Networks of underground fungi will be mapped to protect these systems from damage. These networks use carbon to build their systems in the soil, which connect to plant roots and act as ‘highways’ for the exchange of carbon from the roots for nutrients. Also known as the ‘circulatory system of the planet,’ these fungal networks can extend for many miles without being noticed. 

These networks are under threat because of agriculture, urbanization, pollution, water scarcity, and changes to the climate. To protect fungi, which are vital to soil fertility, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), will collect 10,000 samples of these fungi around the world to understand these underground networks for better conservation efforts. 

Image credit: Biosphoto/Alamy

A resident from Rutland, England noticed an unusual glimpse of pottery on the ground of their family farm during his walk. After getting a spade, the man, Jim Irvine, dug a shallow trench to see what was there. According to the team of experts who excavated the site after Irvine, the ceramic tiles were a Roman mosaic depicting scenes from the Iliad. The artwork is the first of its kind that was found in the United Kingdom. “This is certainly the most exciting Roman mosaic discovery in the U.K. in the last century,” says  University of Leicester Archaeological Services Project Manager John Thomas in a statement. “It gives us fresh perspectives on the attitudes of people at the time, their links to classical literature, and it also tells us an enormous amount about the individual who commissioned this piece.”

Image credit: University of Leicester Archaeological Services

Gamers have been treated to new games, unexpected ports and remasters, and surprising sequels for well-known franchises. While this is good news, there’s also bad news for the gaming world this year, with the complete removal and delisting of old games by publishers uninterested in keeping up with the maintenance. This means that players can no longer find or purchase these games on official sites. Kotaku lists the games or franchises that were removed, delisted, pulled offline, and/or straight-up murdered throughout the year. Check their full piece here.

Image credit: Rockstar Games

Drinking games have been with us since ancient times, because they are a somewhat socially acceptable way of getting completely wasted without having to admit that's what you intended in the fist place. An added bonus is seeing your friends get way drunker than they intended. And with New Year's Eve coming up, you might want some ideas for giving an international flavor to your party. The scariest drinking game I could think of is darts, but that really falls under the heading of "pub sport." Almost as dangerous is the German drinking game called Hammerschlagen.

You start the game off by having players hammer a nail into a tree stump until it stands on its own. Then each person raises the hammer above their head and tries to smash the nail all the way in … using the edge end. Every time you fail, you must drink.

Good thing that alcohol increases your dexterity and coordination (it's why police give you awards for driving after having a few); otherwise, some might consider this game irresponsible and dangerous.

Read up on 15 drinking games from various areas of history and geography at Cracked. Do not attempt any of these games unless you have made arrangements for a designated driver or overnight accommodations.  

Many pasta shapes developed organically over the centuries as cooks modified preexisting designs to fit new needs. But that's not the approach that Dan Pashman took. He decided to start from scratch after studying the best qualities of pasta. The result of his research is cascatelli.

Cascatelli is, appropriate for its shape, the Italian word for waterfall. Core77 describes how this design simultaneously fulfills several pasta objectives.

The ruffled half-tube on one surface creates a lot of surface area for sauce to adhere to. The elongated edge allows the user to easily stab it with a fork. The right angles on the underside create maximum resistance to teeth, establishing what Pashman calls the ideal "toothsinkability." And the overall variations in textures and thicknesses provide a high contrast in textures.

What I haven't been able to learn from Pashman is the ideal sauce for cascatelli. What would you use?

The annual list of foreign objects that required medical intervention to remove from human bodies is out. Honestly, finding our previous posts for such lists was as easy as searching for the word "orifices" (they are now tagged). Every year, Barry Petchesky gathers medical reports from all over as detailed in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits to compile the list, which is broken down by orifice from the top down. All details are verbatim from the report. Here's a sample from the throat section, which is always dominated by children.

“INHALED A SEWING NEEDLE IN A PLASTIC TUBE WITH A STRING ATTACHED WHEN TRYING TO USE IT AS A BLOWDART”

“PER MOM SHE WAS LOOKING FOR HER CAR REMOTE & SAID OUT LOUD ‘WHERE IS THE BATTERY THAT GOES IN HERE’  PT REPLIED, ‘I ATE IT’”

“SWALLOWED A PENNY BECAUSE SHE SAYS SHE IS A ‘HUMAN PIGGY BANK’”

The reports of objects stuck in other orifices get cringier as they go, so be warned that some of the cases may cause sympathetic pain or bring up mental images that are NSFW. The 2021 list is here. -via Fark

🐿️ Meet the squirrelzilla: Grey squirrels in Maine are so huge that they're now terrorizing the neighborhood dogs.

