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

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)

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

Let's go four decades back in time, back the set of the best Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Good Morning America premiered almost seven minutes of footage from the film set, from the difficult filming of the ice planet Hoth to lightsaber training.

A majority of the clips are being seen publicly for the first time, and include many lighthearted moments shot during production featuring lead actors Mark Hamill (Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) and Harrison Ford (Han Solo).

In 1979, cameras captured Hamill and the crew on location in Finse, Norway,—doubling as the planet Hoth— during a major snowstorm that hampered the production. Wearing a blue crew jacket with a name tag that reads “HEY YOU," Hamill jokingly invents the Tautaun Dance, named after the planet’s furry lizards.

“Three steps like this, and then you fall over,” Hamill says with a laugh.

-via The Mary Sue

Day 2 of my #AdventCalendar

[sound up] pic.twitter.com/BhpVBWjbIK

— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) December 2, 2020

Twitter user @Pandamoanimum put together an Advent calendar to spread joy and laughter for the holidays. Or despair, who knows, your mileage may vary. Each day she posts a new video to the thread showing how things go hilariously wrong at Christmastime. Some are Christmas classics that you haven't seen in years; others will be new to you, but each one is aimed at making you giggle. There are 15 days to catch up with so far. Check back for daily updates. -via Everlasting Blort

By the time the Christmas season of 1918 rolled around, the influenza pandemic had raged around the US for months. Cases were going down in some areas, up in others. How could people keep the Christmas spirit and still stay safe? Kenneth C. Davis, who wrote a book about the pandemic, More Deadly than War, gives us a look at Christmas 1918. As now, there was little federal oversight, and local public safety regulations varied widely.  

Davis says San Francisco took it quite seriously, implementing a strong mask mandate in the fall as well as measures that’d be described today as social distancing. After cases rose sharply in mid-October, the city locked down harshly; the measures worked to keep the flu at bay and, a month later, the city reopened and dropped the mask mandate. But the flu was not done with the city yet. Come Christmastime, Davis says, the cases were again on the rise, and residents, having finally escaped from the pandemic shutdown, were not eager to go back.

“San Francisco wanted to institute the mask rule again but people resisted,” he says.

In other places, people decried the cancellation of church services for the holiday, and store owners were desperate to stay open and make sales. So really, things were not all that different in 1918. And 675,000 Americans died of the flu. Read about the pandemic Christmas of 1918 at Smithsonian.

If you were watching TV at all between 2006 and 2010, you are probably familiar with Lost. The series started out promisingly, with a plane crash and a group of survivors on a mysterious island. But this drama was no Gilligan's Island. The series was a sensation and was constantly discussed by fans, but it just got weirder and weirder as the series was renewed year after year. By the time Lost ended, it made no sense whatsoever. Screen Junkies takes a closer look at Lost in this Honest Trailer.

Janelle Shane can generate the weirdest things with artificial intelligence. As 2020 draws to a close, readers have suggested that she train a neural network on the year's headlines and see if the algorithm can come up with anything to compare. I mean, you have to admit that the news this year was unusually unusual. These are examples of real-world headlines.

Mysterious alien-like monolith discovered in Utah desert
What you need to know about ‘murder hornets’
The Mystery of The Platypus Deepens With The Discovery of Its Biofluorescent Fur
Famous Vienna hotel turns to drive-in cake

So Shane took up the challenge, although she admits that she tends to read more news about the natural world, so that may affect the type of headlines generated. She probably just avoided political news. Still, the results are spectacular.

Swarming bears are given deadly slingshots by Russian hunters
Good news / Bad news about crows in Burlington schools
When Killer Orchids Attack: How the Deadly Corpse Orchid Is Turning Up in U.S. Backyards
Massive radioactive sinkhole continues to grow in Russia
Why scientists believe the 'Killer Raccoons of the Pacific Northwest’ are responsible for this kill
Lycoperdons, the tiny deadly puffballs, are on the march again
From deep in the Earth, darkness “boils” to the surface
A sassy tardigrade previews new Doctor Who

That's just the beginning. Read more 2020 headlines generated by artificial intelligence at AI Weirdness. -via Fark

When she was working on her master's in fine art at the University of Hertfordshire, Regina Valkenborgh made a pinhole camera out of a beer can. She attached it to a telescope at the university's observatory, and then forgot about it. That was in 2012. This year, the can was removed by David Campbell, technical officer at the observatory. Inside was photographic paper that had recorded the path of the sun 2,953 times! It had been exposed for eight years and one month.

Regina Valkenborgh said: “It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched, to be saved by David after all these years. I had tried this technique a couple of times at the Observatory before, but the photographs were often ruined by moisture and the photographic paper curled up. I hadn’t intended to capture an exposure for this length of time and to my surprise, it had survived. It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence.”

-via Kottke

How do you make a classical artwork both 3-dimensional and pixelated? You build it in LEGO blocks! Professional LEGO artist Jumpei Mitsui has completed a recreation of the renowned woodblock print "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai.

