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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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A major cold snap is forecast to push south into the contiguous United States over the Christmas holidays, with regions between North Dakota and Colorado experiencing temperatures 20ºF to 40ºF below normal over Christmas Eve. Conversely, the east coast may see above-seasonal temperatures, with a forecast high of 71ºF in Washington D.C, and 62ºF in New York City on Christmas Day.

"If you’re West of the Mississippi River on Christmas Day, then you may want to ask for coal in your stocking," tweets meteorologist Ryan Maue, with weather.us. "Extreme cold arriving via Polar Express. Off the charts Arctic cold."
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In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth constricted the vocabulary used by the population in an attempt to narrow the individual’s range of thought. And it would appear that the Trump administration is copying this move from Minitrue’s playbook: In an apparent attempt to influence specific avenues of research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Trump administration has issued a directive banning specific words from appearing in future budget proposals issued by the agency. This directive, banning seven key words, was delivered during a December 14 meeting with senior CDC officials that oversee the agency’s budget.
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