With severe drought gripping much of central China this winter, authorities there didn’t just sit back and let Mother Nature scrimp on the rain. They blasted it out of the sky, with thousands of rockets launched from pickup trucks.
As some of China’s farming regions faced their worst winter rainfall shortage in six decades, authorities throughout the country turned to cloud seeding — where tiny particles of silver iodide are shot into clouds to trigger the ice crystals that eventually become rain. While using planes to dump silver iodide can help large areas, many provinces rely on rockets launched from pickup beds, a cheaper solution.
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Thai police intercepted four trucks stacked high with crates packed with the animals in an operation in northeastern Thailand near the border with Laos.
Thousands of dogs have been rescued after they were found stuffed into tiny cages destined for dinner tables across Vietnam.
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The Oxford English Dictionary now includes definitions for retweet, sexting and cyberbullying. The dictionary also included “mankini” and “jeggings” but we’ll just go ahead and ignore those entries.
They include retweet (sharing a Twitter message), sexting (sending saucy texts), and cyberbullying (bullying online or by text).
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Psst! Want to earn more money? The secret to earning more money in the workplace is … to be mean.
That’s right: a new study found that agreeable workers earn significantly less than their meaner counterparts.
The researchers examined “agreeableness” using self-reported survey data and found that men who measured below average on agreeableness earned about 18% more—or $9,772 more annually in their sample—than nicer guys. Ruder women, meanwhile, earned about 5% or $1,828 more than their agreeable counterparts.
“Nice guys are getting the shaft,” says study co-author Beth A. Livingston, an assistant professor of human resource studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
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