As climate change accelerates, heat waves have become more and more common, and with more heat waves come more coral deaths. It turns out, however, that some corals have the capacity to survive and recover from heat waves. A team of scientists published these findings recently in the journal Nature Communications.

Corals and algae have a mutually beneficial relationship. The corals are made up of colonies of tiny invertebrates, called polyps, that live in the crevices. Polyps house photosynthetic algae, and in exchange for a place to live, the algae provide them with an abundance of food and a nice touch of color. But even a small hike in the water temperature triggers corals to dispel the algae, causing them to bleach and turn a ghostly shade of white. Bleaching doesn't exactly kill the corals, but it leaves them vulnerable to disease or starvation, and the corals only have a small window to recover before it's too late.

A team of researchers zeroed in on Christmas Island, also known as Kiritimati, to study brain and star corals in the midst of a heat wave that lasted from 2015 to 2016. It is the third largest coral bleaching event in recorded history, and it lasted for an unyielding ten months, according to a press release. The team tagged, photographed and tracked individual corals around the island to see how they were faring throughout the relentless heat wave, reports Donna Lu for New Scientist.

More details about this over at Smithsonian Magazine.

This is great news!

(Image Credit: Acropora at English Wikipedia)

As a kid growing up in St. Thomas in the U.S Virgin Islands, Jelani Nelson would teach himself how to code from the textbooks he picked up during his visits to the U.S mainland. Now, he devotes a lot of time to making it easier for children to study computer science. AddisCoder, the free summer program he founded in 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has now taught computer science to over 500 high students. He now also creates cutting-edge algorithms designed to compress big data sets into smaller components — a type of system that has massive memory-saving benefits.

Learn more about Nelson’s life and work over at Quanta Magazine.

(Image Credit: Constanza Hevia for Quanta Magazine)

As it says in its title, the game World of Warcraft is a game about war. In order for a person to level up in this game, he has to kill beasts such as dragons and boars, and he has to beat other players in battle. But while other players are leveling up via brutal means, a pandaren monk named DoubleAgent is picking flowers. Day after day, this player would do the same thing, and after 17 days, he leveled up to 60, the game’s current level cap.

What's even more impressive is that he's done it all without ever leaving the Wandering Isle, a start zone only meant for players below level 10.

The reason Doubleagent never left the Wandering Isle is because he'd have to choose one of Warcraft's two factions to enlist in: The Alliance or the Horde. That'd mean becoming a pawn in two military regimes responsible for the slaughter of millions.

[...]

It's hard to overstate just how tedious this accomplishment is. The Wandering Isle is a zone meant for brand-new characters and only rewards a paltry amount of experience for killing creatures there or, in Doubleagent's case, picking flowers used for the herbalism skill. Every hour that Doubleagent spends playing, he simply runs in a circle, clicking on flowers as they respawn.

Now that’s determination.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: NeutralAgent/ Twitter)

An archaeological dig in Qubbet el-Hawa, Egypt, has unearthed ten mummies from a common burial chamber. One of those mummies belonged to a woman named Sattjeni A, as her coffin was labeled. She lived around 4,000 years ago.

Between her bandaged legs, in the lower part of the pelvis and beneath the linen wrappings, the researchers found a ceramic bowl with signs of use, containing charred organic remains. The analysis of the skeletal remains was carried out by a team of anthropologists from the UGR (coordinated by Professor Botella) and it confirmed that the woman had survived a serious fracture in her pelvis, perhaps caused by a fall, which must have caused severe pain.

It is highly likely that, to alleviate these pains, the woman was treated with fumigations, as described in medical papyri of the time describing solutions to gynaecological problems.

“The most interesting feature of the discovery made by the researchers from the University of Jaén is not only the documentation of a palliative gynaecological treatment, something that is quite unique in Egyptian archaeology, but also the fact that this type of treatment by fumigation was described in contemporary medical papyri. But, until now, there had been no evidence found to prove that such treatment was actually carried out,” explains the UJA’s Dr. Alejandro Jimenez, an expert in Egyptology and director of the Qubbet el-Hawa Project. This work has now been published by one of the most prestigious academic journals in Egyptology, Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Spracheund Altertumskunde.

The researchers did not say whether the broken pelvis contributed to Sattjeni A's death. It is touching to think that those who prepared her for burial wanted to continue her pain-relief treatment into the afterlife. Read more about this find at Universidad de Granada. -via Strange Company

Like chocolate syrup and pickled pigs' feet, some foods just naturally belong together. McDonald's China division recently discovered that Oreo cookies and Spam are complementary ingredients. Kotaku reports that the Oreo Spam burger will go on sale on December 21. It will be limited to a run of 400,000. Perhaps, like the McRib, it will be occasionally returned to the menu for hungry fans.

Image: McDonald's of China

Some years ago, we learned about snapdragon, a Christmas game that involves sticking your hand in a bowl of flaming brandy to snatch a raisin. While it sounds painful and dangerous, the game was a part of Christmas tradition for hundreds of years. The staff at Atlas Obscura got together on Zoom to find out why, by playing the game themselves.  

True, all of us hesitated before putting our hands into the fire. As the writer of this piece, I took it upon myself to snatch out the first almond. “It’s fine, no pain!” I shouted, showing off the burning nut before popping it in my mouth.

Soon, we were all grabbing at the raisins and almonds fearlessly. While brief bursts of heat did make us occasionally snatch our hands away, the sting faded quickly, and no one got burned. Some early accounts of snapdragon recommended throwing salt on the flames, without any explanation of what it would do. As it happens, pinches of salt tossed on the fire makes the flames pop and flare brilliant gold, for just a second.

