John C. Worsley does a Star Trek Christmas song every year. We've seen them here! He edits Star Trek clips to fashion 23rd-century versions of classic Christmas songs. This year Worsley took on the challenge of recreating Mariah Carey's mega-hit "All I Want for Christmas is You," sung by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (and friends). The entire song is covered, the editing is the best he's done, and there are some lyrical surprises to make you grin.

It's been more than four years since Fabrice Mathieu brought us the surreal short Darth by Darthwest, in which Cary Grant was chased down by a TIE fighter in a mashup of North by Northwest and Star Wars. Now we have episode 2! Roger Thornhill (Grant) is taken aboard the Millennium Falcon for a ride. He bonds with C-3PO and Chewbacca, gets chased by pilots of the Empire, and is finally safety deposited at Mount Rushmore.  -via Digg

When you make cookies in specific shapes, you roll out the dough and use a cookie cutter. There's always negative space involved, meaning leftover dough. So after you cut cookies, you gather up the leftover pieces and roll the dough out again. This is how it's done, but it's not the most efficient way to do it. Chemist Martin Lersch runs a blog called Khymos in which he explores the science of cooking. One of his projects has been to find the most efficient cookie cutter to make Christmas cookies with little to no dough left over to roll out again. He looked at it as a form of packing problem, in which a tessellated shape would be the most efficient. Others have described limitations to this kind of project.  

This didn’t stop Lersch, though, who created his own Christmas-themed tessellations of bells, Christmas trees, and other shapes using the free-to-use platform Tess. With help from a friend, he 3D-printed several cookie cutters and mixed up some dough. Lersch’s cookie of choice, pepperkake, is a sumptuous Norwegian gingerbread. Lersch, primarily a chemist, notes that it was once made with ammonium carbonate from ground deer antlers, though most people substitute baking powder these days.

After deciding on the Christmas tree as the most efficient shape, Lersch then got to work. Emulating Escher’s patterns, he stamped every other tree shape right-side-up, to fit perfectly with the trees around it, which he stamped upside-down. The result? Interlocking rows of cookies, with no leftover dough left between their lines.

Read about Lersch's tessellated Christmas tree cookies and why this kind of efficiency matters beyond baking, at Atlas Obscura. 

Oh yeah, the recipes for the cookies is here.

(Image credit: Martin Lersch)

"A planet near you" is relative, of course, as 300 million miles is still quite a journey. NASA's Perseverance rover launched in July, and is scheduled to land in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18. The landing will be covered live, and to drum up enthusiasm, NASA released a "trailer" for the landing, with all the drama you might expect for a blockbuster event. Perseverance's mission is to:

Seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth.

They named the mission Mars 2020, which was probably unavoidable but still seems unfortunate. Catch up on what the mission is all about at NASA.  -via Mashable

You may have heard at one time or another that honeybees hibernate in the winter. Insects use many different methods to survive cold weather, but bees do not hibernate. The beekeepers at Bell Farm in Iowa explain what they do to stay warm.

In the winter, honeybees cluster together in a ball roughly the size of a basketball. By flexing their wing muscles (the same muscles they use to fly), they are able to generate warmth and hold the cluster at about 85-90 degrees. The bees take turns shifting from the inside to the outside of the cluster so that everyone can stay warm. The queen is always kept at the center of the cluster.

The bees keep track of time passing, and make sure it is even warmer when it's time for the queen bee to start laying eggs. Bored Panda contacted Ellen Bell, who owns Bell Farm, to find out more about honeybees and beekeepers, and how they help each other get through a cold winter.

(Image credit: Bell Farm)

An unnamed man in Rio Linda, California, is known to the neighbors for flying around in his powered parachute. On Sunday, he dressed up as Santa Claus and headed out with the aim of delivering candy canes to community children. But instead, he got caught in the overhead power lines!

"A powered parachute lost power on takeoff near a school in Rio Linda, Calif., and then hit and became suspended in power lines around 11:00 a.m. local time (Sunday)," said a spokesperson with the FAA.

Power was shut off to about 200 customers in the Rio Linda area during the rescue, according to Sac Metro Fire.

“Immediately after power was shut off, we were able to move firefighters up into the power line and then lower the pilot — Santa Claus — down to safety,” said Chris Vestal with Sac Metro Fire.

Neither Santa nor anyone else was injured. -via Boing Boing

While every successful singer eventually does a Christmas album, which may have a single, they are mostly cover versions of earlier Christmas hits. And you can’t beat an original. The most familiar, comforting songs of the season come from the 1940s and ‘50s. The reasons for that have to do with the epic changes in how we consume music and entertainment in the middle of the 20th century. After those Christmas classics were introduced and became classics, any new version of the same song just seems unnecessary. -via Digg

Redditor olives4me designed her family's Christmas card to be the encapsulation of 2020. They weren't the only ones who made personalized greeting cards that couldn't be used for any year other than this one. And some were even for sale.

The best 2020 holiday card, courtesy of my brother and sister in law pic.twitter.com/4S72fZjnSJ

— susan rinkunas 🙋🏼‍♀️ (@sueonthetown) December 9, 2020

See 21 of these cards that people sent in remembrance of 2020 at Buzzfeed.

