Every week, Courtney Wise rounds up the quirky, inspiring and essential stories that brought a smile to her face, plus the mental health news you’ll want to know from around the web.

🎤 Puppet Karaoke in Detroit started small and ‘grew into something crazy’: I had the pleasure of attending a block party with my daughter last month, where we experienced Puppet Karaoke Detroit first hand. Founded by actor, teacher and puppeteer James Abbott II, the experience is a lot of fun – and surprisingly tough work! “I’ve had people come to me and say they’ve never heard their best friend sing like that, but when they were with a puppet, they were able to unleash themselves to become a whole new person,” Abbott told the Detroit Free Press. “I want people to respect how hard it is to be a puppeteer. It’s an art, and I love that people get creative.”

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🦙 Early research with llama antibodies may open “new routes” to schizophrenia treatments. The study involved mice in which PCP had been used to cripple the brain’s NDMA receptors, whose dysfunction is linked to schizophrenia. Researchers created nanobodies – tiny fragments of protein about a tenth of the size of regular antibodies – that could enter the brain and correct the abnormally diminished function in the NMDA receptors. The mice showed improved cognition and brain function after just one dose of nanobodies, with effects lasting for at least one full week. 

“In humans obviously we don’t know [yet], but in mice yes, it is sufficient to treat most deficits of schizophrenia,” the study’s lead author, Jean-Philippe Pin, told Newsweek. On another positive note, no llamas were harmed in the experiments, Pin added. “Nowadays one can identify nanobodies from synthetic libraries generated in vitro, based on llama nanobody sequences. No need for the llama any more, and faster!”

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🎖️ Veterans given a less-than-honorable discharge for trauma-related reasons have a hard time changing it.  Pentagon directives from 2014 and 2017 attempted to correct the issue, requiring “liberal consideration” for soldiers with conditions like PTSD, or who were victims of sexual assault, but those former service members still face major obstacles when appealing to upgrade their discharge to an honorable discharge. 

A new Government Accountability Office report shows that even when boards did take trauma and mental health into consideration, upgrades were still denied, or approved to a lesser degree than requested, Stars and Stripes reports. Approval rates for specially-considered cases ranged from 8% to just 29%, depending on the review board. This isn’t just a matter of pride – a non-honorable discharge bars vets from important benefits, including healthcare, and can make it harder to get jobs beyond the armed forces.   

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🧑🏽‍💼 Employers, want happier, more productive workers? Try a 4-day work week – with no cut in pay. In a 6-month study, a team of researchers led by sociologist Wen Fan of Boston College followed 2,896 workers switching to the shorter week at 141 companies across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland. They had thought that worker well-being might decline if they had fewer hours to complete the same amount of work, Fan told Scientific American, but they found quite the opposite – a fall in stress across the board.

Before adopting the 4-day work week, companies had time to streamline processes – things like eliminating meetings that could’ve been an email. Two weeks before the study began, participants completed a survey on their well-being, which they took again 6 months into the change. Overall, employees reported greater satisfaction with their job performance and better mental health with the 4-day work week. 

Employers seemed pleased too, with 90% opting to stick with the new pattern, indicating that it’s also good for business. Of course, the study had limitations: participants self-reported their wellbeing; it only assessed companies that volunteered for the study; and it didn’t analyze company-wide productivity. But its findings are still illuminating, and benefits seemed to persist for at least a year. 

As for how a fall in hours might make workers more efficient: “When people are more well rested, they make fewer mistakes and work more intensely,” according to Pedro Gomes, an economist at Birkbeck, University of London, unaffiliated with the study.