
YouTube

fact
YouTube
World’s smallest museum opens in British phone booth: https://t.co/JGxPLfHAWM pic.twitter.com/OunxWmq1Cj
— Travel + Leisure (@TravelLeisure) October 19, 2016
It doesn’t take long for guests to explore the contents of the newly-opened Warley Museum in West Yorkshire, England. That’s because the museum, which formerly served as a telephone booth, only has room to accommodate one visitor at a time.
As The Telegraph reports, the museum started as a passion project for the Warley Community Association (WCA). The WCA assumed the booth from British Telecommunications after the company decided to pull the plug on 43 phone booths in the area.
Instead of repurposing the space into a salad shop or a tiny office, the town decided to make it into a museum dedicated to local history. Today the phone box is filled with items like photographs, antique jewelry, and glass etchings, which anyone can stop in to admire. Every three months, the artifacts will be switched out to fit a new theme.
The museum claims to be the world’s smallest, but the WCA is still waiting to hear back from the Guinness World Records committee for the official designation. Other institutions that have brandished the title include a 134-square-foot shed in Superior, Arizona and an old freight-elevator shaft in New York City.
Is this the SMALLEST museum in the world? Old phone box tells history of Warley https://t.co/raYLFxVwVH pic.twitter.com/C69OeITKE2
— Faster All Share (@Faster_Sheare) October 14, 2016
Good call: The ‘world’s smallest museum’ opens inside a red phone boxhttps://t.co/J4DVyaSeNU pic.twitter.com/QfEy3dUulM
— Telegraph Travel (@TelegraphTravel) October 17, 2016
[h/t The Telegraph]
All Images via Twitter.
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
October 19, 2016 – 1:30pm
There are some debates you just can’t win: What’s the most iconic Star Wars film? Is Pepsi better than Coke? And when autumn finally rolls around, which Halloween candy is the best?
These arguments are likely a lost cause, but social brand review website Influenster decided to add to the candy conversation by identifying the most popular sweet in each state. They surveyed the preferences of over 40,000 community members, broke down the results by region, and made a map to display their findings. See which treats made the final cut below.
[h/t Influenster]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
October 19, 2016 – 1:00pm
Most everyone is familiar with the tasty, acidic tomato, the fruit that brings life to sandwiches and pasta dinners. But thanks to some firmly held and erroneous beliefs about proper storage, it’s entirely possible you have never actually tasted a tomato that’s lived up to its full potential.
Why? According to a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tomatoes that go directly into cold storage experience changes at the genetic level that irrevocably alter their taste.
The study looked at both common variety tomatoes and heirlooms to examine the differences on a molecular level after they had been stored at 41°F for one, three, or seven days, and then brought out to recover at 68°F. The tomatoes fared okay after one or three days in this chilly environment, but after seven, there were fewer volatile compounds that contribute to the tomato’s flavor, thanks to a reduced number of RNAs encoding transcription factors that would’ve expressed the genes associated with them. (Sugars and acids tend to remain the same, but without the compounds, taste suffers.) Taste testing confirmed that the cooled tomatoes didn’t have the same appeal as those coming directly from the vine.
It’s possible that selective fruit breeding may one day result in a tomato that won’t be affected by cooler temperatures. Until then, study authors say the best way to preserve peak tomato flavor is to buy fresh and then store them at room temperature for up to a week.
[h/t NY Times]
October 19, 2016 – 12:30pm
For the first time ever, this month the United Nations General Assembly convened a high-level meeting on the topic of antibiotic resistance. At the meeting in Geneva, members committed to develop action plans to reduce antibiotic use.
The urgency for this rare meeting stems from news over the last few months, when we’ve seen the emergence of resistance to the antibiotic colistin in humans and pigs in the U.S. Colistin, an old drug, is one of our “last resort” antibiotics. Physicians have been reluctant to use it because it can be toxic, and because of their restraint, resistance to the drug hasn’t historically been much of an issue in people. But while its use was rare in the U.S., it was commonly used in agriculture in China. Resistance genes ended up on a plasmid (a piece of DNA that can “jump” between bacteria species) and due to travel and trade, is now in the U.S. This is alarming, as once resistance to an antibiotic evolves, we know it can spread very quickly.
Colistin resistance is far from our only problem. There are now many common bacteria already resistant to antibiotics or carrying a resistance gene that may jump between other bacterial species. Antibiotic resistance leads us to a cornucopia of abbreviations: MRSA, VRE, NDM-1: bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; vancomycin-resistant Enterococci) or carry a resistance gene that can jump between bacteria species (NDM-1), like the colistin resistance gene can (abbreviated MCR-1). Even gonorrhea infections are becoming untreatable. A report released earlier this year suggests that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant infections will kill more people each year than cancer.
The bottom line is that we’re losing our last effective antibiotics, and it will change the way medicine is administered in the future.
It can be hard to visualize the enormous impact antibiotic resistance will have, so here are five ways antibiotic resistance might change your life.
Infectious disease journalist Maryn McKenna wrote about her great-uncle’s death at age 30, in 1938, five years before antibiotics became widely available. “Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in. After a few days, he developed an ache in one shoulder; two days later, a fever. His wife and the neighborhood doctor struggled for two weeks to take care of him, then flagged down a taxi and drove him fifteen miles to the hospital in my grandparents’ town. He was there one more week, shaking with chills and muttering through hallucinations, and then sinking into a coma as his organs failed. Desperate to save his life, the men from his firehouse lined up to give blood. Nothing worked.”
