Just a couple of months ago, astronaut Frank Rubio returned from the International Space Station after setting an American record of 371 consecutive days in orbit. Now we find out that Rubio's time on the ISS was not without controversy. There was the case of the missing tomato.

The ISS has been growing a vegetable garden to see if space travelers could grow their own food. Rubio ceremoniously plucked the first dwarf tomato from the garden and used it to demonstrate the agricultural experiment to school children. Then the tomato went missing. On the ISS, it's difficult to keep track of things that aren't tied down (usually with Velcro) and it's also important to know where everything is, lest random objects interfere with equipment. Rubio spent between eight and 20 hours of his own free time searching for it. He mainly wanted to prove that he didn't eat the historic tomato. But it was not to be found.

Until now! Eight months after the incident, astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli notified NASA that something that might have once been a small tomato has been found on the space station. Rubio has been exonerated for the sin of eating a space tomato. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit:Koichi Wakata/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/NASA)

Eleven years ago yesterday, a monkey in a fluffy winter coat was seen walking around alone in an IKEA parking lot in Toronto, after he escaped from his cage and opened the door of the car it was in. The six-month-old Japanese macaque, named Darwin, instantly became one of the biggest memes of 2012. Keeping a macaque as a pet was illegal, though, and Darwin was taken from his owner.  

You will be happy to learn that Darwin is alive and well and thriving at Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Ontario. The macaques and lemurs who live there enjoy relative freedom and privacy compared to the homes, zoos, and research facilities they were taken from. It's not as good as being free in their native habitats, but for monkeys who did not grow up learning to live in the wild, it's the best life they could ask for. Japanese macaques normally live in a cold climate, so Darwin is not out of his element in Ontario. This species can live to be around 30 years old.  -via Boing Boing

Pantone Color of the Year 2024: PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz.

A velvety gentle peach whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and heart.

Learn more about PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz:https://t.co/323jbOLiTA#pantone #pantonecoloroftheyear #pantone2024 #peachfuzz pic.twitter.com/9cjGBY9bsY

— PANTONE (@pantone) December 7, 2023

The Pantone Color Institute has announced that their Color of the Year for 2024 is PANTONE 13-1023, also called Peach Fuzz. They describe it as "a velvety gentle peach whose all-embracing spirit enriches heart, mind, and body." While it is "enriching and nurturing," the color is also "quietly sophisticated and contemporary." The color is soft and gentle, unobtrusive enough to be considered a neutral color, yet more interesting than most true neutrals. It's too pink to be orange, and too orange to be pink, and much more pastel than either color.

Some companies are already offering products in conjunction with Pantone like wallpaper, fabric, and rugs. This is a color I could get behind, but I'd rather taste it than use it to paint the walls. This is the institute's 25th Color of the Year, which they have presented as a forecast for the coming year since 1999. You can see many of them in our previous posts. I guess that makes them the grandaddy of "influencers." Smithsonian has a roundup of reactions from various sources.

One of the concerns people have about electric vehicles is charging the battery. In some places, charging stations are still few and far between. The ability to plug in a car at your home is not yet universal. And even if there were plenty of charging stations everywhere, it takes some time to get a car fully charged. Wouldn't it be quicker and more convenient to just swap out a low battery for a charged one? That technology already exists, in China and a few places in Europe. From the license plate and text on the walls, it appears that Tom Scott is in the Netherlands, checking out a battery-swap from the Chinese automaker Nio. What's even more amazing is that the swap station is completely automated! Nio cars will self-park, and the station itself lines up the car precisely so that a robot can take out the old battery and install a new one. Neat, huh? Only time will tell if this infrastructure will ever be cost-efficient enough to equip that vast United States with Nio charging stations.  

Mental Map Oversimplification (MMO) is a real thing, but it might be overstating things to say people "suffer" from it. MMO is the tendency to think of geographic names and terms as straightforward, when real places on earth do not follow linguistic shortcuts and borders are not simply straight lines.

Americans tend to think of Canada as "the North" (and so do Canadians), but geographically, more than 60% of Canadians live south of Seattle. In fact, the most southern part of Canada is at the same latitude as California! We also look at South America as "south" when it's also very much east of North America. Brazil is much closer to Africa than it is to the US, but that's hard to visualize because of Brazil's continent's name. And you might not realize that Chicago, Illinois, and Rome, Italy, are at the same latitude. Well, Rome is very slightly further north. The local climate of those cities make that hard to believe.

