The year is not over yet and there is more to come before we bid 2019 a final farewell. An annual solar eclipse is expected to occur “at 3.43am Universal Time on December 26, 2019. If you're in Southeast Asia, that'll be between 11am to 1pm local time Christmas Day.”

There's a reason why this particular phenomenon is also called the "ring of fire" and sometimes, "ring of light". That's because watching the 3 minute 40 second eclipse without any protection for the eyes can lead to total blindness.

While it's not expected to be impressive since the New Moon is further away from the sun and will only be blocking the center of the sun's disk - about 97 percent of the sun, experts say the spectacle would still be beautiful to look at.

Don’t worry if you miss out on this one, there’s another eclipse expected to take place on June 21, 2020, and it may even be a rarer spectacle than this one. 

Head over to Mashable for the full article.  

Photo: Jongsun Lee / Unsplash

Up in the chilly Arctic, the frozen bodies of woolly mammoths can be so well preserved that they still have blood in their veins. With their flesh still pink, it is no wonder why some people have thought of eating meat frozen for 35,000 years. In fact, there have been tales of dining on woolly mammoths frozen since the Ice Age, which range from the fantastical to the truer and grosser. Let’s begin with the fantastical ones.

In 1901, a male mammoth was discovered by an expedition to the Beresovka River in Siberia. The mammoth was so excellently preserved that it still had grass in its mouth.

The mammoth’s bones and skin were put on display in St. Petersburg, and its flesh was, supposedly, served at a “mammoth banquet.” The meal was a hit, according to one glowing account, ”particularly the course of mammoth steak, which all the learned guests declared was agreeable to the taste, and not much tougher than some of the sirloin furnished by butchers of today.”

Fifty years later, in 1951, an exotic feast was put up by the Explorers Club in New York. This time, it was said that the meat came from a carcass found in the Aleutian Islands, according to a Jesuit-turned-geologist known as the Glacier Priest.

Each diner got mere slivers of meat, but those slivers made quite the impression. Guests went home bragging of their Ice Age dinner. But they later disagreed over whether the meat was really supposed to be mammoth or mastodon or an extinct giant sloth called megatherium.

DNA analysis say otherwise, however. The meat from the 1951 feast was none of the above mentioned. It wasn’t even prehistoric.

What was the meat from the 1951 feast? And what about the account of the “mammoth banquet” of 1901? What happens to meat frozen for tens of thousands of years? Answers over at The Atlantic.

(Image Credit: Dmitry Bogdanov/ Wikimedia Commons)

A woman from the U.S. shared this heartwarming Facebook post of how she repaired a butterfly’s broken wing with a few tools and a guide she found online. Romy McCloskey helps dozens of butterflies go through metamorphosis by taking caterpillars indoors and releasing them into the wild once the transformation process is done. For one particular insect, its right wing came out deformed and Romy decided to take action by creating an artificial wing for him.

The procedure looks something like surgery for butterflies and thankfully, 

Romy is a costume designer and does embroidery by trade, so it made the delicate procedure of creating an artificial butterfly wing much easier for her.

Romy then posted updates of the butterfly flying in nature with his new prosthetic wing. 

Check out the full article from Megaphone. 

(Image credit: Romy McCloskey / Facebook)

Glenn Druery entered his Tonkinese cat, Gus, as a wild-card contender in the Scotland Island dog swimming race, which has been held every Christmas Eve for the past 44 years. Although Gus is unlikely to win the race because of the physical advantages dogs have over cats, it does make for a good story. 

Other dog owners who joined the race weren’t too hot about the cat joining the race in the interest of the safety of Gus and the other dogs too. In general, “[b]ig water dogs, such as labradors and other retrievers, predictably fare best overall.” The winners are categorized based on 3 dog sizes and receive their respective share of the prizes, which doubles as the entry fee of a beer bottle and a tin of dog food.

The Guardian gives more details about the origin of this holiday tradition here.

