The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

BAND—USED TO CORNY JOKES: Seth Meyers’s 8G band, led by Fred Armisen, will be laid off after accompanying the show for 11 seasons. NBC will try to replace the live music element of the show with a karaoke machine.

WFH SURGEON: Nearly 5,000 miles from the operating table, a Chinese doctor performed surgery and removed a lesion from a patient’s prostate via a four-armed robot and a really good internet connection.

DRONE WRANGLER: The growing number of low-flying drones, especially around Australia, could upset whale migration, experts say. Make ’em air krill, Shamu.

Personal

ALTERNATIVE TO STEALING: You can buy limited drops of certain commemorative street signs through the New York City Department of Transportation. At $75 a sign, we are a long way from filling the funding gap that nixing congestion pricing left.

SOMETHING IN THE WATER: Illegal and pharmaceutical drug pollution is having disastrous effects on river-dwelling wildlife. Brown trout have been reportedly getting addicted to methamphetamines, and European perch are becoming less afraid of predators due to ingesting drugs meant for human depression.

For sale

WORLD’S TALLEST BIKE: Two French friends built a bike that measures 25 feet and five inches tall, beating the previous record by just over a foot. Now comes the challenge of picking one lucky Tour de France rider.

POCKETLESS SHIRTS: Breast pockets on men’s dress shirts have been slowly disappearing. Nearly 40% of Brooks Brothers’s dress shirts now come without the worst place to keep your phone.—MM

Photo of the week

Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images

More than 100 of the world’s funniest comedians and Jimmy Fallon were given an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday before the pontiff departed for the G7 summit in Apulia, Italy. “In the midst of so much gloomy news, you denounce abuses of power…you point out inappropriate behavior,” said the pope, who has been accused of using a homophobic slur as recently as Tuesday.

The event, which also included Stephen Colbert, Chris Rock, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was part of an initiative from the church to “establish a link” with humorists from around the world. More than two-thirds of the invitees were Italian, yet somehow Sebastian Maniscalco didn’t make the cut.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Dexter’s Laboratory/Warner Bros. Domestic Television via Giphy

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even spend less time urinating painfully in the near future.

A popular belief about Mayan sacrifices may be wrong. A new archeological discovery is upending the widely held notion that young women and girls accounted for most of the human sacrifices that took place centuries ago in the ancient city of Chichén Itzá. Researchers analyzed 64 sets of remains from one of the area’s burial sites and found for the first time that all of them were males. Two pairs were identical twins, and a quarter of them were close relatives, which the team linked to a sacred Mayan myth about the sacrifice of young relatives. All this suggests that biological relation was a factor in whom the Mayans chose for sacrificial ceremonies, researchers said.

Prize-winning invention could make UTI treatment a breeze. Scientists just got ~$10 million to continue developing a shoebox-sized machine that can detect urinary tract bacterial infection in just 15 minutes—and pinpoint the right antibiotic for the job within another half hour. The current diagnostic process typically takes two or three painful days. Doctors often diagnose based on apparent symptoms, which can lead to prescribing the wrong medication (up to half of UTI bacteria are resistant to one or more antibiotics). More than half of women and around one-tenth of men will get at least one UTI in their lifetime, and taking the wrong medicine can drive antibiotic resistance, making it harder to treat future infections.

Plant foods are only healthy when they’re not ultraprocessed. Sorry to anyone who thought they were stepping up their wellness game by simply cutting out meat—your new diet isn’t doing much if there are still a bunch of preservatives in it. Whether it’s an imitation burger, fruit juice, cereals, or anything else that may be technically vegetarian, scientists found that consuming ultraprocessed foods is linked with a higher chance of fatal heart disease, while eating whole (non-ultraprocessed) plant-based foods is linked with a 20% lower chance of dying from heart ailments.—ML

How worried should you be about microplastics?

Svetlozar Hristov/Getty Images

From the highest peaks of the Himalayas to human testicles, microplastics are everywhere. And scientists are increasingly concerned about the tiny plastic particles that have spread to the most remote reaches of the planet and our bodies.

Everything from food containers to clothes now contains plastic, and tiny fragments break away from these items through regular wear and tear and after they’re discarded. Other products are intentionally made with microplastics, like the tiny beads in toothpaste or exfoliant creams.

The microplastics end up in oceans, the air, and our food and water supplies.

• People inhale and ingest up to 113,743 of the invisible particles annually, according to one study, with some products like fish, bottled water, and salt known to be particularly common delivery vessels into our bodies.
• As a result, microplastics have been found in human blood, the gastrointestinal tract, the liver, the lungs, and other vital organs.

While the health effects of microplastic aren’t fully understood, there’s some evidence that they can be harmful. So, let’s train a microscope on the tiny particles to get a sense of just how big of an issue they are—and how to deal with them.

