Prince George and Princess Charlotte break royal tradition on Christmas

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Kate Middleton revealed Prince George and Princess Charlotte broke royal tradition by opening their presents on Christmas morning.

She told a royal fan that the youngsters had been up “very early” opening their gifts, as the adults arrived for church today.

Usually it is the norm for royals to exchange gifts on Christmas Eve — with joke presents.

Prince Harry, 34, famously gave his grandma a shower cap with “Ain’t Life A B—h” written on it in 2013.

And Kate, 36, previously gave her brother-in-law a “grow your own girlfriend” kit.

Prince Charles‘ favorite-ever gift is reportedly a white leather toilet seat from Princess Anne, which he found so comfy that it now travels with him on his overseas tours.

It isn’t known for certain what tradition dictates for the royal children, but they too may be expected to open their presents the day before.

But the Duchess of Cambridge revealed her kids had excitedly opened their presents Tuesday morning, as she joined Meghan Markle and their husbands for church.

The pair has been the subject an alleged rift — with rumored reports of various disputes.

But as they walked with the rest of the family the short distance from the Queen’s Sandringham home to St Mary Magdalene Church, they were all smiles.

Hundreds of well-wishers had braved the cold to see the “fab four.”

This is 37-year-old Meghan’s second Christmas with the Windsors, but her first as an official part of the family.

After church, the group was to have returned to Sandringham and tucked into an afternoon tea, before a formal dinner.

Although the kids may be allowed to watch festive films, the older members of the family are only allowed to watch one thing — the Queen’s speech, pre-recorded and shown at 3 p.m.

The Queen has done a televised Christmas broadcast every year since 1957.

But she doesn’t like to watch herself, and is said to go for a walk around Sandringham’s 8,000-hectare (31-square-mile) grounds instead.

After dinner comes charades — a reported favorite of Her Majesty.

And sticking to tradition dictates that no one is allowed to go to bed before the Queen, who’s normally up until midnight on Christmas Day.

Federal employees are losing vacation time in government shutdown

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WASHINGTON – Some federal workers aren’t just losing their paychecks during the partial government shutdown, they’re also losing their vacations.

A wacky rule doesn’t allow federal workers to take paid time off when the government isn’t operating.

Leave is automatically canceled for employees who are “excepted” — meaning they are funded through the congressional appropriations process, but deemed essential to keeping the government going.

Even furloughed employees — those sent home — can’t use up their vacation time because “paid time off creates a debt to the government,” according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

“My kids and I will be home alone starting Wednesday instead of on vacation with my husband who is an essential federal employee and was told his approved annual leave was now denied,” tweeted Lyndsi Parker, using the hashtag “ShutdownStories,” which is shedding light on some of the chaos created by the shutdown.

When Margaret Weichert, a deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget, tweeted that federal employees would receive their paychecks on Friday — covering the days they worked until the shutdown last Saturday — a government employee named Craig slapped back.

“If we are considered essential employees all leave is automatically canceled. There are going to be some very unhappy federal employees that have to cancel vacation plans and are going to have work…” he tweeted.

Collapse of Antarctic ice sheet once caused a 30-foot global flood

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The collapse of a major Antarctic ice sheet once caused a “global flood” and scientists now fear it could happen again.

The devastating collapse caused sea levels to rise between 20 and 30 feet compared to today. The catastrophic sea level rise drowned huge areas of now-dry land.

This cataclysmic event, described in Science, took place around 125,000 years ago.

At the time, temperatures were only slightly warmer than today, but sea levels were significantly higher.

And scientists now believe that the source of the water was the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

There are major concerns over the stability of this ice sheet, with studies going back several years warning over a pending “collapse.”

The base of the ice sheet lies below sea level and is now at risk due to increasingly warm ocean waters.

The worry is that “the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might not need a huge nudge to budge,” Jeremy Shakun, a paleoclimatologist at Boston College, told Science.

He warned that the ice mass lost from the sheet in the past two decades may not be a “short-term blip” – but instead the start of a major collapse.

According to some studies, the ancient ice sheet collapse caused sea levels to rise as quickly as 8 feet a century.

Worryingly, temperatures were 2 degrees above modern preindustrial levels – and we’re at 1 degree higher than that, today.

Climate scientists have regularly warned that global temperatures rising to 2 degrees could have catastrophic consequences for humanity.

The aim for global leaders and environmentalists is to restrict warming to 1.5 degrees – to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

Scientists pinned the rising sea levels to the ice sheet collapse by investigating Antarctic ice cores.

Researchers from the University of Oregon, NASA and others published a detailed paper for the American Geophysical Union, which revealed the truth behind a worrying climate incident from our past.

During the early Eemian period (when sea levels were high), you’d expect to see silt from a number of areas around ice sheets – due to ice-driven erosion.

But there was no evidence of sediments coming from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the cores.

The obvious explanation is that the ice sheet simply ceased to exist – or collapsed so much that it couldn’t erode anymore.

Sadly, it’s impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that the melting ice sheet sparked enormous sea-level rise.

Women are ‘revenge cheating’ on their unfaithful partners

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The festive season puts a lot of strain on relationships as spending days on end with our families and in-laws can lead to arguments.

Which is why it’s no surprise that divorces spike in the new year.

