Good morning and happy Monday!

How’s the festive season treating you? Or, perhaps more importantly, how are you treating the festive season?

The next few weeks could be a celebration and consolidation of a thoughtful year and a launch pad into 2022. But it could also wind up being a frenetic few weeks of late nights and/or stressful deadlines that leave you feeling exhausted and limping into the new year. Which do you think you’d prefer?

Our health/physiology/body doesn’t take a holiday just because it’s Christmas – sounds obvious, but definitely worth a reminder. Regular exercise, plenty of water, getting your spine checked, the odd early night and piece of fruit are probably worth “bonus points” at this time of year, so make sure you reward yourself with any or all of them whenever you can. :)

A plot hole to Marvel at
Ok sure, the Marvel films are fantastical science fiction craziness, but they did inspire some serious research into the relatively mundane (in the real world, at least) finger click. If you’re not familiar with the movies, ultra-villain Thanos clicks his fingers whilst wearing a metallic glove inlaid with the Infinity Stones and wipes out half the population of the universe. But do the physics of clicking fingers whilst wearing a glove stack up? Spoiler alert: nope, it’s not a thing, as biophysicist Saad Bhamla explains here.

Still some great movies though…

Weather-predicting trees
New research suggests that trees not only communicate with one another, but they may well be able to make adaptive changes for future weather conditions also. Observers in the USA have been tracking tree masting – a large dump of seeds – from season to season and it appears to align with beneficial conditions in the future. Clever trees.

Tails of the lost
Many of our not-too-distant primate relatives still wield rather impressive tails, but somewhere along the evolution path we managed to misplace ours. What happened?

Well, according to Bo Xia from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, our distinct lack of an extra appendage could be due to a single gene mutation around 20 million years ago. Had that not happened, life as we know it may well have been very different indeed.

Christmas gifts for little ones
A couple of simple gift suggestions for the stockings:

Educate and entertain the kids (aged 5+) with this brilliant book, A Kids Book About Your Microbiome. Filled with fun facts and great pictures it brings the microscopic world into full focus and teaches the importance of caring for our bodies from the inside out.

Colour the seasons with these fun Peanut Crayons by Goober (age 3+). A whole bunch of colours, non-toxic and made from eco-friendly bean wax. Perhaps not just for kids?

Have a brilliant week and be kind to yourself.

Big love,
Luke