Happy New Year! In China, January 28th ushers in the Year of the Rooster. The Lunar New Year Festival, or Spring Festival, begins today and runs through February 15th. It is expected to be, as usual, the largest migration of humans of the year, as around 3 billion trips will be made, mostly to hometowns.

People born in the Year of the Rooster are "brave, responsible and punctual." Huy Fong Foods founder David Tran was born in the Year of the Rooster 72 years ago, which is why there's a rooster on the Sriracha sauce bottle.

Mental_floss has a list of things you might want to learn about the Chinese New Year.

The above image is fromwebcomic artist Dami Lee, who is spending the holiday with her family in Korea.

Alaska's Lituya Bay had been used for many years as a temporary shelter for boats traveling the eastern Pacific, but no one lives there permanently. In fact, the local Tlingit people told the legend of a monster at the mouth of the bay who shook the ocean to send huge waves. They knew what was going on. The unique geography of the bay amplifies waves to a terrifying extent. Travelers were there when the largest tsunami wave in recorded history blew through Lituya Bay in July of 1958. It reached about a third of a mile up the shore, destroying everything in its way. It started with a magnitude 8 earthquake.

The earth shook for anywhere from one to four minutes—eyewitness reports varied. When the fault finally came to rest, the foamy water of Lituya Bay settled back into something resembling its ordinary lazy waves, and a new quiet blanketed the bay. Despite the cessation of shaking, Orville and Mickey Wagner on the Sunmore—the boat headed for the bay exit—continued their retreat toward the open ocean.

After a minute or so of apparent calm, a crash described as “deafening” rattled the atmosphere. One of the unnamed mountain peaks that stood at the inland end of Lituya Bay had broken off, dropping ninety million tons of rock into the water with the force equivalent to a meteor strike. The resulting impact shook loose other rocks on the slopes, and chunks of adjacent glaciers, and these plunged into the water practically all at once. Millions of cubic yards of displaced water heaved upward and formed a wave traveling outward at about 110 miles per hour (180 km/h).

Within about a minute, the approaching wave became visible to the boats still at anchor, and the occupants looked on in awe as the wide skyscraper of water traversed the length of the bay towards them. When it reached Cenotaph Island another minute or so later, the proportions of the wave became clear. The center of the wave was almost as high as the highest point on the island, 300 feet in the air. On the two opposite shores, the plowing saltwater reached over 1,700 feet (over 500 meters) onto land, twisting even the most massive trees from their roots and scraping the bedrock nearly clean.

Read the story of the Lituya Bay megatsunami, gleaned from eyewitness accounts and the geologic record, at Damn Interesting. -via Digg

Thursday was Australia Day, and as always, there were plenty of summertime fun celebrations. In Canberra, this epic circular slip 'n' slide makes us all wish we lived Down Under. Jake River Henderson Fraser caught this video.

(YouTube link)

Redditor owenob1 tells us more about the contraption.

I WAS AT THIS EVENT!

EDIT: Phil the creator will be on Today Show, Sunday morning.

Some information:

This is an annual event with a new machine each year. I'm told this is the 4-5th year.

It took about 7 days to design and engineer (and built).

This was made from scratch and not actually a Hills Hoist.

The entire centre pipe is pumped full of water to provide to the hoses.

The rig has 3 speeds, this is number 1... the others were deemed too unsafe.

There is an operator who sits and awaits a thumbs up.

Ordinary dishwashing liquid is used of the black sheeting.

When you fall off it hurts - ALOT.

Meanwhile, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere can stay inside in our winter pajamas and dream of such fun. -via reddit

In 1939, the St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, en route to Cuba. Aboard were 937 passengers seeking refuge from the Jewish persecution of Nazi Germany. They had hoped they could stay in Cuba until their applications for U.S. visas could be approved. But Cuba turned them away. And the U.S. wouldn't let them in.

The State Department sent a telegram to the ship stating: “[Passengers must] await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”

With no further progress to be made, the ship sailed back to Europe. Four European nations, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, did agree to take the refugees when the ship returned to the continent. However, as the Nazis invaded western Europe over the following years, 532 of the former passengers found themselves in German-controlled territory. In the end, 254 were killed during the war and Holocaust.

My name is Werner Stein. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz pic.twitter.com/nCgt9V33xm

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2017

A Twitter feed called St. Louis Manifest gives each of those 254 people their own memorial, naming each one, their fate, and a photograph if available, in separate Tweets. The Stein family shown above has three entries. Read the short version of the St. Louis refugees' story at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum courtesy of Judy Katz)

There's a thin layer of ice on top of the pond at Bradgate Park, in Glenfield, UK. But swans gotta swim, for some reason. This swan family follows dad single file as he breaks a path through the ice, bit by bit.

(YouTube link)

You may think it's more trouble than it's worth, but you are not a swan. It must be important to them. -via Tastefully Offensive

Christine Ha was the winner of the cooking competition show MasterChef season 3. She is also blind. Ha and her husband John now co-host the Canadian cooking show Four Senses. Here, she shows us by GoPro how she maneuvers around the kitchen by memory, feel, and a little adaptive technology.

(YouTube link)

You can follow Christine at her personal website or her cooking blog, The Blind Cook. -via Nag on the Lake

In 1964, David Bowie (then David Jones) was the 17-year-older leader of the band The Manish Boys. To gain publicity, his father came up with a stunt. They concocted an organization called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. That garnered the band an appearance on the BBC show Tonight.  

(YouTube link)

Here is that show from November 1964. It's good to see Bowie as an everyday longhaired British teenager. If the host had known where young David's career would take him, he would have been even more scandalized. -via Boing Boing

Those who care at all about Star Wars should have seen the movie Rogue One already, but in case you haven't, this video contains some spoilers. It's Cinefix's 8-Bit Cinema remake that turns the movie into an old-style video game. And you don't even have to control it!

