Level Devil seems like a simple run-and-jump game. I began it thinking that the goal is to reach the doorway that will take you to the next level, but you don't know how many times you have to complete the task to advance. You have to die a few times to figure out your strategy. And there's no limit to how many times you can die and come back, which soon becomes hilarious.

As you progress, you start to think the goal of the game is to see how many ways this game can kill you over and over again. It's called Level Devil because it's diabolical. Just when you think you've got it figured out, you are suddenly confronted with a new way to fail. You can almost picture a demon watching you from somewhere, laughing at your miserable attempts to outsmart a simple run-and-jump game that will sneak up and destroy you before you can even blink. -via kottke 

Polar bears are normally pretty solitary creatures, but there are fewer and fewer of them these days, and this one feels the tug of loneliness. The other creatures of the Arctic either don't like him or are scared of him, and you honestly can't blame them. So he does what he has to do for companionship. It seems a bit strange for a wild bear to have an imaginary friend, and even that fails when climate change is involved. But there's always hope. 

You'll be struck by the gorgeous visuals and the wonderfully expressive faces in the cartoon Snow Bear. That's because it was written and directed by former Disney animator Aaron Blaise, who co-directed Brother Bear and worked on Aladdin, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast, among other films. Blaise spent three years on this project, with the aim of supporting Polar Bears International and the National Parks Conservation Service. -via Metafilter 

We've all heard the story of how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. He went on vacation and left an open petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria sitting out. When he returned, the dish had the mold Penicillium rubrum growing in it, and the Staphylococcus nearest it were dead. The substance produced by the mold was named penicillin, hailed as a breakthrough in killing dangerous bacteria. 

But there were some problems with Fleming's story. First, no other bacteriologist could replicate the original petri dish that Fleming has discovered (Plate 1, which is still preserved almost 100 years later). Instead they discovered that Penicillium would not grow on a colony of Staphylococcus, and even if it did, it would only kill young, developing bacteria. There was the curious fact that Fleming didn't take notes on his observation for almost two months, and only included the discovery story in a write up of experiments with Penicillium. And some of the details of the story were only added years later, when Fleming admitted he might not recall it all correctly.  

So what happened in Fleming's lab to result in Plate 1? There have been lots of theories, a couple of them quite plausible. Bacteriologist Ronald Hare actually replicated Plate 1 after many attempts, but only by making some assumptions and changing the conditions to fit the results. His sequence of events relies on some amazing coincidences, and doesn't really explain Fleming's actions afterward. Professor Robert Root-Bernstein has another theory that credits Fleming's work but infers he added the intriguing story of the initial discovery afterward. Read up on the question of penicillin and how it may have been discovered at Asimov Press. -via Damn Interesting 

It had to happen sooner or later. Santa Claus has been arrested for breaking and entering, ratted out by a naughty kid who resents getting coal in his stocking -again. Kris Kringle doesn't look quite so jolly in an orange jumpsuit as he enters prison life with trepidation. Santa nervously meets his cellmate, Joe Dumbass, who has always been naughty, and now demands an unusual Christmas gift from Santa Claus, even though his sack has been confiscated. A tattoo. Santa's surprising skill with a tattoo gun make you wonder if he's had some experience like this in his past. During the process, Santa has time to listen to Joe's story and figures out a way to turn things around for Joe. 

Tattoo Santa Claus is a dark new award-winning animation from Patrick Ward. The animation appears simple at first, but the lighting and the details add depth to the underlying meaning of the story. -via the Awesomer 

In 1934, two teenagers in Baltimore dug into the dirt floor of their apartment house basement. About a foot down, they unearthed a $20 gold coin. Digging further, they discovered a literal pot of gold- a cache of pre-Civil War gold coins in a copper pot! The two boys, not fully understanding what they had found, were going to cash the coins in at the bank, but were stopped by a brother-in-law. 

