Author: Shaunacy Ferro

When your partner goes out of town, sometimes you just need some special one-on-one with your pets. At least that was the case for Chase Stout, whose girlfriend recently went out of town, reminding him not to forget to feed their new kitten. Stout did one better, and made Mr. Wilson a fancy brunch of teeny-tiny pancakes, as we spotted over on The Daily Dot. 

Stout tweeted pictures of the meal, along with the text he sent to his girlfriend, but he assured BuzzFeed that the chocolate part was just a joke—he does know that chocolate is terrible for animals, yes. 

When your girlfriend goes out of town and tells you “don’t forget to feed our cat.” pic.twitter.com/cJk1VRVzUQ

— Chase Stout (@ChaserStout) September 26, 2016

Chocolate chips or not, Mr. Wilson did seem to enjoy his pancakes. No word on whether this will become a weekend tradition. 

[h/t The Daily Dot]

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As scientists continue to find out more about the human microbiome, that ecosystem of bacteria that live on and inside us, it’s clear that influencing the type of bacteria that colonize your skin and gut can have tangible effects on your health and well-being. But just how to change the composition of your bacteria isn’t clear, and there’s still not enough research to show that the probiotics available now are effective at treating specific disorders. Gut bacterial colonies tend to be very stable even in the face of probiotic treatments, and studies have indicated that alterations in the gut bacteria in cases of fecal transplants tend to be temporary.

However, a new study finds that selecting the right bacterial strain for the gut environment can make a major difference in whether or not the probiotic can impact the microbiome. Published today in Cell Host & Microbe, the study was led by Jens Walter, an associate professor of nutrition, microbes, and gastrointestinal health at the University of Alberta.

The research team gave 23 volunteers a daily dose of the probiotic strain AH1206 of the bacteria Bifidobacterium longum, one of the most common species of bacteria found in the gut. Half took the bacteria dose for two weeks while the other half took a placebo, and then the two groups switched for a second two-week round. The researchers periodically checked their gut flora composition via fecal samples in the months that followed. A third of the volunteers who took the probiotic showed lasting changes to their gut microbiome, showing evidence of the strain’s colonization up to six months afterward. In the other two-thirds of the group, the bacteria had disappeared within a month.

These “persisters,” as the researchers call them, had slightly different microbiomes than the other volunteers at the outset of the study. They had lower levels of that particular species or species with similar genes. Essentially, the bacteria could only survive if it was filling a particular gap in the microbiome. If pre-existing bacterial strains had already colonized the gut, the new bacteria had to compete for the same resources, and usually didn’t survive.

With only 23 volunteers (and just eight “persisters”), this study is far from definitive, especially since the researchers didn’t control for volunteers’ different diets. But Walter likens the main idea back to Darwinism. “Competition in ecosystems is especially harsh amongst closely related species because they have the same resource requirements,” he explains in a press statement. But if someone has lost a particular strain of bacteria or their body never had it in the first place, it’s possible to repopulate the microbiome with that strain. By figuring out who would be a “persister,” researchers could potentially personalize probiotics to be more effective, the study indicates.

The study also suggests that the reason commercially available probiotics might be ineffective is that the strains they contain—if they even contain the type of bacteria claimed on the label—aren’t indigenous to the gut, and thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, aren’t very well adapted to survive there.

Plenty of video games turn the horrors of real life into entertaining couch-bound challenges—say, the life-or-death realities of war, or the trauma of when the neighborhood cats don’t love you as much as you love them—but few are quite as bleak as the Korean mobile game Don’t Get Fired.

Designed to highlight the harsh realities of the Korean workplace, the game, as The New Yorker puts it, “captures the deadened hamster-wheel ambience of office life.” Even more so, it captures exactly how stressful a shaky job market can be. You go to interviews, become an unpaid intern, and hustle around the office as notifications pop up alerting you about more work to be done. All the while, you try to keep your “health” bar high enough to keep working, because if you work too hard, you’ll burn out and end up getting fired anyway.

Tellingly, when my avatar shows up at his first interview, he’s engulfed in flames for reasons the game does not explain. He goes through nine different interviews, ending up in tears each time, before he finally lands an intern gig.

