The process by which Merriam-Webster's team of lexicographers choose the word of the year is simple. They look at how many hits and searches words receive, and among the words in the pool, they pick the one that represents the zeitgeist for that year. Last year, it was "gaslighting". And perhaps, it's no surprise then, that the word of the year for 2023 is "authentic".

In choosing the word, Merriam-Webster removes certain words that constantly get looked up like "love" and "affect". They also filter out words which people playing word games search in the dictionary from time to time. What they look at are unusual spikes in searches for certain words such as "EGOT" after Viola Davis' unofficial induction into the club, when she won a Grammy, or "X" when Elon Musk had changed Twitter's name in July.

This year, the rationale behind "authentic" was not from a particular event, but rather due to the continued and constant interest people have placed on the word. Perhaps, the pervasiveness of AI these days may have contributed to people's curiosity for what it means to be "authentic". Maybe the fact that we are constantly inundated with false information and fabricated facts online and even in the real world, provided impetus for lookups of the word.

One evidence as to the extent of our search and need for "authenticity" may be reflected by some other runners-up for word of the year which include "doppelganger" and "deepfake", which was also quite prevalent last year.

No matter what reason people may have in searching for the meaning of the word "authentic", this might just be a message that we, as a whole, are either lacking in authenticity or trying to be more so but are falling short.

(Image credit: Brett Jordan/Unsplash)

Twin brothers Pat and Sean Kelly are musicians and DJs for private events in Philadelphia. When you mix music on the fly, you get a feeling for what works together, and an awful lot of songs work together. You know sometimes you get a song stuck in your head, and it reminds you of another song that uses the same chord progression, and then that song is stuck in there as well. Take this to the limit and you've got magic, especially if you've got a brother to sing with. They call this medley "My Brain at 3:59am – A Mashup." Twenty songs in one minute, divided by two singers, means each song gets about six seconds, but that's long enough for you to know what song it is, and now you've got an entire mashup stuck in your head. If you hear any songs you don't know, there's a list of them at Boing Boing.   

Futility Closet tells the true tale of four men who went adrift in the Pacific for 49 days in 1960. Soviet barge T-36 originated in the Kuril Archipelago on the eastern end of the USSR. When a hurricane hit, the barge battled to avoid being thrown up on land. After the eye of the storm passed, the barge crew battled against being blown out to sea, and ran out of fuel doing so. The radio was ruined. A search was launched, but when some debris from the barge was found, Soviet officials declared the barge and crew had sunk.

The four sailors, ages 20-22, had a three-day supply of food and hardly any fresh water, so they were reduced to drinking the rusty water used for engine cooling and eating leather. They were picked up 49 days later by the US aircraft carrier Kearsarge, which was traveling from Japan to San Francisco. If this story intrigues you, you can read an expanded version with photographs at Wikipedia. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: USS Kearsarge crew)

While Boston Dynamics keeps working on Atlas, their humanoid robot, and Spot, the quadruped that actually does real world jobs, Disney is concentrating on building robots for their entertainment value. Does it surprise anyone that they are the ones giving us real life droids? A few weeks ago, they took their new droids out for a test run at the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge theme park at Disneyland in California. These bipedal self-learning robots don't look all that useful for the real world, but they are impossibly adorable and are ready to show off their personalities, which is perfect for the immersive fantasy of Disneyland. They look like a cross between an AT-ST and Wall-E. See what else they can do.



Look for the souvenir toy version coming back from the theme parks soon, and in stores by next Christmas. Disney is also working on non-Star Wars free-roaming characters with soft, expressive faces for their other theme parks. -via Metafilter

Ellen Baxter of the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMA) has finished her hard work in restoring a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de Medici. She was the daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Eleonora di Toledo. 

Her artwork was actually concealed beneath a 19th-century overpainting depicting what is assumed to be her mother. Baxter undertook a laborious process of restoring the years of damage through inpainting with tiny brushes. She also used pipettes of varnish and solvent. “You have to …tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she stated. 

The conservator was brought into the project after Louise Lippincott, the CMA’s former curator of fine arts, ran across the work in the museum’s basement storage. Lippincott, who thought that the art was “awful” let Baxter look at it for her second opinion. 

Baxter had a hunch that something wasn’t right, and an x-ray confirmed her initial read on the situation, which was extra layers of paint over the original artwork. After the confirmation, Baxter then proceeded to carefully strip the dirty varnish and other layers until the face of de Medici could be seen. “I’m not the artist. I’m the conservator,” she further explained.”It’s my job to repair damages and losses, to not put myself in the painting.”

