Culture

Carols are playing on the radio and in stores, homes are decked out with colorful lights and displays, and vehicles can be spotted with green spruces or pines on their roofs — all signifiers that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the old Bing Crosby song goes.  Christmas, observed annually on December […]

Bumblebees are known for being excellent workers, helping to maintain and operate a nest while also pollinating plants and flowers. But accomplishing tasks isn’t the only thing these social little buzzers do — they enjoy playtime, too. In a first-of-its-kind study led by Queen Mary University of London and published in Animal Behaviour, researchers found […]

Recently proclaimed to be “the world’s most expensive sheep” by National Geographic, the Ladoum sheep of Senegal compete in annual televised beauty pageants and are known to fetch upward of $10,000 each. In some cases, it’s considerably more: a purchase price of just over $80,000 was allegedly once recorded. To be sure, Ladoum sheep are […]

A lot has changed since Bette Nash became a flight attendant. When she first took to the skies in 1957, tickets cost just $12 and cigarettes and matches were passed out after meals, she told ABC. Though soda and pretzels are the handouts of choice today, and the price of tickets has gone up quite […]

The last few years have yielded plenty of challenges: political and financial unrest, the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, habitat loss, and the effects of warming temperatures due to climate change, to name but a few. But there’s still plenty of good in the world, from small and simple pleasures to larger advancements offering collective hope for […]

In our fast-paced, ever-changing, and chaotic world, it can often feel difficult to remember something good that has happened in the past week, let alone an entire year. Nice News is here to help you remember some of the most significant positive stories from 2022 — from the endangered species that are bouncing back (looking […]

More than a century after his death, Vincent Van Gogh is continuing to delight art enthusiasts with new masterpieces. Experts at the National Galleries of Scotland discovered a never-before-seen self-portrait of the late artist while X-raying another of Van Gogh’s paintings, “Head of a Peasant Woman,” before putting it on display.  When “Head of a […]

In the middle of Nevada’s vast desert there’s a 200-million-year-old rich fossil bed, where many “school bus-sized” ichthyosaurs are petrified in stone. The remains of these 50-foot-long, ancient marine reptiles (Shonisaurus popularis) have been found over the course of half a century, but the findings have perplexed paleontologists since their discovery — specifically why their […]

Have you ever stopped to wonder how the first month of the year came to be called “January,” or where the other months’ names, from “February” through “December,” actually originated? In case the start of another trip around the sun has you curious, here’s a brief overview of how we arrived at our present-day calendar system. […]

Outside of academia, many people have never heard of Pāṇini, the revered grammarian and scholar whom some experts refer to as “the father of linguistics.” A master of Sanskrit — a classical Indo-European language from South Asia, and the sacred and literary language of Hinduism — Pāṇini is thought to have produced his legendary treatise, […]

Canine remains found at the colonial settlement of Jamestown have provided new information about the lineage of dogs, both indigenous and of European origin, in the Americas. After extracting DNA from the bones, a team of archeologists from the University of Iowa were able to confirm that the remains belonged to indigenous dogs. The discovery […]