Read more mind-blowing examples of MMO at Atlas Obscura. You'll start to look at maps in a whole new way.

(Image credit: Victoria Ellis)

Janelle Shane has been testing the relationship between artificial intelligence algorithms, possibly to see if they can operate without human input. They aren't doing all that well. In a recent project, she had ChatGPT4 generate lyrics to Christmas songs and then had DALL-E3 illustrate them. This is their attempt at "The 12 Days of Christmas." While the neural network understands how to draw birds and tree ornaments, it doesn't really understand how to use them. Both programs dropped the ball when it comes to numbers and words.

Another prompt had the programs illustrating Santa's reindeer, as they were named in the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which was also used as the intro to "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." The name labels weren't 100% fractured, but the small print below was a mess. Were they supposed to be species names or the full birth name of each animal? The algorithms did better making cartoon illustrations of "Jingle Bells," if you don't count the spelling of the lyrics. Check those songs out at AI Weirdness. -via Nag on the Lake

You've heard the old saying, there is strength in numbers. There's also lots of money in groups who cooperate with each other to commit crimes. With money comes power, and money and power can attract more members and keep those members loyal to the group. There's always someone else who wants a piece of the action. Organized crime includes all kinds of cooperative groups, from street gangs to drug cartels to the Mafia, some of which have continued for hundreds of years. You have to be pretty organized to keep that running. The activities of these groups sometimes run over into politics and legitimate business wherever money and the power can be found. However, this video does not include political or religious terrorist groups, because that would be too broad of a subject. While violence is often involved, these crime organizations are mainly going after riches. Weird History brings us eleven stories of organized crime activities from all over the world.  

Weird Universe points us to an undated story from Austin where a man gets his food budget down to $5 a day. That seems altogether extravagant as he had meat in two of his three meals. Having fed a family on much less per person, I could share the diet common in my area, where families eat beans and cornbread, with occasional poke sallet or collards and fried potatoes for years on end. But that's not altogether nutritious.

During the Great Depression, food was cheap, but people didn't have enough money anyway. Sociologist Gladys Sellew conducted an experiment with herself as the subject to see how cheaply one person could eat and get adequate nutrition. To the point, Sellew wanted to see if people could actually eat on 15 cents a day. The diet she worked out over the course of five years came to 13 cents a day! Sellew spelled her diet out for the newspapers, but don't expect to use her tips today. You no longer get a discount on day-old bread, turnips are not sold in most supermarkets, and bacon ends go to the butcher's dog instead of the sales bin. That said, eating that cheaply isn't the most pleasurable experience, but as you can see at Weird Universe, Sellew wasn't about to give up her cocoa. -via Strange Company       

(Image credit: Austin American Statesman, June 3, 1942)

Travis Pastrana's Nitro Circus is running a series on "life size toys." What does that mean? In this video, they consider the humble yo-yo. It was meant to be a kid's toy, but adults got more out of it. I could never get a yo-yo to return when I was a child, but as an adult, I could spin it both down and up. That can be pretty satisfying in a mindless way, but there are those who can make yo-yos into a world class floor show. However, these guys wanted to make a yo-yo big enough for a person to ride on it! They built a yo-yo eight feet in diameter, with harnesses so a person could ride on each side. Then they suspended it from a crane. Will it work? No one on the crew wanted to try it. If you want to skip the exposition and get to the action, go to the four-minute mark in this video. I get the feeling that this is way more fun to watch than to do.  -via Born in Space

Can anyone guess what’s going on here https://t.co/Ddkdcdl3RQ pic.twitter.com/W60uYGqTJH

— Zillow Gone Wild 🏡 (@zillowgonewild) December 8, 2023

Zillow Gone Wild posted about a house for sale in Batavia, New York. It has a four-car garage, six bathrooms, and a pool. It was selected for the X account because of the generous dose of taxidermy throughout the home. But what's going on with this bathroom window?

At first glance, it appears that the window is looking out on the scene of a plane crash, or possibly a parked plane. It's hard to tell with the reflection of the photographer and the arch around her. The location is a clue. Batavia has a fly-in community around Genesee County Airport, where you can keep your plane at your home and also close to the airport. This home is for an aviation enthusiast. So are we looking out at a plane in the backyard? No, look at the upper part of the window, where you see trees are growing. Someone guessed that the lower window has a wrap commemorating a crash that the homeowner survived. Continue reading for more. 

