The Brief

The U.S. may be entering another rough winter for flu, according to early data.

"The signs are, it could be a big season," says Richard Webby, who studies the flu at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. "The flu season might have a little bit of a punch to it this year."

The first clue to what may be in store is what influenza did during the Southern Hemisphere's winter. That often predicts what's coming for the Northern Hemisphere.

"They had some pretty decent flu activity in many parts of the Southern Hemisphere," Webby says. "It actually lasted for a longer period of time — the tail of the season went on for longer than typical."

And now, parts of the Northern Hemisphere, such as the United Kingdom, are being hit hard. That often foreshadows what's in store for the U.S.

Another clue is the Northern Hemisphere's dominant flu strain so far. It's an H3N2 flu virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu tracker.

And H3N2 viruses "tend to be a little bit more problematic," Webby says. "When we have an H3N2 season, we tend to have a little bit more activity, a little bit more disease at the severe end of the spectrum."

The last major flu season dominated by H3N2 was 2016-2017.

In addition, a new H3N2 variant recently evolved and has become the dominant strain in the U.S.

"There is basically a new variant of influenza circulating that has mutated a little bit," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. "And that means that it's just different enough from what your body or the vaccine may recognize that it can kind of get around those protections."

And she says the flu shot this year "may not be as good a match as if we hadn't seen this new variant."

That said, data from the U.K. indicates the vaccines still make a difference, Rivers says. In the U.K., the vaccines appear to be about 70% to 75% protective against hospitalization in children and about 30% to 40% protective against hospitalization in adults.

So Rivers and others are urging anyone who hasn't already gotten a flu shot to get one.

"Definitely get it as soon as possible. Because activity is low right now. But it is increasing. And it will continue to increase straight through until we hit peak, which is usually around the holiday season. There's no sense in waiting when we are barreling into flu season," Rivers says.

It takes about two weeks for immunity to kick in. And people don't want to catch or spread the flu over Thanksgiving. The flu kills between roughly 12,000 and 52,000 people in the U.S. every winter.

"I do have concerns that uptake of both the influenza and the annual COVID vaccine won't be as high this year as it had been in previous years," Rivers said. She is concerned by rhetoric coming from federal health officials questioning "whether vaccines are safe and effective."

"We know that they are," she says. "And they are important for protecting against severe illness. So it's really important that people go out and get them this year."

In a written statement to NPR, a Health and Human Services spokesperson said: "It is too early to know what viruses will spread this season, in what proportion, and how well the vaccine will work in the United States."

The statement added: "The decision to vaccinate is a personal one. Individuals should speak to their healthcare provider on the risks and benefits of a vaccine."

Copyright 2025 NPR

A Powerball player in Arkansas won a $1.817 billion jackpot in Wednesday's Christmas Eve drawing, ending the lottery game's three-month stretch without a top-prize winner.

The winning numbers were 04, 25, 31, 52 and 59, with the Powerball number being 19.

Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot higher than previous expected, making it the second-largest in U.S. history and the largest Powerball prize of 2025, according to www.powerball.com. The jackpot had a lump sum cash payment option of $834.9 million.

"Congratulations to the newest Powerball jackpot winner! This is truly an extraordinary, life-changing prize," Matt Strawn, Powerball Product Group Chair and Iowa Lottery CEO, was quoted as saying by the website. "We also want to thank all the players who joined in this jackpot streak — every ticket purchased helps support public programs and services across the country."

The prize followed 46 consecutive drawings in which no one matched all six numbers.

The last drawing with a jackpot winner was Sept. 6, when players in Missouri and Texas won $1.787 billion.

Organizers said it is the second time the Powerball jackpot has been won by a ticket sold in Arkansas. It first happened in 2010.

The last time someone won a Powerball jackpot on Christmas Eve was in 2011, Powerball said. The company added that the sweepstakes also has been won on Christmas Day four times, most recently in 2013.

Powerball's odds of 1 in 292.2 million are designed to generate big jackpots, with prizes growing as they roll over when no one wins. Lottery officials note that the odds are far better for the game's many smaller prizes.