When the news got out, anyone and everyone who had a relative with a connection to the house stepped forward to claim the stash as their own, and the case was tied up in court for years. The value of their discovery changed greatly during the account of what happened afterward. First it rose due to the composition and rarity of the coins, further digging, and the fact that some coins had been re-stashed elsewhere, plus the inflation estimates. Then it went down due to court costs, lawyer's fees, and taxes. But the fight over the gold uncovered some interesting stories about the property going back almost a hundred years. Read the tale of this buried treasure at Strange Company. 

Electrostatic attraction is not a mating strategy, but as you know, Ze Frank will take any opportunity for a double entendre. This video starts off telling us about nematodes, which are weird enough, but eventually gets to the subject matter: how they harness the tiny electrical charges in the atmosphere for their own ends. For nematodes, it's how parasitic species target flying insects to invade. For bees and other pollinating insects, electric fields offer a strategy for collecting plenty of pollen. That benefits the plants, too. Spiders use electrostatic charges to weaponize their webs into more powerful insect traps. And newly-hatched spiders use the power of electrons to spread their silky parachutes and fly. The concept of parasitic nematodes and flying baby spiders might be icky, so instead just think about how these tiny creatures understand the physics of the world around them better than you do. There's a 75-second ad at 4:22.  

There is an entire repertoire of songs that we only hear for one month out of the year, because they are associated with Christmas. This might be because we hear them so much during that one month that we can no longer stand them after the New Year holiday. But some of them got lumped into the Christmas category because they were about cold weather and snow. They would be appropriate up until March, but we don't hear them after Christmas at all. 

Then there are Christmas songs that started out as something completely different, like the song that was written for a Soviet comedy film in 1934. One familiar carol is actually about the second coming of Christ, which you can understand once you know that and go over the lyrics in your head. And then there's one song that was originally about an unfaithful lover, but was changed over hundreds of years and translations. Read about these five Christmas songs and what they originally meant at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: Charles E. Beckett) 

December is the darkest month of the year, so candles, once necessary, are now associated with Christmas. You are liable to light a few yourself, so you may as well learn the science behind what makes them dangerous. See, what actually burns in a candle flame is not the solid or liquid wax, nor the wick, but the vapor of the wax.  

James Orgill of the Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) starts this video with a spectacular reaction you may not see coming. Maybe we should have noticed that he's using a long stick to keep it far away. Apparently this reaction is internet fodder, yet is rarely explained accurately. It's not really new, either, as one commenter relates.

This looks dangerous, but it's a phenomena that would rarely happen in everyday life. Don't try to replicate this stunt, and you'll just need to follow the safety rules we all know about burning candles. The video has a two minute skippable ad at 2:30.  -via Damn Interesting 

It seems simple: people who evolved near the equator have dark skin to protect their bodies from the sun, while people who settled closer to the poles lost melanin to take advantage of scarce sunlight. It's not quite that simple. New research shows that most European people, who settled there 45,000 years ago, had dark skin up into the Iron Age, about 3,000 years ago, when the number of pale-skinned people became the majority. Even more surprising, the genes for lighter skin didn't proliferate from mutations in northern Europe- they migrated in from what is now Turkey.  

These findings come from genetic studies on individual Europeans, such as Cheddar Man, who lived 10,000 years ago, and Ötzi the Iceman, who lived 5,300 years ago, plus others even older now that we have tools to analyze degraded DNA. You might also be surprised to learn that blue eyes became common in Europe long before pale skin and hair. Read about the genetic studies that revealed what ancient Europeans looked like at ZME Science. -via Real Clear Science 

The purpose of a tree, as far as the tree is concerned, is to gather sunlight and water. The fact that a tree magically converts those things into building material and fuel is the purpose of a tree as far as humans are concerned. But first, trees had to compete with all other plants to get that sunlight, so they grew tall, and had to come up with a system to gather and utilize water over distances. 

That system relies on physics that are hard for humans to replicate. It also depends on a form of cellular suicide. The upshot is that even when a tree is healthy and functioning, a majority of it is dead. The dead parts form a strong scaffold for the tree to grow tall and to protect it from the dangers of the world around it.    