Photo: Sharon McCutcheon / Pexels

Re-post cause it blew up on tiktok, which way is he facing? pic.twitter.com/hG4DY9rg0v

— T U P P E R (@ectupper) December 22, 2019

Eric Tupper posted an old video he took of a guy on a swing set in Fairbanks, Alaska. The question is: which way is he facing? Is he swinging toward the building, or toward the camera? The lack of definition in his form and his face not being visible led to conjecture across the internet. People weren't so much arguing about which way he was facing as they were arguing whether this was a new "what color is this dress?" argument. Or maybe the "Yanny or Laurel?" question. Yeah, you can watch this and deliberately change what you think you see with effort. But there is a definite answer.   



Tupper confirmed what the video shows us: the guy is facing the camera. -via The Daily Dot

“From out of the forest I appear, to proclaim that Christmastime is here!” Santa — real name Tim Zander — exclaims as he arrives at a workshop in Berlin to train a handful of newbies how to act like him.

"A really epic arrival is good, just like I just performed," he tells a roomful of recruits, "complete with the bells, the ho-ho-ho, and a heavy knock on the door. But not so hard that you break it." The applicants, one wearing a full Santa suit, sit around a conference table, taking notes.

Across Europe and North America, hordes of Santa impersonators like Zander have been preparing children for Christmas. In Germany, however, the number of people willing to play Father Christmas has declined quickly, after a student union that traditionally supplied candidates ceased doing so last year due to a lack of interest by students.

More details about this over at NPR.

(Image Credit: Rob Schmitz/NPR)

7-year old Sean was visiting a zoo in Ireland with his family. The hungry tiger decided it was lunchtime and didn't notice the glass barrier. He lunged at Sean, much to the amusement of Rob, his father. The New York Post quotes the father:

Fortunately, Sean “reacted pretty calm,” Rob told Storyful. However, the dad adds that his other son “ran like the clappers” — UK slang for “very fast.”

-via The Daily Wire

Hayley Garbutt, a 52-year-old end-of-life carer from England, has figured out a way to make feeding her family more affordable — by charging them for dinner. She does this for good reason, however, and that reason is she gets to spoil her family at Christmas. She charges about $45-a head for a seat at her Christmas dinner table, according to the Sun.

Her guests include her three children, their partners and her four grandchildren. She also invites some friends as well.

“I get all of my family to put in before I go and do the shop,” she told the Sun. “This year I spent $388 online at Morrisons, doing the big shop and making sure I had a variety of things in. But it's not that I'm being tight - it means I get to spend more in other aspects then too like presents - this year the tree has so many presents stacked around it, that you can't even see it.”

So, while her family has to pay to eat dinner, Garbutt makes sure that they get their money’s worth.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Caters News Agency)

Christmas Island, Australia, is home to about 1,800 people and, annually, 50 million migrating red crabs. They swarm across the island, including on the roads. Local resident Chris Bray would like to avoid crushing them as he drives, so he built these wedges and mounted them in front of the wheels of his SUV. Traveller reports:

"I made a prototype two years ago and tested it last year. After making a few tweaks and improvements, the latest version was finished a week and a half ago," Mr Bray said. "If you can imagine little horseshoes on the front of the tyre, these work to lightly bump the crabs out of harm's way."

You can watch a video of the crab mobile in action at Traveller.

-via Jalopnik | Image: The Age

This is a story about a cat, and Christmas, and it's a horror story. That's Jólakötturinn, the Icelandic Yule cat. It's not pronounced anything like you'd guess. -via Laughing Squid

On December 23, 1927, 14-year-old Woody Harris was driving his family around Cisco, Texas, in their Oldsmobile. He had no idea that this Christmas would be different. And unforgettable.  

At a stoplight, Woody looked out his window and saw something that must have caused him a brief moment of amusement. There in the road was Santa Claus—not the Santa, obviously, but a Santa—and he appeared to be coming toward the Harris vehicle.

