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

A Steller's sea eagle — a very-rare, muppet-ass looking bird native to Asia — has been spotted in Massachusetts! For more info, check out @TheBirdist https://t.co/bmsEziktIw pic.twitter.com/JTjEVQFMl3

— Wild City NYC (@wildcitynyc) December 21, 2021

Every year, birdwatchers all over spent time between December 14 to January 5 to take part in the Christmas Bird Count. The data they contribute helps to track the fates of thousands of bird species. What would it take for Nick Lund, blogger at The Birdist and advocacy and outreach manager for Maine Audubon, to abandon the Christmas Bird Count? A very rare bird sighting.

The Steller's sea eagle is the largest eagle on earth. Its wingspan can be as much as eight feet! But the Steeler's sea eagle is native to northeastern Asia, mainly Siberia, Japan, Korea, and occasionally coastal Alaska. They never wander into the continental US. But one eagle appears to have gone rogue. It was spotted in inland Alaska, then in Texas, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and then in Massachusetts. Lund, in Maine, heard about it on Monday, immediately ditched the Christmas Bird Count, picked up a few birder buddies, and drove another two hours to Massachusetts to see the eagle.

Bird enthusiasts were texting and alerting each other about the bird's location, and Lund caught up with it at Dighton Rock State Park. By noon, there were 200 or so birders set up with cameras to see the single specimen of the Steller's sea eagle, who was just chilling with some smaller bald eagles. For a birdwatcher this is like finding the Holy Grail. The story is delightful because the birders were so excited, and their enthusiasm for something we know nothing about is contagious. Read about the sighting and the banzai rush to see this bird at The Birdist. -via Metafilter

Christmas comes with a lot of stories, folklore, and media characters. Most of these characters have nothing to do with each other. There's baby Jesus, of course, and Santa Claus, but also Krampus, Rudolph, Belsnickel, the Grinch, Scrooge, the Little Drummer Boy, Yukon Cornelius, Zwarte Piet, Elf on the Shelf, the Yule Cat, Dominick The Donkey, and for some reason a Nutcracker, among others. Come up with a new Christmas character, and if you're lucky you can make tons of money. Janelle Shane is not looking to make tons of money, but to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Her latest project is generating new Christmas entities. She fed a few existing characters into the neural network, and out came three Christmas weasels. But that's not all. Go to Shane's site, AI Weirdness, to meet the Hostile Choir, Chrishmak, the Blop, and more brand new, uh, things we can write a Christmas story around.  

This may technically be an ad from Chevrolet, but it's a story that serves as the company's holiday greeting. It involves a 1966 Chevy Impala that hadn't been driven for quite some time. You'll figure out why pretty quickly, and then it's time to get your hankie out.

This video is based on a true story, according the Chevy. Everyone will be able to relate to at least one thing in the video. Anywhere this video is posted, it brings out stories of beloved cars in someone's past, or in a loved one's past. It doesn't have to be a Chevy. -via Fark 

#MikesMerryMovieChallenge

December 11: favorite song in a holiday movie

I’ll be man enough to admit that I get a little misty-eyed once I hear “Christmas Time is Here” from 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” when watching it. pic.twitter.com/J8WDEUDuoh

— filmanthropic (@filmanthropica) December 11, 2021

The song in its original version has nothing to do with Christmas. What you think may be jingle bells are brushes on a snare drum. It's a jazz tune that's quite slow and melancholy. But when we hear it, we know it's Christmas, because "Christmas Time is Here" played through a large part of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the beloved 1965 Peanuts TV special we all know and love.

The song was written and performed by Vince Guaraldi, a jazz musician who'd hit the charts with "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" a few years earlier. Lee Mendelson heard the song and got Guaraldi to do the music for A Charlie Brown Christmas. Guaraldi constructed a slow jazz instrumental, which was quite innovative for a children's television show at the time. Mendelson thought it needed lyrics, which he wrote and arranged for a children's choir to sing. Even with cheery lyrics, the song makes Christmas seem somewhat sad and disappointing, which is quite in line with the plot of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Read the story of how the song came about and why we automatically get nostalgic when we hear it, at Mel magazine.

400 Betty Whites ago, there were still living Neanderthals.

Between 300 and 130 Betty Whites ago, the first humans reached North America.