And what a good job it was!

Image credit via Carnegie Museum of Art

We don’t want you to get arrested on your vacation!

France is a beautiful country filled to the brim with various cities and towns that you can enjoy, as well as lots of tourist attractions that will be a treat to the senses. But be careful– France is also notorious for its quirk laws that make visitors puzzled. 

Did you know that the country has strict rules on what you can wear to public pools and beaches? If you want to take a dip in a public bathing area, the law requires you to wear specific items of clothing. To elaborate, men need to wear either un slip de bain (trunks) or un boxer (tight shorts) and in some areas, swimming caps.

Loose-fitting or baggy shorts are prohibited, as France considers it to be unhygienic. And before you come at us with pitchforks, this isn’t a new rule — it can be traced to date back to 1903. "Small, tight trunks can only be used for swimming. Bermudas or bigger swimming shorts can be worn elsewhere all day, so could bring in sand, dust or other matter, disturbing the water quality," Emmanuel Dormois, a head pool attendant in Paris' 11th arrondissement, told The Guardian.

Image credit: Korhan Erdol

Being a civilized, sensible, and well-informed people, the Japanese have an appreciation for Texas. Twitter user @chairmanwon, a hobbyist gunsmith from Texas, discovered this on his ongoing journey through Japan.

He reports that his hosts, upon learning that @chairmanwon and his wife were Texans, took them to a Texas-themed bar. Everyone there dresses like Texans (or how they imagine that we dress) and the bar itself looks like a Texan honky-tonk.

On Star Trek: The Original Series, "fascinating" is a word Mr. Spock used when confronted by something unexpected. How often did that happen in the series? More than once an episode, at least. Merriam-Webster defines the word fascinating as "extremely interesting or charming, captivating." I doubt Spock would use it to mean charming, but since the character is supposedly immune to human emotions (which wasn't quite true), we will assume he finds all things extremely interesting.  

Here we have incidents that Spock found fascinating from all three seasons of the original Star Trek series, plus Star Trek: The Animated Series, the Star Trek movies, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The use of the word is not confined to Spock, because others picked up the habit from him, too. This is another Trek supercut from John DiMarco. See some others in our previous posts. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Louis Sherry owned one of the finest restaurant in New York City during the Gilded Age, when Sherry's would compete with Delmonico's across the street to impress millionaires and others of the city's upper crust. Sometimes this involved stunts that would make the newspapers as well as the gossip circuit. None was more spectacular than the time Sherry served a dinner party on horseback. In his grand white ballroom, on the second floor. A classic tale of conspicuous consumption. 

In 1903, millionaire C.K.G. Billings, a horse racing enthusiast, built an elegant new stable and wanted to celebrate its grand opening with his closest friends. Thirty-six guests, all men, showed up in formalwear at Sherry's on the appointed night, and were led to the ballroom, which contained 36 horses! Each horse was outfitted with a silver tray attached to the saddle as a dining table for each guest, with champagne in the saddle bags. The dinner included caviar, turtle soup, rack of lamb, and flaming peaches. The horses must have stayed calm during the serving of the flaming peaches, because no mention of panic made it into the papers, although the term "freak dinners" was used. Read about the banquet on horseback at The Bowery Boys. -via Strange Company 

Red Side made an illustrated comparison of how fast various birds can move, on foot or flying. They start with the slowest birds which are overtaken by faster ones, one by one. I felt sorry for the penguin, who leads things off as the slowest walker, but never gets to show us how fast he can swim. The information is interesting, and you have to appreciate the research that went into this. But the animation itself is way more fascinating. Where are all these birds going? Why are they all going as fast as they can? Is something chasing them? Some are rather awkward even as they are speeding by other species. I found myself waiting for the roadrunner to show up, wondering if a coyote would be watching. The running birds seem to have no knees, and the ostrich has hips hidden way up in its backbone, which makes this frantic chase seem all the more hilarious. Oh yeah, the epic music will have you wondering if there's some kind of reward at the end of this race. -via Nag on the Lake

It was called Project Iceworm, inspired by Norwegian-born US Army colonel Bernt Balchen, who pushed for the US military's continued presence in Greenland as a strategic geographical midway point between the US and the Soviet Union.

The US Army had planned on digging trenches under Greenland's ice, in which they will burrow medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) as a means of deterring the Soviet Union from targeting the US. They had also wanted to build an underground city where they will presumably conduct operations undetected by Soviet satellites.

