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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

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

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.

The ‘Old American Dream,’ a Trap as the Floods Keep Coming

Still, she wanted so badly to keep her word.

In her kitchen, Juanita Hall routinely found opossums staring back at her from the cage trap she kept under the table

It “is that the Chinese, without direct orders, were so cruel to each other.”

Cultural Revolution trauma differs from that related to other horrific events, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, studies have noted, in part because in China, people were persecuted not for “unalterable” characteristics such as ethnicity and race, but for having the wrong frame of mind.

neither joining the Red Guards nor believing in Maoism protected someone from suffering long-term trauma.

A frantic President Trump, holding court in a bathrobe, ordered his aides to wrap the White House telephones in tinfoil, several Chinese publications reported this week, citing The New Yorker.

Internet readers were puzzled. The state-run news media — and China’s army of censors — are not known for making jokes. Was this for real?

Others were more discerning. “This was made up and meant to be funny,” another user said. “Surprising it was treated as news. Editor, could you be more professional?”

The elephant seal (genus Mirounga) is the world's largest seal. There are two species of elephant seals, named according to the hemisphere in which they are found. Northern elephant seals (M. angustirostris) are found in coastal waters around Canada and Mexico, while southern elephant seals (M. leonina) are found off the coast of New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina.

At sea, elephant seals range solo. They return to established breeding colonies each winter. Females become mature around 3 to 6 years of age, while males mature at 5 to 6 years.However, males need to achieve alpha status to mate, which is normally between the ages of 9 and 12. Males battle each other using body weight and teeth. While deaths are rare, scarring is common. An alpha male's harem ranges from 30 to 100 females. Other males wait on the edges of the colony, sometimes mating with females before the alpha male chases them away. Males remain on land over the winter to defend territory, meaning they don't leave to hunt.

Elephant seals have been hunted for their meat, fur, and blubber. Both northern and southern elephant seals were hunted to the brink of extinction. By 1892, most people believed the northern seals to be extinct. But in 1910, a single breeding colony was found around Guadalupe Island off Mexico's Baja California coast. At the end of the 19th century, new marine conservation legislation was put in place to protect the

If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.

Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.

the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.

“I wouldn’t say that I consider us very happy,” said Nina Hansen, 58, a high school English teacher from Kokkola, a midsize city on Finland’s west coast. “I’m a little suspicious of that word, actually.”

what, supposedly, makes Finland so happy. Our subjects ranged in age from 13 to 88 and represented a variety of genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds and professions

During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.

MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC. But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.

MSNBC sees itself as the voice of Mr. Obama’s America.

A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues.

his was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion.

Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing.

It’s the opposite of the problem you have, in other words, if you are a normal, contemporary, non-agrarian 30-something.

While the majority of jihadists around the world are not teenagers, official figures show that their involvement in violent Islamism is growing.The number of under-18s arrested for alleged terror offences in the UK almost doubled from eight to 15 from 2013-14 to 2014-15.

Experts say this bears out fears that more and more young people are being drawn to extremism, with followers in their early teens among them. "We are seeing this kind of thing happening more and more with the rise of Islamic State," says Charlie Winter, an expert in jihadist militancy.

The main target for groups like Islamic State is said to be young people between 16 and 24 years old.However the radicalisation process can start as early as 11 or 12

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?

On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.

The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.

a new trend I call memory engineering — the process of fashioning our inchoate digital pasts into useful memories.

Many of us generate massive amounts of personal data every day — phonecam pictures, text messages, status updates, and so on. By default, all of us are becoming lifeloggers. But we almost never go back and look at this stuff, because it’s too hard to parse.

Memory engineers are solving that problem by creating services that reformat that data in witty, often artistic ways.

using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.

Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.

But history shows that this is wrong.

By watching how the human body and mind adapts in Antarctica, we can plan and predict what would happen in space,"

has felt the effects of living there on both his mind and his body.

"You're cut off from the rest of the world and in winter, completely cut off as no flights go in or out," he adds.

Sextillions of snowflakes fell from the sky this winter. That’s billions of trillions of them, now mostly melted away as spring approaches.

“How do snowflakes form?” Dr. Libbrecht said during an online talk on Feb. 23 that was hosted by the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. “And how do these structures appear — and just, as I like to say, literally out of thin air?”

The “damn thing” was the camera system for photographing snowflakes. He wanted to use the best digital sensors, ones that captured a million pixels. “The real snowflake is very, very fragile,” he said. “It’s super intricate. So you want high resolution.”