PALO ALTO, Calif.- The “Doomsday Clock” by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists measures the likelihood of a global cataclysm by reflecting how vulnerable the world is to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies. Midnight represents the apocalypse.
Here are some key dates in the clock’s nearly 70-year history:
JERUSALEM Throughout the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and while incarcerated in two prison camps, Mirjam Bolle wrote letters to her fiance that she never sent but hoped to share with him after the war. Yet when the two ultimately reunited she decided to leave the past behind and stashed them away. Now, decades later, she has published them as a memoir.
PARIS Religious Jews in Marseille are facing a wrenching choice: Whether to wear the skullcap that proclaims their religion or tuck it away in hopes of staying safe.
LOS ANGELES Wylee the border collie can search an avalanche the size of a football field in five or 10 minutes. It would take a probe line of 50 people using poles a couple hours to cover the same ground.
When 30 minutes can mean the difference between life and death for a skier lost on a snowy mountain, most people would bank on the dog.
WASHINGTON Celebrate your child’s scribbles. A novel experiment shows that even before learning their ABCs, youngsters start to recognize that a written word symbolizes language in a way a drawing doesn’t a developmental step on the path to reading.
Home sweet home. It seems so simple.
LONDON Lindsay Mattick’s great-grandfather was on his way to fight in World War I when he bought a bear cub he named Winnie, inspiring author A.A. Milne to create the timeless character Winnie-the-Pooh. Now, Mattick has written a new children’s book chronicling the real-life story behind the bear.
MOSCOW A group of Christian enthusiasts has released a calendar showing an unexpected face of the Russian Orthodox Church: cat-loving priests.
The Priest and Cat calendar released earlier this month by photographer Anna Galperina and editor Ksenia Luchenko shows 12 Orthodox priests at their homes posing with their cats.
NEW YORK Merriam-Webster has picked a small but powerful suffix as word of the year: ism.
But not just any ism. The top isms to earn high traffic spikes and big bumps in lookups on the dictionary company’s website in 2015 over the year before are socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism.
LONG BEACH, Calif. An unusual warming in the Pacific Ocean may be having disastrous consequences for the majestic whales that use the waters off California as a migratory super-highway.
