The koala bear is not a bear, the raccoon dog is neither a raccoon nor a dog, and the horned toad is no toad at all. So is a red panda actually a panda? Yes! We call it a red panda to distinguish it from the giant panda, which is actually a bear. The giant panda was given its English name 40 years after the red panda was scientifically described, and besides it had already been called a panda long before that. 

The species name Ailurus fulgens means "shining cat." But we call them red pandas, cat bears, Himalayan raccoons, fire foxes, lesser pandas, or wahs. Wah is a confusing name, but probably as accurate as calling them pandas. It feels derogatory to call them lesser pandas, since the giant panda is the one that's not a panda. You have to wonder how these two very different animals were associated with each other in the first place. The Chinese name for a giant panda means big bear cat, which is two-thirds accurate. The red panda's name in Chinese is small bear cat, which is only one-third accurate. They are small, but they are not lesser. They are pandas. -via The Ark in Space 

You've heard about boys joining the army in the Civil War who were so young that they weren't given weapons but played a drum instead. Perhaps you saw the 1963 Disney TV movie Johnny Shiloh. The film was fictionalized, but was based on a real boy who ran away from home to join the Union Army in 1861 when he was only nine years old. 

John Lincoln Clem was not accepted as a soldier at age nine, but he refused to go home and followed the 22nd Michigan Infantry Regiment. They had to feed the child, and the officers chipped in to pay him. The army officially accepted his enlistment a couple of years later. He was a drummer boy, but he also learned to shoot, and for his heroic deeds in the Battle of Chickamauga, he was promoted to sergeant. Johnny Clem was (and still is) the youngest soldier ever to become a noncommissioned officer in the US Army. He was twelve years old. 

After the war, in which Clem was wounded twice and captured once, he left the army to go to high school. Then he rejoined in 1871 when U.S. Grant appointed him a second lieutenant. Clem retired as a brigadier general in 1915, the last Civil War soldier on active duty. On retirement, he was promoted to major general. Read more on Clem's adventures and accomplishments at Wikipedia.    -Thanks, WTM! 

Yesterday, French artist and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot died at the age of 91. Her passing prompted this X post:

Brigitte Bardot’s death means there are now just three people mentioned in @billyjoel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire who are still alive.

— Jon Hollis (@JonHollis9) December 28, 2025

Billy Joel's 1989 song "We Didn't Start the Fire" contains lengthy lists of people and major events from 1949, when Joel was born, until 1989. It's an anthem of Baby Boomer popular culture mixed with the politics of the United States during the Cold War.

Only three people listed in the song are still alive: Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker, and Bernhard Goetz.

Image: 20th Century Fox

Mary Berry is an English chef and food writer who's been on British TV for many years, including as a judge on The Great British Bake Off. Here she smoothly raps about anything and everything, thanks to the magic of editing. Listen carefully, and you'll hear a coherent narrative emerge.  

Now, I wasn't familiar with Mary Berry until today, but this is a video by master editor Swedemason (previously at Neatorama), who can make anything interesting with his judicious cuts and deft timing. He's been absent from YouTube for seven years, due to the fact that he got a real job doing this. But his creative job was "indirectly" taken by artificial intelligence, a story that is referenced in the lyrics of this video. Bad news for Swedemason, but good news for us in that he's back making the videos he wants to in order to entertain us. It shouldn't be long before some other company snaps up his skills. -via b3ta 

Ice is slippery. We all know that and take precautions when we have to walk across even a small amount, but when we put on ice skates, something magical happens. While ice skating uses many of the same skills and techniques as rollerblading, there is a fundamental difference in what's happening between the skater and the icy surface. That's because water, the most abundant substance on earth, is kind of strange in comparison with other materials. 

Water crystallizes when it freezes into a solid. However, unlike most substances, ice is less dense than water, which is why ice cubes float in your drink. Under the right conditions, ice will melt into water under pressure, while other substances just compact. When a person wear ice skates, their weight is concentrated into a very small surface, creating more pressure. That's why the condition of a sheet of ice is different before a skater reaches it, while the skate is on the surface, and then after the skater passes the ice. This combination of ice conditions allows a skater to glide across ice while keeping their balance (although it does take some practice). Read about the physical properties of ice and water that enable skating at Big Think. 