But rather than breaking up, some people cheat instead.

Many would ditch their partner if they discovered they had been unfaithful but now there’s been a rise in so-called “revenge cheating.”

This is when people have an affair to get back at their partner after their partner cheated on them – and purposefully tell them to get a reaction.

Website Illicit Encounters, designed for married people to find affairs, surveyed 1,000 of its members about cheating.

They found that revenge cheating is more common among women, with 37 percent admitting to it, compared with 31 percent of men.

In more than half – 54 percent – of cases, the cheater told their partner about their affair to inflict the most emotional damage.

But 81 percent of revenge cheaters felt justified as their partner had done the dirty deed in the first place.

Illicit Encounters spokesman, Christian Grant, said: “There has been a big rise in the number of women revenge cheating in the last year.”

“They are stuck in [an] unhappy relationship which they cannot afford to leave because of house prices and economic uncertainty.

“They had not planned to cheat but feel justified in doing so because their partner has had an affair first.”

But he said sometimes it’s not all bad, adding: “Such tit-for-tat cheating can sometimes bring couples closer together because after both have an affair there is no sense of grievance on either side.

“Many discover they are happier with what they’ve already got, realizing the grass isn’t greener on the other side.

“So if you discover that your partner has been unfaithful this Christmas the best advice might well be to have an affair, too.”

VitaminWater will pay you $100K if you give up your smartphone for a year

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Let’s be honest: there’s a good chance that you’re reading this article on a smartphone right now. There’s also a good chance that you’ve been somewhat tethered to your smartphone from the moment you woke up this morning. In today’s digital age, and thanks to social networking apps like Facebook, there’s no denying that our reliance upon and addiction to smartphones has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade.

With that said, do you think you could go a full day without using your smartphone? How about a week or, say, a month? How about a full year? While most people would likely scoff at the idea of trading in their smartphone for a flip phone for a full year, what if someone was willing to make it worth your while? What if someone was willing to pay you $100,000 to give up your smartphone for 365 days? Well, now we’ve got ourselves a hypothetical worth exploring.

The only thing is, this isn’t a hypothetical. VitaminWater this week announced a new contest where a lucky contestant (or unlucky depending on your perspective) can win 100 grand for returning to a mid-2000s era feature phone.

If you want to enter the contest, you’ll have to post a photo to your Twitter or Instagram account, tag VitaminWater, and tell them why you need a year-long break from your smartphone. You also need to tell them what you would do to survive or pass the time over that year period. The company notes that you should add the hashtags #nophoneforayear and #contest to your social media post.

The guidelines to win the $100,000 are as follows:

• you may not use any smartphone for 365 days. if txting is a pleasant experience or you can get on the internet, it’s probably a smartphone.
• this means you may not physically operate, caress, hug or otherwise be physically affectionate with anyone’s smartphone
• if you’re lying in bed and miss your phone, do not attempt to sneak a midnight scroll… just close your eyes and dream about vitaminwater…

The submission deadline is on January 8, 2019, so make sure to get your social media post up over the next few weeks. Notably, you can submit up to four entries.

The winning entries will be based on the following criteria:

• Creativity and Originality of Submission (30%);
  – presents idea in a fun and unique way
• Cultural or Brand Relevance of Submission (30%);
  – fits the brand tonality and persona
• Humor of Submission (30%);
  – relates to breaking the monotony for original and outside the lines reasons
• Quality of Submission (10%)
  – inclusion of proper grammar and spelling
  – inclusion of high-quality photos and/or videos (if photos/videos are included)

Now of course, the obvious question here is how VitaminWater will make sure the chosen contestants keep up their end of the bargain. While details are scarce, the company does note that the verification process will include a lie detector test at some point.

Russia is treating the mysterious ISS hole like a forensic investigation

The hole found in the International Space Station. NASA

The strange hole that was found months ago in the Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station continues to be a major focus for Russian space agency Roscosmos. When it was first discovered, it was thought to be damage from a tiny space rock, but it quickly became clear that it was actually a hole that had been drilled prior to the spacecraft ever leaving Earth.

Russia was quick to boldly claim that it was likely intentional sabotage, but Roscosmos hasn’t made any definitive announcement regarding when the hole was drilled or by whom. To aid in its investigation, Russia conducted a planned spacewalk so that cosmonauts could inspect the damage from outside and gather samples. It’s becoming an unprecedented “whodunnit” and it’s happening in space.

The spacewalk, which took nearly eight full hours, tasked cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Prokopyev with removing an outer layer of protective insulation from the area around the hole before taking samples of the damaged area. That material will be brought back to Earth when the spacecraft returns home and investigators will apparently use it in their search for the truth.

After removing the insulation and snapping images and recording video of the damage, the cosmonauts installed fresh insulation over the top of the already-patched hole.

Unlike any spacewalk before it, the extravehicular activity the cosmonauts embarked on was extremely challenging. As reported by Russian news organization TASS, performing the investigation and sample collection was difficult because it’s in an area of the ship where crew members wouldn’t normally venture. With no handles or railings, the men had to move slowly and methodically.

Russia hopes to conclusively determine whether the hole was made in space or on Earth, though up to this point all word out of the country has suggested that it was created during the manufacturing process.