What does science say?

There’s evidence that microplastic contamination could harm marine environments and might make soil on dry land less fertile by reducing the organisms that live in it. When it comes to human health, scientists are most concerned about plastic nanoparticles, which are small enough to weasel past barriers to enter cells, and, potentially, the brain.

Since plastic takes way longer than a human lifespan to degrade, the tiny pieces can accumulate in our bodies.

It doesn’t take a PhD in toxicology to know that’s bad. Plastics contain a cornucopia of toxic chemicals, including substances like flame retardants, which don’t belong inside human organs.

But scientists are still working on understanding how this affects us.

• Associations have been found between microplastics and health issues in mice, like intestinal inflammation and some cognitive decline.
• A study of people who were undergoing a procedure to reduce stroke risk revealed that those with microplastics in a main artery had an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and death.
• Human semen samples contained microplastics in multiple studies, and some researchers are wondering whether they’re the culprit behind declining sperm counts that have been impacting male fertility around the world.

However, experts note there’s insufficient evidence to confidently blame microplastics for causing health issues. They claim that more research is needed to tease out the effects of microplastics from all the other factors that affect wellbeing, like people’s socioeconomic status and the various substances we’re exposed to besides plastic.

Plus, there’s no certainty about the volume of microplastics entering our bodies. While some studies suggest that it’s a credit card’s worth of microplastics a week or the equivalent of 50 plastic bags per year on average, some researchers say these are overestimations by several orders of magnitude.

What can you do?

Avoiding exposure to plastic is almost as difficult as not running into a relative at your wedding, but there are some precautions experts say you can take to minimize contact with microplastics, including:

• Replacing plastic containers, kitchen utensils, and water bottles with glass products, as well as avoiding microwaving food in plastic.
• Eating less processed foods that are more likely to come into contact with plastic during the production process.
• Buying fewer plastic items and keeping the ones you own out of direct sunlight, as plastic tends to degrade in heat.
• Vacuuming and ventilating your living space more frequently to reduce microplastics in the air.

Governments are taking action…the European Commission recently made it illegal in the EU to intentionally infuse products with microplastics, like nonbiodegradable glitter. Meanwhile, UN member countries are working on an international treaty to reduce plastic pollution. They hope to finalize the agreement by the end of the year.—SK

Place to be: Chick-fil-A summer camp

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

The children yearn for the Chick-fil-A mines.

A store in Hammond, Louisiana, is offering a “summer camp” where up to 30 kids ages five to 12 will learn the chicken sandwich business at a cost to their parents of $35 each. The package will teach customer service skills and offer a chance to meet the Chick-fil-A cow.

While there was blowback to the concept of elementary school children working a deep fryer, they won’t be doing any of the cooking. Employees will act as counselors, giving a kitchen tour and showing the kids how to bag an order.

The program is so popular that the initial three sessions of the service-industry fantasy camp in July were expanded to six. It’s understandable why parents would be excited about the idea.

• The three-hour session comes with a t-shirt and a meal, making it a bargain compared to what babysitters can charge.
• It’s less expensive than travel sports, and the child will not be booed by an overzealous dad who thinks his kid should get more time bagging orders than your kid.

This actually isn’t new. A Chick-fil-A in Houston initiated the program six years ago and has run it there annually. A representative of that restaurant said it sold out this year within seven minutes of opening registration.—DL

Crowd work

Two Sundays ago, we asked: What was your high-school prank? Here are our favorite responses:

• “We changed autocorrect in Microsoft Word to correct the word ‘September’ to ‘Class of 2003 rules!’ on every computer we could get our hands on in the building. It wasn’t much, but we figured it wouldn’t be found until the following fall semester.”—Tom from New York
• “At high school graduation, each senior gave our principal a marble as we shook his hand. We only gave him a jar to hold them when his pants pockets were too full to hold anymore.”—Kristen from Eldersburg, MD
• “There’s apparently a ‘law’ in Montana that if a student rides a horse to school the admins/principal has to care for and feed them throughout the day. Many kids were riding their horses to school on the last day. Luckily the principal was cool about it and actually did take care of them, even though the law is unconfirmed.”—Anonymous
• “Some of our classmates had horse farms. We spelled out our school’s initials in manure spread on a hill visible from our rival school’s football field before the big game. Bonus: It killed the underlying grass, so was visible all winter. Extra bonus: The next spring, the grass there was greener than the surrounding, and you could still see the initials.”—Ed from Knoxville, TN

This week’s question

What’s an inexpensive travel item that has changed your life?

Matty’s response to get the juices flowing: “I bought a big men’s vintage button-down for $15 and it’s become my flying jacket. It has two breast pockets with so much room, I can put my ID in one pocket and phone in the other while I go through TSA and don’t have to worry about anything falling out of my pocket.”

Share your response here.