On December 7, 1941 -- 83 years ago today -- US Navy Seaman Second Class John C. Auld died in battle while serving on the USS Oklahoma. He was one of 2,403 American servicemen who fell that day.

CBS News reports that, three years later, the Navy was able to recover bodies of many of the fallen sailors from the Oklahoma. In 2015, the Department of Defense studied DNA from the sailors' bodies to determine their identities. Now it has notified the family of Auld that they have identified his specific remains. These were interred yesterday in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Here is his obituary.

-via Ed Driscoll | Photo: Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

Colossal introduces us to the works of Caroline Dewison. Her website appropriately named A House of Wonders is filled with wondrously detailed tiny dioramas of scenes from nature. They are little worlds filled with the elements of nature . . . and the supernatural. Or at least the weird. This automaton, for example, presents aliens vessels circling over a lovely tree-lined lake.

This supreme act of gallantry and masculine virtue took place at the Fort Severn First Nation on the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Ontario. BBC News reports that a polar bear attacked the man's wife. He responded by leaping on the bear, which then turned to attack him. The bear mauled the man's legs and one of his arms. A local hunter then shot the bear several times, which retreated into the woods and died.

This heroic husband is badly wounded but expected to survive.

A polar bear expert advises against lying down if attacked by a polar bear. You must fight back to have any chance to survive.

-via Althouse | Photo: James Vincent Wardhaugh

Insect metamorphosis is astounding. We know that a caterpillar is the larval stage of a butterfly or moth. When they form a chrysalis and change into an adult, all their cells are ripped apart into a mass of living goo, which then reorganizes into a butterfly. Now, neurobiologists who study humans cite evidence that our memories are coded by the connections between neurons in our brains. When these brain cells are separated as they in butterflies, one would think that the process destroys all the caterpillar's memories -but it doesn't! There might be something in the neurons themselves that retains memory, or in the chemicals that make up the brain, or there might be something in the process of metamorphosis that we don't yet understand. It could also be that insect brains are just way different from mammal brains.

What else is amazing is how they figured this much out. What kind of memories does a caterpillar have that we can study? Tom Lum of SciShow explains the research into insect brains and metamorphosis. There's a 45-second skippable ad at 3:30.

I saw this in a restaurant today. No idea what it is.
byu/trsuco inwhatisit

Have you ever seen this piece of equipment? Redditor trsuco spotted it in a restaurant and asked the server, who, displaying a strange lack of curiosity, had no idea what it is. Then he turned to the hive mind for identification. Even after I saw the answer, I couldn't find another example elsewhere. Maybe I'm not using the correct search term, because this can't be the only existing one.

Continue reading if you are out of guesses.

Coldplay has a new music video coming out, and the teaser for it is longer than the song. That's because the video for "All My Love" from their current album Moon Music, will star actor, dancer, comedian, and singer Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke turns 99 years old on December 13th, which is when the video will premiere. This "director's cut" video, directed by Spike Jonze and Mary Wigmore, is not only a preview of the song, but also a love letter to Van Dyke, his family, and his career. At 98, Van Dyke stills dances, and rather than being depressed about his age, he laughs at it.  

You won't want to miss the part at  5:45 when Chris Martin composes an impromptu song about getting old. What does he know about it? He's only 47, half of Van Dyke's age. The lyrics are at the YouTube page. -via Laughing Squid 

Steve Tanner is a scholar who has, for fifteen years, been exhaustively studying the trash cans available to guests at Disney resorts and parks around the world. His site dubbed Magical Trash examines how Disney's park designers choose trash cans to convey specific messages (aside from putting your trash into them) or accept merely practical goals of waste management.

Above are trash and recycling bins at the DreamWorks Land district of Universal Studios Florida. Shrek, Trolls, and Kung Fu Panda are the core franchises featured and the bins are appropriately decorated with motifs for those intellectual properties. No detail is too small to deserve attention.

-via David Thompson

This past September, Guillaume Blondel, an archaeologist, led a team of students excavating a Gallic site near Dieppe, France. His group was not the first to dig at this location associated with Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul. BBC News reports that these modern scholars found at the site a message sealed in a glass bottle left by a previous archaeological team in 1825. Their message, when translated into English, reads:

P.J Féret, a native of Dieppe, member of various intellectual societies, carried out excavations here in January 1825. He continues his investigations in this vast area known as the Cité de Limes or Caesar’s Camp.

Historical research forms that a local leader named Féret did indeed excavate the site.

-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Guillaume Blondel

Many folks were introduced to computer games by playing The Oregon Trail in the 1970s or '80s. Even if you weren't, you know the game ended when you died of dysentery. Life as a pioneer was hard. But did you really learn anything about dysentery? Dysentery can be caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites, but the illness is defined by severe diarrhea. Most people recover, and those who die of dysentery are actually dying of dehydration. Ingesting plenty of fluids will get you through it.   

