In a blog post related to their annual Year in Search report, Google has revealed the most-searched term in the United States (and globally). To our surprise, it isn’t a celebrity, a movie, a brand, or a fictional character. It’s a game. 

The 2022 hit game Wordle has been crowned by the search engine as its most searched term. Which actually makes sense since its rise to fame this year. During the first few months of the hype, we did find ourselves Googling the answer for that day’s Wordle puzzle. It managed to defeat topics that trended such as “election results,” “Betty White,” “Queen Elizabeth,” and “Ukraine.” 

image screenshot via Wordle / The New York Times

If you have a bottle of hydrogen of peroxide nearby for cuts and scrapes, heads up! That’s not really good use for the chemical. This is because the oxygen atoms in the mixture, while responsible for destroying and weakening bacteria out of the wounded area can also damage healthy cells. 

Hydrogen peroxide steals electrons from the cell walls of both bacteria and healthy cells. Additionally, it has been found to slow the healing process and worsen scarring. So, instead of putting it into your first aid kit, try using it for other tasks instead! 

You can actually use the chemical for cleaning dirty surfaces such as stovetops, dishwashers, and more areas in the home. It is also the perfect solution for cleaning grease and dirt-filled baking sheets. It can also make them look like they were freshly bought from the store! 

Cubby at Home’s Shifrah Combiths shares more potential uses for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide here. 

image credit: Vi-Jon via Amazon

DOOM is a shooter game initially released in 1993 for the MS-DOS that has seen a lot of users tinkering with it in recent years. From playing the game using a rotary phone to having rats play the game on their own, players and enthusiasts constantly find ways to add spice to the classic game. 

The newest installation to this odd but fun activity (of changing up DOOM games) is by turning it into a different game. Well to be exact, somebody has managed to recreate the original Legend of Zelda for the NES into a DOOM game. 

DeTwelve Games has recreated the video game into a first-person game and remade every asset of the game so that it can perfectly sit in the DOOM engine. From the entire overworld to the items to the enemies and many more, fans of the 2 games can have fun with this new mod. 

If you’re interested in trying out The Legend of DOOM check out this guide here on how to install and play it on your computer. 

Russian scientist and photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (previously at Neatorama) was a pioneer in color photography, and his lush, brightly-colored images of imperial Russia from more than a century ago still amaze us. Prokudin-Gorsky achieved his color images by shooting each image three times, each time with a different color filter on the camera. What the casual viewer doesn't know about these astonishing images is how much work went into producing each one. For every photograph Prokudin-Gorsky considered worth publishing, there were many more that didn't live up to expectations.

The images Prokudin-Gorsky published are often different from the ones we see today. His original negatives are still available, and photographers and color scientists recreate the stacking of the negative images with modern tools like computers to produce even richer colors than Prokudin-Gorsky did. How he ever got the images he was proud of is a testament to his own skill and patience. Read about Prokudin-Gorsky's technique at the Public Domain Review. -via Damn Interesting

The history of medical science is full of theories that might appeal to one's common sense, but didn't hold up over time, and came to be seen as downright crazy in hindsight. One of those ideas became a trend in the early 20th century. People have long been disgusted by the colon, because it contains feces, which was seen as dangerously unhealthy. Doctors and laypersons alike treated this with enemas for a long time, then laxatives. When anesthesia made surgery a lot easier, one doctor came up with the idea of cutting the whole thing out, to keep our wastes from infecting the rest of our body. Eminent London surgeon Dr. William Arbuthnot Lane developed the radical colectomy, in which the large intestine was removed, and the small intestine was connected directly to the anus.

The radical colectomy caused a sensation, with patients flocking in their hundreds to Lane’s surgery to undergo the new cutting-edge procedure. From the 1910s to the 1930s thousands of Britons and Americans had their perfectly healthy colons snipped out as a preventative measure, with Lane himself performing over a thousand such procedures over the course of his career.

