For Christmas, The Hatching Cat has strung together similar stories in several animals posts with holiday themes. One is a list of cats who saved lives in New York around the holiday season between the years of 1904 and 1932. The list has six stories about six cats who saved the lives of a dozen people, plus four kittens. One story involves Patches, pictured here. Patches hung around a building and was owned by no one, until that fateful day during the Christmas season of 1912, when Patches jumped up on the shoulders of Daniel De Lena, the building resident who was the cat's worst enemy.

According to the New York Press, one morning Patches jumped on Daniel’s shoulder and then kept running to and from a rear window while excitedly meowing. At first, Daniel kicked at Patches and tried to shoo the cat away.

But finally, the cat’s persistency paid off. When Daniel got up to look out the first-floor window, he saw that the rear of the building was in flames. He ran through the four-story brick building, waking several people who lived and worked there.

De Lena afterward became Patches' best friend, and even adopted the hero cat. Read the rest of Patches' story and those of five other hero cats at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

See also: Christmas stories of hero dogs and hero horses.

A lamprey is a jawless fish that sports a sucker full of teeth for a mouth. Many lamprey species will latch onto another fish and feed on its blood. While that may seem thoroughly unpleasant, word is that they are pretty tasty themselves. In the Middle Ages, lamprey was a dish restricted to the rich, or even royalty, as Portuguese King João made the fishing of lampreys without permission illegal with a penalty of death. The fish was so prestigious, those who couldn't indulge in lamprey made a not-so-reasonable facsimile by creating a dessert shaped like a lamprey made of sugar and eggs. This is lampreia de ovos, a recipe that survives today as a Christmas tradition in Portugal.  

Lampreia de ovos was more available than the fish, but it was still expensive due to the number of eggs and the expertise required to make it. Today you can buy mass-produced lampreia de ovos, but those that are hand-made by experienced chefs are coveted and expensive. That said, if you think your cooking skills are up to it, you can find a recipe at Atlas Obscura, along with the history of lampreia de ovos.

In 1963, Bing Crosby got another big Christmas hit with "Do You Hear What I Hear?" The song was notable for being new but sounding like a classic Christmas carol. Hundreds of other artists recorded it in the decades that followed. It tells the story of how the news of a newborn messiah spread across the land. But the inspiration for the song is a very different story.

In October of 1962, Cuba and American warships faced each other in teh Caribbean over American demands that the Soviet Union remove its intercontinental ballistic missiles from Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis, as it came to be known, lasted for about five weeks and scared the wits out of everyday people. It was during this time that composer Noël Regney was charged with writing a Christmas song that would be a B-side. He wrote the lyrics and then his wife Gloria Shayne wrote the music. The simple lyrics drew inspiration from the contrast between innocent babies Regney saw on the street and the global crisis unfolding in the news. "A star dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite" is a direct reference to an incoming missile. Read how the Cuban Missile Crisis gave us a beloved Christmas carol at Smithsonian.

This big boat looks like Noah's ark, and likewise it was constructed to sail only once, and not even on the ocean. Back before Russia had railroads, they developed a method of moving timber from the forests to the cities on the Volga and Kama rivers. They built these huge boats called belyanas from the timber, floated them downriver, and then disassembled them as their cargo. Oh yeah, there's plenty more timber inside.

The belyanas were constructed without any tar as waterproofing, and only in the middle of the 19th century did they even begin to use nails. The logs, beams, and planks were tied together for the trip. Once they arrived at a port city, the lumber was sold to fuel steamships and heat homes. The cabins on the deck that housed the crew were sold whole as houses. What I'd like to know was how the crew made it back up to the forests afterward. Read about the belyanas of Russia and see more pictures at Amusing Planet.

Charles Dickens gave us the classic tale of Christmas joy and generosity, along with ghosts, in his story A Christmas Carol. He also gave us a classic villain in Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean and miserly type we've all known at some time in our lives. The greatest literary characters are drawn from real life, and there has been plenty of study on who inspired the Scrooge character.

Dickens drew from more than one real person to make Scrooge. Literary scholars believe that his miserly ways came from member of parliament John Elwes, who lived in the previous century and was well-documented in a bestselling biography that Dickens would have no doubt read.  

The inspiration of the character's name came from the very real Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, who died in 1836, and was unknown to Dickens. How that happened is a bit weird. Read about Scroggie and Elwes and how they contributed to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting

Here's a profession that's right up there with mattress tester. A team of expert ham sniffers are employed by the Spanish company Cinco Jotas. They specializes in very expensive premium quality acorn-fed Iberian hams. The ham sniffers are quality control workers who can appraise the quality of a ham just by smell. But they've been overworked lately due to increased demand.

Manuel Vega Domínguez has been sniffing hams since 1998, and in normal times will sniff around 200 hams a day, but this holiday season, he's up to 800 a day, which he refers to as "at the limit of human possibility." But he will soldier on. Read about the busy ham sniffers at Thrillist.

