Cheesy does it

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Traffic noise during sleep poses risk to heart health; how to know if your wine glass has a full pour; metal icons release graphic album; and would you live in a house made of recycled plastic bottles?

Let’s get into it!

Bars and restaurants don’t have a standardized glass for serving wine. You may go to five different restaurants and get five different glasses, making it difficult to determine the mark for when the server has poured you the amount of wine you paid for.

“Restaurants and bars are dark and trained for speed,” says Amy Mundwiler, national director of wine and beverage for Maple Hospitality Group. In other words, the pour you get is the product of a lot of repetition and is basically automatic for the server most of the time.

So where does that leave the concerned patron wondering if he or she got their money’s worth?

“Trust your instincts: you probably know what the glass looks like when you pour it at home,” says Lisa Lee, owner and sommelier of The Tasting Room on 9th in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

She says that for most glasses, a standard five- or six-ounce pour should top off at the widest part of the glass. It should also take an intuitive amount of time for you to polish it off.

“If it’s gone in three [sips], have a conversation; if it takes a while to work through, you’ve probably been treated fairly.”

Some people can sleep through anything and will happily live next to a busy freeway without compromising sleep quality. However, even for those whose slumber isn’t disturbed by cars driving by in the distance, there’s still a risk for heart health.

Researchers from Boston presented a study at a meeting of the American Heart Association earlier this week, in which they concluded that high levels of transportation noise can elevate the risk of a heart attack, stroke, and heart disease.

“We expected that disordered sleep would influence the relationship between noise exposure and heart disease,” lead researcher Dr. Joseph Nguyen, an internal medicine resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in a news release. “It was surprising to find that sleep health appeared to play no role.”

The researchers made their assessment based on transportation noises at volumes between 45 and 50 decibels, which they likened to average rainfall or a person typing.

They tested their hypothesis against medical records and lifestyle data collected from 100,000 people and determined those who were regularly exposed to transportation noises above 50 decibels had an 8% to 10% greater risk of heart disease.

In Saint-Rémi-d’Amherst, Quebec, a cozy little home sits inconspicuously, passersby none the wiser that this cabin-like structure is actually made of 200,000 recycled plastic bottles.

The concept was developed by Quebec-based PakVille, which makes prefabricated homes with a heavy dose of environmental friendliness using a technology called PakVert.

Developed by Canadian entrepreneur and professional engineer Parinaz Pakniat, PakVert is designed to solve labour costs and construction costs, two of developers’ toughest and longest-standing problems when it comes to the housing shortage.

“People want homes they can afford, without compromising quality or comfort,” said Pakniat, founder and CEO of PakVille. “We developed PakVert to make construction faster, simpler, and more affordable. The fact that we’re also giving plastic waste a second life makes it even more meaningful.”

PakVert panels are made of recycled polyethylene terephthalat, making them resistant to moisture, mold, rot, and many of the other issues that force renovations or teardowns. As a result, Pakniat says these homes can typically last twice as long as the average traditionally constructed home.

Iron Maiden has a few albums that can reasonably be described as seminal. Killers, Number of the Beast, Powerslave—they all meet the mark.

But Somewhere In Time also deserves its recognition, and on the 40th anniversary of the album’s debut, Iron Maiden is releasing a special edition graphic “album” of the record.

Featuring a collaboration with Z2 Comics, the graphic album “dives deep into the menacing Science Fiction future immortalized [in the album],” said a press release announcing the project.

According to the release, Somewhere in Time: The Graphic Album contains a graphic novel-style story about each of the record’s eight songs, along with a prologue and epilogue built around Maiden’s iconic mascot, Eddie, imagining “what could have happened in the moments leading up to that iconic album cover that captured the imagination of generations of Maiden fans.”

The album is available for pre-order now, and comes out March 2, 2027. Deluxe editions also feature 7” vinyl singles for two timeless tracks, Wasted Years and Stranger in a Strange Land.

Name that tune

Time to fill in the blanks, Staker! That’s right, it’s time for another round of ‘guess the lyrics’, with today’s trivia!