Once upon a time, there were two space programs that did great things because of their Cold War rivalry. Now we have many nations with government-funded space programs, plus private enterprises in the space travel business, and these programs work in partnership with each other to expand our missions to explore (and exploit) inner and outer space. If everything goes as planned, the year 2025 will be a banner year for space exploration.

NASA has several unmanned missions to deliver scientific instruments to the moon. They are also launching infrared detectors to see further into space than ever before. The ESA will explore low earth orbit. Japan is sending probes to the moon, while China will explore asteroids. And several programs are sending probes out into the solar system to explore everything from Mercury to the moons of Jupiter. Read up on what to expect in space exploration next year at the Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: NASA/Firefly Aerospace)

Rays, whether they are manta rays, sting rays, or mobulas, swim in a different way from any other swimming creature because they are shaped like pancakes with faces. What's weird is that parts of their faces are on top, and the rest is on the bottom. But you already knew that, and this video is from Ze Frank, so we also learn about their body teeth, their arrowhead with a stutter, their creepyholes, their waterfall of teeth, and their ampullae of lorenzini. You'll have to watch the video to find out what those are. Different kinds of rays have various weird ways of eating, and some even have superpowers like eletrocution or eating with their fins. He doesn't even get to the flying mobulas. This particular True Facts video is rather clean compared to others in the series, but it's still pretty funny in places. There's a 70-second ad at 5:05.

We know in our heads that the New Year is just a date on the calendar, the first date, actually, and holds no astronomical or religious significance. But we still have many superstitions around that date, most involving food. We know that hog jowl, collard greens, and black-eyed peas bring good luck in the new year, but did you know there are also superstitions about foods that will bring bad luck?

There's an entire list of foods that portend a bad year if eaten on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, and many of them are meat. You shouldn't eat crab or lobster because these creatures move in odd ways. A lobster can walk backwards, and a crab scuttles sideways. Eating them could mean that you can't move forward in the next year. The same justification holds for beef and chicken because of the way those animals move. So you might want to go meatless or stick to pork for the holiday. There are also food superstitions around the color or the state of certain foods, varying by nation. Read up on eight foods to avoid for a prosperous 2025 at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Matt Johnson)

Science fiction addressed our feelings about robots long before we actually had humanoid robots. The word itself came from the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which mechanical men are exploited for their labor until they rebel. A similar theme lurks under the surface in the 1927 film Metropolis. Both stories made the treatment of robots an analogy for the treatment of laborers because we are bound to sympathize with a robot who looks like a human. But it's not a human, so businesses were keen to appeal to the exploitive side of humanity by offering labor-saving robots to ease our personal burdens. This motive was personified by a robot named Eric that was introduced to audiences in 1928.

Eric wasn't a true robot as we think of them today. His movements were remote-controlled and his voice was pre-recorded, but he seemed human enough to spark sympathy from people he met. For 1928, he was a miracle of a mechanical man. Almost 100 years later, we still haven't perfected humanoid robots, and we haven't truly sorted out our feelings about them either. The working robots we have, from oversized factory arms to Roombas, don't look anything like a person. Read about Eric the Robot and some early ideas about robot labor at Popular Science. -via Damn Interesting

I can so relate to this. You love your family, and you love it when they come visit. At the same time, spending weeks getting the house cleaned and the pantry stocked only to see the house wrecked and the refrigerator emptied in no time when they all get there... well, it makes you realized how tiring all this merriment can be. Your normal schedule is thrown off, you tense up hoping to make it through, and everyone is trying their best not to offend each other. You notice everyone's weird behavior while they are noticing yours, too, yet everyone is pretending it's all okay. But that's just the downside. Years from now, you'll only remember the best parts of the visit, and that will give you the strength to do it all over again. These common facets of a family holiday get together are perfectly illustrated by Foil Arms and Hog.