Kurzgesagt explains what's happening on the inside of a tree in a way that will make you respect these plants more than you already do. This video is less than ten minutes long (they promise a part two); the rest is promotional. -via Nag on the Lake 

The blessing of getting old is that you survived long enough to do it. Randall Munroe of What If? and xkcd didn't put much of his personal life into his comics when he first started out, but we all knew when he fell in love. Then in 2010, Munroe's fiancée (now wife) was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. He related some of his emotional journey in his webcomic xkcd. We learned how profoundly hardcore the treatment is, and how precarious the prognosis is even after treatment. But the couple made sure to stuff a lot of experiences into the time they have. 

Munroe posted updates every so often, like the two year "biopsy-versary" and the seven year mark. Now it's been 15 years since the diagnosis that changed their lives, and Munroe has commemorated it with another comic. The panel above is only a small snippet; you need to go see it in a larger size (and there is a hover text, too). The past is in lighter ink to bring us up to new material, in bolder drawings. -via Metafilter 

You know that song about Rudolph, you love it, but you've never heard it like this. It's just the thing for someone who is not at all serious about the Christmas season. All kinds of singers and bands have recorded Christmas songs, but they usually keep the original tune, if not the original style. In this version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," the tune is changed as well as the style, to that of "Higher" by Creed. The vocals are not Scott Stapp, but rather Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined it (previously at Neatorama). 

Creed's version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is from the new There I Ruined It album titled A Very Ruined Christmas, featuring "99 Problems:Christmas Edition" and "Rap God: Christmas Edition." Alas, it is only available to Patreon members. Still, its existence hints that we may have more Christmas songs from There I ruined It coming soon. 

Kate Wagner has discovered a home for sale in Alvin, Texas (near Houston), that she says really should be in Florida, I guess because it's blue and it has portholes. Now, I'm not averse to houses coming in unconventional colors, having one such house myself, but I can't imagine using the same color scheme in every room. This 8-bedroom, 10-bathroom home takes blue to the extreme. But it's not just the color; it's the oversized everything and the rococo decorating that make this place as ugly as you can make a nearly $3 million home. 

You can try to be kind and say that the person who had this built had a clear vision of what their personal dream home would be, and made sure it happened. But then you see it was built in 2023! That means that the person with the dream saw the finished product and said, "Naw. I don't want this." Or else the landowner was confident that someone in the area with plenty of money would really want a house with so much blue you can't do much about it. Read Wagner's takedown at McMansion Hell. 

Cat lover Half-Asleep Chris (previously at Neatorama) has a new kitten named Henry, who is active, adorable, and much funnier than his adult cats. So Henry was the perfect choice to test out a series of ten mechanical animals for their value as cat toys. Oh, the other cats, Bella and Ralph, got a chance to interact with the toys, but they quickly figured out they weren't real animals, so their reactions are only shown here when they add to the video's humor. Henry, on the other hand, is in kitten heaven. 

Henry's reactions to each animal robot are not exactly scientifically significant, but they are entertaining. He also spends quite a bit of time in this video licking cat food off a glass table. And somewhere along the way, you get the idea that Chris and his cat experiments are an excuse for buying more and more toys.  -via Laughing Squid

The formation of communities in ancient history seems pretty straightforward: families grew and became tribes, and when they found a good place to live, they settled down and became towns. But how, why, and when did nations, kingdoms, and other state entities emerge? It's much harder to trace the history of civilization in the era before writing was invented, so from what we know now, the first state came about in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, and was followed by Egypt which took the idea to the extreme. 

Someone somewhere came up with an idea to consolidate different communities in the same general area and form a government over them. This offers some benefits to all by building infrastructure, imposing laws, and regulating trade between communities. But you won't be surprised that, according to the latest theories, it began with a profit motive. After all, ancient history is full of people paying tribute to a king. Read about the reasons and mechanisms behind the rise of states at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting   

(Image credit: Prof. Mortel)