CHRISTOPHER INTAGLIATA: Exactly 1,000 years ago, in the year 1021, a Viking or two or three likely wandered around the very northern tip of Newfoundland, cutting down trees ...
MICHAEL DEE: ... for clearing a particular spot or for gathering wood that might have been used as timber for construction or for boat repair. They were careful to make sure their ships were seaworthy.
Intagliata: Michael Dee is a geoscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He says it's not news that the Vikings made it to North America around this time. Scientists and scholars have surmised as much from archaeological remains in Newfoundland and by scrutinizing ancient texts like the Icelandic sagas.
Dee: One is not really sure how literal one can take the Icelandic sagas. They contain a lot of not only inaccuracies, a lot of things that are obviously fantastical — things like dead people speaking to them, and so on.
Intagliata: But now Dee and his colleagues have been able to come up with a precise date—the year 1021—based on evidence these Norse visitors left behind: specifically, a stump, a log and a branch. Wood anatomists have determined that certain surfaces of that wood must have been cut by metal blades — that's a Viking technology the local Indigenous people are not known to have shared.
And Dee’s team was able to use a cosmic occurrence — an extraordinary shower of high-energy particles from space around the year 993 — to date the felling of the trees. You see, that shower of cosmic rays created an abundance of radiocarbon. When taken up by trees, it left a lasting signature in tree rings—giving the scientists a key to pinpoint the year 993 in the three wood samples using radiocarbon dating.
Dee: And then you see what we have to do is count the rings from there to the edge. You have to know where the edge is, the bark edge. And then you’ll know that was the last growth year of the tree, or the felling date of the tree. And it just so happened in all three cases it was exactly the same year: 1021 A.D.
Intagliata: The details are in the journal Nature.
The year 1021 therefore marks the first time we know of that Europeans set foot in the Americas. But as the authors write, it also marks “the earliest known year by which human migration had encircled the planet.”
Dee: Ever since moving out of Africa through Europe and Asia and across the Americas, nobody had got across the Atlantic Ocean, so by this date, we know the Atlantic Ocean was crossed for the first time.
Intagliata: But — as we know — it wouldn’t be the last.

Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783 in New York, as the youngest of 11 children. The British troops had just evacuated the city and the US forces assumed possession. Mrs. Irving said, "Washington's work is ended and the child shall be named after him." Some six years later, when the first American president returned to New York, then the seat of government, a Scotch maid-servant of the family finding herself and the child by chance in the presence of Washington, presented the boy to him. "Please, your honor," said Lizzie, "here's a bairn was named after you." And President Washington gravely laid his hand upon the head of his future biographer and blessed him.
Washington Irving was born into a well-to-do family, yet his education was non-methodical, and his schooling ended at sixteen. Yet he read, and read intelligently, becoming familiar with the best, especially books of travel, and adventure. He also walked about the city and along the waterside, his mind apparently stirred by the sight of the shipping and the romantic suggestions of foreign lands.
Nevertheless young Irving settled down more or less seriously to a professional career. He began the study of law.
In 1798, he thoroughly explored that idyllic region of Sleepy Hollow, north of New York City, afterward immortalized in the Sketch-Book.
Irving enjoyed visiting different places and a large part of his life - from 1815 to 1832 - was spent in Europe, particularly England, France, Germany, and Spain.
By the late 1820s, Irving had gained a reputation throughout Europe and America as a great writer and thinker.
In 1832 Irving returned from Europe to New York where he established his home Sunnyside in Tarrytown. Irving never married or had children.
On November 28, 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, Washington Irving died at Sunnyside. He was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.
Washington Irving is best known for 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' in which the schoolmaster Ichabold Crane meets with a headless horseman, and 'Rip Van Winkle,' about a man who falls asleep for 20 years.

A UN-led plan to tackle climate change by radically improving the way heat-trapping atmospheric pollutants are measured all over the planet, is being given serious consideration by governments and the international scientific community meeting in Geneva.
One of the aims of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) initiative is to create a network of ground-based measurement stations that can verify worrying air quality data that’s been flagged by satellites or airplanes.
Today, “there is no comprehensive, timely international exchange of surface and space-based greenhouse gas observations,” WMO said, as it called for “improved (international) collaboration” and in particular data exchange to support the 2015 Paris Agreement, and its pathway for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building climate resilience.

