Word: stephen
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...best clue to Boxing Day's origins can be found in the song "Good King Wenceslas." According to the Christmas carol, Wenceslas, who was Duke of Bohemia in the early 10th century, was surveying his land on St. Stephen's Day - Dec. 26 - when he saw a poor man gathering wood in the middle of a snowstorm. Moved, the King gathered up surplus food and wine and carried them through the blizzard to the peasant's door. The alms-giving tradition has always been closely associated with the Christmas season - hence the canned-food drives and Salvation Army Santas that...
...Irish still refer to the holiday as St. Stephen's Day, and they have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town. Also known as Wren Day, the tradition supposedly dates to 1601, to the Battle of Kinsale, in which the Irish tried to sneak up on the English invaders but were betrayed by the song of an overly vocal wren - although this legend's veracity is also highly debated. Years ago, a live wren was hunted and killed for the parade, but modern sentiments deemed...
...influenza virus—equipped with only eight genes of its own—hijacks the genetic material of its host cell, infecting and utilizing the human genes to execute the virus’ own operations, according to Stephen J. Elledge, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and head of the lab in which the study took place. With this understanding, Elledge and his team systematically deactivated every gene in the human genome—testing some 20,000 different genes—using new RNA interference technology, hoping to determine the genes in the host cells that...
...Another company within the Evergreen Cooperative group, Ohio Cooperative Solar, offers weatherization services and will soon embark on solar-panel installations - the first a 100-kw system on the roof of the Cleveland Clinic. According to CEO Stephen Kiel, Ohio now has 2 solar megawatts of the 60 the state requires by 2012. "Most installations in Ohio are small," he says. "One hundred kilowatts is a pretty significant system...
...Silverman's blog is more than just a list of funny bloopers. It also recounts several egregious plagiarism cases, including one in which a Canadian newspaper fabricated an entire story about Prime Minister Stephen Harper, claiming that he pocketed a communion wafer instead of ingesting it during a church communion. "Wafergate" never happened, and the story included quotes supposedly uttered by prominent officials that were completely fabricated. Whoops. Hopefully this buys us a little leeway: the next time we screw up, just remember that others have done worse...