Matt Nelson of We Rate Dogs brought us The Top Ten Dogs of 2024, which we posted a few days ago. Those stories of heroic dogs were emotional enough, but there were only ten. We Rate Dogs ranks thousands of dogs every year, all above perfect. In their annual compilation video, Nelson collaborated with filmmaker West Webb to show us hundreds of the goodest boys and girls in clips from 2024 videos. After all, a dog doesn't have to save lives to be a hero. They don't even need to be heroic, because being themselves is more than we deserve. You will laugh at some dogs, tear up at others, but you'll smile the whole time.  

By the time this video is over, you'll fall in love with the song, too. It's "Bloom" by The Paper Kites. See the original video here. You can keep up with the dogs of 2025 at Instagram or Facebook.

Montchavin is a picturesque village in the French Alps where many are employed in the skiing industry. The region is home to Paradiski, one of the world's largest ski resorts. Thousands of people visit every year, but Montchavin itself only has a couple hundred permanent residents. In 2009, a woman from Montchavin was referred to neurologist Emmeline Lagrange, who diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Dr. Lagrange contacted the Montchavin general practitioner, who told her he was well aware of ALS, because he knew of three other cases in the village.

Lagrange was puzzled, because ALS is fairly rare, with two or three new cases diagnosed per 100,000 people in a year. She eventually uncovered 16 cases of ALS in Montchavin, an extraordinary cluster of diagnoses. The patients were not all related, and several came from other countries, although they had lived in Montchavin for years. Of 12 patients who had blood tests, none had genetic markers for ALS susceptibility. Was it an environmental pollutant? Many possibilities were investigated, but no risk factor was identified as being common to all the patients. However, a 2017 report mentioned that six of the patients reported eating wild mushrooms. Lagrange spotted that detail and went back to the 13 patients she was studying. She discovered that all of them had eaten Gyromitra esculenta, a delicious wild mushroom that is so toxic that it is illegal to sell them in France. Read about the investigation, and the state of research into the causes of ALS at Knowable magazine.

(Image credit: Audrey OT)

Explore this image and you'll see represented an entire year of one person's life. Specifically, it's Sophie O'Neill's experience of 2020.

She tells BBC News that she began January 1 of that year by embroidering an icon representing the fountain at a hotel where she worked. Each day, she added a new icon representing that particular day in her life and the experience that was for her. She matches each icon with a few words that she writes down in a journal to provide context.

Now, in 2025, O'Neill is still going strong. She offers online resources for people who would like to join her in embroidering 2025.

-via Kottke

The upcoming film Love Me has an intriguing concept. In a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have gone extinct, a buoy falls in love with a satellite. To be together, they review historical accounts of humanity and create avatars of themselves, played by Steven Yeun and Kristen Stewart. While this may be the best that such diverse machines can accomplish for happiness, we are forced to consider how this kind of virtual love may replace actual companionship among humans.

The idea may remind you somewhat of the plot of Wall-E, in which we felt compelled to root for the success of animated robot romance. Love Me was screened at Sundance a year ago and has middling reviews, so the execution may not quite live up to the idea. Releasing a movie in January doesn't inspire that much confidence, but I certainly enjoyed the trailer. Love Me opens in theaters on January 31. -via Gizmodo  

Human beings have exerted enormous control over the earth, particularly in modern times. But there's a bit of hubris in thinking that we are mightier than the world beneath our feet. The forces of nature are always showing us who's the boss. In 1929, the authorities in Sugarloaf Key, Florida, thought they would conquer mosquitoes by bringing in bats. How? By building the world's largest bat tower, which they did. They planned to attract 100,000 bats with a special bait made by bat expert Charles Campbell. Their tower was up for one day before a hurricane hit. No, it didn't destroy the tower, which survived for close to a century, but no bats ever lived in it because the bait was washed away.

Read the details of that story and four others concerning the folly of man vs. nature at Cracked. As Chiffon margarine once said, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

(Image credit: Ebyabe)

Kaido is a miniature Australian Shepherd. Matty is a human (I'm guessing; he doesn't say directly). Together, they bike through the streets of New York City.

Kaido is a civic-minded dog who contributes to the well-being of his polity. He is involved with the efficient implementation of social services, such as ambulances, by howling whenever he hears the siren erupting from one.

-via Laughing Squid

The trope of the evil scientist is useful for fiction, but it is grounded in real history. Scientists as a whole are just as ethical as the population of people they came from, and that means that some were fine with doing horrible things to experimental subjects they considered lesser than themselves, whether that involved animals, disabled people, subjugated races, or even uninformed volunteers. Some of these experiments turned out to be a bit fraudulent in their findings as well.

A psychological experiment conducted by John B. Watson in 1920 may seem tame compared to those linked above, but it involved an innocent baby, which shocked the scientific world. It was one of the experiments that led to stricter ethical standards in science experiments, and drove home the importance of scientific rigor in claiming results that may or may not stand up over time. There is little direct documentation left of the Little Albert experiment, but Weird History uses what little photographic evidence is left plus plenty of stock footage to tell the tale.

British artist Chris Barker made a poster in the style of the album cover for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band featuring images of notable people who died in 2024. It's a big crowd.