富嶽三十六景 神奈川沖浪裏 をレゴで立体化しました。
長年作りたいテーマで頭の中でイメージはできていたのですが、今回ついに具現化することができました。立体なので色んなアングルから楽しめる作品になっています。

今日から大阪の阪急三番街・HANKYU BRICK MUSEUMで常設展示しています！ pic.twitter.com/fHEXvxfYDT

— 三井淳平 / Jumpei Mitsui (@Jumpei_Mitsui) December 11, 2020

The work has been permanently installed at the Hankyu Brick Museum in Osaka. See more pictures at Brick Fanatics. -via Boing Boing

#SATELLITE SPOTLIGHT: Here's a closer look at today's total #SolarEclipse from @NOAA's #GOES16🛰️. The moon's shadow tracked over the southern Pacific Ocean, as well as across #Chile and #Argentina, before moving into the southern Atlantic Ocean just before sunset. pic.twitter.com/YoO9N36s7c

— NOAA Satellites - Public Affairs (@NOAASatellitePA) December 14, 2020

On Monday morning, people near the southern tip of South America experienced the only solar eclipse of 2020. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite caught images of the moon's shadow sweeping across the continent, blocking out the sun.

People in areas where the outer part of the moon's shadow falls, called the penumbra, see a partial solar eclipse. For today's eclipse, that included much of South America as well as a small portion of Africa's southwest coast. If the sun were a little bit farther from the Earth, there would be what's called an annular solar eclipse, in which the moon appears to not block the entire sun and a ring of the sun is still visible. An annular solar eclipse was visible in parts of Africa and Asia in June.

Read more about the eclipse and see another video from space at Mashable.

The website Every Movie Cough is "The world's most complete collection of cinematic coughs (and sneezes)." Mike Lacher and Jason Eppink put a lot of work into this compilation.

Since the beginning of motion pictures, filmmakers have trained their cameras at whooping, wheezing, sneezing, sniffling, hacking humans. Some of these expulsions are pivotal to the narrative. Many are purely incidental. But today, they all take on a new significance as vectors for disease. That’s why we believe now is the moment to examine them together in isolation, to see how their depictions vary across history and genre, and to understand how they’re shaped by the lens of the present.

You can see all the collected movie coughs in a mega-video, browse the gallery for individual clips, or check out the categories of gross coughs, drowning coughs, Spielberg coughs, and background coughs, or sneezes by themselves. You can even play a game of identifying the movie from an audio clip of a cough, if you think you're an expert on such things. -via Everlasting Blort

An article at Jezebel is ostensibly an opinion piece on whether couples should sleep in the same bed in a shared bedroom, but a large part of it is a history of the bedroom in Western civilization. While poor people always slept communally due to lack of space, even wealthy families all slept together in medieval times, including servants. The concept of dedicating a room for sleeping, separate from other household activities, came about only gradually.  

In the 17th century Dutch or English colonial American home, the master bedroom doubled as the entry parlor, where a family kept all its nicest possessions, including the home’s “best bed,” typically reserved for the master and mistress, according to Elizabeth Collins Cromley in “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms.” But by the mid-18th century, upper-class New Englanders had adopted the English trend of adding landings, hallways, and centrally located staircases to homes in order to create dedicated rooms for different purposes. In America, however, for the upper and middle classes, the home’s main bedroom was still connected to rooms used for entertaining, though more private, dedicated spaces for servants and children were often found upstairs. But trends toward individualizing sleeping spaces by decorating children’s rooms according to gender also had the trick of making them more private, and the “Mother’s room” (which was the term for what we now call the master bedroom) was generally tailored to a wife’s needs rather than a husband’s:

The custom of keeping the master bedroom on the first floor will not go away, because children grow up and leave, but the folks left behind get older and don't want to climb stairs. We also learn about the evolution of sleeping configurations, including sleeping porches and arranging a bed halfway out of a window, which is hard to picture. Read about the evolution of the master bedroom at Jezebel.

You may look upon the face of this cat and think he's about to attack you, or at least judge you harshly from a distance. Meet Giggles, who went viral even before he was adopted from a shelter in Akron, Ohio. It was Riggi Rescue who gave him that perverse name. But Giggles only looks angry; according to his new owner, he's really a sweetie. It appears that he has a puffy forehead that gives him a permanently angry look, what has been called "resting bitch face." Read Giggles' story and see a ranked list of his best pictures at Bored Panda. You can keep up with Giggles in his new home at Instagram.

At the pace our technological advancements are going, it will soon be possible to completely copy a human brain and save it digitally. But if your brain is digitally uploaded and saved, does that mean you are immortal? Would your brain be "you," or just a copy of you? For one thing, we cannot really address whether "consciousness" can be uploaded until we completely define consciousness. And we will not know whether that digital consciousness is actually the same as the person until we try it out. That will lead to questions of personality, existence, and soul, which are more complex than even copying a complete brain. What could possibly go wrong? Well, someone might accidentally delete you, or the power may go out. You might upload to 99% and get stuck. You know how that goes. Or it could be worse. The speculation presented here by Kurzgesagt is fascinating, but if the length of the video bothers you, you can skip the first and last minute. -via Geeks Are Sexy