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

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.