Wow, you’d expect it to be a very old wine hidden in someone’s high-end wine cellar. But alas, surprisingly, it’s horse semen. Before the ‘no nut November’ jokes come butting in, wealthy investors are willing to spend over four million dollars just to ensure that the foal they could breed from a proven winner’s semen will bring back their investment. Watch Business Insider’s piece on the topic to learn more! 

A champagne chair is a dollhouse-sized chair made from the cap, cage, and/or cork from a champagne bottle. We can imagine it originated from partygoers who needed something to do with their hands while listening to drunk conversation, but it has become somewhat of an art form, and as happens to all human activities, it has been turned into a competition.   

The year is the 17th for the annual DWR Champagne Chair Contest. Make a chair from the  foil, label, cap, cage, and cork (anything but the glass) of up to two champagne bottles. There's a division for original design, and a division for recreating a chair from the gallery at Design Within Reach. Entries must be in by January 5, so if you plan correctly, you can use your New Year champagne. Prizes are substantial DWR gift cards, and there's a bonus:

For each entry, Herman Miller Cares is donating $50 to Artist Relief, a charitable initiative providing financial help to artists during the pandemic. The more entries, the more artists are helped.

Read the contest guidelines at Design Within Reach. Find a basic how-to to get you started at Instructables.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user Mark Morgan)

It’s not exactly a painkiller when you get hungover in the morning, but at least this drink can make you forget the pain of living, temporarily, or whatever alcohol lets people feel besides the massive pain in the morning. If you’re looking for a new sparkling cocktail to drown your sorrows with, the Painkiller Cocktail might be the one you’re looking for. Check Saveur’s full recipe for this boozy concoction. 

Image via Saveur 

Scientists have been curious about planets in our solar system for years. Those objects make up a small percentage of the vast unknown space. There’s still a lot of other heavenly bodies out there, and it seems that scientists are now focusing their attention on a different celestial object: asteroids: 

The next round of asteroid missions will try out a bunch of unusual styles of exploration. Lucy will visit the Trojan asteroids that move in the same orbit as Jupiter. The Psyche mission will travel to the asteroid Psyche—a mysterious object that appears to be composed almost entirely of metal. DESTINY+ will head to Phaethon, a "rock-comet" asteroid that appears to be crumbling because it passes so close to the Sun. NEA Scout will use a solar sail to navigate to a near-Earth asteroid.

Most dramatic of all, the DART spacecraft will ram full-speed into a small asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. The goal is to test out a technique for deflecting a dangerous asteroid if we discover one coming our way; four years later, the Hera probe will follow up to assess the damage.

There are many reasons for this current fascination with asteroids. They contain evidence of how our solar system formed, how Earth got its water, maybe even how life got started here. They are rich, complicated mini-worlds in their own right. They are easy to visit because of their very low gravity. Someday asteroids could even provide useful resources for astronauts or for space-based industry.

Image via Discovery Magazine 

Well, it has to be high-end. Also, it has to come with the Pokemon Company’s seal of approval. Which is what this metal replica of the iconic game item is! The Pokemon Company has teamed up with The Wand Company to make an accurate replica of the Poke Ball, Great Ball, Ultra Ball, and Premier Ball, all of which will roll out in 2021. Relive your childhood dreams of catching Pokemon (or not; you could just put them up for display, these are expensive after all) - if you have enough funds to purchase them: 

The Wand Company’s Poké Ball will cost $99.99. It’s available for pre-order now and will ship on Feb. 27, 2021 — Pokémon’s 25th anniversary. So what does a hundred bucks’ worth of Poké Ball entail?

According to The Pokémon Company, the die-cast metal replica Poké Ball features proximity-sensing technology. When it detects motion, the ball will glow. Pressing the button on the Poké Ball “changes the light color or starts a Pokémon-catching illumination sequence.” It also comes with a presentation case and a stainless-steel ring on which collectors can display the Poké Ball replica. The case itself also comes with a touch-sensitive metal plaque that lights up the ball. (Oh, and batteries are included.)

Image via Polygon 

Are you heading to the airport for some holiday travel? Impress your fellow travelers with your refined sense of fashion with this purse by Etsy seller ConcaveOblivion. It's available in a variety of leather colors and finishes. The timer, which looks delightfully realistic, has a secret compartment that you'll need if people keep staring at your handbag.

The 1983 film A Christmas Story didn't make much of a splash when it was first released, but with television repeats over the years, it became a beloved classic for Gen X. Is it because the dysfunctional family makes the viewer feel better about their miserable childhoods by comparison? Or is it because the stories of a miserable childhood become funnier the more you tell them? As Screen Junkies shows us in this Honest Trailer, it's more likely the latter, as two kinds of memories collide to make A Christmas Story a holiday classic: Jean Shepherd's recollections of his childhood that grew into the semi-fictional sequences of the movie, and the shared cinema experience of a generation of movie fans.

In 2019, 4,000 cars were loaded into a cargo ship, but were not properly balanced. The ship capsized off the coast of Georgia, and the salvage operations have been going on ever since. Last month, they got to the big job- cutting the ship into sections and hauling them away. That involves some serious equipment.