While we started the game nervous about dipping our hands into literal fire, it soon became clear that snapdragon is really, really fun. So why does no one play it anymore?

A U.S. Forest Service fire scientist explains why the game works, and we get a recipe for proper snapdragon fire at Atlas Obscura.

(Image: public domain)

Army ants are pretty scary. They are numerous, carnivorous, and relentless. But even army ants have enemies and parasites, those other bugs that are brave enough to infiltrate and even imitate army ants. Ze Frank describes what an army ant's day is like, and what enemies they may encounter. It's pure nightmare fuel.

Beginning in the 1940s, Hallmark commissioned renowned artists to create Christmas cards for the company. One of those artists was Salvador Dali. It was a bold move for Hallmark.

Dali made modern art popular and accessible. He’d painted the Christmas-themed interactive ‘Double Dalí’ cover for Vogue magazine’s December 1946 issue. So Hallmark contracted him to create cards in 1948. His images of a headless angel, a glowing but featureless baby Jesus, and three wise men atop snarling camels did not sell. In 1959 they hired him for a second time, a commission for which Dali requested “$15,000 in cash in advance for 10 greeting card designs, with no suggestions from Hallmark for the subject or medium, no deadline and no royalties.” The results (half of which he dashed off in the bathroom of his New York hotel room within an hour of signing the contract) were too racy, avant garde and perverted for Hallmark. They produced just two of the Dalí cards, a nativity scene and a depiction of the Madonna and Child – neither of which sold well. Hallmark swiftly dropped Dalí’s cards from their product line.

Dali had better luck with the pharmaceutical laboratory Hoechst Ibérica in Barcelona, who produced Dali -designed Christmas cards to send to their clients for several years. See Dali's Christmas cards for both companies at Flashbak. -via Nag on the Lake

Aaron Gage noticed how the lyrics to "Deck the Halls" would fit into Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." Viewers at reddit clamored for the whole song, but he said he didn't want to wear out the welcome, and the rest of the song didn't fit quite a well as this part. I have to say that I agree- once you've heard the joke, there's no reason to drag it out to feature-length. But it's a good joke.

Dodging my responsibilities like....#hockey 🪑 pic.twitter.com/Itk1NuqmaN

— Pavel Barber (@HeyBarber) December 17, 2020

Pavel Barber is a Canadian hockey coach who describes himself as "a stickhandling specialist." That means he's an expert in the precise and consistent use of the hockey stick. In this video, he's at The Skating Lab, a hockey training facility in Toronto. That facility's website is fascinating to browse, as it's filled with photos of many specialized machines designed to optimize hockey performance.

In this video, he's using a treadmill to maintain control of a puck while maneuvering it around increasingly difficult obstacles.

-via The Awesomer

Joaquin Baldwin (previously) spent 101 days making this video as his quarantine beard grew out. You see the beard wax and wane as he sings "Better Days" by Radical Face. There's a video explaining how he made this, which is kind of long. The short explanation is that he shot a reference video, sorted the frames by computer to know where his face should be each day, meticulously lined up each shot, and then edited 2,117 still photographs together. It was way more work than he had anticipated. -via Geekologie

Finland is a wonderful country where the sun shines for a few minutes each year and the language is impossible to learn. Finns avoid social interaction whenever possible, rarely smile, drink boatloads of coffee, and aren't at all afraid of the Russians, yet they have been ranked the happiest people in the world for years. We already know that Finns have a great sense of humor about themselves. British author Joel Willans lives in Helsinki and created Very Finnish Problems, a network of websites that pokes gentle fun at the things that make Finland unique.



You can find lots more at the Instagram account for Very Finnish Problems. Also see a ranked list of their best memes at Bored Panda.

In a year when there were almost no concerts, no music festivals, and hardly any live music even in small venues like bars, some songs managed to catch our ears. DJ Earworm is back with his annual remix of the biggest 25 songs of the year (in the USA). He calls it Something to Believe In. You'll find a list of the songs at YouTube. -via Metafilter 

Check out our collection DJ Earworm's end-of-the-year remixes here.

Between the 1860s and World War I, railroads were built to tie the various communities of New Zealand together. They were heavily advertised with beautiful posters under the auspices of Railways Studios, the creative department of New Zealand Railways' advertising branch. The studio also produced propaganda posters and ads for other products, but the railway posters are their legacy. These travel posters, described as "more beautiful than they needed to be," are the subject of Peter Alsop's new book Railways Studios: How a Government Design Studio Helped Build New Zealand.

Alsop and company’s book is filled with many examples of graphic art that flirts with the finer stuff, although the vast majority of its gems lack attribution since most New Zealand Railways posters were signed “Railways Studios,” if they were signed at all. Take the circa 1929 poster created by an anonymous artist, whose assignment was to promote the Night Express, a roughly 24-hour run on South Island connecting Christchurch and Ivercargill. In that poster, above blocks of text detailing the train’s “Southbound” and “Northbound” timetables, we are confronted by a moody, cloud-filled sky rendered in various shades of blue. Beneath this depiction of heaven hovering over earth, a trio of sheep graze in a pasture. Two appear to be in mid-bolt or about to, but one of the animals stands still, facing the other direction. Only by following the creature’s gaze do we see a pair of train tracks, and only then do we notice the tracks are partly illuminated in yellow, presumably by the headlamp of the Night Express, which the artist has cleverly left out of our field of vision. This is a great painting, no matter what it was selling.

Read about Railways Studios' work and see some fine examples at Collectors Weekly.

A friend of redditor appuhlatchuhn recently brought an adorable dissertation into the world. She got this beautiful maternity photo taken with it. Mama looks so proud. I hope the little tyke grows up and gets published as a monograph some day.