Culture

This year, we had the pleasure of watching and sharing hundreds of touching, adorable, and often downright hilarious videos across our Instagram and Facebook accounts. (If you don’t already, give us a follow!) The best part of the process? Seeing our social media followers like, comment, connect with, and, ultimately, make these feel-good moments from […]

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 […]

It’s hard to imagine Santa Claus without his nine flying reindeer. But although the real-life St. Nicholas’ roots date back to the fourth century and Greco-Roman Lycia, the notion of the legendary character’s sleigh, and the magical creatures that drive it, is relatively new. The first mention of a sleigh as Santa’s mode of transport […]

The song “Auld Lang Syne” is all but inescapable on the night of December 31, indelibly intertwined with New Year’s celebrations in many English-speaking countries. But where did it come from, and what does it mean? The phrase “Auld Lang Syne” is from the 18th-century Scots language, and translates to “old long since,” or more […]

Archaeologists have confirmed that ruins located on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees mountain range in Spain once formed a massive imperial Roman city with its own infrastructure, water supply system, sewers, public monuments, and possibly a temple. Experts wrote in a report that the Roman city was “of urban character” and featured “buildings of […]

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, […]

Have you ever wondered about whose scrawl is in the margins of your library book, or read a note on the inside cover and imagined who it was for? Sharon McKellar’s collection is for you. The librarian compiles items left on shelves and in library books across Oakland, California — from Post-It notes to bus […]