2019 in news: The alternative end-of-the-year awards

Congratulations, you’ve made it through another year of news.

We know it wasn’t always easy, so here’s a reward: our round-up of the moments that put a little smile on our faces in 2019. Many of them, inevitably, involve animals.

Oil rig workers 220km (135 miles) off Thailand’s coast got a shock in April when they spotted a brown dog paddling in the sea, possibly after falling from a trawler.

In this case, the animals were the rescuers rather than the rescued (sort of).

Anticipating the threat of wildfires later in the year, staff at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California hired a hungry herd of 500 goats to eat flammable scrub around the building in May.

Back in August, millions of you read about the adventures of five-year-old Lucie, whose before-and-after photos from her first day back in school were picked up by a newspaper in her native Scotland, then shared around the world.

When her mum saw her return home, she asked what Lucie had been up to. “Nothing much,” came the reply.

It was a close-run thing, pun intended. But all credit goes to Jasmin Paris, who broke the record for a 268-mile race by more than 12 hours. While stopping regularly to express breast milk. And hallucinating. On only three hours’ sleep. In the middle of writing her PhD thesis.

Copywriter Josh Thompson could see the writing on the wall at work when he was called in for a meeting: he was facing redundancy. His managers encouraged him to bring a “support person” to help cushion the blow, an option that is legally required in New Zealand.

But rather than bring a family member, a friend or even a pet, he splashed out NZ$200 (£100) on a clown called “Joe”, who sat making animal balloons during the meeting. The screeching sound proved to be somewhat of a distraction.

“Boy, oh, boy, are they noisy,” Josh said.

Top marks to Eimi Haga, a Japanese student of ninja history who handed in a blank paper. Her professor realised the essay was written in invisible ink, following the ninja technique of “aburidashi”, which involves spending hours soaking and crushing soybeans to make ink.

The South Korean women who deliver yoghurt from motorised fridges, and keep an eye out for the country’s most isolated people.

When archaeologists began an investigation into a stone circle found in rural Aberdeenshire, they thought they had stumbled across a site that was thousands of years old.

When South African comedian Trevor Noah presented the Best Picture nomination for Black Panther at the Oscars in February, he quoted a saying in the Xhosa language.

“Abelungu abazi ubu ndiyaxoka,” he said, “which means: ‘In times like these, we are stronger when we fight together than when we try to fight apart.'”

Tardigrades are tiny creatures with eight legs and are presumably furious at having been dumped so far from home.

Shortly after take-off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airport in August, an Airbus jet with 233 people on board struck a flock of gulls, causing both engines to fail.

With the jet full of fuel, the pilots managed to crash-land in a corn field in a belly-flop without lowering the wheels, to avoid debris flying off and rupturing fuel tanks.

This gutsy helicopter pilot who rescued an injured skier from a steep slope in the Alps in January.

There could be only one: the first ever photo of a black hole. Behold, the blazing space doughnut:

What’s even more impressive is that the black hole is 500 million trillion kilometres away, and about three million times the size of our planet. Here’s how the photo was taken.

This was a seriously close contest, but the discovery that men’s left testicles are slightly warmer than their right is just edged out of first place by the black hole photo.