Before we go into the new year, everyone is looking back to sum up what 2024 was all about. Here at Neatorama, we focus on bringing you interesting, funny, educational, or distracting things to make your day a little bet...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/29/The-Top-Ten-Neatorama-Posts-of-2024/Oh, he nailed it. We are in that weird time between two holidays that are too close to go back to school, but some people have to pretend to work and others don't, and some are dealing with the Christmas fallout as guest...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/29/We-Are-All-Stuck-in-Limbo-Right-Now/When Americans visit Rome, they are impressed by the beautiful architecture that's old, sturdy, and well-crafted. So this is what the Roman Empire was like! Not exactly. The buildings that make up Rome are several hundre...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/29/Eight-Times-Rome-was-Sacked-Pillaged-and-Destroyed/Warning: don't watch this video if you haven't eaten recently, because it will make you hungry. A whole chicken roasted on a rotating spit is a glorious thing. They can cook for a long time without drying out because the...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/28/The-Secrets-Behind-Rotisserie-Chickens/We've seen how customs get switched from one holiday to another over time. In the past, Thanksgiving had trick-or-treaters and Christmas was a time for ghost stories. In the 15th century, the church found the festivities...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/28/The-Silvesterklaus-Are-Ready-to-Ring-in-the-New-Year/If you had really good genealogy records, your family tree could theoretically be huge, with infinite fractal branches. That doesn't happen because the population of the world doesn't get bigger in the past. But even if...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/28/Technically-We-Dont-Have-That-Many-Ancestors/The Guinness Book of World Records was founded in 1954 in order to settle pub arguments. It's now a huge organization that keeps up with the biggest, fastest, oldest, and most outrageous extremes of all kinds. T...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/27/Ignominious-Guinness-World-Records-You-Dont-Want-to-Break/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 busine...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/27/The-Many-Space-Missions-Scheduled-for-2025/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,...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/27/Ze-Frank-Likens-Rays-to-Floppy-Sombreros-of-the-Sea/(Popeye t-shirt on sale at our NeatoShop)The Internet Archive tells us about some of the more interesting works of intellectual property that will become public domain in the United States at the beginning of the new y...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/27/Popeye-Will-Enter-the-Public-Domain-on-January-1/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...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/26/What-iNoti-to-Eat-on-New-Years-Day/Embed from Getty ImagesScience 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)...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/26/Eric-the-Early-Humanoid-Robot/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 refrig...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/26/When-the-Holiday-Celebration-is-Finally-Over/Claire Lamman is a graduate student in astronomy at Harvard University. So she's a genius. But she's also humble enough to describe herself as a "procrastibaker" -- someone who bakes in order to avoid assigned work....
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/26/Gingerbread-Voyager-Space-Probe/Embed from Getty ImagesAfter 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 sw...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/25/What-Marvel-Accomplished-in-2024/Dr. Laura Driessen is a radio astronomer at the University of Sydney. At Study Finds, she explains that the speed of an object in motion affects sound and light waves from that object relative to an observer. This is cal...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/25/How-Would-the-Doppler-Effect-Change-the-Appearance-of-Rudolphs-Red-Nose/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 C...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/25/If-Mario-Was-Santa-Claus/(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...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/25/A-Random-Collection-of-Heartwarming-Christmas-Stories/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 possi...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/24/Finding-a-Way-to-Go-Swimming-on-the-Moon/Who does the best "pa-rum, pum-pum, pum"? @TheSimpsons #TheSimpsons #Christmas pic.twitter.com/GHz3J2lp6x— Hank Azaria (@HankAzaria) December 23, 2024 Hank Azaria's greatest acting accomplishment was, in my opin...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/24/Hank-Azaria-Sings-The-Little-Drummer-Boy-in-Voices-from-The-Simpsons/Licorice is the world's perfect candy. The flavor is optimal for activating dopamine among all right-thinking people. Not everyone agrees, but this is how you can distinguish between the enlightened and the depraved amon...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/24/I-Made-Licorice-Empanadas/Every summer, the town of Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region of New York experiences a surge of visitors in search of scenic wonders, both natural and man-made. The latter includes a tiny diner that bills itself as...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/24/The-Worlds-Smallest-Diner-is-34-Square-Feet/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 u...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/24/A-Cold-War-Christmas-Tale-with-a-Happy-Ending/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 maste...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/24/Let-Them-Eat-Gingerbread/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 mi...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/23/On-Christmas-Eve-a-Space-Probe-will-Fly-Closer-to-the-Sun-Than-Any-Other-Spacecraft/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 Christm...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/23/A-Relatable-Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Remix/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...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/23/What-Scandinavia-is-Doing-on-Christmas-Eve/You can almost feel the testosterone flowing through this video. Loggers have the highest rate of fatal work injuries and this video is a taste of why. These people use dangerously sharp machines to cut through wood as q...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/23/Lumberjack-Sports-Test-Strength-Endurance-and-Agility/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...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/22/Audibaubles-are-Data-Art-and-a-Puzzle-All-in-One/It's fun to look up what was "in" the year you were born, but in this list, the real fun is looking up what the hot gifts for kids were in the years you were, say, five to ten years old. Did you get the gift you wanted m...
https://www.neatorama.com/2024/12/22/Memories-of-Christmas-Past-The-Hot-Toy-from-the-Year-You-Were-Born/
