Darendukes

• 

  Yes, this Wendy's-themed tabletop RPG exists, and it's pretty robust. [credit: Wendy's ]

Unhealthy food and games have been official bedfellows for decades, beyond the snacks that line your average video- or board-gaming marathon. This includes licensed cereal characters in '70s and '80s board games, cartoon food icons as pixelated gaming mascots, and modern promotional games like Burger King's Sneak King and KFC's recent I Love You, Colonel Sanders.

It's not the subject matter we necessarily deem worthy of a brief at Ars, but this week, Wendy's got our attention by rolling a veritable D20 die down our clogged arteries and into our hearts.

On Thursday, the fast-food restaurant chain released Feast Of Legends: Rise From the Deep Freeze. This free, 97-page PDF slaps cheeseburgers, fried chicken, Frosty desserts, and French fries onto a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure that revolves around the years-old Wendy's slogan of "fresh, never frozen" (a phrase that is literally chanted by townspeople in the village of, ahem, Freshtovia).

Enlarge / You're never too young for experimental archaeology. (credit: Helena Seidl da Fonseca)

A recent study found that prehistoric babies drank milk from ceramic sippy cups, including some with cute animal motifs. Lest you be overwhelmed by the cuteness, there's a heartbreaking side to that discovery: Bronze and Iron Age parents buried their dead infants with their clay sippy cups.

A team of archaeologists found microscopic traces of livestock milk in three of the containers: two from Iron Age graves in Germany dating between 800 and 450 BCE, and a broken one from a much earlier Bronze Age grave nearby. The results suggest that feeding babies milk from livestock may have helped early European farming populations grow and expand.

Not kidding around

Archaeologists have reconstructed surprising details of ancient people’s lives, but they still know relatively little about how infants and children in the ancient past lived. “Infants and children were mainly ignored in archaeology until about 20 years ago,” anthropologist Sian Halcrow of the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, told Ars Technica. “Research projects that are interested in children are starting to re-examine previous assumptions about activities and objects in archaeology—some items that were thought to be ritualistic are in fact child toys.”

Enlarge / Surveillance footage shows two men entering the control room at the base of the billboard. (credit: Auburn Hills Police)

Police are trying to find two men who broke into the control room of an electronic billboard in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills. The men caused a pornographic video to play on both sides of the billboard, which is located next to Interstate 75, around 11pm on Saturday evening. Videos of the billboard quickly began to circulate on social media (link is mildly NSFW).

"Two suspects entered a small building, which houses a computer that runs the content for the digital billboard, located underneath the sign," Auburn Hills police reported in a Facebook page. Police shared surveillance footage showing the two men with their faces obscured by glasses and by hoodies pulled tight around their heads.

"The suspects forced entry into the building, which is also secured by a 6 foot fence," the police reported. "The suspects were inside the building for approximately 15 minutes before leaving."

Enlarge / Arum lily / Calla lily (credit: Getty | Flowerphotos)

In the afterglow of successful fecal transplants, researchers are now sniffing around vaginal fluids for the next possible bodily product to improve health—and they’re roused by the possibilities.

Vaginal fluid transplants could “revolutionize the way we view and treat conditions affecting the female reproductive tract,” researchers at Johns Hopkins wrote in a recent study on vaginal microbiota transplants (VMTs). If they work as researchers hypothesize, they could rub out many common problems at once. And based on what we know of vaginas, they could be far less messy than transplants involving poop.

Microbial muck

The basic idea behind VMTs is identical to that of poop transplants, aka fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), which have been around for centuries. Generally, FMTs aim to use microbe-laden bodily products—in this case excrement—to introduce or restore rich, complex microbial communities into the innards of ailing recipients.

Enlarge / Not pictured here: the USB Type-C cable needed to connect the Quest to a gaming PC to take advantage of today's announced news. (credit: Occulus / Getty / Aurich Lawson)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—At Wednesday's Oculus Connect conference, the virtual reality company took the wraps off a secret that it had apparently hidden in its recent high-quality Oculus Quest headset all along. The $400 device has been marketed as a standalone wireless VR system, but thanks to an incoming "Oculus Link" update, coming in November, it will soon double as a wired-PC option.

Should you have a lengthy USB Type-C cable handy, you can expect to plug a Quest VR headset into a compatible "gaming"-caliber PC, then use that computer to power whatever VR games and software you want to run, as if it were the PC's Oculus Rift system. It's an official alternative to using the Quest's built-in hardware, which revolves around a Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip (SoC) like the ones used in the Google Pixel 2 smartphone.

Since Quest already has an array of inside-out tracking cameras, this PC use case won't require additional cameras or sensors. You should expect to plug a Quest into a compatible PC, run a room-calibration test, and be on your way—just like with certain Windows Mixed Reality headsets and this year's Oculus Rift S.

Enlarge / Kellogg Co.'s Pringles brand potato chips. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

In the past, parents may have tried to coax their picky eaters to dinner with misguided reminders of starving children—or perhaps letting them imitate farm animals. But, the parents of today now have a scarier prompt.

A British teenager has permanent vision loss, hearing loss, and weak bones after years of eating only select types of junk food. The teen’s doctors eventually diagnosed him with a relatively newly defined eating disorder called avoidant-restrictive food in-take disorder (ARFID). They report the teen’s case this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The case is a rare one in developed countries, which have a ready supply of nutritious foods. The teen’s doctors in Bristol were initially stumped by his progressive symptoms. But they caution other physicians in their case report that such damage from poor nutrition is potentially reversible—if it’s caught early—and even people with normal weights may be struggling with eating disorders.