Free Republic

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Heavy snow stranded thousands of Christmas travelers in parts of Europe on Friday, with Belgium's main airport closed for most of the day to landing and icy roads in Sweden choked with traffic. Cold weather during the busy Christmas period has disrupted travel and business across Europe this week, and the prolonged period of severe weather is expected to clip economic growth in Germany, Europe's biggest economy. A spokesman for Brussels' airport said hundreds of beds were ready for stranded passengers after the airport reopened to inbound flights following a day of delays and cancellations. "The fact...

Twin strands of DNA seek each other out 11:38 28 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Andy Coghlan Just like twins recognising and approaching each other across a crowded room, it now turns out that identical stretches of double-stranded DNA seek each other out in solution. The unexpected finding could shed new light on how DNA repairs itself, how diseases such as cancer result from the miscopying of DNA, and how genes become tweaked during evolution. Although the capacity for single complementary strands of DNA to attract each other is probably the best-known and most fundamental property of DNA, no-one knew...

EVANSVILLE, Ind. - Frigid temperatures, blasting wind and more snow than some places normally see in a year left parts of the Midwest and South paralyzed Thursday, and transformed a section of highway in southern Indiana into a parking lot. The winter storm dumped double-digits of snow from Ohio to Wyoming, the Texas Panhandle to the Great Lakes, disrupting pre-Christmas travel. Motorists in parts of Mississippi and Tennessee were warned Thursday to stay off highways iced up from freezing rain. Hundreds of thousands lost power in Ohio. Southern Indiana barely had time to catch its frosty breath after a snowstorm...