On the long list of happy 5 in science, some discoveries prove to be more monumental than others. Stephanie Kwolek’s was just such a landmark. In the mid-1960s, Kwolek was working at Dupont, 6 a new synthetic fiber to use in tires. She noticed that one mixture of a polymer and a solvent looked different. 7 assuming she’d made a mistake, she was 8 and followed up on her observation. When her formula was spun into fiber, it proved to be five times as strong as steel. With its unusual protective powers, it is used in bulletproof vests, body armor and workers’ gloves, which helped to save lives and avoid cuts. It has also been used to 9 items from boats and cookware to wind turbines and cell phones.

 “From an evolutionary point of view, we typically don’t think of the nose as very important,” said Dr. Gary Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Arizona. “But it is stuck square in the middle of the face. Why would something that was less relevant to normal activities be so prominent? It implies there is something more important there than we have realized.”

 Indeed, scientists are learning that fragrance affects us more than previously thought. New research indicates that smells influence our minds, our moods and our bodies. Although we know a great deal about the eyes and ears, we only partly understand smell. According to Charles Wysocki, an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, we do know that an odor is first detected by the olfactory epithelium, a sort of receptor sheet located in the nose. This starts a chain of events that leads to an information flow to the olfactory bulb and limbic system of the brain, which plays a key role in regulating body functions and the emotions. Some of the most significant new findings about smell show that scents can keep people more alert and improve performance of a routine task. Subjects tackled a 40-minute vigilance test, which required them to watch a video screen and press a button whenever a certain line pattern appeared. While performing the task, some were intermittently given a whiff of peppermint or lily of the valley through oxygen masks. Scientists discovered that those workers receiving the fragrances performed 25% better than those given only whiffs of pure air. Although it isn’t clear exactly how fragrance works, it is believed that this finding may soon have practical applications. Truck drivers, even passenger car drivers, who need to keep alert while traveling long distances, could find it helpful.

    The Dublin Regulation is a European Union (EU) law that determines as quickly as possible the EU Member State responsible for examining an asylum application. The principle is that only one Member state is responsible for the application for international protection, which prevents the submission of multiple applications by one person and avoids refugees from being sent from one country to another. The country to which refugees first apply for asylum has to either accept or reject asylum, and refugees cannot restart the process in another country. Usually, the responsible Member State is the state through which the asylum seeker first enters the EU. 

    When an asylum seeker has illegally crossed the border into a Member State, the Member State has the responsibility to examine the asylum application. This responsibility ceases 12 months after the date on which the border has been illegally crossed. If an asylum seeker has a family member who is legally living in a Member State, the Member State is responsible for examining the application. When the asylum seeker possesses a valid visa or residence document, the Member State that issued it is responsible for examining the application. If one has more than one valid visa or residence document, the Member State that granted the longest period of residency has to be responsible for the asylum claim. 

    The protection of refugees has been an international responsibility since the early 1950s with the introduction of the Geneva Convention. According to Refugee Convention in 1951, any person who is under “fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” has a right to be granted international protection. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that refugee issues were addressed within the EU. In 1990, the Dublin Convention was established; in 2003 it grew into the Dublin II Regulation and then developed into the Dublin III Regulation in 2013. 

    In April 2015, five boats carrying about 2,000 migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, which claimed 1,200 lives. This tragedy resulted in the wide use of the term “European migrant crisis.” Under the Dublin Regulation, if one who has filed for asylum in an EU country illegally crosses borders to another country, they shall be returned to the former. In June 2015, Hungary was so overburdened by asylum applications that it refused to receive back the applicants who later crossed to another EU country. In August 2015, Germany, having been complaining the Dublin Regulation is failing, quietly stopped to enforce the regulation and processed applications from Syrians even if they have made their way through other EU countries.

   It seemed like a curse. The summer of 821 was wet, cold and yielded a poor harvest. Then winter came. Temperatures plunged. Blizzards smothered towns and villages. The Danube, the Rhine and the Seine – rivers that never froze – froze so hard that the ice covering them could be crossed not just on foot but by horse and cart. Nor did spring bring respite. Terrible hailstorms followed the snow. Plague and famine followed the storms. The next few winters were worse. Fear stalked the land. Paschasius Radbertus, a monk of Corbie, in what is now northern France, wrote that God Himself was angry. Yet it was not God that wrought this destruction, according to Ulf Büntgen of the University of Cambridge, but rather a volcano now called Katla, on what was then an unknown island, now called Iceland.

   At the moment Katla, one of Iceland’s largest volcanoes, located near the island’s southern tip, sleeps beneath 700 metres of ice. It has so slept, albeit fitfully, for almost 100 years. Its last eruption big enough to break through the ice was in 1918. A score of such ice-breaking awakenings have been recorded by Icelanders since the first Norsemen settled there in 870. In 821, however, Iceland was not on the Norsemen’s horizon. They were concentrating their activities on the lootable monasteries and villages of coastal Europe. There is thus no man-made record of what Katla was up to then. But Dr. Büntgen thinks he has found a natural one. A memorandum of an eruption that coincides with the events described by Radbertus is, he believes, written in a prehistoric forest.

   Large volcanic eruptions can affect the weather. In particular they eject sulphur dioxide, which reacts with atmospheric gases to form sulphate aerosols that reflect sunlight back into the space, cooling the air beneath. That is well known. So the suspicion that what happened in the early 820s was precipitated by such an eruption has been around for a long time.