(Image credit: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons) 

The McMansion arose in the 1980s and took over the suburban landscape: huge custom-built houses on too-small lots that defied design rules and contained all the dream elements of the family within. A new trend in architecture is threatening to overtake the McMansion, but it isn't any better. It's called the McModern, a term coined by Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell. It's like a McMansion in the style of midcentury California modernism. We all recognize it when we see it, but the modern version is so much larger than the originals, not to mention super expensive despite the architectural drawbacks. 

The McModern is made up of geometric blocks with a flat roof and lots of glass. The exterior is driven by the interior, where a magnificent view and luxury amenities are priority. The result is a mishmash of cantilevered square shapes on a too-small lot. To be honest, in looking for an illustration, most of the examples that came up were rendered in Minecraft. The interiors are also geometric and neutral in color, so as to preserve resale value. Read about the McModern trend and see plenty of examples at Architectural Digest. -via Fark 

Every year since 1966, the residents of Gävle, Sweden, erect a giant yule goat made of straw to celebrate the season. The Gävle Goat has proven to be a huge tourist draw, and an entire festival grew up around it. In recent years, it has been broadcast worldwide on a live webcam. But the goat is always in danger. In about one out of every three years, someone has managed to burn the goat down before the new year. The expected arson has been less frequent in the 21st century because of serious security protocols. But the goat is still vulnerable to other methods of destruction. In 2023, the Gävle Goat was eaten by birds! 

In 2025, it appeared as if the goat was going to make it to New Year's Day, but fate intervened. Storm Johannes brought winds up to 40 miles per hour to Sweden, and the goat was no match for them. It collapsed to the ground early Saturday afternoon. Thus, 2025 will be another disastrous entry into the history the world's unluckiest Christmas decoration.   

Every year, Barry Petchesky (previously at Neatorama) sifts through the records of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of emergency room visits, looking for cases of foreign objects stuck in body orifices that require medical attention. 2025 is the 13th year of his report, and he has suspended reporting on things that were stuck in ears, noses, and throats. No one paid much attention to those anyway. But the internet is intrigued with the objects that had to be medically retrieved from penises, vaginas, and rectums. Some cases on the list come with notes taken verbatim from the medical reports, for example, "INSERTED TWO DIAMOND RINGS IN HER VAGINA WHILE AT A PARTY IN FEAR THEY WOULD BE STOLEN." Yes, there are a couple of tales of slipping and falling in the shower, and even more of patients not remembering how it happened. The entire post should be considered NSFW. Read all three lists at Defector. 

It's common enough to get a couple fortune cookies delivered with the bill at the end of a meal at a Chinese restaurant. But TAO Asian Bistro goes much, much further. Its iconic fortune cookie is a complete dessert course. At a guess, I'd say that it's about eight inches across. Here's a video that shows how the chefs make it.

Furthermore, the bistro makes custom versions of its fortune cookie dessert for Christmas, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the Chinese New Year.

This fortune cookie is one of 15 huge desserts compiled by The Takeout, including huge sundaes, milkshakes, and a 25-pound apple pie.

Earlier this year, New York City banned cell phones in classrooms through high school. The results are mostly positive. Teachers report that students are more likely to get to class on time. The downside is that they really don't know that they are on time, because many don't know how to read the analog clock found in every room. These same students were taught how to tell time in the first and second grades, but since then they've relied on their phones to display the time digitally. 

It's a phenomenon we've all heard about from time to time, but the NYC school story shines a light on how widespread it is. Students who don't understand analog clocks don't understand the terms "a quarter 'til," "top of the hour," or "incoming fire at ten o'clock," much less "clockwise." Such phrases often reveal a misunderstanding of fractions. I read about a student declaring that "a quarter 'til three" meant 2:35 because a quarter was 25. But how can 35 be three-quarters? A misunderstanding of round clocks may also interfere with the understanding of 360° geometry or compasses, not to mention number systems outside base ten. 

There are those who would argue that people no longer need to understand analog clocks because there are digital clocks everywhere, and the phrases we use for time and direction are outdated. What do you think? 

