The This week it's sleigh bells and snowflakes are plenty as we're cramming our

entire Christmas day into one hour with a scientific look at our favorite festive traditions.

From the psychology of gift giving to how to eat Christmas dinner in space and why board games bring out the beast in all of us. I'm

Georgia Mills and I'm Chris Smith and this is the Naked Scientists Christmas special.

The Naked Scientists podcast is powered by UKfast.co.uk.

The first part of my Christmas day is always to see if Santa has visited in the night.

The jolly philanthropist has never let me down yet with his trusty sled and reindeer.

But he's had those for years. Isn't it about time he got a tech upgrade?

Well, Peter Cowley is the naked scientist expert and he's been thinking about how a savvy

Santa might cut down his time and energy in the future.

Hi Peter, to start with love the bow tie.

Oh thank you.

Nobody can see it.

It's very large.

It's almost as big as Peter's shoulder blade down side when.

Where did you get that? I don't know, a joke shop, I suspect.

Well to start with, how big of a task does Santa have Christmas Eve?

Well I was amazed by this. I did some research on this, and the numbers of course are huge,

because if you take the number of children on the planet, you've probably got about a billion,

and we'll come to later which ones are not going to get presents because they're being naughty.

He's got about 300 million miles to travel over the time when it's dark and if you extend it,

the Earth rotation and everything, you end up with about 2,000 miles per second, which is 1% of the

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