It's true that an architect's job is to design buildings, not construct them, but like many other jobs, learning the real-world tasks down the line can make you more knowledgeable about your own work. In other words, architects will learn a lot by actually constructing a building. That's what senior architecture students a California Polytechnic State University do, to gain real-world experience in putting their ideas into action. Hence their slogan "Learn by Doing." That said, these students' ideas can be quite outlandish. You have to wonder how many of these ideas were later replicated elsewhere. Many of the buildings still survive, although not in pristine condition, in the area known as Poly Canyon. Tom Scott takes us on a short tour of the students' projects, although he's a bit reticent to invite people to go there due to the constant vandalism that plagues the stuctures. It's too bad no one really lives there anymore. 

Gregor Mendel was a 19th century Augustinian friar and scientist who is often called "the father of genetics." He didn't know about chromosomes or DNA, but he discovered and documented many of the rules of heritability, including dominant and recessive traits an organism inherits from its parents. Most of the organisms he studied were pea plants.

July 20, 2022, was the 200th anniversary of Mendel's birth. What could the scientific community do to appropriately honor Mendel for the occasion? A team of scientists in the Czech Republic, where Mendel lived and died, decided to sequence his DNA. Mendel always promoted the advance of science, and even requested an autopsy in the event of his death, so we might assume he would be okay with that. But the project was far from simple. They would have to get permission to exhume Mendel from a tomb owned by his Augustinian monastery. Then they would have to accurately identify his remains, which were buried in the same grave as four other monks. Read about the strange but appropriate memorial project and what they learned from the results at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

In 1959, Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens hitched a ride in an airplane and died when that plane crashed. Those deaths were followed by a whole slew of popular musicians dying in plane crashes, Otis Redding, Jim Croce, John Denver, Ricky Nelson, and several members of Lynyrd Skynyrd among them. But the first music superstar to die in a plane crash was Glenn Miller. Miller and his orchestra logged 16 #1 hits and 69 top ten hits in only four years, a streak that ended suddenly in 1942, when Miller volunteered to entertain the Allied troops fighting World War II, and was commissioned as an officer. By 1944, he was playing concerts and radio broadcasts in England.  

Following the Allied capture of Paris in August 1944, the BBC planned for Miller and his orchestra to travel to the newly-liberated city to perform a special concert on Christmas day. Miller was anxious to fly over to finalize travel arrangements for his bandmates, but unfortunately thick fog and cloud cover made travel inadvisable. As luck would have it, American Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell was also in a hurry to get to Paris and offered Miller a ride in his chartered UC-64 Norseman light aircraft. Miller accepted, and on December 15, 1944 he, Baessell, and pilot Flight Officer John Morgan took off from RAF Trinwood Farm outside Bedford and headed out over the English Channel. They were never seen again.

So what happened to the plane? Media coverage of the disappearance was soon eclipsed by the Battle of the Bulge. The Army Air Force report consisted of speculation. Rumors arose with all sorts of wild theories, some more plausible than others, but the mystery remained. Then in 1956, a possible witness to the plane's demise came forward. In 1987, a fisherman encountered wreckage that may have been Miller's plane, but did not recover it. There are plans to search for that wreckage with new technology, but the passage of time puts the possibility of finding anything at great odds. Read what we know and what we don't know about the disappearance of Glenn Miller at Today I Found Out.

Just noticed I made a bit of a mess of that at midnight so here’s the final final version. #sgtpepper2022 update 5b… pic.twitter.com/lOM04mSVAQ

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) January 1, 2023

We lost an awful lot of notable people in 2022. If you were to put the celebrity deaths of 2022 together on a record album cover in the style of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it would look like this.

This collage is the work of British artist Chris Barker, who revised it several times in the last few days to add more people. This is version 5b, which he hopes is the final version. You can click to enlarge it here. Some people are represented by objects or avatars that are more familiar than their faces. For example, the penguin in front represents Carlo Bonomi, who was the voice of Pingu in the children's television program, and the airplane in the sky represents Johnny Johnson, the last of the World War II Dambusters.  

Barker is already getting pushback for some people not included, mainly Americans he hasn't heard of. If you don't recognize all the people in the picture (and who would?), you can use the key to their names here. There are 196 of them. The key does not yet include Barbara Walters or Pope Benedict. The project was obviously a massive amount of work, but Barker has done it before.