You can imagine this caused problems, particularly a 30% death rate due to postoperative complications and infections. But he wasn't the only doctor to try removing a possible source of future infection. Surgeries were developed to remove healthy teeth, testicles, ovaries, spleens, stomachs, appendixes, gall bladders, and cervixes, in addition to colons. More research eventually went into these organs, and such radical surgery died out. Or did it? The removal of healthy tonsils was fairly routine for children through the end of the 20th century, and even today doctors are warning against routine but unnecessary circumcisions and wisdom tooth removal. Read about the story of the radical colectomy and the other surgeries that followed at Today I Found Out. 

Can you talk to your toilet? Yes, and some of us do. But toilets generally don't answer back.

Until now. The future has arrived in the form of the Kohler Numi 2.0. The Verge reports that for a mere $11,500, you can have a toilet that comes equipped with Alexa, which is Amazon's digital assistant. Command her to fire up your custom music playlist for your special event.

Additionally, the Numi 2.0 has what you'd expect from a luxury toilet: UV light sanitation, a bidet that can sweep through all of your precious areas, an automatical misting bowl, a heated seat, and an air dryer. You can control all of these features with a handheld remote control.

I don't see any indication that these advanced toilet commands can be controlled by Alexa. That's a shame because I like to keep both hands freed up, not bound to a remote control.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Kohler

Tom Scott did a video on London's 18th century fire brigades a few years ago. Now he's retracted it completely because it was based on a premise that was just plain wrong. The story of how that happened illustrates how narratives can arise based on assumptions from random observers, and then the facts assumed become urban legends, and if repeated enough, they eventually transform into history. Tom got his information from reputable sources, which in turn got their facts from what they thought were reputable sources, but you have to go back even further to find out that "the way it was" just ain't so. He not only owns up to it, but explains how it all happened and gives us the real story as he learned it after exhaustive research by a professional researcher. Sometimes you have to go much further down the rabbit hole than you think necessary to uncover the truth.

Back before every home had a computer with graphics programs like Photoshop, people still went all out to produce funny yet personal Christmas cards. This was when "cut and paste" meant cut with scissors and paste with glue. Then you had to run the whole thing to the local print shop to be copied. The print shop would also supply you with envelopes, but you still had to go to the Post Office to buy stamps. Imagine the coordination of the design to get the photographs right in the card above, because you couldn't just zoom in- you had to size everything during the photo shoot and get the photographs printed while crossing your fingers. It all seems so quaint now. But if you had a good enough sense of humor, you didn't even need scissors and glue.

These folks didn't know we'd be laughing at those cards 60, 70 years later. Check out a festive collection of personalized Christmas cards from the mid-20th century designed to make the recipient laugh, at Bored Panda.

When you lose your teeth, you could have a set of dentures made with the latest space age materials, but it wasn't always that way. It used to be that artificial teeth were made from ivory, taken from elephants, walruses, or hippos, but they didn't look all that real, and didn't hold up well after being chiseled into human tooth shapes. The best artificial teeth were made from real teeth, sometimes called Waterloo teeth, as they often came from dead soldiers. But they also could have been traded by grave robbers. We've also heard that healthy teeth were sometimes extracted from live but enslaved people for this purpose, but taking them from dead bodies was altogether easier. Waterloo teeth, of course, got their name from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and the practice continued at least through the American Civil War. They were expensive and gruesome, but they worked. You can read more at the British Dental Association. -via Nag on the Lake

If you love the movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, imagine it as a musical. Not just a musical, but an opera, as all the dialogue is sung, and the only speaking part is a bit of description of the setting. Penn Holderness plays all the roles, from Clark Griswold to Eddie to the neighbors and peripheral characters. He can't do all the slapstick humor by himself, but if you know the movie, it's not necessary because your brain will fill it in. Whats important is that he captures the meaning of the film in his clever rhymes. However, if by any chance you haven't seen Christmas Vacation, you might get just a bit lost. Don't let that stop you from enjoying it! It starts out a bit slow, and gets better as it goes along.

The influence of Queen Victoria is still felt all along our culture. She is the reason that brides wear white at their weddings, anesthesia became popular for childbirth, and why we eat chicken for dinner. Her majesty was also instrumental in the way we celebrate Halloween. You could say that Victoria was a superstar influencer. So it's not that difficult to believe that she made family Christmas trees a thing.

