1. Pepé

We have many dogs who can lead the team, but our true Lead Dog — the pup who makes each run happen, who gets us through every storm — is Pepe. Pepe is smarter than all of us. She will run forever and keep running. She is basically everyone’s mother. pic.twitter.com/K6ckFTvv6l

— Blair Braverman (@BlairBraverman) January 2, 2019

Blair Braverman is the musher who cleaned up after a storm with her puppies a few months ago. Now she is training for the Iditarod, and introduces us to her chosen team. The leader is Pepe, of which Braverman says,

Pepe came to us from our good friends at @OtterRunKennel. Immediately after leading (and placing 5th) in the 440-mile Kobuk race last spring, she refused a ride back to our host family’s house and insisted on running the whole way.

Fun fact: If Pepe leads us the 1000 miles to Nome, her own mother (a legendary leader who retired to be a pet last year) will be waiting for her at the finish line.

Also meet Flame, Colbert, Clem, Boo, Helli (previously nicknamed Hellbitch), Grinch, and the others. Every puppy selected has his/her own talents to add to the team.

Grinch has a heart of gold and a brain like a box of rocks. He is extremely strong, maybe our strongest dog, but is easily confused. He loves attention. He loves giving hugs. He has a significant overbite and his limbs are fitted together like off-brand LEGOs.

Read about each dog at Thread Reader. The original thread, where Braverman answers questions, is here. The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race will take place in early March. -via Metafilter

You could watch an entire Christian Bale movie and not know who is playing the part. For example, he portrays Dick Cheney in the new movie Vice, despite no natural resemblance at all. That's because the actor has a habit of transforming his body into whatever the role calls for. Sure, it shows commitment, but that cannot be healthy. -via Digg

(Image credit: Katherine Cusack)

There's a meme on Russian social media that translates to "Take a photo of the Rembrandt type," in which participants recreate a classical painting in real life and present the photo with the original art. At first it was limited to Rembrandt works, but eventually spread to include other master artists. There's some photo manipulation involved in the best of them, but others are just plain humorous.

(Image credit: Anastasia Scheremeteva)

You can see a roundup of the best of these recreations, ranked by readers, at Bored Panda.

Pupsi carved musical instruments out of sweet potatoes and butternut squash, and then played Toto's "Africa" on them. The making of the instruments is the fascinating part, but the music is pretty good, too. I wondered how many sweet potatoes he went through before he got the sound right, but since he's a professional ocarina carver, he probably got it right pretty quickly. -via reddit

Georgia Gilmore worked two jobs to support her six children in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. After Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to accommodate a white man, Gilmore went to hear a preacher talk about boycotting Montgomery city buses. The preacher was Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gilmore was inspired. She went to work to support the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that coordinated the boycott.  

In order to raise money for the MIA, Gilmore organized an underground network of black women who sold pound cakes, sweet potato pies, and plates of fried fish and stewed greens door-to-door. More than half of the city’s black female workers were employed by white families, so Gilmore’s group provided an opportunity for them to contribute without jeopardizing their jobs. “Some colored folks or Negroes could afford to stick out their necks more than others because they had independent incomes,” Gilmore told the Chicago Tribune in 1975, “but some just couldn’t afford to be called ‘ring leaders’ and have the white folks fire them.”

To protect the participants from any backlash, Gilmore named the group the Club from Nowhere. That way, if the MIA was ever asked where their money came from, they could honestly say “nowhere.” Only Gilmore knew who cooked and purchased the food.

Gilmore herself was fired from her cafeteria job for her efforts, but she turned that setback into an opportunity by opening a restaurant in her home, which became a hangout for Civil Rights figures. Read the story of Georgia Gilmore and the food that fueled the Montgomery bus boycott at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: rmhermen)

Venom was a movie about a Spider-Man villain, but Spider-Man was nowhere to be found. Venom didn't make anyone's best-of list for the year, but it made a ton of money. And now Screen Junkies had given us an Honest Trailer to explain what happened.

Twitter star Matt Nelson of WeRateDogs™, who never met a dog he didn't like, gives us a truly wonderful gift- a compilation of the dogs of 2018. They are just being their adorable selves, which is all we need. You may tear up at the dog who wants ear medicine like his brother, the puppy that helps his sibling climb a step, and the survivors of natural disasters. They're all good dogs. -via Metafilter

Scientists have detected hidden lakes trapped underneath the vast ice of Antarctica -400 of them so far! Back in 2013, we reported on the first one that had been reached by drilling. The samples brought up contained previously-unknown bacteria. Now a second sub-glacial lake, called Lake Mercer, has been exposed by a drilling project. The team hauled in a million pounds of drilling equipment to the site, 650 miles from McMurdo Station, early last month.   

According to the latest SALSA blog post, the team began drilling its main borehole on the evening of December 23. (A secondary borehole that acts as a well, its water back-pumped into the main hole after being filtered and sterilized, was started a night earlier, Priscu told Earther.) Things apparently proceeded smoothly, with the team reaching the 54-square-mile lake on the evening of December 26 after drilling to a depth of 3,556 feet (1,084 meters).

Now that the lake is open, the real fun has begun. The SALSA team is deploying a suite of instruments to study the lake, including a CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) probe that will assess temperature and provide details on the structure of the water column, and a remotely operated vehicle to take similar measurements away from the borehole and capture 4k video. Researchers will collect samples of water and microbial DNA, as well as ice from the top of the lake and sediment from the bottom.

Read about the expedition and the further possibilities of the project at Earther.