Plastic - it’s all over the ocean. And for sea turtles, it’s a killer. At least 1,000 die every year because they swallow plastic or get tangled up in it.
So why do sea turtles run into plastic so often? And why the heck are they eating it? Scientists believed the turtles may think they’re biting into their prey, like a jellyfish, when they come across some plastics.
And now a study finds that the smell of plastic may also be attractive. Researchers exposed 15 loggerhead turtles to different odors in the lab. They tested the animals’ response to the smell of turtle food, distilled water, clean plastic and also to biofouled plastic—that’s plastic that has marine organisms growing all over it, which is a common occurrence in the sea and on beaches.
“It gets occupied by algae and other organisms pretty quickly. And it doesn’t take very long. I mean, if you leave a plastic water bottle sitting on the sand, even for a week, it’s liable to get covered in these organisms. And once it’s covered and biofouled, that’s what makes it so appetizing to turtles.”
Kayla Goforth, a Ph.D. student in biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The research team found that the loggerhead turtles had similar responses to biofouled plastic as to their normal food.
“So they have to come up to breathe. And we know that they can detect airborne odors. So when they find that there’s an odor of interest in the air, they’ll spend an increased amount of time at the surface with their nostrils out of the water. And we found that the turtles spent more time with their nostrils out of the water when there was this biofouled plastic odor or a food odor.”
The researchers don’t know exactly what makes biofouled plastic smell so tasty to turtles. But they think a compound called dimethyl sulfide might be the culprit.
“It’s a chemical that we know that sea turtles can detect. And seabirds and some fishes are also capable of detecting it. And they all use it as a feeding cue.”
So the next time you’re about to buy that plastic bottle, remember: it could wind up inside a sea turtle.

Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in eastern Kentucky. Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. Before and after graduating in 1977, Kingsolver lived and worked in Europe.
After graduate school, a position as a scientific writer for the University of Arizona soon led her into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad.
From 1985 through 1987, Kingsolver was a freelance journalist by day, but she was writing fiction by night. She began to write The Bean Trees, a novel about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky and finds herself living in urban Tucson. This novel was enthusiastically received by critics.
"A novel can educate to some extent," she once said. "But first, a novel has to entertain--that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessiblity. I believe in plot. I want English professors to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with--who may not often read anything but the Sears catalogue--to read my books."
Barbara Kingsolver lives with her husband and their two daughters in Tuscon, Arizona, and has a second home on a farm in southern Appalachia.
"I don't ever write about real people", she said. "That would be stealing, first of all. And second of all, art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window. An artist has to look out that window, isolate one or two suggestive things, and embroider them together with poetry and fabrication, to create a revelation. If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."
Some of her best known works are: The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer.

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909. She was educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University's business school. While at Columbia University, she also was the captain of the women's polo team.
During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer, but her true love was literature. Her first short story, Death of a Traveling Salesman, appeared in 1936. Her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights.
She also took full-time for her family for fifteen years: for two brothers with severe arthritis and her mother who had had a stroke.
Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of Jackson.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi on July 23, 2001.

Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. When he was twelve years old, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's College. There Heaney was taught Latin and Irish, and he also studies Anglo-Saxon while a student of Queen's University, Belfast.
In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, where he became a lecturer in 1961.
Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who became the mother of his three children. His poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s.
In 1972 Heaney gave up his work at Queen's. Partly to escape the violence of Belfast, he moved from to County Wicklow, where he was a freelance writer for three years. After spending frequent periods as a guest professor at American universities, he was appointed visiting professor at Harvard.
Heaney was Professorship for Poetry at Oxford from 1989 until 1994. In 1995 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
He now divides his time between Harvard and Dublin.
(Seamus Heaney died in the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin on 30 August 2013, aged 74. After a fall outside a restaurant in Dublin, he entered hospital for a medical procedure, but died the following morning before it took place.)

