Month: January 2017

Venice may be the world’s most famous canal city, but it’s not the only one. Giethoorn, a town of 2600 people in the Netherlands, has almost no roads. Holland’s “Little Venice” only has canals, according to Travel + Leisure.

Amsterdam may boast dozens of miles of canals, too, but most of the quaint village of Giethoorn, by contrast, is almost only accessible by boat. The town was built by harvesters of peat, a fertile mixture of decaying vegetation found in bogs, and as they dug out the peat, lakes and ponds formed. Thatch houses were built up on the islands between them, and residents could only traverse the town by narrow boats called punters.

You can get around by walking across the 170-plus bridges between the islands, but the best way to see the town is still by punter. You can rent boats and canoes for as little as $8 an hour.

Giethoorn is now a major tourist destination for travelers from Asia—it receives around 200,000 Chinese tourists a year. And now that Giethoorn has a spot on the new international edition of Monopoly, it might be poised for an even bigger tourism boom.

[h/t Travel + Leisure]

Who doesn’t love a Grumpy Cat video or sneezing kittens? But offline, domestic cats represent a threat to the natural world—and a much more serious one than you might think. Here’s a look at some of the environmental risks cats pose that might encourage you to keep Kitty inside.

1. ISLANDS ARE VULNERABLE TO FELINES …

Thanks to their isolation, islands generally boast high levels of biodiversity and endemic species found nowhere else. Island species evolve based on a very specific set of circumstances; on islands without large predators, for example, some birds lose the ability to fly because they simply don’t need it. This makes the cat problem particularly acute on islands, where free-ranging cats have caused or contributed to 33 of the modern bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.

2. … BUT SO ARE CONTINENTS.

Felines down under have become a major pain: A recent study in Biological Conservation finds that feral cats roam 99.8 percent of Australia. This means that at any given time, there are somewhere between 2.1 to 6.3 million cats ranging around the continent, ignoring any and all posted signs about environmentally protected areas. Since Australia is the only continent other than Antarctica where wildlife evolved without wild cat species, its wild creatures are particularly vulnerable. John Woinarski of Charles Darwin University, the deputy director of the National Environmental Science Programme’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub and the study’s co-author, tells mental_floss, “Australia has the worst record of extinctions of native mammal species over the last two centuries.” Approximately 30 species have gone extinct. “Introduced cats were a significant factor in most of these extinctions, and feral cats continue to be one of the most serious threats to many of Australia’s threatened animal species,” he says.

In fact, some of Australia’s endangered species survive only within specialized cat-proof exclosures or on cat-free islands. According to a 2012 government plan, species at risk include the endangered woylie, night parrot, bridled nail-tail and black-footed rock wallabys, and the vulnerable greater bilby. To combat the feline threat, the country’s Threatened Species Commission recently launched an ambitious plan to cull feral cats using baits, traps, and even trained cat-finding dogs.

2. THEY’VE TAKEN OVER NEW ZEALAND.

New Zealand has a number of rare endemic species, including the iconic flightless kiwi. The island also has an estimated 2.5 million feral cats. It’s a problematic equation. Cats have already contributed to the extinction of nine native bird species and have affected 33 endangered bird species. The National Cat Management Strategy Group (NCMSG), which includes the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Local Government New Zealand and the Morgan Foundation, set a goal of eliminating feral cats by 2025. Government officials have been quick to point out that no one is limiting cat ownership and the former Prime Minister, John Key, has a pet cat.

 “We all agree on what we are trying to achieve,” Geoff Simmons, spokesperson for Morgan Foundation, an NCMSG partner, told Radio New Zealand, “which is making sure all cats are loved pets and are looked after well, and that we minimize the stray and feral population and ensure that the cats that we do own have the least possible impact on our environment.”

The government also plans to eliminate all invasive vertebrate predators, including rats and brushtail possums, by 2050. Worldwide, more than 1,000 islands have been cleared of invasive species, including more than 100 around New Zealand. But the largest island ever successfully cleared, Australia’s Macquarie Island, is only about 49 square miles; in contrast, New Zealand is 103,483 square miles. To accomplish this daunting task, the government will turn to new methods, including drones and genetic biocontrol.