Previous years 2/2 pic.twitter.com/e1lh0FNR8r

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) January 1, 2023

-via reddit

This account is mainly about domestic cats but I needed you to see this happy Cypriot lion. 5th or 4th century BCE. https://t.co/QUzf6qpdpJ pic.twitter.com/0IpM4QLgdf

— Cats of Yore (@CatsOfYore) December 29, 2022

The Twitter account Cats of Yore normally gives us vintage photographs of cats, but also some delightful surprises. Just look at the smile on this lion sculpture! The funerary stele might be 2400 years old, but he looks strangely familiar, doesn't he? It's like we have seen this lion before somewhere.  Hmm, big smile, tongue hanging out, human-like teeth, eyes strangely flat on the face...

(Image source: Lejonet på Gripsholms Slott)

Yes, we've seen this lion before. It is on display at Gripsholm Castle in Sweden. The lion was a gift to King Frederick I in 1731. When it died, the pelt was taken to a taxidermist who had never seen a lion, and he did his best by pure guesswork. Ulrika Good told the story of the lion back in 2011 and the lion, already viral in Sweden, went global. The lion was Photoshopped into so many memes that a Facebook page sprung up to archive them, and it's still active!

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

And now we find out that some sculptor in the fourth century BC had the exact same vision of a lion when he was commissioned to chisel one out of limestone. He had probably never seen a real lion, either.  

The headline makes sense when you learn that Brian May has been knighted by King Charles III. May's new honor was included in the U.K.’s annual New Year’s Honors list. He was recognized for his contributions to music and to animal welfare advocacy. May responded to the honor by saying he hopes the knighthood will give him “a little bit more clout.”

That was tongue in cheek, of course. May is known globally as the guitarist and songwriter for the band Queen, but his interests are wide ranging. He has long advocated for animal rights, and founded the organization Save Me in 2010. He is also an astrophysicist, stereograph collector, gardener, and a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. As such, May already has plenty of clout. Just ask the millions of Queen fans who followed them in the 1970s, witnessed Live Aid in 1985, discovered the band via Wayne's World in 1992, or saw the movie Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018. -via Fark

Laurence Brown (previously at Neatorama) normally brings us humorous and often stinging observations about the differences between Britain and the US in his Lost in the Pond series. Born in England, he's lived in the US for about 14 years now with his American wife, and for seven of those years has been making YouTube videos about the contrast between the United States and his home country. Now he's finally become an American citizen! In this video, he takes us through the process as he experienced it, in his wry and self-deprecating manner. The real excitement is when he finally confronted the citizenship test, covering subjects he's researched and made videos about. He also studied diligently for it. But when the crucial moment arrived, he came close to panicking and forgot everything he learned! Somehow he managed to pull it together just enough to become a dual citizen with the right to vote. Congratulations and welcome to the club, Laurence!

While the New Year holiday really doesn't signal anything more significant than a new calendar, it's a symbolic time of reset and renewal, of looking back and looking forward, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, for which January is named. As such, there are plenty of superstitions connected with the New Year holiday. Many of these involve food! In my neck of the woods, hog jowl, black-eyed peas, and cooked greens are served for luck in the new year, but I alter that to pork chops, black-eyed peas, and broccoli. Each dish represents something good that will happen if you eat it. There are plenty of other food superstitions from all over the globe associated with good fortune for the new year. If we call them traditions instead of superstitions, we can just enjoy them for what they are. Read about eleven traditional good luck dishes for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and what each is supposed to mean at Thrillist.

When Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played "Auld Lang Syne" at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan while ringing in the New Year of 1930, it wasn't planned as anything other than a nostalgic song out of their regular repertoire. While the song had a tenuous connection to the show's sponsor, that idea wasn't set in stone. It was just a tune that they sometimes used to end their set. They had no plans to repeat it every year. But it eventually became "the" song of the New Year holiday.  

"Auld Lang Syne" might not have become the tradition that it is if it weren't for the fact that the University of Virginia liked the Canadian orchestra, and hired them for various campus events and celebrations. And the fact that the band would party with the UVA fraternities afterward. Read what happened and how those parties contributed to our holiday traditions at Atlas Obscura.

