(Photo: Konrad Lackerbeck)

Pictured above is Mallersdorf Abbey, a Franciscan convent in southern Germany. 490 nuns live there. They all have different jobs to make the abbey a self-supporting home. Sister Doris Engelhard, 65, is among them. Her job is to make beer. And she's really good at it.

From an early age, Sister Doris wanted to become a nun. She needed a trade to offer the community, so she apprenticed with another nun who was a brewer and took a course on the subject. Once she had become a master brewer, she took her vows and went to work. Tracy Brown Hamilton of The Atlantic describes her work:

The abbey makes a different beer for each season, including maibock, a doppelbock, a dark zoigl, and a copper-hued lager. But given that the beer is made with natural ingredients and is not treated with preservatives, it doesn’t travel well—you can only find it in the vicinity of the abbey. “It’s a fresh product,” Sister Doris says. “Beer is not supposed to be left sitting. It changes the taste. It should be enjoyed as soon as possible.”

Sister Doris says she never expected that her call to serve God would lead her to brewing beer, but she loves her work and will do it until her health prevents her from doing so. “You can serve God everywhere, no matter what profession or job you have,” she says. “As Saint Benedict wrote, ‘in all things God may be glorified,’ and that is also true of beer.”

-via First We Feast

(Photo: Tablelog)

Maple leaves are more than just a national symbol of Canada. In Osaka, Japan, they're a snack. Brian Ashcraft describes them at Kotaku. People collect fallen maple leaves, then preserve them in salt for more than a year. Cooks then fry them in a sweet batter for about 20 minutes to produce a pretty and tasty treat.

(Photo: eikblo)

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This mysterious video shows a thug scream at and harrass a woman on a German train. When he savagely kicks her, a fellow passenger stands up. In one quick movement that did no harm to the attacker, he immediately defused the situation.

-via 22 Words

This swaying glass-bottomed bridge has opened in China http://t.co/FDOHpC9UUz (Pic: Rex) pic.twitter.com/kqenHvWABm

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) October 1, 2014

Don't look down: could you walk across this swaying glass-bottomed bridge set over a valley? http://t.co/XjLZAL2BWS pic.twitter.com/LZHstj6gWg

— Telegraph Travel (@TelegraphTravel) October 1, 2014

Don't look down, because it's 180 meters down to the ground. Don't look to the sides, either, because the bridge sways in the wind. This new bridge in Pingjang, Hunan Province, China, stretches 300 meters between two mountain peaks. The bottom is made of sheets of glass.

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It leads to a similar glass-floored walkway along a vertical wall of Tianmen Mountain. The facility has trained staff detailed to help faint-hearted tourists who lose their nerves while attempting to cross.

-via Twitchy

(Image: HBO)

George R.R. Martin's slaughter of the inhabitants of Westeros and Essos appears random, but there are clear patterns that can detected and extended mathematically. Dr. Richard Vale, a professor of mathematics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has conducted a survey of the first five books in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novel series. He has applied Bayesian statistical methods to the deaths in those books to make predictions about The Winds of Winter, the upcoming sixth novel in the series. You can read his formal paper on the subject here.

Warning: spoilers and math. Lots of math.

-via Ian Chant

(Image: Pendleton Ward)

Cartoonist Pendleton Ward came to California to make his dreams come true. It hard going. For a while, it looked like he might become homeless.

Then came Adventure Time. Ward's cartoon is wildly successful, with 14 million weekly viewers, along with video games, comic books, and hundreds of items of merchandise. Adventure Time made Ward the head of a vast entertainment empire. Now he's walking away.

Pendleton Ward is now just a writer and storyboard artist on the show that he invented. Why? Neil Strauss of Rolling Stone investigated. Ward explained to Strauss that running a show is simply contrary to his personality:

It's not that Ward is ungrateful. It's that helming a hit series generating top-10 games in app stores, comics that have collectively sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and nearly a thousand individual items of merchandise is just not part of his DNA. He would far prefer to be at home with the lights off and the curtains closed, playing a video game and eating pizza. […]

Recently, Ward signed up for improv classes because he thought they would be a fun distraction. But, it turns out, all they did was make him even more uncomfortable. "I didn't think that I had a bunch of walls until I started taking that class and then I was like, 'Whoa, this is forcing me to get out of my comfort zone,'" he says. "I realized I love my comfort zone. I spent a long time building my comfort zone. It's precious to me, and I love it and I want it.

-via Jeremy Barker

(Chris Hallbeck/Minimumble)

Upside: if you skip your morning pot of coffee, you can blame your mistakes on the lack of it.

Downside: you don't get that sweet, delicious happy juice.

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The drawbridge in the town of Tisno, Croatia was rising. For the rest of us, that means bring your car to a stop and wait for the bridge to lower again. But for this lady, it means drive faster! Security camera footage captured the scene of her driving her Peugot microcar over the bridge. She made it to the other side in one piece . . .

. . . and then kept driving. She didn't stop. BBC News reports:

The unnamed woman, 58, passed a red light that had just come on, according to bridge warden Tome Mejic Sidic. "I was shouting and gesturing her to stop but it was no use", he says. "She ignored me, went full throttle and flew across the bridge. I was convinced she'd overturn the car."

