The purpose of this paper is to define an α-type cohomology, which we call α-type Chevalley–Eilenberg cohomology, for Hom-Lie algebras. We relate it to the known Chevalley–Eilenberg cohomology and provide explicit computations for some examples. Moreover, using this cohomology, we study formal deformations of Hom-Lie algebras, where the bracket as well as the structure map α are deformed. Furthermore, we provide a generalization of the grand crochet and study, in a particular case, the α-type cohomology for Hom-Lie bialgebras.

We introduce the concept of a rare element in a non-associative normed algebra and show that the existence of such an element is the only obstruction to continuity of a surjective homomorphism from a non-associative Banach algebra to a unital normed algebra with simple completion. Unital associative algebras do not admit any rare elements, and hence automatic continuity holds.

An algebra $A$ is homogeneous if the automorphism group of $A$ acts transitively on the one-dimensional subspaces of $A$. The existence of homogeneous algebras depends critically on the choice of the scalar field. We examine the case where the scalar field is the rationals. We prove that if $A$ is a rational homogeneous algebra with $\dim\,A\,>\,1$, then ${{A}^{2}}\,=\,0$.