Barker has worked around the clock in the past few days trying to include every celebrity. The image above is version five for 2024, as he updated the collage to include former president Jimmy Carter and a couple of other people who passed on in the last week. By now it should be definitive. Barker said he received more notifications about Carter than anyone else since he's been doing this annual project. You can enlarge the picture at Instagram or Bluesky. The latest key we have is for version four, enlargeable here, and if he gives us an updated key I will edit this post. Note Kobosu, the dog we know from the doge memes, in front. Also Burt the crocodile who starred in the movie Crocodile Dundee. The objects in front are representative of people who aren't recognizable by their pictures.

See Barker's poster from last year here, and those going back to 2016 here.

Putting up Christmas decorations can be exciting, but taking them down and packing them away feels like a chore. It's difficult to switch from an array of festive lights to the bleakness of the rest of the winter. Redditor 1s0m3r posed the question of everyone's traditional schedule in taking Christmas decorations down. The most common answer seems to be after January 6th, which is Orthodox Christmas, Epiphany, Three Kings Day, or the 12th day of Christmas. Coming in second was soon after New Year's Day. Some leave them up much longer because they dread the work, or have another family occasion to celebrate. Some folks just take down the Santa Clauses and leave the tree to be decorated for Mardi Gras or Valentine's Day. And some people just leave all the decorations up until they are good and ready to say goodbye to them, maybe around Easter.  

I prefer the gradual approach. I stashed all the wrapping paper and ribbon first, then Christmas clothing as it's washed. Around New Year's Day I pack the tree ornaments away, but I will leave the tree and lights up until Epiphany, at least. I have so many lights, inside and out, that it will take a week to pack them away, because I don't like to spend all day doing anything. What about you?

In Finland, college students often wear haalarit, or overalls (what we would call coveralls) to university events, parties, and ceremonies. The appearance of each haalarit will tell you a lot about the wearer. The color indicates what discipline they are studying, which will vary by school. The patches worn are from a student's experiences and accomplishments, so being covered with patches is a sign of status. And sometimes you can tell that a student is "taken" if the overalls have a mismatched part, because they swapped with their significant other. The haalarit are a source of pride for students, and a way to boost school spirit. It also makes it easier to see who has the same interests as you do.        

The custom of the haalarit began in the 1950s or '60s when other students began copying the coveralls worn by Civil Engineering students in Sweden. Further digging reveals that these overalls should never be washed. Well, college doesn't last forever. -via Kottke

For many Americans, the only time we drink champagne is at weddings or on New Year's Eve, so we may as well get the most of out it. For advice, we can turn to scientists like chemical physicist Gérard Liger-Belair of the "Effervescence & Champagne" team at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. He has possibly the best job a physicist can have, studying the bubbles that make champagne special.

Liger-Belair explains the science behind champagne, which is fermented twice to produce the bubbles. The experience of drinking it relies not only on the quality of the underlying wine, but also in the bubbles. People will rate a cheap wine as more expensive if it has bubbles, no matter how they are produced. You'll get more bubbles by pouring champagne down the side of a glass, and instead of a champagne flute, you'll have a nicer sip from a wider glass that won't concentrate the carbon dioxide under your nose. Read more about the science of champagne and how to maximize the pleasure of drinking it at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Hubert Raguet/Equipe Effervescence, Champagne et Applications)

Kelsey Piggott is a master baker in North Salt Lake, Utah who specializes in sourdough bread loves painted with vivid images from life and popular culture. I take it this loaf comes from a scene in which Bluey and Bingo pretend to be elderly women.

Now, technically, snowglobes are edible if you're sufficiently reckless. But redditor /u/bloomcakes created edible snowglobe cupcakes that will be completely pleasant to consume.

We don't deserve dogs. The account We Rate Dogs always rates a dog at more than ten out of ten, and at the end of the year, they take on the gargantuan task of selecting the top ten dogs of the year for us. In this year's list, you'll meet courageous dogs who rose to the occasion as heroes, who proved their undying loyalty to their humans, and who work hard to please us. Rowdy suffered multiple injuries in protecting an autistic child who had wandered off. Coby saved an entire neighborhood by finding a gas leak. And the stories get even more inspiring after those. There's even a dog who performed CPR! While man's best friends are all good dogs, these puppies went above and beyond for their humans, and deserve to be on the top ten list. You might want to grab a hankie before watching this video.  -via Metafilter


 

Tom Nichols once taught a class in the Cold War and American pop culture, for students who were too young to have experienced both at the same time. Many songs, movies, and TV shows carried references to the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union that fly over their heads today. The Twilight Zone is famous for this, but the original Star Trek series, which aired from 1966 to 1968, was rich with Cold War allegories.

The various sci-fi writers who worked on Star Trek were open to all kinds of adventures, but series creator Gene Roddenberry pushed his own ideas constantly. In the series, the United Federation of Planets stood in for first world countries, specifically NATO, and the Klingon Empire represented the second world, the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Despite the Prime Directive, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise often stepped in to stop wars on various planets or protect a planet from the Klingons. Some episodes mirrored real-world events that have become disconnected over time. Nichols takes us through a few of those episodes and explains the Cold War analogies in an essay that will bring back memories, good or bad. -via Damn Interesting