Though this was 80 years ago, this scenario could become common again. As the available drugs fail, any breach of the skin could once again result in a deadly, untreatable infection. Something as simple as gardening or getting a tattoo could be fatal.
Infectious disease physician and researcher Eli Perencevich tells mental_floss, “The post-antibiotic era will be your sister or mother dying of a urinary tract infection or your brother dying of a simple appendicitis. But I can’t offer a description of life cut short quite like Alfred Reinhart’s death.”
As a medical student at Harvard, Reinhart had survived a bout of rheumatic fever at age 13, leaving him with a chance of developing rheumatic heart disease later in life. He was also concerned about the potential to develop a bacterial infection in his heart—which he tracked by keeping close watch on his own symptoms during his time in medical school. He meticulously documented his irregular heartbeats, heart murmurs, and faint skin rashes for months, telling his own doctors he was going to die. He continued to take notes on himself until two days before his death at age 24 from subacute bacterial endocarditis following rheumatic fever.
“Both conditions would be prevented or treated with antibiotics only a few short years later,” Perencevich says.
Even now, infections occur after 1 to 3 percent of surgeries. Most of these are still treatable with antibiotics, but about 3 percent still lead to death. Even surgeries many consider “routine” now could easily become complicated without antibiotics, such as Caesarean sections or knee replacements. Infectious disease physician Judy Stone tells mental_floss, “Joint replacements, which are now routine, would be enormously risky. Without effective antibiotics, 40 to 50 percent of patients undergoing hip replacement would develop infections, and approximately 30 percent would die.”
Something like a bone marrow or organ transplant, where the host’s immune system must be compromised to accept the new tissue, would no longer be possible at all; the risk of an untreatable infection would be too high. Stone notes this trend has already started. “I already regularly see men who develop sepsis following prostate biopsies,” she says. “They are routinely given Cipro as antibiotic prophylaxis by their urologist, and the bacteria causing their bloodstream infections are now often resistant to Cipro.”
And “elective” surgeries, such as most cosmetic procedures? Forget about it.
It may sound far-fetched, but we’ve seen in recent months how easily critical medicines—EpiPens, insulin, treatments for HIV-associated infections, even acne creams—can quickly become financially out of reach. Because antibiotics are “community drugs”—use in anyone can affect how well they work in the whole population—as we find ourselves with fewer and fewer options available for treatment, the few remaining drugs may become strictly rationed—and expensive.
In many developing countries, deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections are already far too common. In 2015, approximately 1.8 million people died of tuberculosis—in part because drugs weren’t available, and in part because their drugs did not work.
The grandfather of antibiotics, Alexander Fleming, famously predicted in his speech for the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he received for his discovery of penicillin, that in the future, penicillin might be misused and rendered ineffective. He was all too correct. By 1950, 40 percent of Staph bacteria found in hospitals were already resistant to penicillin.
Now, we have an almost impossible task ahead of us—to preserve the antibiotics we still have by using best prescribing practices in hospitals and clinics, reducing unnecessary use in livestock, and working to develop novel ones before it’s too late.
October 19, 2016 – 12:00pm
Few movie props are as iconic as the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (1939), but even cinematic treasures aren’t immune to the ravages of time. According to the Associated Press, the Smithsonian Institution—which owns one of the only surviving pairs of the shoes—has launched a Kickstarter campaign to conserve Judy Garland’s fancy footwear for a new era of museumgoers.
The MGM Studios prop department made Garland multiple pairs of the red sequined slippers, and in 1979 an anonymous donor gave one to the National Museum of American History. Today, the shoes are 80 years old, and badly in need of a little TLC. Their hue is dull, the sequins are flaking, the felt soles are battered, and they’re also beginning to fray. The Smithsonian wants to raise $300,000 for conservation efforts, and to construct a high-tech museum display case that simulates the optimal light, humidity, and temperature conditions to keep the ruby slippers bright and shiny.
The Smithsonian Institution is federally funded, but government money only covers about 70 cents of every dollar it needs to maintain its vast network of museums and research centers. The institution relies on private and corporate contributions for the rest, and they recently turned to crowdfunding. In 2015, the institution launched its first Kickstarter—a $700,000 campaign to preserve, digitize, and display the spacesuit Neil Armstrong wore during his historic moonwalk. Now, they’re hoping that a similar effort will save the slippers.
“This particular pair of ruby slippers really belongs to the American people, and so we thought as we sought support that we would invite the public to join us on this journey to help preserve them for the next generation,” said museum spokeswoman Melinda Machado in a statement quoted by the AP.
As of Wednesday, October 19, the Smithsonian’s Kickstarter had raised more than $140,000—meaning it will likely reach its $300,000 goal (and then some) by the fundraiser’s end on Wednesday, November 16. Contributors who pledge $10 or more will receive a The Wizard of Oz-themed gift, ranging from posters, to tote bags, to a lunch and group tour with a Smithsonian curator.
You can learn more in the Kickstarter campaign video below.
[h/t Associated Press]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
October 19, 2016 – 11:30am
This Digital Display Frame Is the Only Art You’ll Ever Need
20 Fascinating Facts About Doctor Who
11 Classic Facts About Rashomon
Lifelike Animal Sculptures Made Entirely of Rolled-Up Newspaper
Vimeo courtesy Hitotsuyama Studio