There are plenty of ways to get canned in the game, some more reasonable than others. You can get caught working two jobs, or be missing when your boss comes looking for you. If you make a single mistake—“oops, I put an extra 0 in the document!”—you’re gone. Plenty of the fireable offenses are random and uncontrollable, such as your company going bankrupt. Sometimes the company runs out of work for you to do, because you worked too hard. You can get too sick to work—no sick leave here! Sometimes, you simply don’t make it past the interview stage at a company. (Fans have compiled a handy list all 29 different offenses, if you’re interested.)

Each time you go to interview at a new job, you get a little “tip,” from the creators, most of which are despondent commentaries on the game’s too-real themes. “Don’t recommend this game to your mom,” one recommends. “She’ll be sad.”

The game alternates between drudgery—spending a lot of time just waiting for a task to come up—and intense scrambling to complete all the work at hand. In short, just don’t work too hard, or your health will fail and you won’t be able to work. But don’t work too little, or you’ll get fired anyway. Simple, right?

Get it: iOS, Android

[h/t The New Yorker]

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When it comes to speaking another language, you have to learn more than just vocabulary. All languages have aphorisms that just don’t translate neatly into other cultures, even if you know what the words technically mean.

To that end, the insurance comparison site GoCompare.com put together this handy infographic of how people talk about money around the world. Because whether you’re traveling to Sweden or Bulgaria, you should know how to call someone stingy.

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The Wave, a favorite of crowds at professional sports arenas, was first recorded at an Oakland baseball game in 1981. It has gone on to delight and disgruntle sports fans at virtually every baseball game since. It’s such a widespread phenomenon that it has even become the subject of scientific inquiry, as Vocativ recently reported.

A Hungarian biological physicist named Illes Farkas studied The Wave (also known as the Mexican Wave, since it made a notable appearance at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City) as part of a study published in a 2002 edition of the prestigious journal Nature. He was primarily interested in the way the social phenomenon mimics how particles behave, and to analyze crowd behavior, his team used models originally created to study cardiac tissue.

Please enjoy this very important analysis of how The Wave usually works, according to Farkas’s study: (Note that meters have been changed to feet.)

“The wave usually rolls in a clockwise direction and typically moves at a speed of about [39 feet] (or 20 seats) per second and has a width of about [19 to 39 feet] (corresponding to an average width of 15 seats). It is generated by no more than a few dozen people standing up simultaneously, and subsequently expands through the entire crowd as it acquires a stable, near-linear shape.”

Now you know that if you really want to start The Wave, you’re going to have to convince a few dozen people to do it with you. Science says so.

[h/t Vocativ]

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This little log cabin is the perfect retreat from your other retreat. The library in the woods, spotted by Mashable, was designed by Studio Padron and SMITH for the backyard of a vacation home in upstate New York. 

It’s a tiny book lover’s retreat filled with more books than furniture. Called the Hemmelig Rom (“secret room” in Norwegian), it was constructed using leftover wood from the construction of the main house. 

“The strategy for the cottage centered on preserving and transforming a material that would otherwise have become construction waste,” architect Brandon Padron told Dezeen.

The logs were cut and left out to dry for several years before the secluded black shack was assembled. Similar to a Lincoln Log creation, the lumber is arranged in a jigsaw fashion so that gaps between the logs form built-in bookshelves. A wood-burning stove heats the hut, which contains only a bed for guests and an armchair for reading. Hermits only, please. 

[h/t Mashable]

All images by Jason Koxvold

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One person’s trash is another person’s art, at least for Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the artist who became the New York City Department of Sanitation’s first and only artist-in-residence in the late ’70s. She isn’t paid for the position, but she does keep an office within the city agency’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, as The New York Times reports.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, a retrospective of the artist currently on display at the Queens Museum, displays the fruits of that decades-long municipal partnership. In the museum’s introduction to the exhibit, the curators explain why the Department of Sanitation was the perfect place for Ukeles to create art:

Ukeles’ main body of work flows from a four­ page manifesto written in 1969. In the manifesto she identifies two categories into which Western culture has divided all activity: Development (which is valued) and Maintenance (which is not). As an artist, she considered her work part of the first group but with the birth of her first child she felt—shockingly—relegated to the second. Rather than accepting this, she designated Maintenance as Art and herself a ‘Maintenance Artist.’