(Image credit: SALSA)

The Atlantic has been around a long time. To end 2018, the website is looking back at magazine articles they published 50, 100, and 150 years ago. These include coverage of the Vietnam War protests, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Andrew Johnson's impeachment.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the drawn-out political battle between the Republican majority in the House and President Andrew Johnson, a lifelong Democrat, culminated in his impeachment—though the Senate later fell one vote short of removing him from office in the final months of his term. That fall’s election to replace Johnson, an anonymous Atlantic contributor contended, would be critical to the Republican effort to retain power and continue the uneasy process of national Reconstruction: “It would, indeed, be no exaggeration to say that it will be the most important election that Americans ever have known.”

There are also more offbeat stories, such as a report on an asylum for drunkards, science in the battlefields of World War I, and Teddy Roosevelt's interest in ostrich research, all with links to the original texts.

"Auld Lang Syne" is sung or played at New Year's celebrations, but the traditional tune is used around the world for other purposes. The original is Scottish, and few of us know the original words -or even the modern English words. Here's a video that tells you everything you need to know about "Auld Lang Syne."  

It is a custom during special events such as weddings and holiday parties to raise a toast. We think of it as a bonding ritual to drink in hunison. But why is it called a "toast'? There's more than one theory about this, one of which is quite literal. At one time, a bowl of punch or grog would be garnished with toasted bread floating on top.  

Although it now seems strange, for the privileged in medieval Europe, no day was complete without a bowl of warm wine and “sop,” sodden, toasted bread. Even Joan of Arc was known to enjoy it. For everyone else, warm, ale-soaked bread was an inexpensive, calorie-filled meal. But sops were added to soup and milk as well. Toasted bread was a potent symbol of plenty. The English even covered apple trees in cider-dipped toast, as part of an ancient ritual for a good harvest. (The custom is still ongoing.)

Read about the custom of drinking a toast with actual toast at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: Wellcome Collection)

You might not remember much else about grade school or high school, but you will never forget that time a teacher told the class something that was so obviously wrong that your jaw dropped, even though you were just a kid. To be fair, no one is perfect, especially outside their area, and we suspect a few teachers are disproportionately represented in these incidents. Redditors shared these memories in a recent thread that you'll enjoy perusing.

Our teacher put materials from plants and materials from animals on a board. We could not convince her that wool was not a plant. —Pedantichrist

Computer teacher told us if you select 'cut' on an image from a website it will be removed from the website and will upset the website maker, so we had to use 'copy —Raven_of_Blades

When i was in kindergarten, our homework assignment was to ask our parents what country they were from so the teacher could show us on the globe where it was. Younger me was so excited! I went home and asked my Mom where she was born and she told me her family was from Malaysia. All day i practiced and practiced. I couldn't wait to share this info with my teacher!

When i went to school the next day, i told my teacher that my mom is from Malaysia. With a look of utter disappointment, my teacher informed me that Malaysia was not a country, and i needed to ask my mom again. I was CRUSHED that my Mom would lie to me like that. Or that she was wrong. Either way little me cried to her and told her that my teacher said Malaysia is not a country..

So Mama was not happy that i was told this and came with me to school the next day to give the teacher a piece of her mind. To this day I've never seen my mother get so red in the face while yelling at my teacher. After she was through, I quickly got an apology and a geography lesson on where Malaysia was! —llCloudIXll

See a roundup of the funniest answers at Buzzfeed and all the responses at reddit. There are even more stories in the comments at Buzzfeed. Feel free to add your own here.

September is most common month for birthdays, and if you count backwards from there, you may think, oh yeah, holiday celebrations and alcohol, long nights and cold weather, sure. That's the conventional wisdom, but September is not the most common birth month in all places. Scientists believe there are more natural reasons for peaks in human births that depend on climate and daylight more than cultural practices. In animals, evolutionary forces insure that births peak at the time of year that helps babies to survive, such as when resources are plentiful. The same forces may be at work in humans.       

There is a clear pattern of births across latitude. Here in the U.S., states in the North have a birth peak in early summer (June-July), while states in the South experience a birth peak a few months later (October-November).

Globally, popular birthdays follow a similar pattern with peaks occurring earlier in the year the further north you get from the equator – for instance, Finland’s is in late April, while Jamaica’s is in November. And in the U.S., states further south, like Texas and Florida, experience birth peaks that are not only later in the year, but also more pronounced than those seen in the North.

These peaks may have to do with temperatures conducive to newborn survival, or possibly the threat of disease- while diseases evolve even faster in order to take advantage of victims. Anyhow, the seasonal effect of birth rates is lessening due to birth control and a disconnect from our natural environment. Read more about seasonal birth rates and the possible reasons behind them at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Arteida MjESHTRI)

Remember our posts about people afraid of being buried alive, and the devices they invented to prevent that? Here, a poor soul rings a bell from his grave, but no one will ever hear him above ground. This automaton sculpture titled Still Here is a creation of New Orleans artist Jamie Winn. Her other kinetic sculptures depict animals and ghosts, with a hint of movement that will leave an eerie feeling. See a roundup of Winn's automata at High Fructose, and more of her art at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

We've seen a few year-end movie compilations, but we can make room for one more when it's done by LEGO minifigs! And the movies in this video by Toscano Bricks aren't the critics choices; they are the ones with visually familiar characters that we went to the theater to watch. Yeah, it's pretty heavy on super heroes, but what else would you expect? -via Tastefully Offensive