As with most of the secular parts of our Christmas celebrations, bringing evergreens inside was an ancient way to celebrate midwinter, specifically the solstice. The tree was incorporated into the Christian feast early, but not universally. German Protestants took it up as a backlash against Catholicism after the Reformation, and then Christmas trees were later rejected by Puritans. But the Christmas tree only really took off as a universal symbol of the holiday after illustrations of Queen Victoria's tree were published in 1848. Read the historic journey of the Christmas tree at the Conversation.

We are used to the annual mayhem on the streets when a snowfall lands in an area that's not expecting it, and does not have adequate plans for making the streets safe. Usually it's a north-south thing in which Minnesotans and Canadians laugh at drivers in places like Georgia with no salt or snowplows at the ready. This time it's England, which doesn't usually get a lot of snow. On December 11, ten inches fell in Gloucestershire on top of a layer of ice, and people had to get out in it regardless of whether a snowplow had been through or not. The slow-motion carnage is just crying out for a soundtrack, like maybe the Blue Danube Waltz. -via Fark

The premise of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is to "compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels." As such, the sentence itself doesn't have to be bad, but is designed to set up a story that will make you dread the rest of the book. And those books don't exist. More than 5,000 entries came in for the 40th edition of the contest. This year's top prize is by John Farmer of Aurora, Colorado.

I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn't help—I was fresh out of salami.

Whew. In this case, the sentence was bad. The Grand Panjandrum's Special Award went to Brent Guernsey of Springfield, Virginia, for this horrible pun.

And so the two pachyderms with the same first name met, and they formed the jazz duo legend known as the Elephants Gerald.

You have to wonder what could possibly come after that, but the sentence deserves an award just for beginning an entire book with the word "and." There are plenty of other entries recognized as winners and dishonorable mentions in various categories (Adventure, Children's & Young Adult Literature, Crime & Detective, Dark & Stormy, Fantasy & Horror, Historical Fiction, Purple Prose, Romance, Science Fiction, Vile Puns, Western, and Odious Outliers) that you can read here. -via Metafilter

See also: Winners from previous years.

Grocery stores are usually organized and created with the customer’s convenience in mind. After all, the more satisfied customers are, the more sales an establishment can get. Companies usually spend time, effort, and money, to comprehend the psychology and habits of their clients so they can create the best environment where everything can be made easy for them. 

Today’s grocery stores utilize a counter-clockwise design, where you enter the store on the right and exit on the left. In the middle of these doors is the entire store where products are placed, with the essentials towards the back of the store. We think this placement is because you’ll end up picking non-essentials along the way, which adds more sales. 

Another new addition to modern stores is those self-checkout lines. Essentially, these are cashiers, where customers can check out their own items using the machine provided. These devices were installed to save the cost of labor. However, it seems to not be geared toward customers.

In a 2021 survey, almost 67% of shoppers had failed during the checkout process at a self-checkout counter. Aside from that, there could also be health risks in opting for purchasing your goods in these places. 

Research done by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine discovered that self-checkout stations contained five types of disease-causing bacteria, with one of them commonly present in human waste (Enterococcus). Make sure to wash your hands properly after using one if you need to!

Image credit: Wikimedia commons

Art Basel is a privately owned international art fair staged in different parts of the world. These include Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach, Hong Kong, and Paris. For its 2022 exhibition in Miami Beach, the organization hosted some… interesting individuals. 

While the Miami Beach fair had its fair share of memorable, thought-provoking, and unique art pieces, we think nothing beats both the shock value and making people actually think than a live breast-milking display.

Heads up though, because we’re not talking about artisans milking a cow live for the sake of art, no. It’s an actual woman getting milked for the show. 

Contemporary artist OONA performed “MILKING THE ARTIST” with Lori Baldwin in front of a huge crowd. Some of the visitors actually joined the live auction, where the winner could get the milk extracted live at the exhibition. The bidding actually reached up to $200,000 for the milk. 

Without getting too explicit here, allow us to say that there was milking, yes. After the show, the artists were forcefully removed from the premises of the fair. We aren’t sure if that’s part of the show though, as they were allowed to perform “MILKING THE ARTIST.” 

Well, one thing’s for sure, the visitors Miami Beach show certainly got a sight to remember! 

Image credit: Pixabay/Pexels