After some disappointments over the last few years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a good year in 2024-  100% of their movies were record-breaking hits! That fact is a little easier to swallow when you realize that Marvel only released one movie this year, and it was Deadpool & Wolverine. Still, you can't argue with success.

But Marvel's good year involved a lot more than what you see on the big screen, or what you saw on your television screen. The news going on behind the scenes made it clear that Marvel has changed its focus and may be in for big changes in the future. First, the 2024 movie release schedule shows that Marvel is willing to step back and consider their path, and the one film they had this year shows they are also perfectly willing to venture into new territory with an R-rated film. Other news spoke to the future: Robert Downey Jr. returning to Marvel as Dr. Doom, the Russo Brothers coming back to Marvel to do two Avengers films, and the upcoming Spider-Man and Fantastic Four projects. Read about what Marvel has done this year to inspire confidence among their fans, and what it all may lead to in the coming years, at Gizmodo.

Does Santa Claus exist in the video game universe? You betcha- even in Super MarioWorld! But this pixelated Santa in his skivvies turns out to be a grumpy old man who'd just as soon someone else take the title of Santa Claus for a while. That duty falls to Mario, who is only interested in what new powers this arrangement brings him. One is that he can transform koopa troopas into koopa reindeer! It's all in service of bringing gifts to good little boys and girls, and video game characters, too. The problem comes when Mario focuses only on the video game characters, meaning he doesn't quite live up to the standards we set for Santa Claus. What else wold you expect? Dorkly shows us in this video what chaos follows when Mario tries to play Santa. The plot may remind you of The Santa Clause, but luckily here, the old man doesn't have to die for someone else to take his place.

(Image credit: daQueen1011)

Good stories should be shared with strangers on the internet, because we all need to be reminded of what's good in the world. Imagine getting excited for your baby's first Christmas. Sure, he's too young to understand, but there will be pictures documenting it for the rest of his life. Then something happens and he's in the hospital over the Christmas holiday. The child's nurse understood what a first Christmas photo meant, and she went above and beyond to recruit a Santa Claus to be there when the shutter clicked, watching over the little boy and keeping him safe. I checked OP's comment history, and found the baby is okay a year later.

(Image credit: NotGayRyan)

You know how some people buy a gift for their significant other that's really something they want themselves? It works out when a couple is in tune and has shared interests. A husband and wife got the gifts above for each other. Perfect. You have to wonder what their dog got- probably everything! Read a long list of Christmas posts gleaned from reddit that will bring a smile to your face at Bored Panda.

The question for this episode of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) was, if there were a lake on the moon, what would it be like to swim in it? Well, there is no lake on the moon, but someday there might possibly be a swimming pool. It would have to be sheltered from the elements, or lack of, just like astronauts have to wear helmets. Safely inside a secured moon base, a pool would be a lot of fun. See, physics works the same on the moon, but the gravity is different from that on earth, leading to the kind of fun Randall Munroe is famous for.  

Alas, real astronauts know better than to get their hopes up about a pool on the moon. The cost of transporting that much water would be, dare I say it, astronomical. Right now, we can't even manage to get our people back home from the ISS.

Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup was the operations officer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in 1955. It was close to Christmas when Shoup received a call on the "red phone," a dedicated line that was to be used if the Soviets were to launch an attack on the US. Back then, Americans expected that to happen any minute. But it was a false alarm of a sort, actually a wrong number. When the news got around to the airmen, they made a joke out of it. But Shoup was a father as well as a straight-laced, by-the-book Air Force officer and knew how to handle children. That one call led to an entire series of events that would change the way we celebrate Christmas.

Shoup later became known as "the Santa Colonel." He died in 2009. Three of Shoup's four children got together to tell the folks at StoryCorps what happened that day in 1955, and what became of it as time went on.

It's not that unusual for artists to dip into the past when designing a gingerbread house, so artist and occasional baker Edward J. Cabral went back to the bloody days of the French Revolution. Behold his Christmas masterpiece: a gingerbread guillotine! Click to the right to see this bad boy from all angles. And it works, too! Well, the blade is probably not all that sharp, but it does move.