"With the prize so high, I just bought one kind of impulsively. Why not?" Indianapolis glass artist Chris Winters said Wednesday.

Tickets cost $2, and the game is offered in 45 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Copyright 2025 NPR

The holiday season means holiday movies: films that can be counted upon to bring warmth and holiday cheer — and also probably some snow, a little bit of magic, and grumpy, greedy, workaholic protagonists who need to be reminded of the true meaning of Christmas.

Good holiday movies can be great, but bad holiday movies? They can be fun in their own way. Maybe they serve up tired clichés or schmaltzy sentiment. Or maybe if it's Love Actually, they just do Emma Thompson really dirty.

So we're debating: what's the worst Christmas movie of all time?

This has been adapted from an episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. You can listen to the full conversation here. 

Jingle All The Way (1996) 

Stephen Thompson: When you break it down, what makes a Christmas movie bad? I don't think you can come up with a better metric than purports to satirize or comment upon commercialism while being 100% steeped in it, and refusing to undermine it in any way.

The plot of Jingle All The Way can be summed up in five words: Man wants toy for science. Arnold Schwarzenegger is your star, and Sinbad is his kind-of sort-of rival. This is part of the colossally large genre of '90s family comedies about terrible fathers. It has enough material for a skit, maybe a 22-minute episode of a sitcom, but it is stretched out to 90 minutes full of digressions. None of this looks fun for anybody. Phil Hartman has a ton of scenes, none of which are funny.

On top of that, very little lesson-learning happens. The only person who winds up having any kind of perspective is the little kid played by Jake Lloyd, who would go on to play Anakin Skywalker and then leave acting.

Jingle all the Way has a sequel from 2014. Does it have any of the same actors? It does not. It has Larry the Cable Guy.

I Believe in Santa (2022) 

Aisha Harris: I have a pretty high tolerance for bad Christmas romantic comedies. That is my genre. I can enjoy them almost no matter what. The 2022 Netflix rom-com, I Believe in Santa, is an exception.

What if Elf or Miracle on 31 Street were supremely creepy? That is the premise of this movie. Lisa (Christina Moore) is a writer for a local newspaper. The only assignments she seems to get are holiday-related. Then she meets Tom (John Ducey), a lawyer, and when they hit Christmas season, she discovers that Tom is obsessed with Christmas — and he believes that Santa is real.

He likens his faith in Santa Claus to a religious belief that adults just don't get. If you've had enough eggnog, that might actually start to make sense. But the more you think about it, the more you wonder: is this movie trying to say that Tom is a persecuted minority because he believes in Santa Claus? 

Love Actually (2003) 

Wailin Wong: Love Actually is the much beloved 2003 holiday rom-com written and directed by Richard Curtis and featuring a stacked cast: Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Laura Linney, and Colin Firth are all in it. But I have resented this movie getting canonized as the ultimate holiday rom-com — or even a rom-com at all — because to me, it fails as a rom-com. There are too many storylines, and only a few of them are even a little bit romantic. Most of them are super sad, or just kind of nothing-burgers to me.

It opens with a monologue by Hugh Grant's character, playing the prime minister, in which he mentions 9/11. No, thank you. Why are we talking about 9/11 in the opening minutes of a rom-com? The script is also weirdly fatphobic, which I realize on a rewatch. It's terrible.

And the one thing that I really, really don't like about this movie — the thing that grinds my gears the most — is the storyline featuring Keira Knightley, whose character is married to Chiwetel Ejiofor's. His best friend is played by Andrew Lincoln, and he has been secretly yearning for her. He shows up at the end of their storyline with these big cue cards that say things like, "To me, you are perfect." I hate this: it's been sold to us as the ultimate grand romantic gesture, when to me, it is the height of narcissism. It's so selfish.

