Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 Dutch natural history book. — Read the rest

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1999 A.D. is a short film the appliance maker Philco-Ford made in 1967 to show what family life would look like at the end of the century. It opens with a boy named Jamie, who builds a sandcastle version of his family's house on a Southern California beach. — Read the rest

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Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In his Essay on the Modification of Clouds, he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of hair, cumulus for "convex or conical heaps," stratus for a "horizontal sheet." — Read the rest

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