☕ That coffee mug you never use would like to have a word about your disrespectful attitude. BRB I'm rotating my coffee mugs now.

🤖 Now these are the pop culture action figures we all wish we got for Christmas.

🎵 Gregorian monks chant the Halo theme music in a medieval castle.

🏠 At 16 square feet, the Quay House is the smallest house in Great Britain. Still feels larger than my first college apartment, I'm sure.

🖼️ 9-year-old girl found out how museums work and decided to donate her "most precious" rock to the Poole Museum in Dorset, UK, so the museum proudly put it on display.

🛸 From the NeatoShop: The world's neatest Sci-Fi T-shirts you can buy.

We've got many more neat posts over at our new network of sites: Supafluffy, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Infinite 1UP, Homes & Hues and Pictojam. Please check 'em out!

Image: Beth Ditkoff

Thanks, Coach pic.twitter.com/wnv8W1pIjJ

— EA SPORTS (@EASPORTS) December 29, 2021

When one door closes, another opens - and for John Madden, the door that closed was a knee injury that practically ended his pro football career in his first year as a professional player. But rather than calling it a career-ending injury, perhaps it’s better to call it a career-starting injury, as it actually ended up starting Madden in his journey to become one of history’s greatest coaches. 

John Madden passed away recently at the age of 85. You may know him as a Hall of Fame American football coach, Emmy-winning sportscaster, or through his video games series Madden NFL but you probably didn’t know that the start of Madden’s football career wasn’t an auspicious one.

In 1959, in his first year as a pro football player for the Philadelphia Eagles, Madden suffered a devastating knee injury during practice. His doctor told him that he wouldn’t play that year, but maybe he could play the next. That didn’t sound very confidence inspiring to Madden, but he dutifully went through his physical therapy sessions with the team’s staff, which were held early in the morning so he could be out of the way when the players showed up to train.

It was during those early mornings that the then 23-year-old rookie Madden noticed that quarterback Norm Van Brocklin would come into the dark locker room to watch game films that he played on an old movie projector. Van Brocklin would watch and study the games for hours, and Madden would sit quietly in the back of the room to watch him watch the games.

One morning, Van Brocklin noticed the red-headed Madden and said, “Hey, Red. Come up here and watch it with me.” From then on, Madden would sit with the future Hall of Famer quarterback, and learn from him how to analyze the game of football at a deeper level.

The next year, Madden’s knee was still not fully healed so he went back to school to get his teaching credential. To earn some extra money while pursuing his degree, Madden took a job as a student-teacher at San Luis Obispo Junior High School. The high school was looking for an assistant football coach, so Madden’s first coaching experience was actually to teach 50 high school kids how to play football!

Reference: Madden: A Biography by Bryan Burwell and Pat Summerall

In this video, guitarist Dave Simpson of the Dave Simpson Trio is strumming his own guitar, but fretting the bass. Bass player Carina Powell/CiCi Bass is picking her bass, but fretting Simpson's guitar. While they are playing basically the same tune, the sensation of two very different instruments in different hands is quite jarring to a musician, but they pull it off well. They switch left hands back to their own instruments before the video is over, to show us what they're best at. It's cool to watch, and cool to imagine what it feels like. -via Laughing Squid

The history of human organ transplants is a series of small steps. Skin transplants have been around a long time, but the first successful replacement body organ was a transplant of thyroid tissue in 1883. The possibility of moving organs from one person to another opened up a whole world of speculative fiction. Randolph Hartley wrote a short story for Life magazine’s short story contest in 1915 called "The Black Patch." In the hundred years since, we've become used to organ transplants, but the premise that unfolds here is still gripping. It opens with:

I wear a black patch over my left eye. It has aroused the curiosity of many; no one has suspected the horror that it hides.