4. THE U.S. HAS A CAT PROBLEM TOO.

In the United States, an estimated 60 to 100 million cats range free, and the number of domestic cats has tripled during the past 40 years. Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that domesticated cats—both free-roaming pets and feral—kill as many as 4 billion birds and 22 billion small mammals in the U.S. each year. This makes them “likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals,” according to the Smithsonian. While controlling feral cats poses a daunting problem, simply keeping pet cats indoors at least reduces the slaughter. The Humane Society of the United States has developed tips to help indoor cats stay happy, and suggest that you always neuter even indoor animals, because…

5. CATS REPRODUCE LIKE RABBITS (IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING).

Female cats can reproduce as young as four months old, and on average have two to three litters per year of four to six kittens each. One cat can produce as many as 100 kittens in her lifetime, and one pair of cats and their kittens can account for 420,000+ kittens in just seven years (it’s an exponential thing).

6. THEY CARRY DISEASES.

Peter Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and co-author of Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, tells mental_floss that cats are known to carry plague, rabies, and the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. All are zoonotic diseases, carried by animals and capable of jumping to people. Toxoplasma gondii only reproduces in cats, Marra said, producing virtually indestructible oocysts—cysts containing a zygote formed from an egg and sperm. “They persist for years, in frozen soil, in saltwater environments. In the U.S., about 20 percent of the human population is infected, and globally, about a third of the population.” There is no cure.

While most infected people seem to have no symptoms, recent research links the parasite with behavioral changes, including depression and bipolar disorder, Marra reports. For example, one recent study showed infection causes disruption of a major neurotransmitter in the brain. Infections in pregnant women can cause death or serious health issues in the fetus; the parasite damages the eyes of some 3000 infants in the U.S. each year. Toxoplasmosis can cause fever, fatigue, headaches, blindness, and, in people with compromised immune systems, death. Like a ticking time bomb, the parasite can hide in brain tissue, putting an infected person at risk if the immune system later becomes compromised.

Toxoplasmosis also affects wildlife, representing a serious threat to highly endangered Hawaiian monk seals and to sea otters.

7. CAT OWNERS ARE IN SERIOUS DENIAL.

Despite the evidence lined up against cats, pet owners have a hard time accepting that their felines may causing problems. In the UK, which has more than 10 million domestic cats, a recent study found that cat owners did not recognize the risk their pets pose to wildlife. “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats’ impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information,” the study’s authors concluded.

Solving the problem of cat predation on wildlife obviously will require cooperation of pet owners. So it’s important to note: While one individual cat’s predation may not be an issue, the sheer number of cats equals a big problem. This is especially true since predation by cats is often not a normal ecosystem interaction (in other words, domestic cats are not part of a healthy natural ecosystem).

8. IF YOU’RE FEELING DEFENSIVE, REMEMBER THE CASE OF THE MISSING WREN.

In Cat Wars, Marra tells the story of Stephens Island, off the south island of New Zealand, where cats drove an endemic, flightless wren to extinction in—wait for it—roughly one year. A lighthouse keeper named David Lyall arrived on the island in January 1894. A pregnant female cat arrived about the same time, likely the island’s first feline. An amateur ornithologist, Lyall studied the dead birds that this free-roaming cat brought to the lighthouse. Based on his prepared specimens, noted ornithologist Walter Rothschild described a new species, the Stephens Island Wren. Unfortunately, by that time the bird had disappeared. Subsequent lighthouse keepers began killing feral cats and had the island once again cat-free by 1925—but it was too late for the endemic wren. 

Researchers from Stanford University and the University of Tokyo have pioneered a technique to grow organs from one species inside another, then transplant them back into individuals of the first species. The technique, described this week in the journal Nature, suggests that we might someday be able to grow desperately needed human organs inside other animals.

