It's not the best version of Jingle Bells you'll hear this year but have some festive cheer – it's being played by a rubber robot hand that can't move by itself. What's more, the hand could point the way to better designs for robot limbs. Most artificial limbs require complex mechanisms to control all their moving parts, but that might be overkill. When we use our hands to play piano or pick something up, a lot of the movement comes from the way their physical structure interacts with the environment. "Hands have intelligence in themselves," says Josie Hughes at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Neural networks are a type of computer program that imitate the way that brains learn to solve problems. They're used for face recognition, self-driving cars, language translation, financial decisions, and more. I mainly use them to write humor. My process starts with a dataset - something that the neural network has to figure out how to imitate. Rather unfairly, I give it no instructions about whether it's trying to write knock-knock jokes or invent Halloween costumes or begin a novel.

A neural network enthusiast has shared the hilarious results of an experiment to let an AI write Christmas carols. With mentions of reindeer, jingle bells, and even some'Fa la la la's', it may have gotten some things right – but, it's doubtful anyone will be singing these songs around the tree. The neural network, starting with no knowledge of what Christmas carols are, created songs filled with bizarre and nonsensical phrases, from'Hurry Christmas to you,' to'Santa baby, and Dancer, and Curry down.' With mentions of reindeer, jingle bells, and even some'Fa la la la's', it may have gotten some things right – but, it's doubtful anyone will be singing these songs around the tree. To train the neural network, Shane fed it roughly 240 carols, collected by the Times of London and reader Erik Svensson.

Here's a new version of Jingle Bells you won't hear played in malls, and it's courtesy of one of the oldest computers in history. Turing archive director Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long have recreated Ferranti Mark 1's Christmas performance for the BBC back in 1951. During that broadcast, the first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer (housed at Alan Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory) performed several melodies created using the sounds it used to emit. While three of the songs were recorded, its rendition of Jingle Bells and Good King Wenceslas weren't. Thankfully, one of the engineers present during the event saved a copy of the recording, and that's what Long and Copeland used to recreate the missing Christmas tunes. They started by manually cutting up the audio to get access to the 152 individual computer-generated notes in the recording.