Is it 7 AM? 11 AM? 3 PM? Look at the whole picture. The tire tracks on the snowy road. The school buses. The lamps on the street. The quiet ski resort.

If you can tell the time here on this picture correctly, then chances are you have the potential to be a spy.

Members of the Central Intelligence Agency must be meticulous in order to successfully analyse global intelligence, and now it's testing the public.

The agency asked people to "put your analytical skills to the test" by working out what time of the day it was in [this] wintery scene.

This picture was posted via the agency’s official Twitter account.

The correct answer over at Mirror.

(Image Credit: CIA/ Twitter)

A rare conjunction of planets will soon be visible from earth for the first time in almost 800 years. Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be in close conjunction from our vantage point, only about a tenth of a degree apart. This closest point will be on December 21, the winter solstice, as NBC reports.

It will be the first Jupiter-Saturn conjunction since 2000, but the first time the planets will have been so close since 1623. It will also be the first time such a close conjunction has been observable since 1226, according to EarthSky.

Still, according to NASA, "while the two gas giants may appear close, in reality they are hundreds of millions of miles apart."

The event has been dubbed the "Christmas star," because some astronomers have theorized the “Star of Bethlehem” could have been a rare conjunction involving both Jupiter and Saturn.

While the conjunction on the 21st will be brief, the planets will appear close together on days both before and afterward. Read more about the phenomenon and how to best observe it at Bad Astronomy.  -Thanks, WTM!

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Japan — Twitter user Nekomarusuisan was worried about his girlfriend, who was spending a really long time in the bath. To make sure that nothing’s wrong with her, he checked up on her, and he was surprised with what he found out. “When I went to check, she was busy enjoying paradise,” he said in his tweet. And when he said that his girlfriend was “enjoying paradise”, he meant this.

If we were the girlfriend, we probably wouldn’t have moved from that position either. A nice drink, a nice game, and two nice cats. What more could you possibly want?

Nekomarusuisan also has a YouTube channel for their cats, Chamunosuke and Marukichi.

I just hope the Nintendo Switch did not get wet.

(Image Credit: nekomarusuisan7/ Twitter)

Peru, Illinois — On December second, cops and firefighters as well as city residents joined forces for a mission. The mission: capture a runaway wallaroo, a marsupial between the size of a wallaby and a kangaroo.

This bloke — named Wally — got away from his owner in LaSalle County.

Over the course of two hours, Wally the wallaroo leapt through yards, streets, and roads, while the townspeople chased after it.

Fearing that the marsupial might get hit by a vehicle, Peru Police Chief Doug Bernabei shut down nearby roads.

Eventually, Wally made his way into a river, where he was rescued by two anglers who happened to be at the right place and at the right time.

“We were screaming and pointing. We were saying, ‘Get your net out, get your net out,’” Bernabei told the (Peoria) Journal Star. “They yelled, ‘It’s not a dog!’ We said ... ‘It’s not a dog, it’s a wallaroo.’”

They used a net to fish Wally from the frigid water and into their boat before taking him to shore.

“He was so cold we couldn’t register his temperature on the thermometer,” said veterinarian Allison Spayer. “We warmed him up. We dried him off.”

What a chase!

(Image Credit: Scott Anderson/NewsTribune via AP)

Okay, I don’t know how much time you have on your hands, but there’s no harm in asking about  the unknown, right? Well, scientists are looking for a hidden message from the ‘creator’ of the cosmos at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is space’s largest billboard, so to speak, as it is visible across all of space. Did physicists find something? Sadly, no: 

Michael Hippke, a self-described "gentleman scientist" affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany, went looking for a sign from a creator in that background radiation. But, either way, he didn't find one.

Leaving aside all the hidden assumptions in the question — that there is a cosmic creator, that a cosmic creator wants people to know about them, that the cosmic creator has an insight into the minds of future intelligent creatures and can therefore predict the future — the CMB would be a good place to hide a message if you were a creator trying to target civilizations at our current level of development, said Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who wasn't involved in Hippke's work published to the arXiv database on Nov. 29. (The paper has not been peer reviewed.) 