The field of organ transplantation is no stranger to interspecies interactions. Surgeons have been giving patients heart valves from pigs for decades—a situation that speaks to the fundamental shortage of viable human organs available today. Researchers are currently attacking that issue from a number of different angles, including recycling used organs and 3-D printing new ones.

The latest study focused on the pancreas, an organ essential for digestion and regulating blood sugar. Pancreas transplants are very effective in combating Type 1 diabetes, but as with hearts and lungs, there just are not enough organs to go around.

To see if they could grow new, viable pancreata from scratch, researchers bred a type of rat that could not grow its own pancreas. They then implanted mouse stem cells into the rats while they were still embryos. The stem cells took, and grew successfully into mouse pancreatic cells. Next, the scientists removed these cells and transplanted them into diabetic mice.

 
The new organs worked beautifully, as though the mice had grown them themselves, co-author Hiromitsu Nakauchi said in a statement: “We found that the diabetic mice were able to normalize their blood glucose levels for over a year after the transplantation of as few as 100 of these islets.”

Rejection of new organs is a substantial risk with any transplant, but the mice’s new pancreata made themselves right at home. The mice only needed a five-day course of immunosuppressive drugs to keep their bodies from attacking the new organs, as opposed to having to take those drugs for the rest of their lives.

“We examined them closely for the presence of any rat cells, but we found that the mouse’s immune system had eliminated them,” said Nakauchi. “This is very promising for our hope to transplant human organs grown in animals because it suggests that any contaminating animal cells could be eliminated by the patient’s immune system after transplant.”

Further research and ethical discussions will be required before the technique can be used in other animals.

Soon, artificial intelligence could help you spot skin cancer. A new algorithm can now classify some of the most common and fatal skin cancers by images alone, according to a new study.

Researchers from Stanford University trained a machine learning network on more than 129,000 images of skin lesions representing more than 2000 skin diseases, resulting in a system that is about as accurate as human doctors in figuring out whether an off-looking stretch of skin might be cancerous. The system is described in a paper in the journal Nature.

Not all moles and other skin abnormalities look alike, making it difficult to diagnose skin cancer. As of now, doctors visually assess the appearance of the skin, then do a biopsy to confirm whether or not the lesion is malignant. Until now, it has been hard to automate this process, especially considering how different light, angles, and lenses can affect photos.

The researchers trained their algorithm on images of skin lesions that had already been confirmed as malignant by biopsies. In two different validation tests on its ability to recognize examples of the malignant carcinoma and melanoma—both deadly and common—the algorithm performed as well as, if not a little better than, 21 board-certified dermatologists.

It still hasn’t been tested in real-world clinical settings, though, and will have to be validated outside the lab before it can be used in practice. However, considering how deadly skin cancer can be if left untreated—melanoma’s five-year survival rate is 99 percent if it’s caught in its early stages, but only 14 percent if doctors don’t find it until its late stages—any system that can help catch it earlier could save lives.

Netflix’s offline viewing option is great for catching up on your favorite shows one episode at a time, but committed binge-watching requires more storage space than many smartphones have to spare. Now Android owners have the option to download a lot more of their favorite Netflix content than they were able to before. As The Verge reports, a new update to the Netflix app allows Android users to store their downloads on an external SD card.

The Netflix app had previously given users one offline viewing option: saving movies and shows to a device’s internal storage drive. Android owners with microSD cards are now free to use that extra space to store Orange is the New Black, The Crown, Narcos, and other popular Netflix content for a limited time (expiration dates vary from title to title).

Not every movie or TV show that’s available to stream is available to download, and the feature doesn’t work with every Android device with a microSD slot. If you aren’t able to take advantage of the update, there are still plenty of tricks you can try to make your regular streaming experience more enjoyable.

[h/t The Verge]

Tucked away in the sleepy forests of southwestern Pennsylvania sits one of the world’s most famous buildings: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Commissioned by wealthy department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann and completed in 1937, the home’s cantilevered tiers hang suspended atop a 30-foot waterfall—Wright’s ingenious way of melding the man-made structure with its natural surroundings [PDF]. Here are 12 facts about the work’s history and legacy.