The woman later told police that she had been blinded by the sun. 

-via Tastefully Offensive

(Photo: Giordano Garosio)

(Photo: Walhuetter Photography)

Which is, of course, the appropriate place to do so. Highlining is the sport of walking a tightrope high over the ground. This year's International Highline Meeting was conducted at Monte Piana in northwestern Italy.

Attendees could just stand on the wire. But that gets tiring after a while. Many brought hammocks out on the ropes to relax and enjoy conversation and the scenery. You can see more photos of the fun they had at Design Taxi.

-via Visual News

(Photo: Paul Fagan and Cameron Polom)

Paul Ezekial Fagan, a 10-year old boy in Tampa, Florida, vanished from his home last Thursday. Police searched the neighborhood on foot and in a helicopter while his frantic parents feared the worst.

Local news reporters drove into Paul's neighbhorood to report on the case. Among them was Cameron Polom of the local ABC station. At around 7 AM on Friday, Polom spotted a tired-looking child in some dense vegetation. The Today show describes the scene:

“He’s looking at me and I’m thinking, ‘Could this possibly be this kid? Is this really happening?’ It was a very surreal moment,” he told TODAY.com on Monday.

Polom, 29, said he called out to the boy and asked for his name. He then picked the boy up over the fence and walked him to nearby sheriff’s deputies.

Paul's family was overjoyed to see him back. The boy explained to them that he had left home because he needed some space from his younger brother.

(Video Link)

-via Huffington Post

In his youth, photographer Gray Malin once heard of a Scottish shepherd who dyed the wool of his sheep in order to make them more visible at night and thus less easily stolen. This story rolled around in his head for years until it came into fruition as the "Dream Series."

Malin dyed a flock of sheep bright, vibrant colors. Then he photographed them as they moved around. The results are magical in appearance, as though these animals have become mysterious cryptids passing into our world only temporarily.

-via Huffington Post

Bubblegum Squash McFlurry in Australia

McPaneer in India

Taro root pie in China

Are these just on the secret menu? I doubt it. There's a wide array of wonderful foods served at McDonald's restaurants around the world that just aren't for sale in the United States. Jessica Misener of BuzzFeed rounded up 25 strange and wonderful dishes that are inspiring me to travel abroad.

Wait--did you read the terms and conditions before you clicked to agree to them? If you had, you might have spotted this passage:

In using this service, you agree to relinquish your first born child to F-Secure, as and when the company requires it. In the event that no children are produced, your most beloved pet will be taken instead. The terms of this agreement stand for eternity.

Oops! Well, the upside is that you now have free Wi-Fi access from F-Secure, a computer security company. Also, you won't have to spend as much money on Christmas this year.

(Images: F-Secure)

To promote its services, F-Secure assembled a simple Wi-Fi hotspot, which is pictured above, from about $200 in parts. Company representatives took it to a busy shopping mall and convention center in London. In half an hour, they recorded 32 MB of data, such as passwords and private messages, from passersby who logged into their hotspot.

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They deleted the information, of course. But that didn't diminish their point: your electronic information isn't necessarily secure if you use free Wi-Fi.

(Image: NASA)

The Aral Sea is--or was--a large body of water in Central Asia. It is divided between the nations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. While the Soviet Union existed, the Aral Sea was entirely within its borders.

Two rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, were the primary sources of water for the Aral Sea. In the 1960s, the Soviets diverted the two rivers in an attempt to irrigate the nearby desert lands and make them arable.

The result was an ecological disaster. The Aral Sea gradually shrunk into three small basins connected by narrow channels. According to NASA satellite imagery, one of those basins has now completely evaporated, leaving the Aral Sea with only 10% of its original capacity. In the photo above, you can see an outline showing the approximate shape of the lake in 1960. The fields of blue are all that is left.

(Image of Russian Aral Sea warships from The Russians in Central Asia by E. Stanford, 1865)

It was not always so. Prior to Soviet activity, the Aral Sea was a thriving lake that was a center for fishing and commerce. It was of such great importance that the Imperial Russian Navy maintained a fleet of warships there starting in 1852.

These warships were built in Sweden or elsewhere in Russia, then transported down rivers to the Aral Sea. They were based at the town of Raim, which is now a Kazakh town on a small lake about 30 miles away from the remains of the Aral Sea.

By 1880, this flotilla consisted of 6 armed vessels and several unarmed vessels. They provided mercantile security, conducted hydrographic surveys, and supported troops who campaigned in the area in 1868 and 1873. In 1883, the flotilla was disbanded, with some portions transferred to the Russian naval presence on the Amu Darya, a river that flows into the Aral from Afghanistan.

During the Russian Civil War (1917-1923), the Soviets briefly maintained a fleet of warships to combat Tsarist and British troops in the area. But with the Red victory, the need for a fleet evaporated. And, later, so did the sea on which it had sailed.

(Images: Knight Architects)

This beautiful and novel bridge design by Knight Architects and engineers at AKT III is designed to unfold across the water like a fan. It's their concept for a bridge over a canal in London.

The bridge would consist of five steel beams with hydraulic jacks and counterweights that form a walkway. LED lights illuminate the structure, providing an architectural spectacle during both night and day. You can view more images of it at Design Boom.