1. Politwoops has been tracking the tweets politicians delete for a whole year now.

"As 2013 winds down and Washington retreats to spend the holidays with family and friends, the Sunlight Foundation looks back at the many gifts politicians left for Politwoops in 2013 as they deleted messages once shared eagerly with their followers. Of the more than 1,000 accounts followed by Politwoops, 76 percent of them deleted something over the course of the year."

2. How to build an indestructible gingerbread house. 

"That's why Erica Kahn, an undergraduate at the Brown University School of Engineering who helps put on the school's yearly Extreme Gingerbread Competition, said she steers clear of icing altogether.

Instead, Kahn recommends melting down caramel, gummy candies and marshmallow. Once they're melted, the marshmallows become tacky and glue-like, Kahn tells The Salt. 'They become this really strong, cement-like substance.'

With these tips in mind, we proceeded to construct."

3. A melted Mr. Goodbar inspired the microwave oven. 

" Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine who worked at the time for Raytheon was working on an active radar set when he noticed that a Mr. Goodbar he had in his pocket started to melt: the radar had melted his chocolate bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters."

4. Other Networks Newsletter (1981-1988).

"The first issues were laid out by hand with paper and scissors; subsequent issues took advantage of then-new desktop publishing technology. This metamorphosis in production was paralleled in the publication's content: E.g., earlier issues mentioned "multilogues", in which social networks were created by people sending snail-mail letters to one person who would then send out copies to all; later issues increasingly described uses of computers for interpersonal interconnection. All of this, of course, went out to the public far in advance of the advent of 21st-century tools like Facebook and Twitter."

5. The average breastfeeding rate obscures huge regional variation among American states. The west's rates are high. The south's rates are low. 

"The percent of US infants who begin breastfeeding is high at 77%. While there is concern that infants are not breastfed for as long as recommended, the National Immunization Survey data show continued progress has been made over the last ten years. Of infants born in 2010, 49% were breastfeeding at 6 months, up from 35% in 2000. The breastfeeding rate at 12 months increased from 16% to 27% during that same time period."

Bonus: We made our readers a holiday present, an e-book presentation of Sad Keanu's Excellent 3D Adventures. (It's the story of a 3D-printed doll's quest for happiness and love in the modern age.)

Another book recommendation:

Lori van den Berg's remarkable book of stories, The Isle of Youth. Powerful, unnerving, unflappable.

Thanks Lori E. & Amos Z.!

Subscribe to 5 Intriguing Things

Pay Attention to the Melting in Your Pocket