Woe Industries has remade the game to reflect this reality. You Have Not Died of Dysentery is an alternate version of The Oregon Trail in which you suffer from dysentery, but do not die. Instead, you have to constantly deal with diarrhea as you make your way across the Great Plains with your family. How much toilet paper should you take? How many times can you cause the wagon train to stop before they abandon you? And how do you keep your pants clean? This game may be too real for some folks, as the aim of finding a new home takes a backseat to just finding a place to poop. -via Kottke

As they do every year, the Pantione Color Institute has decreed the fashionable color of the upcoming year. For 2025, their selection is Mocha Mousse, described as a warm brown hue with "the delectable qualities of chocolate and coffee, answering our desire for comfort." They have a point that we are craving comfort, and who doesn't like a good cup of coffee or a cup of hot cocoa? Or a mix of both (which is what mocha is)? However, Pantone partners with design companies to put their color of the year everywhere, and a nice comforting mocha in an entire outfit or in home decor can be overwhelmingly dull. It sure fits in with the "sad beige" aesthetic.

In 25 years of selecting a color of the year, this is the first time that Pantone has chosen a shade of brown. You can see this color on everything from wallpaper to Motorola phones at their announcement page. But whether it will become popular in 2025 is another question. Do you recall the color of the year for 2024? Or 2023? I didn't think do. -via Smithsonian

Underneath our feet, the earth stores masses of organic matter like peat, coal, or methane, which are all extremely flammable. When conditions are right (or someone does something stupid), these masses can ignite and burn for years underground before we even know it. Even when we know about them, there is little we can do when the fuel seems unlimited and our efforts to fight these underground fires is quite limited. What's really going on with these underground "zombie fires" that spread beneath us?

Zombie fires are even more dangerous than they appear. Sure, there's the danger of falling into one, and the danger that the fires will burst through to the surface. In addition, even when they stay underground, they are emitting smoke and tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to toxic pollution and to climate change. Oh yeah, and they are burning up our fuel. What can we do? Scientists are working on solutions. Let's hope they make progress in our lifetime. -via Damn Interesting

Touch2See is a device designed to help visually impaired people experience watching soccer games. A small disk floats across the simulated field in real time with the movements of the actual ball.

Daniele Cassioli, a champion water skier, tested it at a recent game between the Verona and Cagliari teams. L'Union Sarda reports that Cassioli was able to follow the action with the haptic feedback that Touch2See provided.

-via Massimo

Board racing is a traditional sport of the Zhuang people, an ethnic minority in southern China. Legend has it that the sport was devised as a military training technique. In this video, you can see why: the sport requires precise coordination and teamwork for squads of three people in order to remain upright and move faster than competitors.

This video is from the twelfth National Games of Ethnic Minorities, a sporting event which brings together teams from 35 of China's politically recognized ethnic minorities. You can see photos of the pageantry of this event at the state-run media outlet Global Times.

-via Massimo

I first became aware of the impending death of the star Betelgeuse in this xkcd comic a few days ago. Orion will lose his shoulder! Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky, a red supergiant 640 light years away. This star is 700,000,000 times our sun’s volume, and if it were here, it would fill our solar system. Over the past few years, Betelgeuse has brightened and dimmed (or "faintened," a word new to me) considerably. That means it is getting ready to collapse and explode, lighting up our sky to a superlative degree.

When it happens, Betelgeuse will go supernova, and become brighter than a full moon over the course of about ten days. It will stand out among other stars for many months. When will this happen? It could be soon, or anytime in the next 100,000 years. We will know when it happens, because astronomers will detect neutrinos before the light show begins. Or when it has already happened sometime in the last 640 years. Read what is going to happen to Betelgeuse in more detail at Big Think.

(Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

Ze Frank was surprised with an invitation to join the advisory board of the Senkenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA), based in Frankfurt, Germany. To find out if this was legit or just a prank, he went to Germany, and surprise! He's on the advisory board of a research center that studies and names new species of mollusks. They obviously realized that an American who makes fun of ocean creatures draws a lot of attention to them. So of course, Ze Frank repays the gesture by making fun of the institution, its scientists, mollusks in general, and Germany as a whole. In the meantime, we learn about how taxonomy works and how long it takes for a new species to be named. Some of the folks he roasted in this video came into the comments to show they are good sports. Of course they are, or they wouldn't have contacted Ze in the first place. The result is that today, a lot more people know what SOSA is and what they do, even if they never hear the end of a crayon's worth of argon or jiggly DNA. Watch out, Ze, you'll be inundated by requests to join other scientific boards now.