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If your internet connection slows down, you usually blame your system or your server. But it could also be the weather: The internet may slow down when the weather is cold.

In Wired.com, Cliff Kuang asked some engineers about this, and they replied that temperature could affect the conductivity of the copper wires in the system, since the electrical conductivity of a metal falls as the temperature rises, meaning that cold weather would slow things down (it turns out that most of the world’s cable is made out of copper). But Kuang quotes engineer Doug Webster as saying that “the infrastructure is engineered to counter those effects.”
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Even if one of them happened in the past! – Can an earthquake that occurred in the past make one more likely to happen today in a place on the other side of the earth? The surprising answer is yes.

The 2004 earthquake in Sumatra may have weakened the San Andreas fault across the earth in California. Researchers who compared measurements of the 2 faults found that small “repeating earthquakes” became more frequent as the San Andreas Fault weakened, and this began happening after the major 9.3 magnitude quake in Sumatra in 2004, which triggered a tsunami that killed over 200,000 people.
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A sign of the recession – Politicians may announce that the recession is over, but that won’t be true until all the empty cargo ships that are anchored off Singapore start moving again. This group of 500 empty ships is bigger than the US and British navies combined, but they have no cargo and thus no destination, so they just sit and wait.
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If you don’t want your kid to grow up to be violent, don’t feed him (or her) sweets and chocolate every day.

A recent study found that 10-year-olds who ate sweets daily were much more likely to have a violence conviction by age 34. The researchers suggested that this might be because they hadn’t learned to delay gratification.

BBC News quotes researcher Simon Moore as saying, “We are fairly confident that this is a realistic relationship, the key is explaining what the mechanism is behind this relationship. We think that rewarding bad behavior in childhood with confectionary can lead to later problems but we need to look at this more closely.”
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