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She's one of America's newest citizens — and one of its oldest.

Watch this 101-year-old woman become an American citizen.

Becoming a U.S. citizen is a lengthy and complicated process that includes all kinds of forms, interviews, tests, and oaths.

But that didn't stop this 101-year-old woman from becoming a proud, naturalized American citizen on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2015.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Her name is Juana Hernández.

Eight years ago, at her daughter's urging, she moved to Miami from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

So what made her want to go all out for citizenship now?

She wanted to show her two sons back in Honduras how it's done.

“I want them to come,” she told the Miami Herald. (It's a lot easier to get an immigration visa if you're related to a U.S. citizen.)

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

The immigration process is notoriously long, difficult, and expensive.

Juana had to fill out the 21-page application for naturalization. She was also facing the challenge of a roughly $600 application filing fee. Luckily, a local organization helped her fill out the application (folks can actually face long delays or even deportation over a single mistake in the application). She was also able to apply for a fee waiver.

Many immigrants struggle to go through the overly-complicated system. It's difficult, confusing, expensive, and in many cases, it's a dead end. It's precisely because so many undocumented immigrants find themselves without a path to citizenship that President Obama has been pushing for reform.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

"We didn’t raise the Statue of Liberty with her back to the world, we did it with her light shining as a beacon to the world,"President Obama said during a Nov. 21, 2014 speech, urging comprehensive reform:

"And whether we were Irish or Italians or Germans crossing the Atlantic, or Japanese or Chinese crossing the Pacific; whether we crossed the Rio Grande or flew here from all over the world — generations of immigrants have made this country into what it is. It’s what makes us special."

President Obama announces executive action on immigration in November 2014. Photo by Jim Bourg-Pool/Getty Images.

And while there's been a big push for immigration reform for a while, it still seems to be a ways off.

Last year, the Senate passed a bill that would have helped streamline the immigration process. Unfortunately, the bill never came up for a vote in the House of Representatives. President Obama has been able to take some action through executive order, but it's been more focused on delaying deportations rather than really fixing the system.

One of the most broken parts of the system? How visas are granted.

Right now, the U.S. government caps the number of immigration visas granted per year. It also specifically caps how many immigrants can come to the U.S. from any given country.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to cap immigration visas by country. Think about it: Depending on the situation and what's going on in the world, those numbers need to be able to shift. We have a similar cap system in place for refugees, and that's what's led to the bottleneck for Syrian refugees. Here's what the Department of Homeland Security has to say:

"In general, family-sponsored preference visas are limited to 226,000 visas per year and employment-based preference visas are limited to 140,000 visas per year. ... In addition, there are limits to the percentage of visas that can be allotted based on an immigrant’s country of chargeability (usually the country of birth). When the demand is higher than the supply of visas for a given year in any given category or country, a visa queue (waiting list or backlog) forms."

If there wasn't this hard cap on immigrants, there wouldn't be so many undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

If we were to give immigrants a clearer path to citizenship, we wouldn't have to worry about anyone being undocumented.

It's reasonable to think that most undocumented immigrants would like to become full citizens if given the opportunity.

But a system that threatens to deport folks who want to become citizens when they come forward? That's a broken system.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

So let's hope Congress takes up immigration reform soon. It'd be a great 102nd birthday present for Juana.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Joy

Nurse turns inappropriate things men say in the delivery room into ‘inspirational’ art

"Can you move to the birthing ball so I can sleep in the bed?"

via @Hollyd_rn/TikTok

Holly the delivery nurse.

After working six years as a labor and delivery nurse Holly, 30, has heard a lot of inappropriate remarks made by men while their partners are in labor. “Sometimes the moms think it’s funny—and if they think it’s funny, then I’ll laugh with them,” Holly told TODAY Parents. “But if they get upset, I’ll try to be the buffer. I’ll change the subject.”

Some of the comments are so wrong that she did something creative with them by turning them into “inspirational” quotes and setting them to “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton on TikTok.

“Some partners are hard to live up to!” she jokingly captioned the video.