Before Woody could process what was happening, Santa brandished a gun. So did the two men with him. They ordered the Harris family out of their car, screaming for them to hurry. The men quickly loaded their belongings from a nearby Buick into the Oldsmobile, including a giant and cumbersome sack like the kind Santa toted for gifts. Santa also produced a moaning and bleeding man from the back seat of the Buick, who was summarily stuffed into the Oldsmobile. Two children were with him, but they didn’t appear to be there of their own volition. Down the road, dozens of men were running toward them, most bearing a firearm of some kind.

Woody Harris did not know why Santa had a gun, why he was accompanied by a badly injured man, why a mob appeared to want to kill him, or why he had carjacked his family. He and his relatives ran away, gunshots ringing in the air.

Well, that ruined Christmas for the Harris family. What they had fallen into was the aftermath of a bank robbery gone deadly wrong. Read the entire story at Mental Floss.


(Image source: Library of Congress)

Minneapolis’ ‘Green To Go Ordinance’ has managed to inadvertently  ban your favorite holiday cups. The Green To Go Ordinance aims to increase the amount of commercial waste that is recyclable or compostable. One of the banned materials is polyethylene, a material used as a liner in coffee cups to make them waterproof. In response to the ordinance, Starbucks retracted its holiday cups, sticking to the classic plain white cups, as Reason detailed:

A spokesperson for Starbucks tells Reason that the company reacted to the new Minneapolis requirements by switching to to-go coffee cups lined with polylactic acid, a bioplastic typically made from corn-starch. But these cups were only available in plain white.

image credit: via Reason

Mortal Kombat is an ongoing video games series, a fighting-themed game. It’s gruesome, violent, and filled with murderous characters. While some would rank the best characters in terms of stats or abilities, or their favourite characters, Polygon’s Brian David Gilbert takes a step in the other direction, as he finds which character can cuddle you the best. 

In NASA’s efforts to map the Milky Way galaxy, scientists captured an image of the galaxy’s central zone. The central zone is highlighted by a candy cane-shaped portion in the captured image. This galactic candy cane isn’t edible at all, as it is part of a set of radio-emitting filaments extending 190 light-years, Science Daily detailed: 

This image includes newly published observations using an instrument designed and built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Called the Goddard-IRAM Superconducting 2-Millimeter Observer (GISMO), the instrument was used in concert with a 30-meter radio telescope located on Pico Veleta, Spain, operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range headquartered in Grenoble, France.

"GISMO observes microwaves with a wavelength of 2 millimeters, allowing us to explore the galaxy in the transition zone between infrared light and longer radio wavelengths," said Johannes Staguhn, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who leads the GISMO team at Goddard. "Each of these portions of the spectrum is dominated by different types of emission, and GISMO shows us how they link together."

GISMO detected the most prominent radio filament in the galactic center, known as the Radio Arc, which forms the straight part of the cosmic candy cane.

image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center via Science Daily

It appears that in Jerusalem, Santa Claus rides a camel. Santa Claus in Jerusalem? The nation of Israel is a Jewish state, and the Christians who make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land in December are focused on the birth of Jesus, not Santa Claus. But Jerusalem has a Santa Claus, and he's an Orthodox Christian Arab. Meet Issa Kassissieh.   

It was 14 years ago when Kassissieh found an old Santa Claus costume that had belonged to his father. He decided to amuse himself and tried it on. It fit so well that he went to the nearby Jaffa Gate, a historic portal in the Old City’s wall, while wearing it. Children happily gathered around, and it had an effect on him. “I realized that as a child I didn’t get to have this happiness, and that it’s time to give it to the children of Jerusalem,” he says. “While traveling the world during Christmas I realized how deep Santa is embedded in Western cultures, while here, in the place where Christmas began, we only know Santa through television and movies.” The following year, Kassissieh donned the costume again. The year after that he hired a camel. Since then, around Christmas, he has ridden the camel around the Old City spreading cheer, and then receives visits from children and their families in Santa’s House in the afternoon. At the height of the season, the line in front of “Santa’s House” can be two hours long. Kassissieh funds most of the operation himself, but he does get candy donations from Christian individuals and organizations worldwide.

Read about Kassissieh, his journey to become Santa, and his Christmas house at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Heidi Levine for Atlas Obscura)