The entire gingerbread sculpture is edible, from the glittery rainbow candy platform to the peppermint "heads" in the receiving basket (minus the wrappers). You have to admire the ingenuity and skill that went into this gingerbread device, but at the same time, you have to wonder whether it's meant to be a warm Christmas greeting or a not-so-subtle warning. Miniature depictions of the guillotine were quite fashionable during the French Revolution, from haircuts to earrings, and it was always a warning to aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. Any way you see it, it's an incredible work of gingerbread- just don't lose your head over it. -via Everlasting Blort

The Parker Solar Probe took off from earth in 2018 and has been spending its time bouncing from Venus to the sun and back again, each time getting closer to the sun. On December 24th, it is expected to come within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. Nicki Rayl, NASA’s deputy director of heliophysics, calls that "literally touching the star" because the probe will be in the sun's upper atmosphere. And you didn't know the sun had an atmosphere.

The Parker probe is there just in time to catch the sun at the apex of its eleven-year activity cycle, when the magnetic poles move, sunspots appear, and geomagnetic storms flare out into the solar system. But that's what it was sent for, to collect valuable data about the sun from a vantage point never before possible. The probe will be close enough to experience temperatures of 1700 degrees. How will it survive? Read about the purpose of the Parker Solar Probe and the extreme design that allows it to handle temperatures of up to 2500 degrees, at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

Charlie Brown was always the perfect character to illustrate the feelings of confusion or inadequacy we all experience some time or another. In clips from the 1965 Christmas television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, that inadequacy includes not really getting the Christmas spirit like everyone else around you. That doesn't make him odd, because it happens to most of us, at least in some years. It makes him relatable.

Charlie Brown's depression is a small part of the show, and takes a back seat to his bad luck and Snoopy's World War I fantasies, but it means a lot to people who share those same feelings. Chetreo took the relevant clips and gave them some autotune and arranged them into a song, for those who feel alone in their lack of Christmas spirit. You are far from alone.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

It seems every nation has it shared television habits, especially around holidays. We were a little surprised a year ago to find that it's a tradition in Italy to watch the 1983 film Trading Places on Christmas Eve. In Germany and Scandinavia, it is a tradition to watch Dinner for One on New Year's Eve. But on Christmas Eve, most of the television sets in Sweden, and many more in Denmark, Finland, and Norway, will be tuned to an annual broadcast of Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul  (Donald Duck and His Friends Wish You a Merry Christmas). At least that's what it's called in Sweden. The show is 66 years old, and is an American television production.  

It's the 1958 special Christmas episode of the series Walt Disney Presents called "From All of Us to All of You." This particular episode only ran occasionally afterward in the US and had not been on broadcast television since 1980. But in some countries it's become a beloved tradition to spend the afternoon of Christmas Eve with the family, watching that show. If you want to see what the fuss is all about, you can what that episode on YouTube. It's a compilation of clips from Disney's classic animated features, some cartoon shorts, and a greeting from Walt Disney. In the annual European broadcasts, a preview of an upcoming Disney project is usually included. Only a small part of the show is Christmas-related, but it's a big part of the holidays in Sweden! -via Boing Boing

A digital production company in London named Sennep made a new thing called Audibaubles, described as "sonic seasonal decorations." These are video snippets that look like Christmas ornaments in motion, although they are based on sound, specifically movie clips. The audio from each clip is rendered as a symmetrical waveform in the colors of Christmas tree ornaments. The puzzle part is when you try to guess the movie these sound clips came from. If you are distracted by the shimmering ornament, watch (and listen) again. Maybe even turn the sound on.



If you know what movie it is, you know. There are four Audibaubles in all, and if there's one (or more) that stumps you, the answer key can be found at vimeo. -via Moss and Fog