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In a November speaking engagement at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film & TV, acclaimed film director Guillermo del Toro described an encounter with a UFO near Cerro del Cuatro, Mexico. Being a master storyteller of fantasy movies with lavish visuals such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, it should come as no surprise that he was disappointed by the otherwise mundane appearance of what he called a "crappy" UFO — although he says that the encounter was the most terrifying experience of his life.

"You sound like a complete lunatic, but I saw a UFO. I didn’t want to see a UFO. It was horribly designed."
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Most of us are familiar with how the legend of Santa Claus evolved, having descended from the traditions of Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century saint famous for his charity work and gift-giving, along with all of the details that have been added onto the story of Santa over the centuries, including his red suit, flying reindeer, Arctic abode, etc. However, Sierra College anthropologist John Rush suggests that many of these details might have an origin that has flown under the radar until recently: the shamanic use of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
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The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK has created the world’s smallest Christmas card, and at a mere 15 microns wide by 20 microns tall (0.015 by 0.020 millimeters), it out-miniaturizes last season’s 30-micron (0.030 millimeter) World’s Smallest Snowman. To apply a sense of scale, a human hair is about 50 to 80 microns (0.05 to 0.08 mm) wide.

The microscopic greeting on the 200 nanometer-thick (0.0002 mm) card includes a picture of a smiling cartoon snowman, and the inscription "Season’s Greetings", etched into the platinum-coated silicon nitride card using a focused ion beam. "From NPL" is the inscription signed inside the card.
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A professor of solid and structural mechanics at the University of Trento in Italy has come up with a way of combining natural spider silk and artificial graphene-based nanoparticles to produce a lightweight material three times stronger than steel. What’s more, this material is spun naturally by the spiders themselves, bypassing the need for problematic manufacturing processes.
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