(YouTube link)

This is cute, but I must say that it's no substitute for seeing the film in its entirety. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Snowfall in Japan means it's time to make some anime snow figures! They grow to life-size from the worlds of Pokemon, Studio Ghibli, manga, TV, and video games. See a roundup of these wonderful winter creations at BBC News. -via Everlasting Blort

We study the big wars of history, but there will always be things we don't know due to the chaos, death, and destruction all wars bring. Records and witnesses are hard to come by even in recent wars, but World War I was 100 years ago. Things we don't know about the Great War will most likely forever be shrouded in mystery. One of the more shocking of these mysteries is the case of Béla Kiss.  

Béla Kiss was a Hungarian tinsmith who marched off to war in 1914. He left his home in the care of his housekeeper, along with his collection of seven giant metal drums. Townsfolk knew that he had been collecting gasoline in anticipation of wartime rationing, and when gasoline was needed, they cracked open the drums. Instead of gasoline, they were met by the stench of death.

A search of Kiss’ property revealed 24 dead bodies, 23 women and a man, who had been strangled and pickled in alcohol. Further investigation uncovered a secret room and stacks of letters between Kiss and 74 different women. Police discovered that he had defrauded countless women and had even been taken to court. They issued an arrest warrant for Kiss. He was almost apprehended in a Serbian hospital in October of 1916, but escaped at the last minute.

From there, Kiss vanished. Rumours circulated about a French Foreign Legion soldier who used his alias (Hoffman) and boasted about strangling people). Another alleged sighting occurred in New York City. But Béla Kiss’ fate – and his story in general – remains one of the more sinister mysteries of World War One. It’s also likely that not all of his victims were found.

That's one mystery that may never be solved. There are others, some with a glimmer of hope, that you can read about at Urban Ghosts.

The Shrek movies tickled our fancies for a lot of reasons, but one reason was the many callbacks to other famous films. The Dreamsworks production referenced all the top Disney films, and slipped in scenes that reminded us of classic non-animated films, too. Possibly more of them than you realized.  

(vimeo link)

In this video, Bora Barroso collected as many of these references as he could and show them to us side-by-side. There's a list of them at the vimeo page. -via TVOM

The Soviets sent the dog Laika and other animals into space before humans. NASA sent chimpanzees into space to pave the way for astronauts. The French, a little behind the superpowers, sent a cat into space.

On October 18th, 1963, the Centre national d’études in France was set to send a small cat named Félix into space. After lagging behind its Soviet and American competitors, France was eager to stake its claim in the space race—with cats, for some reason. But on launch day, the mischievous little beast went missing—and an accidental heroine stepped in to take his place. Her name was Félicette.

From the streets of Paris, this tuxedo kitty—nicknamed “Astrocat”—would reach heights never achieved by feline kind. On October 24th, 1963, Félicette jetted 130 miles above Earth on a liquid-fueled French Véronique AG1 rocket, soaring high above the Algerian Sahara Desert. She returned just fifteen minutes later, already a decorated heroine for her nation.

Read about the French space program that launched a kitty at Gizmodo.

While the U.S. occupied Japan after World War II, between 30,000 and 50,000 American GIs married Japanese women. To prepare these brides for life in the US, the American Red Cross opened "bride schools" starting in 1951 to teach them what they would need to know to fit in as an American housewife.   

The instructors were usually American wives of stationed military men. Their lessons covered cooking, baby care, etiquette, and everything in between—but despite the educational intentions, the schools took on an unmistakably patronizing tone. “The war bride schools are a great vehicle for neatly encapsulating what we thought of ourselves as Americans at that time and place,” says Lucy Craft, a co-director of the documentary Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides. “We won the war and decided that not only had we won the war, but that everything about us was superior to every other civilization, particularly the people who lost the war.”

While a minority of Japanese brides took the classes, those who did became very familiar with tuna casserole and eyeliner. Read about those bride schools, which were later reproduced in other countries, at Atlas Obscura.

when you order an emma watson doll online but a justin bieber doll in a yellow dress & a wig arrives instead pic.twitter.com/PUQUBXyufT

— rebekka (@dolanschistad) January 7, 2017

Emma Watson stars as Belle in the upcoming live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. Disney, of course, released a doll of the character, and while you know who it is, it leaves a little to be desired. Watson is a lovely woman, and the doll just doesn't do her justice. I wonder what Noel Cruz could do with this...



Noel Cruz (previously at Neatorama) is a master at repainting celebrity dolls to improve them. On the left is Disney's doll. On the right, you might think it's the actress herself posing with her doll, but that's the one Cruz repainted. Now it looks like Emma Watson! The doll is up for sale at eBay.

-via Buzzfeed 

You might be surprised to know that there are more than 1500 volcanoes that have erupted during the Holocene era. Which country has the most? We're number one! The U.S. is tops on the list of the nations with the most volcanoes. Russia comes in second, although this list will never be the subject of a competition. Of course, it has to do with land area, so bigger nations would be expected to have more volcanoes. But that's not the only criteria.  

The Ring of Fire that encircles the Pacific Ocean – which stretches up the west coast of the Americas, around and across to Asia, looping down to the east of Japan, before overwhelming much of Indonesia and the Philippines and whipping around Australasia – boasts the most, with 452.

This is why Indonesia, despite its diminutive size, has the third most volcanoes in the world, at 139. Likewise, the small islands of Japan, which is fourth with 112. Chile (also on the Ring of Fire, on the cusp of the South American plate) is fifth, with 104.

Read more about the world's volcanoes, and see an interactive map of them at The Telegraph. -via the Presurfer