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST: Since the news broke yesterday, we have been reporting on the deadly school shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. Three children and three adults were killed.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: And while more remembrances will come for those six lives and as the investigation continues, we're going to take a moment to lay out how this latest tragedy fits into a broader picture of data on gun violence in U.S. schools.
FLORIDO: First, it's worth noting that last year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified gun violence - no matter where it happens - as the leading cause of death for children in the country, based on the most recent data available from 2020. But when it comes to school shootings specifically, the federal government does not track them. vSUMMERS: Several other independent sources do. And what happened in Nashville marked the 39th incident so far this year that involved gunfire on school grounds. That's according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.
FLORIDO: And by many measures, the number of school shootings in this country has increased over the years. According to The Washington Post, 46 shootings took place on school campuses during school hours in 2022. That was the highest number of school shootings recorded in a single calendar year since 1999. And the Post data also finds that school shootings have a disproportionate impact nationally on children of color.
SUMMERS: And if we account for reports of any kind of gun-related incident at a school - including those that don't result in gunfire, ones after school hours, even just when a gun is brandished on school property - that's happened 89 times in 2023, according to the K-12 Database.
FLORIDO: That's about one gun-related incident at a school for every day so far this year.
SUMMERS: And for those who survive these incidents - the children, teachers, families, school staff - the toll it takes, it's impossible to measure.

When you walk on a sandy beach, it takes more energy than striding down a sidewalk — because the weight of your body pushes into the sand. Turns out, the same thing is true for vehicles driving on roads.
“The weight creates a shallow indentation or deflection in the pavement, and makes it such that it's continuously driving up a very shallow hill.” Jeremy Gregory, a sustainability scientist at M.I.T. His team modeled how much energy could be saved—and greenhouse gases avoided—by simply hardening the nation’s roads and highways.
And they found that stiffening 10 percent of the nation’s roads every year could prevent 440 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions over the next five decades—enough to offset half a percent of projected transportation sector emissions over that time period.
To put those emissions savings into context—that amount is equivalent to how much CO2 you’d spare the planet by keeping a billion barrels of oil in the ground—or by growing seven billion trees—for a decade.
As for how to stiffen those roads? Gregory says you could mix small amounts of synthetic fibers or carbon nanotubes into paving materials. Or you could pave with cement-based concrete, which is stiffer than asphalt. (And it’s worth noting the research was funded in part by the Portland Cement Association.)
This system could also be a way to shave carbon emissions without some of the usual hurdles.
“You know. Usually, when it comes to reducing emissions in the transportation sector, you’re talking about changing policies related to vehicles and also driver behavior, which involves millions and millions of people—as opposed to changing the way we design our pavements. That’s just on the order of thousands of people who are working in transportation agencies.”
And when it comes to retrofitting our streets and highways — those agencies are where you might say the rubber meets the road.

Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 on April 16 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. There he joined the Communist Party. "Most party members join without any knowledge, some, it is whispered, without any intelligence," he wrote to his friend.
Amis served in the army with the Royal Corps of Signals, earning in 1943 his commission as second lieutenant.
In 1947 Amis published his first collection of poems. As a novelist Amis made his debut with Lucky Jim in 1954. It gained a huge success. Lucky Jim is the antihero Jim Dixon, a junior faculty member at a small university, who faces one disaster after another with his girlfriend and his boss, Prof. Welch. Dixon can't take academic life seriously and therefore his position at the university is often at risk, but at the same time he tries to make his boss like him. Behind the story was the Education Act of 1944, which attempted to assimilate a larger amount of working- and lower-middle-class students into English university life. Amis' work as a junior lecturer gave him inside information about the academic life.
After the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, Amis wrote a James Bond adventure, Colonel Sun.
In the 1980s Amis wrote the novel The Old Devils, which was awarded the Booker Prize.
Amis was knighted in 1990, being now called Sir Kingsley Amis- according to his son, Martin Amis the writer, he got the knighthood partly for being "audibly and visibly right-wing, or conservative/monarchist."
Amis died in 1995 at the age of 73 with over 20 novels to his credit, plus dozens of volumes of poetry, stories and collections of essays.

Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin on April 17, 1897, the second of five children, He spent his childhood traveling back and forth to the Far East where his father was posted as the United States Consul General to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Wilder's mother was a cultured, educated woman who instilled a love of literature, drama, and languages in her children. The Wilder children were all highly educated and accomplished.
In 1915 Wilder finished high school in California and enrolled in Oberlin College in Ohio, where he studied the Greek and Roman classics. When the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, two years later, Wilder followed, enrolling in Yale University. After he had complete his B.A. in 1920, he went to Rome, where he studied archaeology. That summer in Rome inspired his first novel, The Cabala (1926).
Wilder's breakthrough novel was The Bridge Of San Luis Rey (1927), an examination of the fate of five travelers who fall to their deaths from a bridge in 18th-century Peru.
In 1938 Wilder wrote Our Town, which was a huge success on Broadway. The play traces the childhood, courtship, marriage, and death of Emily Webb and George Gibbs, and finds universal meaning in the ordinary lives lived in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, a fictional town. based on Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Wilder spent many summers at the MacDowell Colony.
Inspired by James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, The Skin Of Our Teeth came out in 1943. It depicts five thousand years in the lives of George and Maggie Antrobus. The play was Wilder's critical response to the American entry into World War II. Although many visitors exited the theater after the first act, the play earned Wilder a Pulitzer Prize.
The Matchmaker (1954), was turned into the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! A critical and popular success, the musical went on to win 10 Tony Awards and ensured Wilder's financial security for life.
In addition to Pulitzer Prizes and Tony awards, Wilder received many other literary awards for his work as well.
On December 7, 1975, Wilder died at the age of 78 in Hamden, Connecticut, where he had lived for many years with his devoted sister Isabel.

Ball games are a big source of modern amusement. But they’re nothing new. Consider, for instance, a 4,500-year-old linen ball found in a child’s tomb in Egypt or 3,600-year-old rubber balls from Central America—where the contest called for players to slam the ball with their hips.
Now researchers have pinned a date on what they say are the oldest sporting balls in Europe or Asia: three spheres, dug up from the tombs of horsemen in the deserts of northwestern China and crafted three millennia ago.
“We are quite sure they were used in some kind of bat-and-ball game.”
Patrick Wertmann is an archeologist at the University of Zurich and part of the team that analyzed the ancient sporting equipment. The balls are about three inches in diameter, wrapped in rawhide leather, and stuffed with leather strips and hair.
As for how this ancient ball-and-stick game was played?
“It could be something like polo. But it could also be something like an early form of hockey or golf. But since we don’t have any textural evidence, and we don’t have any sticks from the same period, we don’t really know exactly.”
Regardless of the sport, Wertmann and his colleagues write that a ball game of any kind would have provided excellent exercise—and military training, too.
A ball, found in the tomb of a child in Tarkhan, Egypt

Vladimir Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the oldest of five children in a wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to the Czar Alexander II. His father was a liberal political leader and the editor of a liberal newspaper. His mother was the daughter of the wealthiest Russian goldmine owner.
As a child he was already reading foreign writers Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russians Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, and Anton Chekhov. He excelled in languages and literature, as well, as in soccer, tennis and chess.
When Nabokov's father was arrested during the Russian revolution of October, 1917, and the family estate was confiscated by the communists. The Nabokov family emigrated to London and then to Berlin. There Nabokov's father was murdered.
In 1923 Nabokov graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology and literature. He worked as a translator and tutor in Europe for 18 years. In 1925 he married.
In 1937 he move to Paris. Three years later he fled from the advancing German Armies to the United States, with his wife and son. In 1945 Nabokov became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught literature at Cornell University.
In 1960 Nabokov moved to Switzerland and made his home at the Montreux Palace Hotel.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977 and was laid to rest in the Clarens Cemetery, Montreux, Switzerland.

In an effort to tackle another scourge – online disinformation and hate speech – the UN cultural, educational and scientific agency, UNESCO, is spearheading a bid to establish ground rules for social media platforms.
To get the ball rolling, thousands of representatives of governments, regulatory bodies, digital companies, academia and civil society, will convene at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
The work of the Internet for Trust Global Conference will be driven by human rights considerations, and in particular, freedom of expression, said Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO.
The agency said that it recognised the revolutionary value of social media platforms but noted that the algorithms that are integral to most social media platforms “often prioritize engagement over safety and human rights”.