Despite the fact that movie theaters were closed for a big part of the year, and many productions were postponed, 2020 still had movies. And like every year, Sleepy Skunk made an artistic and emotional mashup of those movies with footage taken from their trailers. See it in widescreen mode at YouTube. If you stayed home this year and don't have a multitude of different streaming services, you may well find something here you want to explore further. There's a list of the movies here. This video contains NSFW language. 

Have you ever seen a cast-iron dog? They were once quite popular, used to prop open doors or to keep doorknobs from damaging the wall behind them. Scott Thompson knows all about doggie doorstops, rabbit and fox doorstops, too, as he has collected hundreds of the antiques. Their value depends on age (which can sometimes be hard to determine), condition, and rarity.

Collectors also pay a premium for animals that face one way or another. “Boston terrier doorstops came in left-facing and right-facing models,” Thompson says. “Believe it or not, only 10 percent were made with their heads turned to the left, so the value of left-facing Boston terriers is like four times that of right-facing ones.” Thompson also has a couple of Boston terrier doorstops that are looking straight ahead. “You don’t see many of those,” he says. “As a collector, it’s rare to even come by one, but I’m fortunate enough to have two in my collection.”

As he learned more and more about antique and vintage cast-iron doorstops, Thompson’s collection multiplied, like Leporidae, you might say. “After I bought that Albany doorstop, that spurred me to buy another, and another, and another. At this point, I probably have 100 or so rabbits and hares.” For the record, there’s a difference.

For their part, the rabbits and hares got Thompson interested in dogs. The dogs, in turn, sent him down a rabbit hole filled with foxes, probably because Thompson has also always been intrigued by English fox hunting, a social ritual that happens to involve a lot of dogs. “Those are my favorites,” Thompson concludes, “rabbits, foxes, and dogs.” Foxes, it should be noted, are the rarest of these three animals, at least in doorstop form, which is why Thompson only has a dozen or more, including a boot scraper, another type of heavy object found near doors that Thompson collects.

Thompson took a winding path to collecting animal doorstops, involving top hats and antique trunks. Read about his unusual collection of cast-iron doorstops at Collectors Weekly.

AsapSCIENCE doesn’t really need eight minutes to tell a joke, but this one requires some setup, because it’s SCIENCE! First, we get an explanation of the origins of humor, then the basic structure of a joke and what makes it funny. However, there is some humor along the way to the statistically funniest joke. Besides, you’ve heard that joke before.  -via Digg

If you've got a funnier joke, let's hear it.

We've often said the easiest way to find happiness is to help others. Now we see evidence that helping others may extend your happy life as well!

Studies show, for instance, that volunteering correlates with a 24% lower risk of early death – about the same as eating six or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day, according to some studies. What’s more, volunteers have a lower risk of high blood glucose, and a lower risk of the inflammation levels connected to heart disease. They also spend 38% fewer nights in hospitals than people who shy from involvement in charities.

And these health-boosting impacts of volunteering appear to be found in all corners of the world, from Spain and Egypt to Uganda and Jamaica, according to one study based on the data from the Gallup World Poll.

But it's not just volunteering for charitable work that has health benefits. The same benefits can come from donating money to good causes, performing random acts of kindness, and even taking care of children. Read about the research into doing good for others at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

A dramatic action film in miniature! This little guy goes the extra mile, but the prop master deserves  credit for bringing this story to life. It's amazing what quarantine boredom can accomplish. See more of Mr. Hamster's adventures.  -via Nag on the Lake

Newspapers.com presents a roundup of letters to Santa Claus from as far back as 1901. Most are pretty straightforward: I've been a good boy/girl, please bring me a GI Joe/dolly/pony, etc. But there was a letter dropped in a mailbox in 1992 that was reprinted across the country because it was so sad.  

“Dear Santa Clas, Please help my mom and dad this Christmas. My dad is not working anymore. We don’t get many food now. My mom gives us the food she would eat. Please help my mom an dad. I want to go to Heven too be with the angels. Can you bring me to Heven? My mom an dad woud not have too by things for me no more. That would make them happy. Plese bring my dad a job an some food. I live in my house like last year. We got candils. A city man took the lights a way. It looks like we don’t live heer no more. We do. I will wate for you too come in my room. I will not slep. Wen you give my dad a job and some food too my mom I will go with you and the rain deer. Merry Christmas too you Mrs. Clas too the elfs too. Thad.”

Readers donated a total of $17,000 for Thad and his family. Despite the efforts of many who tried to investigate, Thad was never identified, and the money was eventually given to the United Way. Read more letters to Santa from over the years at Fishwrap.  -via Strange Company 

(Image source: The Library of Congress)

Once again, mathematician Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University has won first place in the Best Illusion of the Year contest. His "3D Schröder Staircase" can break your mind until you see how it's done... and then it may still break your mind. Another finalist that caught my eye shows an illusion you probably never thought about before.



"Subtitles Illusion" is from high school teacher Masashi Atarashi. See the top ten illusions of 2020 in this gallery.