Today’s Word of the Day, thanks to dictionary.com, is felicific, an adjective that means “causing or tending to cause happiness” (https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-day/). The website adds the following information about the word:

• Felicific was first recorded in 1860–65.
• Felicific comes from the Latin stem of fēlīx, which means “happy.”
• Other related words include felicitous, “apt or appropriate,” felicitate, “to congratulate,” and felicity, “the state of being happy.”

Etymonline.com does not have an entry for felicific, but it does have felicitate, and in the entry for felicitate it says, “Little-used alternative verb form felicify (1680s) yielded adjective felicific (1865).

Today is New Year’s Eve, 2023, and if you’re watching the news, you are likely seeing a lot of reviews of the year. And it is probably not all that fun. You are likely hearing about the deaths of celebrities, the wars that are taking place in Ukraine, Israel, and other places, the records set in temperatures or mass shootings, or the poor quality of the political candidates running for president. It actually makes one almost anxious for the new year to begin.

But good things did happen in 2023, and maybe we should take note of a few of them. You can actually find a lot more by just searching the web, but you probably won’t find very many if you just watch the news.

The Guardian has a story this year about the Lassen Volcanic National Park. A couple of years ago, the park experienced a terrible fire, the worst in California history, that destroyed most of the vegetation in the park. “A third of the burn area saw the sort of high-severity fire that kills most trees and bakes the nutrients from topsoil” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/23/lassen-volcanic-national-park-dixie-fire-greenville-california). And yet today the park is showing resilience: “From a distance, the trail next to the Kohm Yah-mah-nee visitor center appears to offer a window into all the devastation wrought by the Dixie fire. The path unfurls itself through blackened forest with singed trees, but as it winds over a bridge and up a hillside, there is a sudden burst of green. The land is verdant and dotted with wildflowers. Grasshoppers emit an electric hum that fills the air. Many of the burned trees are gone – with help from the Mooretown Rancheria of Maidu Indians of California. The hazards have been removed, though some bridges in the back country await replacement. The park highway offers a glimpse of the area’s natural wonders and a living model of what happens when fire moves through the landscape.” In Yassen, it’s comeback time.

I grew up in the 1960s, during the Space Race, and as a result developed a fascination with science fiction. One of the popular tropes in scifi is the colony ship, a ship filled with thousands of people who are on their way to another planet, usually because the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war or climate change or something. Well, according to The New Scientist, researchers in October announced that they successfully grew mice embryos in space, embryos which were not negatively affected by the no or low gravity environment or the radiation in space (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2399067-mouse-embryos-have-been-grown-in-space-for-the-first-time/?utm_source=rakuten&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=2116208:Skimlinks.com&utm_content=10&ranMID=47192&ranEAID=TnL5HPStwNw&ranSiteID=TnL5HPStwNw-XOMjPPXktkV4iPJZB44Ucw). “’There is a possibility of pregnancy during a future trip to Mars because it will take more than 6 months to travel there,’ says Teruhiko Wakayama at the University of Yamanashi in Japan, who led the study. ‘We are conducting research to ensure we will be able to safely have children if that time comes.’” That’s exciting; wish I could live long enough to see it.

On the medical front, there were a number of advances related to Parkinson’s disease, sickle-cell anemia, migraines, cervical cancer, birth defects, and others. AI at DeepMind may now be able to predict if genetic mutations will cause disease.

And AI, while it is scary for some people, has been used to predict an earthquake in Chile, allowing residents to evacuate.

Despite all the problems we see in the world today, there is no better time to be alive than ever before. Yes, people have troubles. There is still poverty, disease, war, and crime. And life is always a bit like a roller coaster with its ups and downs. And we can all dream of a utopia in which these problems don’t exist. But these problems have been with us since the first human took the first step. But there really is no era in history in which people were less likely to die a violent death, in which people were less likely to starve to death, than right now.

This is truly a felicific era.

Today’s image is of Felix the Cat, “Otto Messmer’s little black cat, created for Pat Sullivan’s Studio, as drawn by Raoul Barre” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_the_Cat#/media/File:Felix_the_Cat,_by_Raoul_Barr%C3%A9.gif), with a slight addition from me. I grew up watching the Felix the Cat TV cartoons. It was not until years later, studying Latin in high school, that I learned that felix means “happy.”

Happy New Year. Felix Novus Annus. Frohes Neues Jarh. Feliz Año Nuevo. Gelukkig Nieuwjaar. Maligayang begong Taon. Feliĉan Novjaron. שנה טובה. Bliadhna mhath ùr.