Scrooge and Marley (2012) 

Glen Weldon: The 2012 film Scrooge and Marley is a gay take on A Christmas Carol set in modern day Chicago. And when you hear that there's a gay version of A Christmas Carol, certain questions leap inevitably to mind. So let's knock them down: Number one, is it narrated by Judith Light? Yes, it is narrated by Judith Light. Another: Who plays Fezziwig? Is it Bruce Vilanch? Bruce Vilanch does play Fezziwig, because Bruce Vilanch is what happens when you can't meet Harvey Fierstein's quote.

Ben Scrooge (David Pevsner) owns a gay piano bar (redundant), he hates Christmas, and ghosts arrive to take him on a tour of Chicago in the past, present, and future. This film was done on the cheap, and it looks it, filmed in cramped, underlit Chicago apartments and bars. There's one gay bathhouse, Man's Country, which has since closed. In the credits, the producers thank two and only two companies for their product placement — Absolut Vodka and Grindr.

Look: I don't legitimately believe this to be the worst holiday movie of all time. It exudes exactly what you expect it to exude, which is raw sincerity and sentimentality. Those are two things I'm allergic to personally — but it's doing its job, right? I think it's entirely possible that someone who does not have a desiccated husk where a heart should could even enjoy this film. Not likely, but entirely possible.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Winter may seem like a season of stillness, but science tells us a different story.

Even in the quiet winter months, the natural world buzzes with activity. Insect migration patterns shift, animal survival tactics kick in, and tiny engineering feats unfold as snowflakes form in the sky.

These five Deep Look videos bring that hidden winter world to life.

The sex lives of Christmas trees

When forests grow quiet in winter, pine cones emerge as the reproductive engines of conifers, with male and female cones playing distinct roles.

The male cones release clouds of pollen in spring, but the female cones do the real winter magic: they hold the seeds.

Their armor-like scales act like tiny gates, opening just wide enough to catch pollen spread by the wind, then sealing shut for months as the seeds develop inside.

When conditions are just right, often during crisp, dry weather, the cones flex open again and let the seeds whirl out into the cold air, find a home in the ground and grow into the next generation of trees. Conifers survived ice ages, fires, and everything in between with this ancient system, as old as 300 million years.

Why reindeer and their cousins are total boneheads

Every year, male reindeer grow an entirely new set of antlers, essentially full bones that sprout from their heads in a process fueled by testosterone.

In summer, these antlers are wrapped in velvet, a dense skin rich in blood vessels that nourish the fast-growing bone. Come fall, the velvet sheds, revealing the smooth, polished antlers, the reindeer use to spar with rivals and impress potential mates.

But after this courtship season ends and hormone levels drop, the antlers simply fall off. Squirrels, mice and other winter scavengers gnaw on the cast-off antlers for calcium.

Within weeks, the reindeer begin growing the next set. They may not fly, but they’re winter’s most impressive bone-builders.

Identical snowflakes? Scientist ruins winter for everyone

Each snowflake starts as a tiny water-vapor speck freezing into an icy hexagon.

As it tumbles through clouds, temperature and humidity shape its branches, making each one’s journey and pattern unique.

But in a lab, physicist Ken Libbrecht can actually make identical snowflakes by precisely controlling the conditions.

Nature may be unpredictable, but science proves it can be repeatable, at least under the right conditions.

You’d never guess what an acorn woodpecker eats

In the oak woodlands of the West, acorn woodpeckers spend the colder months guarding something very valuable: thousands of acorns meticulously stored in their communal granaries.

These birds drill hole after hole into trees, sometimes over generations, to create a kind of pantry wall where they can tap acorns in like a wooden peg.

Acorn woodpeckers live in family groups and spend winter tending their stash and defending it from thieves. Come spring, they’ll shift to insects and oak flowers, but in winter, acorns fuel their lively, noisy, and highly social world.

Loveliness of ladybugs

Did you know that a cluster of these insects is known as a “loveliness of ladybugs”?

Just when the cold sets in and their favorite foods, like aphids, disappear, ladybugs join one of the most surprising winter gatherings in nature.