100 Betty Whites ago, the last mammoths roamed the Earth.

7 Betty Whites ago, the Aztec Empire rose, only to fall 2.2 Bettys later.

— Yell in a War (@jelenawoehr) December 20, 2021

On January 17 of next year, Betty White will turn 100 years old.

I was about to write "actress Betty White", but that seems like a wholly inadequate description. Betty White is not just an actress. It is best put that Betty White is Betty White in all fullness of the term; a Platonic ideal of Betty Whiteness.

As the world prepares to celebrate, writer Jelena Woehr would like to propose using Betty White as a unit of measurement. Specifically, a Betty White is a unit of time--a lifespan of incredible magnitude. A very long-lived person expresses that events that felt a long time ago were, from a different perspective, very recent. Read Woehr's thread here.

-via Kottke

How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a classic Dr. Seuss story first published in 1957. It was made into a Christmas television special in 1966 and two feature films in 2000 and 2018, among other spinoffs featuring the Grinch. This Honest Trailer is about the 2000 film version starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch. It was a huge hit, and probably the most familiar version of the story to the internet generation. As Screen Junkies reveals, this movie was less Dr. Seuss and more Ron Howard and Jim Carrey. The basic story is there, but stretched out to feature length by adding lots of violence and sexual innuendo. Is it really? I've never  seen the movie. After watching this Honest Trailer, I don't have the desire to, either.

The Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life was released in 1946, and is set on Christmas Eve of 1945. The movie follows the life of George Bailey, who was born in 1907. Bailey and the characters around him experience life in the 20th century just as the 1946 audience would have, without too much explanation. They lived through the Spanish flu epidemic, the crash of 1929, and the World War II draft as a matter of course. No one around at the time had any idea that the movie would became more popular over the next 75 years, and that many folks would have to go to school to learn about the events that shaped their lives. But here we are, with a movie that chronicles a momentous period in history and how it affected everyday people.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History's History Film Forum examines the historical accuracy and value of American films. They recently discussed It's a Wonderful Life and the historical events portrayed in it. The movie was not written as a history lesson, but due to its age and scope, it deserves a deeper look into its contemporary references. For example, the scene in which Mary and George are on the phone with Sam Wainwright is memorable to us for its extraordinary sexual tension, but there is real history behind the conversation.

To help George, who’s at a crossroads in his life, Sam offers them some illegal insider-trading tips as he reminds George of an idea they once discussed to make plastics out of soybeans. This hearkens back to an effort popularized in the 1920s through the early 1940s, most prominently by automotive titan Henry Ford, known as “chemurgy.” According to Landis, an agricultural historian, chemurgy was the “idea [of] taking farm crops and making industrial products out of them ... growing rural America out of the Depression with one foot in industry, one foot in agriculture.”

Ford set up laboratories and employed scientists to experiment on crops to determine if he could “grow a car.” After experimenting on everything from cantaloupes to dandelion seeds, the researchers had the most success with soybeans. Though the effort succeeded in creating some plastic components for cars and allowed Ford to swing an ax at the plastic trunk of his personal car for publicity, soybean plastics didn’t result in the success or riches portrayed in the film, but the research did result in a plethora of food products, which in turn pushed soybeans from a marginal crop in North America to one of the largest.

This is just one tidbit from the film forum's discussion. You can read more fascinating bits of history referenced in It's a Wonderful Life at Smithsonian, or if you have time, you can watch a feature-length video of the forum discussion plus the relevant movie clips at the same link.  

Capture the Atlas has announced their 25 winners in the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition. Each of the chosen photographs comes with a great story. The photo above is titled "Santa's Cabin," taken by Olli Sorvari in Levi, Finland. He hiked out to the cabin in a couple of feet of snow without snowshoes to get it, and then it started snowing again. At Instagram, he says, "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire... Didn’t need no water to put it out but sure felt thirsty after the hike🥸"  



The above image was capture by Marybeth Kiczenski on November 4 at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, on the shore of Lake Superior in Wisconsin. She drove eight hours to get out from under clouds to witness the effects of a geomagnetic storm. This view is definitely worth it.