We've been waiting all year for it (and he's been teasing it for a month), and now it's finally here! Louis Plamondon, YouTuber Sleepy Skunk, has unveiled his 2022 movie mashup just barely before the New Year holiday. The annual video is a cleverly-edited collage of the year's biggest films, with clips taken from movie trailers. This year's video comes in three sections, beginning with epic shots of set pieces, followed by a section of visual music beats, and ending with the emotional moments designed to pull on your heartstrings. The list of movies used is here. How many of these movies have you seen?

See also: Sleepy Skunk's previous movie mashups.

Some creatures are carnivores and eat animals, others are herbivores and eat plants, and some, including humans, are omnivores and will eat both. But until now, we haven't identified an organism that eats viruses. Of course, we ingest viruses, along with bacteria and other microbes. But scientists have now observed a species that ate viruses in the absence of other nutrients and thrived! That makes them "virovores."

In an experiment, various pond water microbes were isolated, introduced to purified water, and fed Chlorovirus, a common virus that infects algae. The plankton genus Halteria multiplied to 15 times its population, while the Chlorovirus population was reduced. In a control sample without the virus, Halteria didn't grow at all. That doesn't mean that Halteria is unique. There may be many species that feed on viruses that we don't know about yet. Read about the discovery of virovores at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Don Loarie)

Ruth Handler designed an adult fashion doll for little girls to play with. Her name was Barbie, and she hit the market in 1959. The Barbie doll became a hit, and soon Handler decided she should have a boyfriend. Mattel went to work on a doll named Ken, after Handler's son. But there was a problem. The dolls were meant to be dressed and undressed, because they were fashion dolls. Barbie appeared anatomically correct (if unrealistic) for an adult woman. What would Ken look like undressed?

No one wanted to give Ken realistic genitalia, but Handler wanted him to have a "bulge" in his pelvis. The male executives at Mattel were horrified and resisted the idea. The doll would not be anatomically correct without one, and it would look weird even with clothing on. But how big would such a bulge be? Would a bulge traumatize little girls, or would the lack of one be worse? After all, little girls have fathers and brothers. And Mattel executives knew that the first thing a child does to a fashion doll is to undress it. Maybe they could paint permanent underwear on Ken. Read about the fight over Ken's crotch and how he ended up the way he is at Business Insider. -via Digg

Floating high above our world, there's a network of satellites that are watching us. They relay information from and to earth, and to each other. They enable our global phone, TV, and internet systems. They geolocate us and allow GPS to send us on our way. And since they appear to stay in the same place all the time, they must have very specific orbits. Geosynchronous orbits and geostationary orbits are not exactly the same, but they are both rather weird. They would not be possible if our planet were the slightest bit different from the way it is. In other words, if we lived on Jupiter or Venus, we couldn't have satellite TV. Imagine that. Minute Physics tells us why.

If you've got some free time between holidays, you might want to read, or at least skim through, a list of some things we learned in 2022 on a wide-ranging number of subjects, like animals, artificial intelligence, art, archaeology (wait, is this list in alphabetical order?), music, space, celebrities, health (I guess not), pets, chemistry, food, history, and more. You need to know about how a new Guinness World record was set for a mass gathering of vampires, how monkeys use tools for masturbation, and how a poll to name a Uranus probe didn't result in "Uranus Probe."    

Mental Floss has put together a mega-list recapping the tidbits of knowledge that crawled across the internet in 2022. You can listen to it the Mental Floss List Show video, but it's 52 minutes long. Lucky for us, they also give us the text version, so you can skip the stuff you already know, if that's what you prefer.   

A bristlecone pine in California is the oldest living thing on earth. The tree named Methuselah is estimated to be around 5,000 years old! How in the world does a tree last that long? It comes down to adaptation to environmental stresses, plus luck in the extremity of those environmental stresses. Minute Earth explains how Methuselah is perfectly adapted to deal with the things that normally kill trees. Then there are humans, like the one who killed Methuselah's neighbor Prometheus. In that case, Methuselah was defenseless, but also just plain lucky. This video is only two and a half minutes long, the rest is a promotion.