These usually solitary insects take to the air, riding wind currents toward mountain slopes where their ancestors have clustered for years. They’re guided by pheromone trails that act like tiny chemical breadcrumbs.

When they arrive, they pile together in rust-colored heaps, sometimes thousands strong. This communal hibernation is their best chance of surviving winter, and since most only live a year, it’s also their one shot at reproducing in spring.

Stealing a smooch under the mistletoe is a time-honored holiday tradition — but the word itself has an origin that invokes the exact opposite of romance.

As part of NPR's "Word of the Week" series, we're exploring the history of the plant's name, diving into the tradition of kissing beneath it, and taking a scientific detour along the way.

The etymology of mistletoe — a plant with small, oval evergreen leaves and waxy white berries — likely comes from the Anglo-Saxon words for manure — "mist" or "mistel" — and "tan" (sometimes rendered as "toe"), meaning "twig" or "stick."

"It literally means bird poop on a twig," according to Susie Dent, a British lexicographer and author of Guilt by Definition.

The name stems from the way its seeds are carried by birds and dropped after passing through their digestive tract. This method of seed dispersal is called endozoochory, says Tristram Seidler, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the curator of the UMass Amherst Herbarium.

In short, animals eat fruits, including berries, move on and "deposit" the seeds in a different location, he says. For mistletoe seeds, that location happens to be the tops of trees. From an evolutionary standpoint, Seidler says, species survival can depend on getting seeds away from the parent plant.

"Any seeds that land near their parent plant may germinate," he explains. "But they're almost certainly going to be wiped out by disease because those areas tend to be crowded and small plants are very susceptible to their own pathogens."

Humans, then, make use of the mistletoe spread by those birds — planting it in cultural practices that stretch back into antiquity.

Mistletoe history

The oldest customs surrounding mistletoe are likely tied to celebrations of the winter solstice, according to Bettina Arnold, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. These go back to the Neolithic era in prehistoric Europe.

"All agricultural societies would have made note of [the winter solstice] because it literally is the time when… you can start seeing the days getting longer again," she says. "So it's a return to life after sort of a seasonal death, in a way." The mistletoe, being evergreen, "is actually almost a metaphor for that."

Arnold says that Pliny the Elder, a first-century Roman author, provided a detailed account of mistletoe and its use by druids, a nature- and ritual-focused priesthood that lived in Iron Age Gaul (modern-day France) and the British Isles. Pliny said that when they found mistletoe growing on a particular kind of oak tree, a priest in white vestments would climb up to cut down the mistletoe with a golden sickle.

"They believe that mistletoe given in drink will impart fertility to any animal that is barren, and that it is an antidote for all poisons," Pliny wrote. (In fact, modern medical literature says the exact opposite).

Given mistletoe's association with fertility and rebirth, it's not surprising that it made its way into Christian tradition, Arnold says, noting that although we often forget it today, "the Roman Catholic Church is really kind of an extension of the Roman Empire." The Romans themselves also had their own solstice tradition that seeped into Christian practice: Saturnalia, in honor of the god of agriculture, Saturn, included decorating homes with evergreen boughs, wreaths and garlands to symbolize renewal.

Norse mythology adds another mistletoe tale — of Baldur, the god of light. In a story reminiscent of the Greek hero Achilles, Baldur's mother, Frigg, makes her son invincible to all things except mistletoe. Loki, the trickster, exploits this unusual weakness by using an arrow made of mistletoe to kill Baldur. In some later versions of the story, Frigg's tears over her son's death become mistletoe berries, symbolizing her love.

Plant a kiss

So, what about all the kissing?

A reference appears in a song from the 1784 musical comedy Two for One, which celebrates "what good luck has sent ye / And kiss beneath the mistletoe."

It's the oldest written reference to the custom, according to Arnold. It appears to have gained popularity in the following centuries, with holiday themes of regeneration, renewal and redemption helping to reinforce it.

According to author Dent, the story of mistletoe reflects this transformation, evolving from a "slightly scatological beginning … [to] blossom into something rather beautiful."

Copyright 2025 NPR