regained its independence. Tallinn, the capital city, has since become a popular destination for tourists; it's a few hours by boat from Finland and Sweden, it's cheaper than most Nordic countries, and the medieval town center is remarkably well preserved.

Beyond the old city walls, though, lies the real Estonia: new glass high-rises clash with Soviet-era apartment blocks, mothballed USSR uniforms hang in shops next to t-shirts ridiculing Joseph Stalin, and the rapid economic progress of the past two decades contrasts with scars from half a century of hardship, decay, and suppression.

Five years ago today, residents of New Orleans were struggling to survive and trying to navigate a decimated city in the days following the end of Hurricane Katrina. The storm had left indelible marks on New Orleans, and the people responded in kind, spray-painting messages of hope, cries for help, and seething phrases of darkly comic pathos all across the city's walls.

Between October and December of 2005, Richard Misrach used a pocked-sized four-megapixel camera to photograph countless images of graffiti messages. The previously unpublished collection now fills the pages Destroy This Memory, a book that documents the physical and psychological toll Katrina took on the city, and reveals something essential about humans in crisis.

The once-thriving Rust Belt city of Braddock, Pennsylvania, saw 90 percent of its population leave town as its steel industry collapsed. Over the past decade, as storefronts have seen more boards than patrons, and the remaining residents have witnessed profound urban decay. However, with the emergence of a new creative class and an ambitious drive to revive and re-imagine its industrious spirit, Braddock has refused to surrender hope.

Presented in partnership with Levi's, what follows is a visual tour of a transitioning city.

My family loves traveling. Not vacationing, but traveling: trying to cover as much distance and see as many things as possible before exhaustion and darkness force us to stop and rest. When my sister and I reached an age of suitable patience for long car rides, every summer became focused around "The Trip": My parents would pack our brown 1983 Volvo 240 DL and we would set off across California and beyond. We had no iPods, no Gameboys: just thousands of miles of interstate and state highway; deserts, beaches, and forests.

After a thousand miles spent gazing out the window, a brain becomes a sponge for visual landmarks. On trips to Los Angeles, I'd recognize our imminent arrival by the giant Western Exterminator billboard in Silver Lake; if we were headed to LAX, I'd start gathering my things and putting my sneakers on as soon as Randy's Donuts was in sight.

In 1986 we went to Wisconsin, staying at my great-grandmother's tiny cabin by a lake. I remember the general mood of the place—birch trees and loons crying at sunset, the cedar scented knickknacks at the local souvenir shop. My most specific memory, however, is of a 50 foot tall Paul Bunyan (accompanied by an equally large Babe the Blue Ox) outside Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty in Minocqua. The statue (it might have been just a flat billboard) was nowhere near 50 feet tall, maybe 15 feet at most. But my memory is of finishing my pancakes and walking into the parking lot to behold Paul and Babe, lit from below with spotlights, stretching infinitely skywards into the Midwestern summer night. Being five years old, I doubt the Taj Mahal could have impressed me more.

Today, I cannot pass a Muffler Man, Sinclair dinosaur, or giant doughnut without the urge to stop and take a picture. They seem lonely out there, fiberglass antiques ignored by a generation of kids with headrest DVD players and iPod Touches. Maybe the decline and disappearance of roadside kitsch is for the best—after all, the sculptures are a goofy reminder of America's painful reliance on fossil fuels to move us from place to place.

Despite all that, some of the landmarks live on. Even today, somewhere on the 405 Freeway, there is probably a kid in a backseat with his face against the window. Who—upon spotting the giant golf-club-clutching Muffler Man at the Dominguez Hills Golf Course—begins putting on his shoes and posing a question to which he already knows the answer: "Are we there yet?"

In the real world, no man can outrace a bullet. No woman commands storms with her mind. No one spins webs from his wrists or flies across continents or shoots lasers from his eyes. But that doesn't mean there aren't super heroes among us. Inside every human is the capacity to do something kind, brave, and strong for our fellow humans; some among us simply choose to do so in secret. In the spirit of the heroes who fill the pages of comic books, an unlikely assortment of men and women have been donning masks and costumes, and venturing into their respective neighborhoods to feed the hungry, comfort the sick, and protect the innocent.

The Real Life Super Hero Project is the photographer Peter Tangen's attempt to document the work of these loosely affiliated individuals; it's also a gallery exhibit designed to raise money for the causes with which these men and women are affiliated. Highlighting the people who do good under the secrecy of masks with no hope for personal gain, the Real Life Super Hero Project is a call for all of us to engage with and help those around us.

"Celebrate and honor them," says Tangen. "And find the hero in all of us."

Citizen Prime focuses on educating children, working with at-risk youth in his "Kid Heroes" school programs in Arizona and Utah.

With a history of substance abuse now far behind him, The Crimson Fist performs outreach for people living on the streets of Atlanta.

In the spirit of Captain America, Washington, D.C.'s Guardian aims to make a difference in our nation's capital. He's a member of the Skiffytown League of Heroes and has worked with Make-A-Wish, The Joyful Heart Foundation, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Army Fisher Houses, the Autism Research Institute, and more.

The silent but stylish Geist works in southeastern Minnesota, helping victims of tragedy, the homeless, and various non-political local charities.

Near Vancouver, British Columbia's notorious Hastings and Main neighborhood, Thanatos (named after the Greek personification of death )attempts to heal the "walking dead," the addicts, dealers, and prostitutes that so many other people do their best to ignore and avoid.

One distinction between machines and appliances is that we tend to regard appliances as singular objects. We might realize that our toasters or microwaves or cameras are full of various components, but how many of us actually consider about the fascinating interactions taking place among those many parts. As with living things, there are vast networks of connections at work inside those object that allow them to function.

For his "Separations" and "Tapes" series, the artist and photographer Benjamin Innes focused on magnetic tape, disused electronics, and flora and fauna, pulling them apart and arranging the piece-by-piece, resulting in a collection of magnificent mobile-like structures.

"I've always been excited with exploded diagrams," says Innes. "It's a fun way of understanding an object. A Polaroid, for instance, seems like this one solid object, but you break it open and find all of these wonderful different components."

The national conversation regarding immigration feels at a perpetual crossroads. But while members of the media debate the constitutionality of various policies, recent transplants from Latin America are looking for work. In cities like Los Angeles, many people find employment as mobile food vendors, working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.

Sam Diephuis wants to document their work. Originally from San Francisco, the photographer makes his home in the charming variegation of Venice Beach, where the food vendors pictured here work. Using what limited Spanish he possesses, he has met scores of workers—and enjoyed all varieties of fruit and tacos—between Venice and East L.A.

"The project illuminated some things about immigration for me," says Diephuis. "Almost all the people with trucks, for instance, have green cards. Those I met are so proud of their trucks, and well they should be. For many of these people, what you notice is that clearly they work really hard."

Orange seller, corner of Penmar and Rose in Venice, California

Taco truck on the Pacific Coast Highway

The food

East L.A.

Ice Cream Vendor, Venice Beach

Ice Cream Vendor, Venice Beach

Grocery store on wheels, Indiana and 5th, Venice Beach

Fruit seller, corner of Sunset and Electric, Venice Beach

Taco truck owner, East L.A.

One of the many murals around East L.A.

Late afternoon in East L.A.

Taco truck against the sky

Mariachi band

Fruit vendor, Rose and Lincoln, Venice Beach