See all 25 winning images with their photographers' stories at Capture the Atlas. -via Everlasting Blort


See also: the 2020 winners.

Krampus is a European Christmas demon that serves as the opposite of Santa Claus. For children, Santa Claus, or Father Christmas or St. Nicholas, was the carrot and Krampus was the stick. But why should kids have all the fun? Krampus was never really much of a thing in the United States, as if we let the legend drop in the ocean as Europeans immigrated to the States. Or maybe the Protestants who didn't celebrate St. Nicholas Day left Krampus behind when they moved the St. Nicholas traditions to Christmas. But most likely, it's just that Krampus wasn't all that well known outside of the Alpine region until relatively recent times. Of course, once we had the internet, the Krampus legend spread and grew exponentially, as anything as weird and fun as a Christmas monster is bound to do.  -via Boing Boing

Read more about Krampus in many previous Neatorama posts.

The documentary series The Beatles: Get Back took a look at the recording of the Beatles' 1970 album Let It Be. Over about eight hours, we got an in-depth look at how the band wrote and recorded the entire album in three weeks. That feat would not have been possible if the band members didn't know each other thoroughly or hadn't been working together for years. The collaborative process of writing songs worked because of unwritten rules that John, Paul, George, and Ringo, as well as their producers and crew followed. Sure, there was conflict, but not nearly as much as could have been for such a project. Tom Whitwell identified some of those rules from watching The Beatles: Get Back, and explains them for us. The most important is how to get your two cents in without alienating your collaborators.

1. The ‘yes… and’ rule

The first rule of improvisation (and brainstorming) is “yes… and”. When someone suggests an idea, plays a note, says a line, you accept it completely, then build on it. That’s how improvisational comedy or music flows. The moment someone says ‘no’, the flow is broken. It’s part of deferring judgement, where you strictly separate idea generation from idea selection.

As they slog through Don’t Let Me Down, George breaks the spell. Instead of building and accepting he leaps to judgement, saying “I think it’s awful.” Immediately, John and Paul lay down the rules: “Well, have you got anything?” “you’ve gotta come up with something better”.

Don’t judge, build.  

Read all ten rules for productivity and brainstorming in a group at Medium. -via Kottke

The longest place name in the world is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, which is a hill in New Zealand. I would guess the sign painter charged an arm and a leg to label it. TikTok member tehamua says he can't pronounce it, but he will try for us, and give us some background, too. According to Wikipedia, the name means "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one". Most folks just call it Taumata. If you want to hear someone who knows how to pronounce it, weather reporter Oriini Tipene-Leach rattles off the 85-character name of the hill easily. But then she is challenged to pronounce that place in Wales, which trips her up.

That place is Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch, which, at 58 characters, is the second longest place name we know of. It has several shorter versions. And tehamua tries that one, too.

-via Metafilter 

Back in the day, those who made a living hauling goods from the Great Lakes to New York City spent their summers working and the cold winters living on their barges tied to the city's docks. They couldn't afford to rent a house on land, and they formed a community of sorts on the water. It was a life they were used to. In the winter of 1926, around 80 men, women, and children lived in 30-40 barges lashed together at the dock end of 96th street. On Christmas night, a storm blew in while the residents were sleeping and somehow caused the moorings that kept the barges in place to came loose. They silently began to drift down the East River, toward what seamen called "Hell Gate," where currents and tides were particularly dangerous. Two dogs on the barges, named Fanny and Sandy, started barking frantically.

Three blocks away, the city fireboat George B. McClellan was tied up at the foot of 99th Street. Fire Lieutenant John Hughes and his crew of 16 men were below deck. All cuddled up on an old coat on a bench in the McClellan’s cabin was Peggy, a fluffy white spitz dog who served as mascot–not watchdog–of the fireboat.

Hearing Fanny’s barks for help, Peggy awoke from her snooze and sprang from her comfy bed. She leaped through a partly open hatch and landed on the boat’s icy deck.

Peggy responded to Fanny's barks with her own barks, waking the fire crew. She kept barking, pointing her face in the direction of the drifting barges, until Hughes figured out what was happening. The rescue of the barge fleet was complicated, but could have been a huge disaster for the people on them if it weren't for the three dogs that were on alert that night. Read about the rescue and about the culture of the barge colony at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company