The main player in the complex slicing operation is called the Versabar VB-10000 lift vessel, a gigantic yellow dual-barge crane used for the first time in 2010 and developed in response to hurricanes damaging oil platforms. The company that builds the enormous contraption says capacity of the tall twin-gantries is 7,500 tons, though each of the two trusses is structurally capable of handling over 5,000 — it’s apparently the buoyancy of the barges that limits capacity to 7,500. Speaking of the two barges, each has four 1,000 horsepower thrusters to keep the vessel precisely positioned overtop of the wreckage.

See pictures of this huge undertaking and an explanation of how it's done at Jalopnik. -via Damn Interesting

Archaeologists have found thousands of paintings of animals and humans across cliff faces in Colombia. This newly-discovered long stretch of prehistoric art is one of the world’s largest collections of rock art, and hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients.” Experts estimate that the paintings were created at least 12,500 years ago, as the Guardian details: 

Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.

These animals were all seen and painted by some of the very first humans ever to reach the Amazon. Their pictures give a glimpse into a lost, ancient civilisation. Such is the sheer scale of paintings that they will take generations to study.

The discovery was made last year, but has been kept secret until now as it was filmed for a major Channel 4 series to be screened in December: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.

The site is in the Serranía de la Lindosa where, along with the Chiribiquete national park, other rock art had been found. The documentary’s presenter, Ella Al-Shamahi, an archaeologist and explorer, told the Observer: “The new site is so new, they haven’t even given it a name yet.”

Image via the Guardian

cheers pic.twitter.com/pVFNfVXHUY

— Food (@fooduz) November 28, 2020

At your office Christmas party, you may find that you don't have enough plates to serve everyone cake. So, once you have drunk all of the wine, just slip the upended glasses over the cake to slice off a piece. Then you can spoon it into your mouth. Or just be the first person to grab a chunk of cake with your hands, which is my usual approach.

-via Born in Space

Santa Claus feels like society has progressed to the point where he's a has-been. No one wants to sit in his lap, people no longer welcome late night intruders, and they like to track their packages with apps. In this video, the jolly old elf confides his anxieties to his psychotherapist. This ad for the Norwegian Postal Service was produced by the agency Matias & Mathias. -via Laughing Squid

I would call it the right headpiece for someone’s Among Us cosplay, but I guess some people would recognize Daft Punk first before the little animated beans in a video game. Regardless, this equipment serves as a protector of your health and your privacy at the same time! The Blanc Mask, designed by Alexey Dolgushin, was created to work as a PPE but not look like one: 

The Blanc provides a protective, full-face cover, giving you a tinted visor to look through, and specifically designed air-channels to breathe through. Two high-efficiency SGS-tested HEPA filters make sure the air you breathe is 99.97% pure, trapping any microparticles, microorganisms, and VOCs in the process. The mask itself offers an air-tight seal, while carefully calibrated pathways ensure the air you breathe always passes through a filter, giving you pure air with each breath. Air that you exhale passes out through outlets located at the base of the mask, ensuring your visor never gets fogged up. Should you choose, the Blanc even comes with a unique corrective visor system that gives you prescription visors, so you can effectively wear the mask without spectacles… although the mask’s inner padding offers enough space for you to wear your own glasses.

Image via Yanko Design 

Reddit user TySquii was messing around his camera one day and was taking random pictures in his house. And upon shaking the camera a little while it took a shot, TySquii happened to take this picture of the fire, which looked like a flaming sword at this moment.

Cool!

(Image Credit: TySquii/ Reddit)

If you watch this video and are on the edge of your seat waiting for the glass to break, I can tell you it isn't going to -at least not when we can see it. It really is glass. Glass artist Matt Eskuche makes a lot of beautiful glass objects, but the most astonishing is the "impossible goblet." The incredibly thin stem shows off just how much play borosilicate glass can have!



While your first thought may be "When is it going to break?" the second thought is "How can you ever wash this glass?" I can relate. -via Boing Boing

Saturn's moon Titan is bigger than Mercury, and so far as we know, it's the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has surface liquid. Near Titan's north pole, there's an entire system of lakes filled with liquid methane. These lakes show tributaries that hint of a weather system in which methane evaporates and then rains over the land. We know this because the Cassini probe scanned Titan with radar, which bounces off land but is absorbed by liquid. The rate of absorption indicates depth.

Kraken Mare (literally, Kraken Sea) is a huge lake near the north pole of Titan. Cassini pinged it with radar many times. On one such pass, the track of the radar went over land, then the main part of Kraken Mare, and then a bay called Moray Sinus (no, not the nose of the eel; sinus means bay, and the name comes from the Scottish firth). As the radar pulses pass through the liquid they get attenuated, fainter, before reflecting back up to Cassini. By measuring the attenuation the depth can be measured.

The scientists found that Moray Sinus has a depth of about 85 meters, which is impressive. But over the main body of Kraken Mare they got no reflected pulse at all. Local conditions can make it hard to know exactly how much radar is absorbed by the liquid (for example, if the surface is rough with waves, which is actually likely) but the lower limit for their measurements is 100 meters. If conditions were actually good, then it means the depth is at least 300 meters.

For reference, the average depth of Lake Superior is around 150 meters. While impressed the otherworldliness of a moon with liquid methane lakes, I am also intrigued by the naming of such lakes, and wish I could've been a fly on the wall when those were proposed. Read more about Kraken Mare and the other lakes of Titan at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/USGS)