One has to wonder if Hartley won that contest, and what tale could have possibly bested it. You can read the entire story (it's not long) at Futility Closet. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: FOTO:FORTEPAN/Saly Noémi)

I found the cutest little frog in the bottom of my romaine lettuce tonight- it’s too cold to set him outside (27 degrees), but he’s been living in the lettuce in the fridge for several days now- does anyone know what I should do so that he doesn’t die? pic.twitter.com/usaCIEWaLv

— Simon Curtis (@simoncurtis) December 21, 2021

Simon Curtis bought a box of lettuce. It was in his refrigerator for several days before he got to the bottom of it and found a tiny green tree frog in the container! Now, a lot of people would get squicked out and complain to the store, but this frog was alive. And adorable. Curtis didn't want to set the frog outside, because the temperature was below freezing, so he turned to Twitter for advice.

He kept the frog in the original container, but added moisture and a water dish, and kept him in the kitchen. He named the frog Tony, and found out Tony is somewhat of an escape artist. Curtis kept his Twitter followers updated on all of Tony's shenanigans, and every day fell more in love with the frog.  Tired of constantly looking for Tony, Curtis got a terrarium to give him a bigger, more secure home. After consulting wildlife experts, Curtis decided that he now has a pet frog.

You can read the entire saga as it unfolded on Twitter just before Christmas, at Bored Panda.

Language changes fast, especially in the internet age. But it had always changed. While we have words our ancestors never imagined, we have also lost words. We know how to be ruthless, but at one time we could be full of ruth. We recognize when something is unwieldy, but would we recognize a thing that is wieldy? Lexicographer and etymologist Susie Dent thinks there are plenty of words that need to be brought back, especially positive words.

If we could be full of "ruth," that would mean we are full of compassion. Another great word is "confelicity," which means taking joy in someone else's happiness. Or how about old words that are just funny, like "cacklefarts" for eggs? There are plenty of lost words in English, and in other languages, which deserve to be brought out and used properly. Read about more of them at The Guardian.  -via Metafilter

Did you know that the word "scientist" didn't exist before 1834? At the time, the term used was "man of science," and that couldn't apply to Mary Somerville, who was a woman. "Mathematician" didn't quite work, either, although she was a mathematician and for a long time taught mathematics to children, along with her studies and raising her own four children. Somerville was brilliant in so many scientific subjects that the word "scientist" was coined to describe her.

Somerville was born in 1780, a time when women weren't given much of an education. She was schooled in art and music, but her parents objected to her fascination with Euclid, which they thought would drive her insane. It did not, and she taught herself higher mathematics. In 1834, she published a book called On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, which described how astronomy, mathematics, physics, geology, and chemistry fit together to explain the world around us. It wasn't her first impressive science book, but it cemented her status as a "scientist." Read the short version of Mary Somerville's amazing life at the Marginalian. -via Damn Interesting

Elizabeth Bathory, known as the Blood Countess, was convicted of unspeakable crimes. The story goes that she tortured and killed virgin women and then bathed in the blood of her victims, believing it would preserve her youthful looks. Her legend partially inspired the tale of Dracula. Bathory is credited with killing 600 people, which is a world record for female serial killer.

However, most of what is told about Elizabeth Bathory was added to the narrative long after she died in 1614. If you go back to the actual investigation and trial, you'll find it severely lacking in evidence. There is no documentation of her torture chambers, and almost all the witnesses were powerless servants. Plus the investigator and the prosecution had powerful political motives for getting rid of Bathory. When you know all this, and how the other "facts" were added later, its easy to see how the whole incident could have grown from nothing at all. Read the Elizabeth Bathory story from another angle at Cracked.

In 1949, the Washington Post published an article about a 14-year-old boy who had been cured of demon possession. William Peter Blatty, then a college student, read the article, and many years later wrote the 1971 novel The Exorcist. Blatty had used the diary that Father Raymond Bishop, who assisted in the exorcisms, as a reference. The family had consulted their own Lutheran priest because their son "Roland Doe" (a pseudonym) heard mysterious noises and objects would move when he was present. The boy underwent an exorcism by a local Catholic priest in Maryland. The phenomena worsened, and the family went to St. Louis to consult the Jesuit order for guidance. That led to twenty exorcism sessions, led by William S. Bowdern and assisted by Father Bishop and two other priests.

When the book The Exorcist came out, and the movie two years later, supposedly based on a true story, journalists and skeptics wanted to find the real Roland Doe. It turned out that both Roland Doe and another name used in various 1949 news articles were pseudonyms, and also his hometown was misidentified to preserve his privacy. However, some background information yielded clues that various parties traced back further and further until they knew exactly who Roland Doe really was. Read how they figured it out at Skeptical Inquirer. -via Strange Company