Following a year of severe drought across the United States, the precipitation from winter 2013 may not be enough to eradicate dry conditions and return the water supply to normal levels.

The snow cover compared to last year on this date for the contiguous U.S., is significantly wider: approximately 65 percent versus last year’s 25 percent.

The highest percentage of snow coverage in any month last year just barely reached 48 percent.

But despite the seemingly wide coverage right now and talk of more snow to come, the U.S., will not be quick to recover.

‘Our current snow cover is not anything unusual. It was just way less than normal last winter,’ said AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Jack Boston.

‘Snow cover will probably hold for much of this month but we expect it to turn drier and milder again over western U.S. to the central and northern Plains in February, which should cause the overall snow coverage to decrease.’

Above average snowfall would be necessary to bounce back this winter, with more than 42 percent of the U.S., still undergoing severe to exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

But as the AccuWeather.com Winter Forecast predicts, not a lot of additional snow is expected from the […]

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WASHINGTON — When Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Morgan returned from a year-long deployment to Kuwait with the New Hampshire National Guard in 2010, her doctor didn’t have good news. The breast cancer thought to be in remission, the physician said, had returned, and the diagnosis was terminal.

That’s when Morgan began a new battle – to make sure her wife and their daughter receive the same survivor benefits that would go to any other married couple with children.

The US Supreme Court’s decision to take up the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) could have a considerable impact on the benefits of same-sex spouses of service members, who were largely invisible to the military until the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell

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The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official.

That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage from the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.

‘When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world - escorting, command and control, medevac support - when you throw all that infrastructure in, we’re talking over $20 billion,’ Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. He’s a retired brigadier general who served as chief logistician for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He’s now in the private sector, selling technologies branded as energy-efficient to the Defense Department.

Now it’s important to note that wrapped up in Anderson’s $20 billion figure are all kind of other expenditures – for instance, the cost of building and maintaining roads in Afghanistan, securing those roads, managing the security operations for those roads. That all costs a lot of money and is part of the overall war effort in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon rejects Anderson’s estimate. Still his […]

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The controversial extinct human lineage known as ‘hobbits’ gained a face this year, one of many projects that shed light in 2012 on the history of modern humans and their relatives. Other discoveries include the earliest known controlled use of fire and the possibility that Neanderthals or other extinct human lineages once sailed to the Mediterranean.

Here’s a look at what we learned about ourselves through our ancestors this year.

We’re not alone

A trove of discoveries this year revealed a host of other extinct relatives of modern humans. For instance, researchers unearthed 3.4-million-year-old fossils of a hitherto unknown species that lived about the same time and place as Australopithecus afarensis, a leading candidate for the ancestor of the human lineage. In addition, fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that at least two extinct human species lived alongside Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of our species. Moreover, fossils only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old hint that a previously unknown type of human called the ‘Red Deer Cave People’ once lived in China.

Bones were not all that scientists revealed about modern humans’ extinct relatives in 2012. For instance, scientists finally […]

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Kids who are kind are happier and gain greater peer acceptance, study finds

Nine to twelve-year-olds who perform kind acts are not only happier, but also find greater acceptance in their peer groups, according to research published December 26, 2012 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kristin Layous and colleagues from the University of California, Riverside.

The authors randomly assigned over 400 students aged 9-12 to two groups: one group performed ‘acts of kindness’ and the other kept track of pleasant places they visited each week. Examples of kind acts included descriptions like ‘gave someone some of my lunch’ or ‘gave my mom a hug when she was stressed by her job’, and places visited included the baseball diamond, shopping center or a grandparent’s house.

Children were asked to report on their levels of happiness after 4 weeks of activities, and the researchers found that children who performed kind acts were happier than the other group. To assess peer acceptance, students were given a list of classmates and asked to circle those they would like to work with for school activities. Here, the authors found that the group that had performed kind acts fared significantly better.

Though both groups of children had […]

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