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Why do we love songs that make us cry? The strong emotions they invoke set off a physical reaction that increases our "feel good" hormone dopamine. So even though it seems like we’re unhappy, we’ve never felt HAPPIER!

When psychologist John Sloboda asked people to identify the parts of songs that made them cry, he analyzed these passages and found that they all contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura," which is a type of note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound.
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For the first half of the winter, there were warm temperatures and a lack of snow. But then all that changed: Temperatures in Europe have plunged. It has even snowed as far south as North Africa. Now it’s starting to warm up again.

On the NASA website, Dauna Coulter quotes NASA climatologist Bill Patzert as explaining what happened: "A couple of weeks ago, Mother Nature did an about face. The tight polar vortex that had bottled up the cold arctic air in the beginning of winter suddenly weakened. Cold air swept out of Siberia and invaded Europe and the Far East."
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Hundreds of dead starlings dropped from the sky in Laurel, Maryland recently. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. This time, the mass deaths are being blamed on everything from fireworks to bad weather.

The birds fell out of the sky onto a highway, during a weekday commute. On the local ABC News affiliate website, Brad Bell, Jason Cherkis and Stephen Teschider quote Laurel resident Ray Wheltle as saying, "I travel this all the time and have never seen anything like that before."
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There are a lot of things I don’t like about Los Angeles–too spread out, too hard to make friends here–but one of the things I DO like is being among so-called "secular Jews" once again. I lived with these people in New York City and I find them delightful: They don’t try to "convert" you, they are interested in the arts and support them enthusiastically, and they love intellectual ideas. They’re A BIT tribal (you’ll always do better with them if you’re Jewish too), but not too much.
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