The beloved TV host and chef on CNN's travelogue, Anthony Bourdain, had died in June of this year and it was a bit too soon for a lot of people. For his colleagues, though they were in a period of grieving, they still had to finish the rest of the series that had already been shot.

The pieces were there. But they had to be assembled. The last five episodes that featured all original material had been shot. But Bourdain had fully narrated only one of those. What the ZPZ staff quickly realized, however, was that they were uniquely qualified to complete Bourdain’s opus.

Alan Siegel of The Ringer tells us more.

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The Big Bang isn't the start of everything? It appears that time had already existed before the Big Bang happened and physicists test the theory out in a new study.

Taking Einstein's famous equations at face value and making as few assumptions as possible, a team of researchers has rewound the clock on our Universe to find it wouldn't lead to a stopping point at all, but would take us through a different kind of beginning into a flipped space.

To understand what all the fuss over the Big Bang is, we need to rewind a bit to understand why physicists think it may not have been the start of everything.

Keep rewinding the clock – by around 13.8 billion years – and we get to a point where space has to be confined to an incredibly tiny volume, also known as a singularity.

Read more on Science Alert.

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Colin O'Brady will go down in history as the first person to complete an unaided, solo trek across the Antarctic continent. After 54 days in the icy wilderness, he has finally crossed his finish line.

Using solely his own muscle power, O’Brady skied 932 miles pulling a 300-pound sled over 54 frigid days across the coldest, windiest, most remote continent on Earth, crossing from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean via the South Pole.

After a remarkable 80-mile continuous push over the last two days, almost five times his strenuous daily average, he emerged from the TransAntarctic Mountains onto the Ross Ice Shelf a little before 1 p.m. EST, December 26 and stamped his name into the annals of polar lore.

Read more about his story on Nat Geo.

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During the holidays, or probably even on weeknights, a cold glass of beer would help relieve some of the stress that you experienced throughout the day. As you down that glass, a warmth fills you inside.

Quinn Hargitai for The BBC tells us more about the spruce beer, a drink that was commonly used to prevent scurvy.

Despite its name, the drink contains a negligible amount of alcohol; it’s more like a root beer (a sweet, North American soft drink) than a lager or ale. Even so, on such a sweltering day, it wouldn’t feel a stretch to say the drink saved my life. As legend has it, this beer has something of a reputation for saving lives.

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Genetic engineering has given us so much possibilities toward the advancement of medical technologies and being able to reprogram blood cells into neural stem cells may help in finding treatment for a whole host of illnesses.

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the stem cell institute HI-STEM* in Heidelberg have succeeded for the first time in directly reprogramming human blood cells into a previously unknown type of neural stem cell.

These induced stem cells are similar to those that occur during the early embryonic development of the central nervous system. They can be modified and multiplied indefinitely in the culture dish and can represent an important basis for the development of regenerative therapies.

So what other benefits will we have from this research? Rei from DKFZ shares more.

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There you have it. Listening to the same holiday music over and over again can literally drive you crazy, according to science.

The sights and sounds of the holidays are here — and they're completely inescapable. No matter where you go, it seems like the same classic songs are played on repeat.

But the incessant repetition can have a psychological impact. There's a U-shaped relationship between how often we hear a song and how much we like it, what's known as the mere exposure effect.

At first, holiday music may spark nostalgia and get you in the holiday spirit. But hearing "Jingle Bells" for the millionth time can lead to annoyance, boredom, and even distress, researchers say. That's because the brain becomes oversaturated, triggering a negative response.

Read more on the Business Insider.

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If I were living a comfortable life with a high-paying job, I would probably only think of ways that I can help people with the resources that I have. But I would never think about risking my life to put a stop to one of the most infamous crime syndicates in the world. But this guy did.

His name is Gaspare Giacalone and he had been working as a manager at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development in London until he quit his job in 2012 to run for mayor in his hometown in Italy.

Petrosino, his hometown, is at the heart of the territory controlled by the Cosa Nostra crime syndicate and it was his goal to end their streak.

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We live in a time where the world is at the precipice and one wrong move could effectively make the balance of power collapse. So what happens after that? And is there a way to prevent it from happening again?

History shows that it is bound to happen but there are other factors that come into play surrounding its eventual dissipation. Learn more about it on Foreign Affairs.