-via reddit

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Adam Hillman is best known for artistic arrangements of everyday objects, often ordered by slightly differing color tones. He finds and creates patterns in the daily stuff of life. Hillman is, as he explains in an interview with Stir World, especially fascinated with food, which serves as his primary creative material.

His most recent creation is this pixelated image of Mario. If I understand Hillman correctly, he began by arranging M&M chocolate candies on double sided tape to match the colors of our 16-bit hero. Then he sprayed water on the surface. Over time, the colors melted off the candies, creating an integrated image.

Saving lives is getting to be a habit for 11-year old Drayvon Johnson. This young man from Muskogee, Oklahoma saved the lives of two people on the same day. Essense magazine shares his story.

The first time was one morning when, at school, another student used his teeth to pry open a water bottle. The cap fell into his mouth and he began to choke. The student staggered into Drayvon’s classroom, where our hero performed the Heimlich maneuver.

The second came that afternoon, while Drayvon was walking home from school. He saw an elderly woman trying to flee a burning house. She used a walker and thus could not move quickly. Drayvon rushed across the street and pulled her to safety.

And he’s just getting started. Drayvon wants to be an EMT when he grows up, so we can expect more stories like this in the future.

Drayvon has been honored by his local school board and the county sheriff’s office. In the above photo, he poses with an undersheriff while receiving the title of an honorary deputy.

-via Hadro | Photo: Muskogee County Sheriff's Office

Rémi Gaillard, a French comedian, has become famous for playing pranks in public, such as setting up a pretend railroad crossing and playing Mario Kart on a public road using a go-kart. In his most recent video, he dresses as Santa Claus and acts much like you want expect Santa if he was trying to get ready for Christmas.

I hope that some of the participants in these videos are Gaillard's collaborators, especially those of which Gaillard conducts actual crimes. Assume that they are and that the real Santa Claus isn't this desperate to be ready for the big day.

-via Laughing Squid

Uruguayan artist Bruno Baietto has a unique process for shaping his blown glass pieces: he cools the glass inside loaves of bread that have been hollowed out. The bread burns away, leaving the completed glass forms inside.

Here's a video in which Baietto demonstrates the process. 

He explains to Dezeen that bread is a symbol with multiple powerful meanings. Baietto grew up in a family of bakers, so it represents a long family history. It is also the Body of Christ in Christianity, the icon of progress in socialism, and the staple food of capitalist societies. Bread thus, if I understand him correctly, stands for hope in many dimensions.

-via Dornob

This new feature will let headphone users easily listen to their surroundings without the need to take it off! The transparency mode is a feature that helps people keep track of their surroundings even if they are fully absorbed in music, podcasts, or a phone call. It’s a mode that can be found on new noise-canceling headphones, such as the Apple AirPods Pro and the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds. Learn how to activate the transparency mode for your next trip outside here! 

Image credit: C D-X

Liangzhu City was home to an ancient civilization in the east of China that was known for building the most brilliant city in all of Asia. Unfortunately, the culture of this city mysteriously collapsed around 4,300 years ago, much to the scientists’ bafflement. Christoph Spötl from the University of Innsbruck in Austria and his colleagues tried to find a clear conclusion behind the mysterious disappearance of the Liangzhu residents. 

After studying the mineral formations (or speleothems) from two underwater caves in the region, which preserved chemical signatures of climatic conditions long ago, the researchers concluded that massive flooding and inundation due to poor drainage systems forced the people to abandon their capital city, which led to the collapse of the Liangzhu civilization. 

Image credit: Hangzhou Liangzhu Archaeological Site Administrative District Management Committee

Neutrinos, also known as ‘ghost particles,’ were detected by physicists in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. These elementary particles are tricky to detect because of their electrically neutral nature. In addition, neutrinos are light and rarely interact with other particles, so it’s rare and tricky to detect through instruments, even though the particles are very common. Experts need the right instruments to find these particles. During the pilot run of an experiment called FASER, which was executed in the particle collider, scientists picked up six neutrino interactions. “Before this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” says Jonathan Feng, co-author of a study describing the results. “This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe.”

Image credit: CERN

Over 130 works of 15th-century Florentine sculptor Donatello will be displayed in an exhibition in Florence after 40 long years! The works will be displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi and at the nearby Museo Nazionale del Bargello, which are home to the artist’s most popular works, such as David and bas reliefs made for the Baptistery in Siena and the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua. Smaller exhibitions of his works will be held in Berlin and London in 2023. The exhibition in Florence will be open from March 19  to July 31, 2022.  

Image credit: Antje Voigt/SMB Skulpturensammlung

Don’t worry it’s not the kind of killing you’re imagining. A team of experts looked for peptides, which are fragments of proteins that can contain the right combination to be lethal to pathogens, that were naturally produced by people, and can fight microbes. To determine the peptides that fit these conditions, they used an AI that scrutinized the chemical makeup of each and every one in the human proteome (the set of proteins the body can produce). Their search yielded 2,603 antibiotic candidates, a feat they accomplished because of AI’s strength in digesting huge data sets. Learn more about the study here. 

Image credit: Solen Feyissa