The festive season ramps up to full tinsel this weekend, and many of us will be elving around ticking off our to-do lists. If you’re decking your halls with boughs of holly, you might like to have a quick read about the history of such traditions. It seems we’ve been adorning our homes with Christmassy decorations even before Christmas existed.

Next comes gift wrapping. There are two types of people in this world: those who spend hours delicately enveloping Christmas presents in sparkly paper, binding them in colour-coordinated ribbon and etching heartfelt messages on tiny labels with a fountain pen – and those who take the nearest page of a magazine, slap it around the gift (whether or not its big enough) and hold it all together with a used piece of masking tape. Some staggering scientific evidence out of the US this week reveals that latter approach is optimal. When people open gifts that look like garbage, they tend to prefer them. So that should save some time, at least.

There are big changes ahead for the UK in the wake of last week’s election. Prime minister Boris Johnson intends to use his large majority in the House of Commons to push through some radical changes to the nation’s constitution. These could see the number of MPs cut from 650 to 600 and the process through which elections are called changing. A legal expert has been reading over some of the proposals to try to work out what’s in store. There has been a lot to digest about this vote and the campaign that preceded it. As ever, Conversation authors have been taking an evidence based approach to their analyses of events, cutting through the spin to assess what Johnson’s victory really means.

One thing that definitely won’t be happening under Johnson is reform to the electoral system. Johnson is on to a winner with the first-past-the-post model, so why rock the boat? This, of course, has had many people wondering what the make-up of parliament might have looked like under a proportional voting system. An expert crunched the numbers.

This week we’ve also been looking on agog as a US president is impeached for the third time in history, assessing the scientific accuracy of Star Wars and trying to tell the difference between aliens and microfossils.

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