"There could be different media on which you'd encode the message," Loeb said. The CMB is a good option because we've been able to detect it since the first good microwave study of the sky in 1964, as opposed to, say, gravitational waves, which require more technical equipment and we only detected in February 2016. "It all depends on what level of intelligence you want to approach. It's almost like writing different sections of a newspaper for different audiences."

Image via Live Science

Move over, mysterious monoliths, there’s a new conspiracy in town. Time to bring back your tinfoil hats on, as an unclassified image that was reportedly circulated among U.S. intelligence agencies has leaked online. The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the Pentagon’s term for unidentified flying objects, is silver and cube-shaped: 

The Debrief’s Tim McMillan, a contributor to Popular Mechanics, learned of the photo’s existence from a “defense official who has been verified as being in a position to have access to the UAPTF’s intelligence reports,” he writes. Three other government officials confirmed with McMillan that the photo, which was shared on a secure network used by the U.S. Intelligence Community, comes from a 2018 task force report.

A military pilot reportedly encountered the object while flying over the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast of the U.S. in 2018 and captured it with their personal cell phone. It’s likely that a backseat weapons system operator on an F/A-18F Super Hornet took the photo of the object, which McMillan calls “inverted” and “bell-shaped,” and describes it having “ridges or other protrusions along its lateral edges, extending toward its base.”

It’s possible the object may be a GPS dropsonde, a sensor on a parachute that provides info on the vertical profile of a storm. But as McMillan points out (and confirms with an atmospheric researcher), the actual dropsonde doesn’t appear in the photo—just the potential square-cone parachute. And there would obviously have to be an aircraft above the object to drop it, and no such craft is visible in the image.

Image via Esquire 

Christmas becomes gloriously weird in the song "Apocalypse Christmas" by the RiffTones. Josh Flowers made a video for the song using clips from various B-movies featured on RiffTrax. From those movies, he managed to find an illustrative scene for every line about the very worst of Christmas. -via Metafilter

In the wee hours of Christmas 1964, more than 30 people experienced weird sounds and apparent mayhem on their rooftops in the village of Warminster, England, and at the nearby military base. You might be tempted to blame it on Santa Claus, but the phenomenon became known as the Warminster "Thing."   

Strange things continued to happen in Warminster, a town just over 15 miles from Stonehenge, in the new year. In February 1965, an entire flock of pigeons suddenly died. The following month, three families heard loud noises coming from above their houses, their roofs and windows shaking with the force. And in June, the Warminster residents began to see unidentified objects flying through the sky.

Residents who witnessed the UFOs gave wildly differing descriptions. News of the "Thing" drew notoriety to Warminster for years, but no plausible explanation has ever been found. Read about The Warminster "Thing" at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: Pete Linforth from Pixabay)

There’s something symbolic about it, if you think about it. Artist and sculptor Daniel Popper created a permanent public installation at Society Las Olas, a residential building in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The installation is a huge figure ripping open its chest. The work also features a fern-adorned archway that viewers can walk through, as My Modern Met details: 

Works of this scale are not new for Popper, who has spent years sculpting monumental public installations. In 2019, his Modem Swamp work towered over the Modem Festival in Croatia. For that installation, Popper collaborated with others to illuminate the work with projection mapping.

While music festivals are not possible at present, Popper says that he has already been focused on permanent public art installations. He hinted that more permanent works like Thrive are forthcoming. When asked how he hopes audiences will interact with Thrive, he tells My Modern Met, “I hope they will continue to interact with it and enjoy it and that the message and feeling continues for many years to come. In many ways it's a symbol of hope and transformation which have been central to many people's worlds during 2020.”

Image via My Modern Met 

Google Trends has released the top search terms for 2020, and made this video to illustrate the overarching topics of what people searched for. It's a short but good look at the year, centered around the word "why," but then you see the actual lists of top searches in the US, and here are the top five that start with "why."