Scientists from the U.S. and Canada say Arctic warming is reducing the food supply for polar bears. The animals are forced to look for food at waste sites. That is causing problems for both the bears and humans.
A report on the scientists’ findings recently appeared in the publication Oryx.
Polar bears normally hunt seals. But a warming climate is reducing the amount of sea ice. The bears need sea ice in order to move around and find seals.
With the usual food running low, the bears are coming off the ice and onto land. They get closer to areas where humans place waste, including bones from whale hunts and used food packages.
The bears often end up eating the food packaging when trying to get to the food inside. Since their bodies cannot break down the material, the bears can develop blockages that can result in sickness and even death.
In addition, people living close to the area where waste is collected sometimes shoot the bears because they fear the animals might hurt people.
Andrew Derocher is a biologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. He helped write the report. He said, “Bears and garbage are a bad association.” Derocher added that scientists have already seen black bears and brown bears eat food waste in other parts of the world. “Now,” he said, “it’s an issue developing with polar bears.”
The bears have been found at garbage collection places in Russia and in the American state of Alaska.
Scientists say the problem will only get worse for the bears as more humans move into their territory.
One area where the bears live is Nunavut, Canada. The human population there is expected to increase by over 40 percent by 2043.
As more humans move in, the waste becomes more of a problem because it is hard to manage in frozen lands. The ground is frozen, which means the garbage cannot be buried. It is costly to send the waste out on trucks. The scientists say more government money is needed to help the problem.
Derocher said meetings between people and bears are increasing already.
"It's surprising just how many places that never had polar bear problems are now having emerging issues," he said.

Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28, 1926. She is the youngest of four children. One of her childhood friends is Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood and Breakfat at Tiffany's. Harper Lee attended Huntingdon College (1944-45), studied law at University of Alabama (1945-49), and also studied one year at Oxford University.
In the 1950s Harper Lee worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC in New York. But in order to concentrate on writing she gave up her position with the airline.
Rumour has it that it was Truman Capote who urged her to write.
In 1957 Miss Lee submitted the manuscript of her novel To Kill a Mockingbird to the J. B. Lippincott Company. She was told that her novel consisted of a series of short stories strung together, and that she should re-write it. For the next two and a half years she re-worked the manuscript. In 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird was published, her only published book.
Miss Lee prefers to keep her life private; she does not give interviews and very little is known about her private life.
Miss Lee has received a number of honorary doctorates. She seems to divide her time now between New York and Monroeville.
(Harper Lee died in her sleep on the morning of February 19, 2016, aged 89.)

I’m a big fan of sushi and ceviche, so I was alarmed to see the headline on a recent news release from the University of Washington stating that “‘sushi parasites’ have increased 283-fold in past 40 years.”
But after digging into the research, which came out of a marine ecology lab run by Chelsea Wood at UW’s Seattle campus, I learned that the rising abundance of marine worms known as anisakids is actually less of a problem for people than it is for whales and dolphins, which are the natural hosts infected by those parasites.
Wood’s team did what’s known as a meta-analysis. They collected data from 123 papers published over the past half-century that estimated parasite abundance in various species at sites all over the world between 1967 and 2017.
Their analysis, published last month in the journal Global Change Biology, found that since 1978, when less than one worm was seen in every 100 host animals on average, the prevalence of anisakid parasite infection has skyrocketed to the point that more than one worm is now typically seen in every host animal examined in 2015.
Anisakid worms grow in the guts of whales, spread to krill through the whales’ poop and then move up the food chain to squid and small fish like anchovies, then to big fish like salmon, tuna, and halibut and, finally, to humans.
In the U.S. and most parts of Europe, fish and squid served raw must first be frozen to kill the nematodes and their larvae, which are big enough to see with the naked eye. And even if you’re unlucky enough to eat live anisakid larvae in your sushi, ceviche, or gravlax, you’ll probably be fine. The worms rarely survive long in the human gut to cause anisakiasis, which typically involves abdominal pain and vomiting.
The condition seems to be most common in Spain due to Spaniards fondness for raw anchovies. Experts estimate there are roughly 8,000 cases a year in Spain—that works out to about one illness for every 10,000 meals of raw fish eaten.
Chelsea Wood says the findings haven’t put her off eating sushi. Her concern is that the rising abundance of anisakids might be harming the dolphins and whales that these parasites evolved to infect and grow inside for years. She notes that there are millions of species of parasites in the ocean, and we know very little about which ones are becoming more common. The epidemiology of the oceans is still in its infancy.
Parasites in Sushi