Happy May Day! May 1st is a traditional day of celebration of the coming of spring with May poles and dancing and general carrying on. In Europe it is also a day of solidarity with labor, similar o the US celebration of Labor Day toward the end of Summer.
Of course, Mayday, as a single word, typically repeated three times, is also an international call for help on the sea and in the air. Mayday is a fairly recent term, dating only to the use of radio for communication with ships and airplanes. In 1923, Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, Mockford was asked to think of a word that would indicate distress in an emergency. Many of the flights from London in those days were to Paris, so he borrowed from the French phrase, venez m’aider, meaning “come help me.” Shortened to two rhyming syllables, Mayday was easily understood by pilots and ground crew. Mayday was adopted as an international code word in 1927.
There were two scientific conferences scheduled recently, both of which would address or were, to one degree or another, inspired by the “
Wonderful news! In February 2012, the 1893 built, Freedonia class fishing schooner,
The mature female humpback whale that washed ashore dead on Long Beach Island last week was well known to scientists, who have tracked her for thirty seven years. Kimberly Durham, rescue program director of the Riverhead Foundation, described her as a “celebrity in the whale world.” The humpback was nicknamed 
Our hearty congratulations to 
The roller coasters on the 
A few months ago, the Mississippi River was showing the effects of a near record drought. There was talk in December of 
Last week, 
A 23 year old Croatian kite surfer, Matea Medak Rezic, 
You can’t make this stuff up. Only a week after the last wreckage of the minesweeper USS Guardian was removed from the reef in the Philippines’ Tubbataha National Marine Park, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site, where it 
Update: Carnival Corp has has agreed to reimburse the U.S. government for costs related to the high-profile fires aboard the Carnival Triumph in February and Carnival Splendor in 2010.