1 Why were chainsaws invented

2 Why is there a coin shortage

3 Why was George Floyd arrested

4 Why is Nevada taking so long

5 Why is TikTok getting banned

Welp. The chainsaw thing happened back in January, when a story went viral explaining that the chainsaw was invented to help with childbirth. The story's virality lasted all year, finally reaching TikTok late in the year. But the trend list has plenty of other stuff that makes more sense. The global list is more consistent, with really big news at the top of every topic.  -via The Mary Sue

What could be more festive than a hot toddy infused with honey, spices, and citrus fruits? That's what boilo is, but unless you're from Pennsylvania, you've probably never heard of it.  

While boilo’s range is firmly in coal country, its origins lie over the Atlantic. Lithuanian immigrants coming to work in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal mines brought their krupnikas honey liqueur with them. Krupnikas does share some similarities with its coal-country cousin, such as its spice-and-honey flavoring and the fact that it’s often whipped up at home for special occasions. But stateside, boilo-makers often use the drink as a canvas for creativity. Additions from mint to cranberries are fair game, though purists often butt heads over what constitutes authentic boilo.

You have to be careful making boilo, since it is cooked (hence the name) and the main ingredient is 101-proof Four Queens whiskey. Be sure to keep those two things separate in both time and space. Find the recipe for boilo, which requires an entire bottle of whiskey and only yields a little over three pints, at Atlas Obscura. Be careful warming up any leftovers.

If ever you see this type of octopus being sold at your local market, alert the authorities immediately. While it may look good and smell good, these octopus are not edible, as they can kill people.

These are Blue-ringed octopuses, one of four most poisonous species of octopus and among the most venomous marine animals.

… The bodies of these octopuses contain tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin that can cause respiratory issues, nausea, heart failure, paralysis, blindness, and yes, even death.

Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources state that the poison is so strong that it cannot be neutralized by cooking the octopus. There is also no cure in the event that a person gets poisoned by this neurotoxin.

Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of such dangers posed by eating this type of octopus. The said department has issued a warning about these octopus after a woman alerted them that these were sold at the night market in Thailand.

Yikes!

(Image Credit: Facebook/ Mashable)

If you’re wondering how entities like Goodwill sell people’s donations and where the profits go, this piece from Good Day LA will fill you in. With people cleaning and emptying their closets, Goodwill has received a surge of donations. Find out how they sort, organize, and sell them here. 

(via Flipboard) 

Image screenshot via Flipboard

I have a large red cat, and I see cats on the internet all the time who look just like him, so I know how common they are. Redditor teoman_asyn got a lesson on how common they are as he got into a strange situation.

My cat went missing for 2 days, so I put an advert on Facebook. Literally 5 mins after my cat comes to the door. 30 mins later, my neighbour comes and drops off what he thought was my cat. Now I have two identical cats.

You may consider two identical cats a bonus, but the cats aren't all that happy. The picture sparked quite a few puns, but also some imaginative speculation.

1. The original cat goes away for only two days and when he gets home, he finds that his human has already bought an identical replacement. Imagine what that can do to a cat's ego.

2. This is what happens when Schrodinger's cat participates in the double slit experiment.

3. The owner of the new cat will place a missing cat notice on Facebook, and will suddenly have three cats.

4. It's possible teoman_asyn always had two cats, but they were never in the same room.

5. It's also possible that neither one of these is the original cat, and there may be even more big red cats show up before the original cat comes home.

6. Of course, teoman_asyn now plans to advertise a "found cat." He'll have to be pretty careful not to return the wrong cat to the rightful owner.

Donnie Darko is described as "a 2001 American science fiction psychological thriller film," which is a lot. I didn't see it, and only became aware of it later as a movie about an imaginary rabbit, kind of like Harvey but darker. It became a cult favorite among misunderstood teenage geniuses contemplating the more sinister aspects of existence. This Honest Trailer explains the movie further, but I am still far from understanding what it's really about.