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American Cancer Society
American Cancer Society
Science

Meet the researcher shining a light on the “white lens” of medical AI in skin cancer prevention

How we can create equity for all communities?

All images provided by Adewole Adamson

It begins with more inclusive conversations at a patient level

True

Adewole Adamson, MD, of the University of Texas, Austin, aims to create more equity in health care by gathering data from more diverse populations by using artificial intelligence (AI), a type of machine learning. Dr. Adamson’s work is funded by the American Cancer Society (ACS), an organization committed to advancing health equity through research priorities, programs and services for groups who have been marginalized.

Melanoma became a particular focus for Dr. Adamson after meeting Avery Smith, who lost his wife—a Black woman—to the deadly disease.

melanoma, melanoma for dark skin Avery Smith (left) and Adamson (sidenote)

This personal encounter, coupled with multiple conversations with Black dermatology patients, drove Dr. Adamson to a concerning discovery: as advanced as AI is at detecting possible skin cancers, it is heavily biased.

To understand this bias, it helps to first know how AI works in the early detection of skin cancer, which Dr. Adamson explains in his paper for the New England Journal of Medicine (paywall). The process uses computers that rely on sets of accumulated data to learn what healthy or unhealthy skin looks like and then create an algorithm to predict diagnoses based on those data sets.

This process, known as supervised learning, could lead to huge benefits in preventive care.

After all, early detection is key to better outcomes. The problem is that the data sets don’t include enough information about darker skin tones. As Adamson put it, “everything is viewed through a ‘white lens.’”

“If you don’t teach the algorithm with a diverse set of images, then that algorithm won’t work out in the public that is diverse,” writes Adamson in a study he co-wrote with Smith (according to a story in The Atlantic). “So there’s risk, then, for people with skin of color to fall through the cracks.”

Tragically, Smith’s wife was diagnosed with melanoma too late and paid the ultimate price for it. And she was not an anomaly—though the disease is more common for White patients, Black cancer patients are far more likely to be diagnosed at later stages, causing a notable disparity in survival rates between non-Hispanics whites (90%) and non-Hispanic blacks (66%).

As a computer scientist, Smith suspected this racial bias and reached out to Adamson, hoping a Black dermatologist would have more diverse data sets. Though Adamson didn’t have what Smith was initially looking for, this realization ignited a personal mission to investigate and reduce disparities.

Now, Adamson uses the knowledge gained through his years of research to help advance the fight for health equity. To him, that means not only gaining a wider array of data sets, but also having more conversations with patients to understand how socioeconomic status impacts the level and efficiency of care.

“At the end of the day, what matters most is how we help patients at the patient level,” Adamson told Upworthy. “And how can you do that without knowing exactly what barriers they face?”

american cancer society, skin cacner treatment"What matters most is how we help patients at the patient level."https://www.kellydavidsonstudio.com/

The American Cancer Society believes everyone deserves a fair and just opportunity to prevent, find, treat, and survive cancer—regardless of how much money they make, the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, gender identity, their disability status, or where they live. Inclusive tools and resources on the Health Equity section of their website can be found here. For more information about skin cancer, visit cancer.org/skincancer.

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Mercury would be 76 today.

Some icons have truly left this world too early. It’s a tragedy when anyone doesn’t make it to see old age, but when it happens to a well-known public figure, it’s like a bit of their art and legacy dies with them. What might Freddie Mercury have created if he were granted the gift of long life? Bruce Lee? Princess Diana?

Their futures might be mere musings of our imagination, but thanks to a lot of creativity (and a little tech) we can now get a glimpse into what these celebrities might have looked like when they were older.

Alper Yesiltas, an Istanbul-based lawyer and photographer, created a photography series titled “As If Nothing Happened,” which features eerily realistic portraits of long gone celebrities in their golden years. To make the images as real looking as possible, Yesiltas incorporated various photo editing programs such as Adobe Lightroom and VSCO, as well as the AI photo-enhancing software Remini.

“The hardest part of the creative process for me is making the image feel ‘real’ to me,” Yesiltas wrote about his passion project. “The moment I like the most is when I think the image in front of me looks as if it was taken by a photographer.”

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