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Who knows how much resources our planet still contains especially with the excessive mining and harvesting of precious stones and minerals from the earth. But, it seems we may have a possible alternative source and it's not on Earth.

A newfound kind of super-Earth alien planet might glitter with rubies and sapphires, a new study finds.

Scientists conducting previous research have often thought of super-Earths as rich in iron, much like Earth. However, Dorn and her colleagues suggest this new type of super-Earth is loaded with calcium and aluminum, as well as minerals rich in these elements, including sapphires and rubies.

Read more on Space.

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According to data and statistics, drug-resistant strains of malaria tend to emerge in ares with low transmission but that seems to be the opposite of how we would think about it logically. And researchers might have found the answer to this puzzle. It's all in the math.

Researchers from Emory University in Georgia, US, might have cracked the puzzle – and the answer lies not in environmental or public health factors, but in sheer, brute mathematics. “It's basically a numbers game,” says lead author Mary Bushman.

In order to try to resolve the issue, she and her colleagues set up a computer model that ran simulations of malaria transmission over a period of roughly 14 years. The model contained 400 digital people who were attacked, on a random basis, by 12,000 digital mosquitoes.

The first thing that became apparent was that earlier simulations contained a serious flaw. The models had assumed that people co-infected by both strains would contain a parasite population that split evenly between the two.

“But our model showed that the system is asymmetrical,” explains Bushman. “When you put two strains in a host they virtually never split 50-50.”

And this led to a second, critical observation: the time of infection was critical.

Andrew Masterson has more on the study at Cosmos Mag.

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It has been one of those objects associated with Christmas. They are pretty and nice to look at, and some faint glow of giddy merriment wells up inside when you shake them. They have an assortment of designs inside them, but have you ever wondered where they originated?

Snow globes are irresistible for their promise of brief, easy entertainment—plus the added visual delight of the whimsical miniatures found inside.

Yet despite their ubiquity, most of us don’t know where snow globes come from. Indeed, the early years are rather fuzzy—but it is clear that the snow globe traces back to Europe near the end of the 19th century.

Kim Hart writes about the brief history of the snow globe on Artsy.

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More than 25 years ago, Stephen Hawking posited in a paper he wrote which was published on the journal Physical Review D that time travel just isn't possible. At least, not in this universe.

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I haven't heard ot this government organization before and I believe a lot of people haven't either, so what is this Working Group and what do they do exactly?

US Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin announced this weekend that he would be convening the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets for a call today (Dec. 24) to discuss the volatility that has plagued markets in recent weeks.

The official line on the working group is almost staggeringly unsexy: it’s a Reagan-era initiative connecting Wall Street and Washington to work on issues affecting the market.

At least, we can glean that much from what it's called but it was actually created to perform three clear jobs which can be summarized thus: identify, consult, and report. Simple enough though because of its secretive nature, there have been conspiracy theories about it.

Read more on Quartz.

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Being able to see something magnificent or majestic for yourself is one thing. You can tell people about it but not all will be convinced about what you've seen and whether you actually saw it, or if you're just making it up.

But for the crew of Apollo 8, especially Bill Anders, who was the mission photographer, they had seen our world like never before and they were able to capture that moment for everybody else to behold.

Before that moment 50 years ago, no one had seen an earthrise. The sight sent Bill Anders, the mission photographer, scrambling for his camera.

What he captured became one of the most influential images in history. A driving force of the environmental movement, the picture, which became known as Earthrise, showed the world as a singular, fragile, oasis.

Anders talking to the Guardian about it said:

“It didn’t take long for the moon to become boring. It was like dirty beach sand,” Anders told the Guardian. “Then we suddenly saw this object called Earth. It was the only colour in the universe.”

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It seems that our search for a place outside Earth, which could accommodate the entire human civilization just in case our planet implodes, has turned up with something.

Scientists say that they have detected large organic molecules on the surface and the immediate surroundings of Enceladus.

“But we were completely shocked [to find] organic compounds much more complex than we had previously imagined,” says study team member Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, US, who specialises in the oceanography of outer moons.

Is this a cause for celebration? We don't know about that yet. I mean, if life could possibly continue on Enceladus when Earth is no more, we need to first take time to build spacecraft that could take the entire human race on a journey toward that safe haven.

Whether we would even have the time to focus our attention on that is something that I doubt would happen given everything that's going on. But if the findings prove to be true, then we can probably breathe a little sigh of relief knowing that we have some kind of last resort.

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