Half a century later, America’s crumbling infrastructure has made Ukeles’s point about the lack of respect for maintenance even more salient. Deferred maintenance and a dearth of public spending for infrastructure upkeep have created a system of roads, trains, and airports that is out-of-date, and, in some cases, dangerously neglected.

Some of the works included in Ukeles’s retrospective include Trax for Trucks and Barges II, an audio piece using field recordings of the city’s sanitation system and snippets from the artist’s conversations with the “sanmen” who care for it; Pulse II, a facade of three-light blinkers salvaged from old trash trucks; and photos of her early ‘70s series Maintenance Art Performances, in which she washed steps, raked leaves, and scrubbed sidewalks to highlight the fundamental, overlooked tasks performed by maintenance workers that keep society running.

You can even see the piece that spurred her collaboration with the Sanitation Department: the 1971 project “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day,” when she took 704 Polaroids of 300 maintenance workers at a downtown office building and asked them whether the photos captured them during a period of Maintenance Art or of work.

“I have been very lucky to have officials and workers and the art world willing to open all the doors, to take a risk and say ‘Yes. Yes!’” Ukeles writes in her artist’s statement. “Welcome to the results.”

The show runs until February 19, and anyone who has worked or currently works for the Department of Sanitation in New York gets in free with their family.

[h/t The New York Times]

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“A book is a loaded gun,” Ray Bradbury famously wrote in Fahrenheit 451, and plenty of people seem to concur with the story’s book-burning Captain Beatty that certain works are just too dangerous to leave sitting around. Parents and library patrons regularly band together to demand that certain books be pulled from public shelves, citing a desire to protect readers from coarse language, sexual themes, or other perceived offenses. In honor of Banned Books Week (September 25 to October 1), take a gander at the infographic below from Readers.com, which features some of the most protested books ever published, according to the American Library Association. 

Though the ideas presented in books like the Harry Potter series might not be quite as dangerous as some protesters would have you believe, a few kids’ books have actually had to be recalled for safety reasons—like the 1990s crib books, which mistakenly included straight pins left over from the manufacturing process. 

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If you’re like most people, you didn’t get truly invested in Stranger Things or The Get Down until the second episode. According to Netflix’s latest data, as spotted by Complex, that was the episode that turned most viewers from casual to addicted. About 70 percent of viewers who finished the second episode have ended up watching the full season.

Other series tend to be more of a slow burn. Most people watch three episodes of Narcos or Prison Break before committing to the first season, while Making a Murderer and Fuller House both take about four episodes to get people really hooked. Gilmore Girls and Jane the Virgin, meanwhile, both take around seven episodes to get people invested.

Netflix has previously broken down the same data with some of its other popular shows, like Breaking Bad (two episodes), Pretty Little Liars (four episodes), and Mad Men (six episodes). This latest version includes data from January 2015 to August 2016, from viewers around the world.

Across shows and international borders, viewers get hooked by a lot of the same plot lines and themes, according to Netflix. People tend to get invested when there’s a love story (Rory’s first kiss in the seventh episode on Gilmore Girls or a sexy elevator scene between Meredith and McDreamy in episode two of Grey’s Anatomy) or when there are mysteries to be unraveled (episode two of Stranger Things includes two missing persons and a mysterious monster).

“Regardless of whether they live in Argentina or Japan, members are not only getting hooked on similar episodes, but identifying with similar storylines,” the company argued in a press release on their data. Who knew that by obsessively watching all of Narcos in one weekend you were revealing something universal about humanity?

[h/t Complex]

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A former teacher in the Chinese province of Guangdong is making excellent use of his retirement. He’s not just gardening, but building entire scale maps out of shrubs. As featured on Atlas Obscura, Cai Mingxing’s terrace is entirely devoted to a map of China carved out of the garden.

The terrestrial cartography uses tiles to indicate international and national borders, shaping the garden into all of the Chinese provinces with small red-and-white signs denoting each province. Even the islands in the South China Sea have their own planters in the garden’s pool, and there are basic outlines of Mongolia and the Korean peninsula.

The terrace map, more than 30 feet wide, took the 75-year-old retiree a full year to build. Judging by the pictures, his project is really blooming now.

BestChinaNews has more pictures for your perusal.

[h/t Atlas Obscura]

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