1. FALLINGWATER HELPED FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT MAKE A COMEBACK.

Today, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is revered as one of history’s greatest architects—but by the time he reached his late 60s, many critics considered him to be washed up. Wright had only built a few buildings in the previous decade, the Great Depression had diminished demand for new projects, and, adding insult to injury, his younger peers considered his style to be anachronistic. Kaufmann—whose department store, Kaufmann’s, was later incorporated into Macy’s—helped resuscitate Wright’s career when he asked the architect to design a weekend home in the Laurel Highlands for his family.

Nobody quite knows how the Kaufmann family and Wright first became acquainted. However, we do know that Kaufmann’s son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., admired the architect’s work, and studied under Wright as an apprentice at his Taliesin Studio in Wisconsin. In 1934, the young student’s parents visited Taliesin and met Wright in person. Shortly after, the Kaufmanns asked Wright to build Fallingwater.

With Fallingwater, Wright proved to the world that he wasn’t quite finished yet, ushering in a final, fruitful period of his career. Near the end of his life, Wright designed a handful of other renowned works, including the Monona Terrace Civic Center in Madison, Wisconsin and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

2. FALLINGWATER’S CONSTRUCTION SITE WAS ORIGINALLY A “SUMMER CAMP” FOR KAUFMANN’S EMPLOYEES.

The site Kaufmann chose for his home was a swath of wilderness near the villages of Mill Run and Ohiopyle, on a mountain stream called Bear Run. Once upon a time, the wooded area had been home to a small cabin where Kaufmann’s employees sought refuge from Pittsburgh’s pollution. But once the Great Depression struck, the employees could no longer afford to travel there, so Kaufmann decided to convert it into a country getaway.

3. WRIGHT IS RUMORED TO HAVE SKETCHED FALLINGWATER’S DESIGN IN ONLY TWO HOURS.

According to legend, Wright sketched Fallingwater in only two hours. In 1934, the architect visited the home’s construction site and asked for an area survey. Then, he did absolutely nothing for nearly a year—until Kaufmann traveled to Milwaukee and called up Wright, announcing he’d be paying a surprise visit to his Wisconsin studio, Taliesin, to view the plans. Wright and his apprentices reportedly drew Fallingwater in the time it took his wealthy patron to drive to Taliesin.

Needless to say, Franklin Toker, author of Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House, is skeptical of this claim. “We want to believe drawing up Fallingwater needed only two hours, just as we want to believe—despite massive contrary evidence—that Lincoln scribbled the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope,” he writes. “We don’t want to hear that Lincoln struggled through five drafts on his historic oration because that makes the speech less of a work of genius.” And in this case, one of Wright’s associates remembered Wright and Kaufmann discussing that the house would be built on the falls months before the supposed rush of inspiration.

4. THE KAUFMANNS DIDN’T KNOW THAT THEIR HOME WOULD BE BUILT ATOP A WATERFALL.

According to another legend (many of Wright’s apprentices disagree on key details of how Fallingwater was conceived, so learning the truth is difficult), Kaufmann thought that Wright would design the home on the banks of the river, facing the waterfall, so he was surprised when he looked at Wright’s plans and saw that his country estate would sit on top of it. Wright explained that he wanted to integrate the house with the waterfall so it would be an essential part of the structure instead of simply serving as a pretty backdrop. (You can’t actually see the waterfall from Fallingwater, but visitors can hear rushing water if they listen closely.)

5. FALLINGWATER’S INTERIOR IS DESIGNED TO RESEMBLE NATURE …

Wright wanted Fallingwater’s interior to feel like the surrounding forest. The 5300-square foot home’s walls and floors are constructed of local sandstone; a rock outcropping is incorporated into the living room’s hearth; each bedroom has its own terrace; and its cornerless windows open outward so windowpanes won’t interrupt visitors’ view. There’s even a glass hatchway in the main level’s floor that opens to reveal a staircase leading down to the stream below.

