Funen, Denmark — It was the winter of 1984, and Timothy Tangherlini was hard at work at the dairy farm. One day, as he was brushing cattle in the barn, he spotted a tiny man in a hat, who was sitting on the back of one of the cows. Tangherlini tried to talk to the stranger, but the tiny man immediately jumped out the barn window. He then told about his strange encounter to the couple who owned the farm. The couple then told him that it was “the nisse.”

Tangherlini is now a professor of Scandinavian folklore at UC Berkeley. Whether or not one truly believes the tales, the barn-dwelling “house elves” often known as nisse have been figures in folklore across the Nordic region since at least the late Middle Ages. Farmers believed that surviving a hard winter depended on the nisse’s whims, which were mercurial. Keep your farm’s nisse happy, and he’d make sure your milk stayed fresh and your livestock remained healthy. Disrespect him, and you might find your cow dead in the morning.

A family that wanted to stay on their nisse’s good side could offer him a tasty present. On Christmas Eve, before the harsh winter had truly set in, farmers left a bowl of porridge in the barn. Everyday porridge was made by boiling barley, rye, or oats in water. But the nisse received something special: a luxurious, sweet porridge of rice boiled in milk and topped with butter.

Take note of the ingredients stated above, especially to the butter on top.

Woe to the person who forgot the nisse’s butter. In one story, a milkmaid decides to play a trick on her farm’s nisse, hiding the butter beneath the porridge. Seeing his offering ungarnished, the nisse flies into a rage and kills the family’s cow. When he finishes his meal and realizes his mistake, he “solves” the problem by stealing a neighbor’s cow and delivering it to his family’s farm.

Today, most Danish families no longer live in farms. However, the tradition of leaving a bowl of sweet porridge for the farm nisse still continues.

Learn more about this over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Sam O’Brien/ Atlas Obscura)

“With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.” These were what Goethe, the famous German poet, has to say about this man. Throughout this man’s life, he was praised across Europe and was considered one of the greatest minds in the said continent. He influenced many scientists after him, such as Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Alfred Russell Wallace.

He was a botanist and a zoologist. His pivotal work: the binomial classification system. His name: Carl Linnaeus.

Learn more about Linnaeus’s life and legacy over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: Alexander Roslin/ Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s your daily dose of cuteness: tiny kittens. Because if there’s something that could make you say “awww” easily, it’s them. And if you don’t have a reason to smile today, this could serve as one.

Have a good day ahead!

Image via Martini on Facebook

Rommy De Bommy, an artist in the Netherlands, makes fashion accessories that look just like (and I'm going to guess tastes like) food products. She says that they're made of clay and "and little bit of magic." She can make custom orders, so if there's some special food that speaks to your soul, De Bommy can make a purse that looks like it.

The latest mashup from YouTuber There I Ruined It (previously) features Billy Idol singing a lively Christmas song. The tune of "Jingle Bells" fits the lyrics of "Dancing With Myself," but that doesn't mean it's a good thing.

This one was a challenge from a co-worker. I hope you enjoy, and also hate it, as much as he did.

-via reddit

Now that’s wicked! The Morus, designed by Roy Yan and Axe Yi, is a tiny vacuum dryer that can completely dry and de-wrinkle your clothes in a few minutes! The dryer uses a combination of heat and vacuum to extract the water from laundered clothes, as Yanko Design details: 

The technology is a little new-fangled, but to uncomplicate how it works – the Morus uses heat to turn water into vapor (not steam), and generates a vacuum to reduce the pressure to just below the vapor pressure of water (0.0313 atm). This basically accelerates the drying process, extracting every bit of water from your clothes so that they’re 100% dry when they come out. A spinning drum on the Morus ensures that every corner of the clothes you put in is exposed to the heat and the vacuum for the highest efficiency, and a reverse-tumble feature makes sure your clothes don’t get crumpled or wrinkled in the process. To top everything off, the Morus even UV sterilizes your clothes before giving them to you, so not only are they perfectly dry, they’re safe and disinfected too!

Image via Yanko Design

Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network in the Solar System recently. Through this “celestial highway”, comets and asteroids near Jupiter are driven to Neptune’s distance in less than a decade. These routes could be used to send man-made spacecraft to the ends of our Solar System rather quickly.

In their paper, published in the Nov. 25 issue of Science Advances, the researchers observed the dynamical structure of these routes, forming a connected series of arches inside what's known as space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. This newly discovered "celestial autobahn" or "celestial highway" acts over several decades, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of years that usually characterize Solar System dynamics.

Whoa.

(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)

Because if there’s something that you should do if you have big muscles, it’s to show them off, and this 5-year-old kangaroo named Jack knows just how to do that. When his name was called, he gave a look at the camera and started flexing, perhaps to assert dominance.

I got to be honest. Kangaroo Jack looks terrifying.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: ViralHog/ YouTube)

This is the Simeis 147, a supernova remnant known by many names. It is also cataloged as Sharpless 2-240, and the Spaghetti Nebula, probably because of its reddish appearance.

