Christmas can be hard. For some people, it increases loneliness, grief, hopelessness and family tension, and the festive season has a way of turning ordinary concerns into urgent ones. Not because something terrible is guaranteed to happen, but because more is often at stake: money, time, family dynamics, travel and expectations.

A large study found a small but consistent dip in people’s wellbeing in the run-up to Christmas. One psychological process that often shows up under this pressure is worry.

A small, icy moon of Saturn called Enceladus is one of the prime targets in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system. A new study strengthens the case for Enceladus being a habitable world.

The data for those new research findings comes from the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004-2017. In 2005, Cassini discovered geyser-like plumes of water vapor and ice grains erupting continuously out of cracks in Enceladus’ icy shell.

Desire to have a short-term companion for the holidays - a "holidate" - is common enough that it gets its own portmanteau but the reasons may not always be positive. A survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association found that 43 percent of U.S. adults report stress levels during this time of year high enough it makes the season difficult to enjoy.

The pressure is all the usual stuff some people struggle more than others over, like money and difficult families, but they are magnified in this narrow window of time. It may be why Thanksgiving is the source of so many angry, depressing movies. 

A recent survey by found that over 28 percent of adults claim they have an intimate, even romantic relationship, with an LLM (Large Language Model), colloquially deemed Artificial Intelligence - "AI".(1)

It seems plausible because 41 percent of people believe in psychics and ghosts.

What may be surprising is the demographics of the people embracing this new technology. It isn't young people, they know it's not real, it is Baby Boomers. Not only are they fine with AI relationships, over 50 percent say they can engage in a romantic relationship with an AI guilt-free.

Ford is the latest company to take a massive write-off on current electric car production- nearly $20 billion. Because making them would be even more costly.

With criticism due to an overspending frenzy funded by student loan debt still in full swing, some universities want to get back to education and not be social justice platforms for its employees to groom children to their beliefs.

From an early age, my life’s goal was to get at “the truth.” There were only two obvious career paths: Science, or investigative journalism. I went the first route, becoming an academic researcher. Proud of the path I chose, and always admiring the other one.

Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting with increasing frequency the northern Sweden town of Lulea, and its Technology University (LTU). In 2023 I spent three months there, invited by Marcus Liwicki and Fredrik Sandin to join the Machine Learning group for some studies of neuromorphic computing applications to particle detectors. Then toward the end of 2023 they were able to secure funding to invite me as a WASP Guest Professor. I thus spent at LTU some four months in 2024, but this year I have spent there over 6 months, as the research collaboration with the computer scientists of LTU has become more intensive. 

A doctor who told you to smoke cigarettes "in moderation" would likely lose their license, but alcohol has long been known as a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, deemed such before the International Agency for Research on Cancer was hijacked by activist epidemiologists as likely as not to be caught signing contracts with predatort trial lawyers, and has gotten 'in moderation' hand-waving by the medical community.

Maybe it is due to the amount of money the American Medical Association gets from the alcohol industry, maybe it is because there are 6X as many alcohol drinkers as there are smokers, but one thing certain is 'in moderation' free passes have nothing to do with science.

Bleeding hosts and stigmatizations are the best-known medieval miracles but less known ones, like a scorched cherry twig miraculously sprouting, a diseased swamp becoming fertile land, and healing the broken leg of an ox, are getting a new look.