YouTuber Posy has taken what seems like still scenes and shows us just the parts that move. He's termed this technique "motion extraction," and he explains exactly how he did it, and how you can, too. But this is more than just a tutorial, because even if you will never try this, you'll be amazed by watching these clips. First, we get scenes in which only the moving parts are shown, no matter how subtle, and then he overlays the motion extraction video with the original video to make the motion a highlight. From there, he does all kinds of effects to make the motion the centerpiece of the scene, no matter how small or slow the movement may be. The clips are all quite beautiful, except for maybe the one where the guy makes the building shake by walking across a wooden floor, but that one is interesting in its own way. -via Digg

Is it Hanukkah or Chanukah? I have used both, usually going with the spelling used in whatever I am linking to. Both are correct, but in various places and eras, the holiday has been spelled

Chanucha, Chanuchah, Hanuca, Hanucka, Chanuca, Chanucah, Chanucca, Chanuccah, Chanuka, Chanukah, Chanukka, Chanukkah, Hanucah, Hanucca, Hanuccah, Hanucha, Hanuckah, Hanuka, Hanukah, Hanukka, Hanukkah, Khanukah, Khanukka, and Khanukkah.

That's due to the difficulty of translating חנוכה from Hebrew, which has its own alphabet. But Christmas has a similar history of various spellings, which include

Cristesmæsse, Xpes mæsse, Cristesmas, Crystesmasse, Kyrstemas, Kyrstemasse, Kyrstemaste, Kyrstemes, Cristmas, Crestmas, Crystmasse, Curstmas, Christmasse, Chrystmas, Christmass, and Christmas.

Oh yeah, there's also Xmas, which some folks objected to in recent years because they believe it takes Christ out of Christmas, yet the real story is exactly the oppposite. How did any of those odd spellings enter the lexicon? Find out in a history of holiday spelling at Grammarphobia. The article is about English spelling; there are plenty of other ways to say Christmas, from Noel to Navidad. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Leonhard Lenz)

The classic tale of a women who lost her shoe and gained a prince has been told for centuries in many different parts of the world. Those tales vary, but are mostly really gruesome compared with the 1950 Disney animated movie. They involve murder, adultery, cannibalism, mutilation, resurrection, and a massive dose of family dysfunction. The one version that creeped me out the most is not included in this video. The tale from China has the Cinderella character leaving her shoe behind at a banquet, and the king becomes obsessed with the owner of the tiny shoe, and vows to marry her even though he had never met her or had even seen her. That only makes sense in the context of the old tradition of binding a woman's feet to make her more attractive to men. It's creepy because it reflects historical reality. You may be more disturbed with the cannibalism in this video from Weird History.  

In 1960, the Soviet Union began the Vostok space program, a series of unmanned satellites carrying various equipment. The first such satellite was Korabl-Sputnik 1, launched in May of 1960. The West called this satellite Sputnik 4. The descent module separated from the equipment module, but did not "descend" as planned. Instead, the descent module orbited for two years, then burned up on reentry. A piece of it fell in the United States.  

Two policemen in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, encountered a chunk of something that was too hot to touch. They didn't think much of it until they heard on the news that Sputnik 4 had burned up in space. They went back to retrieve the 20-pound chunk of metal. NASA analyzed it thoroughly, then offered it back to the Soviets. Meanwhile, in Manitowoc, the historic chuck of metal was memorialized in the street where it was found, on the sidewalk nearby, and in two museum exhibits that have been there for decades. Read about Manitowoc and the satellite at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Amy Meredith)

Brenda Lee's 1958 song "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" is enjoying a surge of popularity this holiday season, but what it really needs is some rock lyrics. Bill McClintock is here to remix the song in a way you'd never expect, which is what he does. Imagine the Christmas tune with the lilting voice of Bon Scott, the late singer for AC/DC, singing their 1976 song "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap." Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT, neckties, contracts, high voltage -how festive! I am always surprised to hear isolated vocals from a familiar tune, and curious as to how they are available, and I'm even more surprised to hear them mesh so well with another song that is so different. This one is destined to become a Christmas classic. And don't they all look so impossibly young in the video? Scott was only around 29 when the video was recorded, and the other band members were pretty close in age.