Seen toward the boundary of the constellations Taurus and Auriga, it covers nearly 3 degrees or 6 full moons on the sky. That's about 150 light-years at the stellar debris cloud's estimated distance of 3,000 light-years. This composite includes image data taken through narrow-band filters where reddish emission from ionized hydrogen atoms and doubly ionized oxygen atoms in faint blue-green hues trace the shocked, glowing gas.

Looks more like a brain to me, but what do you think?

(Image Credit: Georges Attard/ NASA)

There are many types of fungus that will invade insects in order to reproduce, but most kill the host and then release spores. Two new species of fungus discovered in Denmark consume their fly hosts from the inside out, but keep them alive for as long as possible to walk or fly around while the fungus shoots spores out of the fly's abdomen over a larger area than they could from a deceased fly, which also brings them into contact with new victims. A study from the University of Copenhagen identifies these new fungi as Strongwellsea tigrinae and Strongwellsea acerosa.  

The unusual tactic of keeping the host alive while releasing spores is called active host transmission (AHT). It is an effective way of getting access to other healthy individuals. Scientists think the fungi could be producing substances that “dope” their hosts (sometimes colloquially referred to as “zombies”), meaning they can stay fresh enough to live for days after infection – only collapsing once there is nothing left in their abdomens but the fungus.

“We suspect therefore that these fungi may produce amphetamine-like substances which keep a fly’s energy levels high up until the end,” said lead researcher Prof Jørgen Eilenberg from the department of plant and environmental Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. Researchers also believe the fungi produce substances that keep microorganisms away from the fly fungal wound and keep it clean, but they are yet to test this.

While we don't know what species of insect is pictured, we can imagine the victim might look (warning: disturbing) something like this. Read more about the new discoveries at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Martin Cooper)

Blob Opera is an experimental generator in which you control four opera voices coming out of cute and colorful blobs. It's a bit limited in lyrics, but luckily it's also limited in letting you mix something out of tune. As you play with it, the generator will eventually offer a button in the lower right to switch to festive Christmas tunes. You can play a quick sample I recorded here. -via Metafilter

In order to keep people safe from each other, masks are required at all times at Walt Disney theme parks in Florida. However, this protocol doesn’t seem to be strictly implemented in the parks, and so there are still some who manage to get inside these places without wearing one. Disney is trying to address this health concern, but not on the way that you’d expect.

… Disney is reportedly taking an eccentric approach to mask enforcement: editing a digital mask onto visitors’ faces in photos. The bizarre practice, first spotted on social media by industry blog Walt Disney World News Today, has left guests confused about why the park is doing something about masks but not actually enforcing them.

[...]

WDWNT suggests that the digital masks are being added to remind guests that they are in fact supposed to keep their masks on.

A Twitter user commented that this is a waste of time and programming. Another asked if this was even necessary.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: WDW News Today/ Twitter)

Youtuber GEN3 OWL CHANNEL writes:

Garu likes to play with toys.

He loves stuffed toys and will not return it to me.

!Check!

It is dangerous for owls to eat toys.

Monitor and be careful.

Caylee Gilson realized that it was time to say goodbye to her large sectional when she moved to her new apartment, and so she put it up on sale on her local Facebook Marketplace. On the social media site, however, she saw a smaller grey couch, and she fell in love with it, and so she bought it. Upon bringing the old-new couch to her home, however, Gilson and her boyfriend did not realize that they brought something else with them.

Gilson knew the springs on the bottom of the sofa were exposed but didn't think anything of it. "[The seller had] already told me there was no liner under the couch because her Boston terrier liked to rub on the underside of the couch,” Gilson told The Dodo. “We packed all of it up in the truck and thank goodness we didn’t have to take a highway to get home. But it was about a 30-minute drive.”

The next day, Gilson worked from home and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. But that night, as she was preparing dinner, her young son called to her from the living room. “The next thing I know my son says, ‘Mama, there’s a cat in here,’” Gilson said. “I didn’t think anything of it because he is always talking about this imaginary cat named Ender Dragon.”

As you may have guessed, Gilson’s son really was not making stuff up; there was a real cat in their house.

Gilson couldn’t figure out where the mysterious cat had come from since all her doors and windows were closed. “I started thinking, ‘The only thing I’ve changed is the couch. Maybe the cat came in with the couch,’” Gilson said.

Sure enough, a quick text to the couch’s former owner revealed that the cat had caught a ride to Gilson’s house via his favorite sofa.

The couch’s previous owner, who was also the cat’s mom, rushed over to Gilson’s house to retrieve the cat, which apparently was hiding inside the couch’s arm as Gilson brought it home.

What an adventure for the cat.

(Image Credit: Caylee Gilson/ The Dodo)

Toby Turner, also known as Tobuscus, made an excellent literal trailer of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and in his version of the trailer you’ll learn at least two things: one, the bad guy’s feet should never touch the ground, unless he’s introducing another bad guy. Two, arrows should always be recycled.

(Image Credit: Tobuscus/ YouTube)