Word: wintered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...months being raised in France's Atlantic cultivation beds had died. The reason, officials at the French Institute for Research Into Use of the Sea (Ifremer) say, is Oyster Herpes Virus type 1 (OsHV-1). That virus, has proliferated along France's Atlantic coast due to a mild winter and abundant rains that allowed ocean water to remain warm, scientists believe. Those same conditions have also created an abundance of plankton - a cornucopia of nutrition that the shellfish have gorged...
...olive wreaths upon their victors. The medal tradition began with the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, where winners got silver, seconds got bronze and third place got zip. In the intervening 112 years, the coveted awards have been rectangular, ridged, doughnut-like, gilded and--for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games--shaped like an amorphous blob. At the 1900 Paris Games, some events forwent medals in favor of prizes: one pole-vault runner-up won an umbrella...
Today's gold medals are actually silver covered with about 6 grams of 24-karat gold. Winter Olympic medals have no standard design, hence their strange shapes and nontraditional materials, like those of the 1992 Albertville medals, which were mostly glass. Summer medals, however, almost always depict Nike, the winged goddess of victory, on their front in some fashion. Since 1972, host cities have designed the medals' back. This year Beijing represented Chinese culture with a ring of jade inlay...
...16°F) on the ice--balmy, as far as summertime goes on the Greenland ice sheet. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the motherly Danish field leader of the NEEM project, greets us at the camp's main kitchen, dining room and work space: a toasty geodesic dome straight from the winter dreams of Buckminster Fuller. I quickly learn that a great deal of time in an arctic research camp is spent preparing and sharing food. In part, that's because the body churns through calories in the cold. But those shared meals--featuring steaks half the size of Frisbees on this particular...
...office space. Many athletes snap photos of each other standing before an oversized picture of the Temple of Heaven. The mural is right beside a public toilet, which somehow takes something away from the mystique. And as much as the Olympic Village sports a bacchanal tradition - at the Albertville Winter Olympics in '92, condom machines had to be refilled every two hours - things seem relatively staid. Boo. Since every athlete, in theory at least, could win a medal right now, it makes sense that folks are playing it cool at the moment. "It'll be a way better experience...