-via Fark 

(Image credit: Julian Herzog) 

In 2023, millions of fans went to stadiums to see Taylor Swift's Eras tour. Most of the fans were young ladies, many of them too young to drive to concerts. Tickets were very expensive, and often out of reach for entire families. So the fathers of fans who were lucky enough to get tickets took their daughters to the arena, and then waited in the parking lot for hours to take them home. With so many other men in the same boat, they had a community of sorts in the parking lot. After all, they have a few things in common. 

Hearing the music through their children, some of these dads are Taylor Swift fans themselves, and some are not, but they all love their daughters. Paul Scheer noticed the parking lot phenomenon and spent several evenings outside Swift's concerts in Los Angeles talking to these dads, 50 of them, to see who they were and how they felt about what they were doing. You might need to grab a hankie. -via Metafilter 

Lucky for us, modern commercial food production is governed by laws on food safety and regulations ensuring fair trade practices. For the most part. But it wasn't always so, and some iconic brands have sad or cutthroat origin stories. You know John Pemberton developed Coca-Cola and named it after its ingredients, but did you know he started using cocaine to treat his own morphine addiction? Okra is not native to the US, and was smuggled in. Fanta was developed during World War II when Germany lost their American suppliers and had to use garbage from local food processors to made soda. The story of the first pink lemonade is either cute or gross, depending on which story you believe. Several companies blatantly ripped off the competition and won through the magic of marketing, leaving the originals in the dust. Read the more nefarious (and sometimes gruesome) parts of the origin stories of 12 familiar foods at The Takeout. 

(Image credit: angrit) 

In 1989, Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced us to the Borg, a collective of cyborgs that work together as one unit to capture and assimilate the universe's beings and technology for their own purpose- which is to capture and assimilate others. They are seemingly soulless, more powerful than Starfleet, and growing bigger and more powerful all the time. A truly frightening nemesis. 

The more our heroes learn about the Borg, the more frightening they became. In later episodes, the philosophical question of individualism, free will, and the hive mind are explored. However, over time and multiple appearances in later movies and series of the Star Trek universe, the Borg lost their horror because they were always ultimately thwarted. We also got to know a few individual Borg drones, and they became sympathetic. The Borg never succeeded in permanently assimilating any of the main characters, although they came frighteningly close. This video is 20 minutes long, but it's from The Art of Storytelling, so you know it's going to be riveting. -via Laughing Squid 

Exotic, amazing, and totally untrue tales from faraway lands come through many paths. Locals like to troll visitors with scary stories, like that of the snipe or drop bear. Returning travelers like to impress people by becoming brave witnesses to things they heard. Some storytellers have an agenda, like proving their superiority over uncivilized cultures. And news outlets sometimes prioritize a good story over the truth. Sometimes legends arise due to a combination of these factors. And that's how we got the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar. 

On April 28, 1874, the New York World published an account of German botanist Karl Leche about a tree in Madagascar that resembled an eight-foot pineapple. The Mkodo tribe showed him a ceremony in which a woman was sacrificed to the tree by forcing her to drink its poison nectar, after which the tree's upper tendrils encased her. When Leche returned later, all that was left of the woman was her skull at the base of the tree. 

The problems with the story are 1. there is no evidence of the existence of Karl Leche, 2. there is no Mkodo tribe in Madagascar, and 3. no one ever saw the tree after that. But the story spread like crazy, and stuck around. This happened after insectivorous plants were discovered. There was a 19th-century queen of Madagascar who eliminated her rivals and invading foreigners by forcing them to drink poison. And, perhaps most importantly, most readers knew very little about Madagascar. Read how the legend of the man-eating tree came about at American Strangeness. -via Strange Company 

Christopher B. Buck, Ph.D., is a virologist with the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory of Cellular Oncology. Science News reports that he has lately experimented on himself and his brother by brewing and drinking beer that contains effective vaccines against cancer-causing polyomarivuses.

The project has caused legal difficulties for Buck who, as a scientist with the US federal government, is constrained by ethical requirements for experiments on human subjects--even if test subjects are himself and his brother. The formed and serves as the sole employee of the Gusteau Research Corporation to provide himself with some means of evading these restrictions.

-via NEXTA