Senior Women Web

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone. It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. more »

Joan L. Cannon writes: I see woods all around, with an unpaved road that forks in a Y. For no reason, it’s always twilight. A traveler can choose to return, or to take one branch of the Y: three choices. No metaphor presents itself — except for the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken", once again filled with possibilities for our imaginations and especially recollections. My psyche immediately rejects the choice of turning back. more »

Kristin Nord writes: Outfitted in parkas and mittens and hats the hearty women scaling the hillsides were soon rewarded. There were meadows of trillium and foamflower, wild ginger, ginseng, and Solomon’s seal. There were Jack-in-the-pulpits, Mayapple, blue cohosh, and five varieties of violets, some 55 natives in all. The naturalist Carol Gracie was at the helm, urging the group to slow down, and look closely at the natural feast spread out like a picnic before them.  more »

The largest source of uncertainty in today’s climate models are clouds. Clouds can both cool the planet, by acting as a shield against the sun, and warm the planet, by trapping heat. But why do clouds behave the way they do? And how will a warming planet affect the cloud cover? “We don’t understand many basic things about clouds,” Lawrence Berkeley Lab scientist David Romps says. more »