However, what foiled the US Army's plans was neither Soviet spies or budget constraints. It was nature, as Greenland's ice started to shift. After nine years of building the facility that was supposed to house 600 MRBMs, they were forced to abandon the site, which cost an estimated $2.37 billion.

However, this also led to some tension between Denmark and the US after the truth was exposed. Thankfully, the discovery of fossilized leaf and twig fragments under the ice helped ease those tensions as it suggested that there had been plants growing there before.

(Image credit: Tina Rolf/Unsplash)

Scientists may have finally found out how serotine bats reproduced, and it may be the first mammal to have such a reproductive process. Since bats are nocturnal, it's very difficult to observe their mating behavior especially since they would most often have their backs turned from their observers. But, with new footage taken by a Dutch bat enthusiast, researchers now have visual evidence of what exactly goes on when bats have their backs turned.

According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, serotine bats reproduce through touching, or something akin to the "cloacal kiss". In short, no penetration occurs during the process. And the researchers reasoned that this may be due to the structure of the bats' genitalia.

Despite now having footage of the bats' mating behavior, there is still no definitive proof of how the sperm transfers from the male to the female bats, but it provides scientists new avenues for further research on the matter.

With this information, researchers may now have the means of devising strategies on how to artificially inseminate bats or even help in understanding human infertility.

(Image credit: Denley Photography/Unsplash)

Purple has been the color signifying royalty since time immemorial. The reason being that the purple dye was one of the rarest and most expensive to procure and process. But even among the purple hues, one sits atop them all, the Tyrian Purple or also called, shellfish purple.

The manufacture of Tyrian purple dyes had been the central industry of ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire. The dye was used on the robes of royalty, cardinals, and religious manuscripts. Originating from the ancient Phoenicians, neighboring regions of Southern Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia had all coveted the precious dye.

Though it is generally known to come from sea snails, the exact process and recipe had been lost after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. The dyeing industry had been very elusive and protective over their recipes that nobody had written records about them. Pliny perhaps comes closest to documenting how the dye was made, but it's no easy task.

First of all, extracting the mucous from the sea snail itself required laborious work and thousands upon thousands of snails. Then, to get the color just right, one would need to have the right conditions to turn the chemicals in the mucous into the purple dye.

However, one man who had a stroke of luck and serendipity, incidentally rediscovered Tyrian purple. His name is Mohammed Ghassen Nouira, and for 16 years, he had obsessed over the process of making Tyrian purple dyes. But perhaps he has finally found the right formula. Read more about it on BBC.

(Image credit: Mohammed Ghassen Nouira)

How did Messi’s bodyguard just spawn out of nowhere 😭 pic.twitter.com/AKMPxhIPcR

— 𝐀𝐅𝐂 𝐀𝐉𝐀𝐗 💎 (@TheEuropeanLad) November 23, 2023

This new tweet has gone viral over the past two days because it shows Lionel Messi walking on some grass, and after a few seconds later, his bodyguard just appears as if from thin air, without any sign where he came from.

Initially, I had thought that the bodyguard had been in the golf cart and possibly got down then started walking behind Messi, but the timing just isn't right, and if you looked closely at the golf cart, there was no one wearing a black shirt and joggers a few frames before. Perhaps it's a magic trick, or some kind of camera illusion, or video editing but it seems that the person who shared the video doesn't know where the bodyguard came from either.

Many people have been scrambling their brains trying to figure it out, but still nobody has provided any rational solution to the problem. You can check some of the funniest responses to the tweet on The Poke.

(Video credit: TheEuropeanLad/X)

Retro video game tunes are timeless pieces of cultural history as much as classical music is. One wouldn't think that these two would have anything in common, until the birth of Arcade, Classical California's new 24-hour streaming channel which is dedicated to playing some popular and nostalgic video game music alongside classical music.

Jennifer Miller Hammel hosts the stream, and plays a selection of video game music as well as requests from listeners. In proposing the concept to her producers, Hammel curated a 12-hour playlist of video game music which she remembered from when she was a kid. They agreed with the suggestion of adding classical music into the mix, which many video games now incorporate as well.

Reception for the streaming channel has been great so far with fans of both video games and classical music, as well as people who have no experience in either, finding it enjoyable with one major donor even remarking how she loves listening to the channel despite having no knowledge of video games.

Anyone can jump in and listen to the Arcade channel at anytime.

(Image credit: Sarah Golonka)