6. … BUT ITS OUTSIDE WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO BE COVERED IN GOLD LEAF.

Wright opted for a rustic, natural look when he designed Fallingwater. Only two colors of paint were applied to the concrete, sandstone, glass, and steel structure—light ochre for the concrete, and Cherokee red for the steel. However, Wright originally envisioned a more flamboyant aesthetic: He proposed that the home’s concrete exterior be coated in gold leaf.

The Kaufmanns thought that gold leaf would be too over-the-top for a country house, and after rejecting Wright’s secondary proposal (a white mica finish), they settled on the ochre, which, according to Wright, was inspired by “the sere leaves of the rhododendron.”

7. FALLINGWATER STILL HAS ALL ITS ORIGINAL FURNISHINGS AND ARTWORK.

Wright didn’t just design Fallingwater—he also custom-designed its furniture. Around half of the furnishings were built into the house, which Wright said made them “client-proof” (i.e., unable to be removed and replaced with tackier/incongruous purchases). Today, Fallingwater is the only remaining home designed by Wright that still has its original furnishings and artwork.

8. FALLINGWATER HAS STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS.

Fallingwater is an architectural marvel, but it still has a few major flaws. Its skylights leak, the waterfall promotes mold growth (Kaufmann nicknamed Fallingwater “Rising Mildew”), and—even worse—the builders didn’t use enough reinforcing steel to support the first floor’s concrete skeleton.

Kaufmann had initial doubts about the technical feasibility of Wright’s concept, and he hired consulting engineers to examine Wright’s plans. They discovered that the main floor’s girders needed additional reinforcement, but Wright dismissed this claim and forged ahead with construction.

Over time, gravity caused the home’s first floor cantilever to sag, and in 2002, the structure’s foundation was reinforced to prevent a future collapse. In the process, the first level’s stone floor and furniture had to be ripped out.

9. FALLINGWATER WOULD BE WORTH MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TODAY.

Kaufmann’s original budget for Fallingwater was somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000, but in the end, it and a guesthouse ended up costing the family $155,000. (This sum included $8000 worth of architect fees and $4500 for installed walnut furnishings.) That amount now translates to over $2.5 million after calculating for inflation.

10. FALLINGWATER RECEIVES THOUSANDS OF VISITORS PER YEAR.

Fallingwater remained in the Kaufmann family’s possession from 1937 to 1963. Edgar Kaufmann Jr. inherited the home after his father’s death in 1955, and he later donated the home and its surrounding 1750 acres of land to a nonprofit trust called the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Nearly 5 million people have visited Fallingwater since 1964, and the home received more than 167,000 visitors in 2015 alone.

11. AYN RAND’S THE FOUNTAINHEAD WAS PARTLY INSPIRED BY WRIGHT AND FALLINGWATER.

Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Fallingwater are believed to have inspired writer Ayn Rand’s seminal 1943 novel The Fountainhead. Its protagonist, the iconoclastic architect Howard Roark, bears a striking resemblance to Wright, and several of the homes Roark designs for clients resemble Fallingwater. Toker even goes so far as to guess that the book’s title—which Rand changed from Second-Hand Lives to The Fountainhead—pays homage to Fallingwater, as both monikers are 12 letters long, begin with the letter “F,” and conjure the image of cascading water.

12. FALLINGWATER HASN’T MADE THE CUT FOR THE UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE LIST QUITE YET.

Fallingwater has received plenty of accolades and honors over the years. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1966, and in 1991, an American Institute of Architects poll voted it as the “best all-time work of American architecture.” However, the home has yet to be added to the United Nations’s World Heritage List of significant cultural landmarks.

The U.S. Department of the Interior nominated 10 of Wright’s buildings (including Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and more) for inclusion in 2015. But last summer, a UNESCO committee decided they needed to review additional information before making a final decision. Their requests included a revised argument for why Wright sites should be considered to be of “outstanding universal value,” along with clarified specifics of how the individual properties would be managed.

Additional Source: Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House