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side from depriving schoolchildren of the sheer fun of a snow day, climate change could lead the popular imaginary of British winters into uncharted territory.

By studying weather observations and stories carefully recorded in diaries, letters and newspapers, it’s possible to trace winter’s icy fingerprints on the human drama.

During the winter of 1794-1795, temperatures struggled to climb above freezing, hovering at a daily average of 0.5°C

Deforestation rates are significantly lower in forests protected and governed by Indigenous people, according to a new report.

found that, on average, forests in Indigenous and tribal territories have been much better conserved than other forests in the region.

Forests are huge carbon sinks and vital tools in holding back the climate crisis as well as stabilizing regional temperatures and rainfall patterns. Indigenous territories hold roughly one-third of all the carbon stored in the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean, and 14% of the carbon in tropical forests around the world. 

In Houston, as millions suffered power and water outages, food shortages and subfreezing temperatures, another problem confronted families: price hikes.Steep increases in the price of food, gas and fuel have been reported across Texas. And as millions of Texans lost power, exorbitant prices were being asked for hotel rooms with power, with some climbing to US$1,000 a night.

Disaster creates a scarcity of basic necessities; retailers and providers respond by sharply raising the price tags on sought-after commodities.

Contrarian voices argue that price hikes are good – they provide incentives for sellers to bring extra supplies and prevent hoarding.

How the World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory

At 12,500 years old, the Shigir Idol is by far the earliest known work of ritual art. Only decay has kept others from being found.

The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture — a nine-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years old — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border

This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we joked about the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily accessible in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an adulterated form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like after.

The sunniest optimist would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens to us, and we tend to do it pretty quickly—after the first 24 hours or so. “Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech, told me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.

The share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to December 2020, according to a Census Bureau study released late last year. What’s more, we simply don’t know the long-term effects of collective, sustained grief. Longitudinal studies of survivors of Chernobyl, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina show elevated rates of mental-health problems, in some cases lasting for more than a decade

When COVID-19 struck, mRNA vaccines in particular were ready to be put to a real-world test. The 94% efficacy of the mRNA vaccines surpassed health officials’ highest expectations.

DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria.

Gene-based vaccines also produce precise and effective immune responses. They stimulate not only antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T cell response that can clear an infection if one occurs.

Novavax

Johnson & Johnson

Russia’s Sputnik V

House pushes for Trump's removal after deadly Capitol riot

Some House Democrats think their party leaders made a strategic mistake by calling for a vote

President Trump needs to be removed immediately. 

"Perception by the senses rather than by the intellect." (Dictionary.com)

"Perception by or based on stimulation of the senses." (Medical Dictionary)

We perceive the world through our five senses. (Hearing, Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste) Our sense receptors are stimulated by sensory information. The brain translates the sensory information into sensations such as sound, taste, temperature, etc. Higher centres in the brain either ignore or recognize the sensations and their meanings, based on neuronal networks of past association and expectation. (Some of this stage 3 work actually involves reasoning).  Click the video to see a coffee-taste expert discuss the intricacies of how different coffees taste.    Sense perception is an important dimension of comprehending the world around us. It allows us to gather information from the outside world, so we can then go on to hopefully make sense of it

“Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games,’” Mr. Gardner wrote when he introduced Life to the world 50 years ago with his October 1970 column.

The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.

The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest).

Meltdowns, common as they are among young children, are a complicated physiological response related to the brain’s threat detection system. Mid-freakout, it’s helpful for parents to understand what’s going on beneath the surface, then to mitigate the “threat” by establishing a sense of safety.

temper tantrum involves two parts of the brain: the amygdala, which is primarily responsible for processing emotions like fear or anger; and the hypothalamus, which in part controls unconscious functions like heart rate or temperature.

“When you have a fire burning in your house, you don’t want to sit and ponder, you want your body to fire on all cylinders so you can escape,”

The human brain is more complex than any other known structure in the universe.

Weighing in at three pounds, on average, this spongy mass of fat and protein is made up of two overarching types of cells—called glia and neurons—and it contains many billions of each.

The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain, accounting for 85 percent of the organ's weight. The distinctive, deeply wrinkled outer surface is the cerebral cortex. It's the cerebrum that makes the human brain—and therefore humans—so formidable. Animals such as elephants, dolphins, and whales actually have larger brains, but humans have the most developed cerebrum. It's packed to capacity inside our skulls, with deep folds that cleverly maximize the total surface area of the cortex.

In technical terms, the Great Red Spot is an anticyclonic storm lying in a high-pressure zone high in Jupiter's clouds. It rotates counter-clockwise and takes about six Earth days to make one complete trip around the planet. It has clouds embedded within it, which often tower many kilometers above the surrounding cloud decks. Jet streams to its north and south help keep the spot at the same latitude as it circulates.

Observers have studied the gas giant planet Jupiter since antiquity. However, they've only been able to observe such a giant spot for a few centuries since it was first discovered. Ground-based observations allowed scientists to chart the motions of the spot, but a true understanding was only made possible by spacecraft flybys. The Voyager 1 spacecraft raced by in 1979 and sent back the first close-up image of the spot. Voyager 2, Galileo, and Juno also provided images.

Scientists have been able to measure the spot's depth using specialized instruments on the Juno spacecraft. It appears to be some 300 kilometers deep. That's much deeper than any of Earth's oceans, the deepest of which is just over 10 kilometers. Interestingly, the "roots" of the Great Red Spot are warmer at the bottom (or the base) than at the top. This warmth feeds the incredibly strong and fast winds at the top of the spot, which can blow more than 430 kilometers per hour. Warm winds feeding a strong storm is a well-understood phenomenon on Earth, particularly in massive hurricanes. Above the cloud, temperatures rise again, and scientists are working to understand why this is happening. In that sense, then, the Great Red Spot is a Jupiter-style hurricane.

Last week, the country saw its cases spike more than 40% in just 24 hours. This week, the number of daily cases continues to rise — even as Americans practice social distancing by working from home, limiting outdoor excursions, and staying 6 feet away from one another.

They estimated only 12% of coronavirus cases (including asymptomatic ones) had been reported in the US as of March 15, which would mean about 29,000 infections had gone undiagnosed by that time. The US has reported more than 69,000 cases and over 1,000 deaths as of Thursday.

The most extreme model predicted that up to 1.2 million people could die. By comparison, a typical flu season in the US kills between 11,000 and 95,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The record 3.3 million jobless claims reported Thursday mark the beginning of an economic crisis facing American workers and businesses — a slump, experts say, that will only end when the coronavirus pandemic is contained.

Although no official figures exist yet, the unemployment rate has likely jumped to at least 5.5 percent, says economist Martha Gimbel of Schmidt Futures, a level not seen since 2015 and up from 3.5 percent in February.“The most terrifying part about this is this is likely just the beginning of the layoffs,” Gimbel said

The bill, which gives most Americans checks worth $1,200 or more and provides billions in low-cost loans to businesses, is likely to provide a lifeline to workers and companies facing devastation, but it won’t stop a severe recession nor be adequate to sustain workers if the coronavirus health crisis lasts more than a month or two.