Farmers can adjust to earlier planting times, perhaps avoiding some extreme temperatures during the sensitive flowering period, and lengthening the growing season.

CNN: Extreme heat and droughts -- a recipe for world food woes

Some speculate that the tabloids' flowering is really just a relic of the Clinton years: a more upright (and less charismatic) president will be the death of them.

ECONOMIST: The tabloid press

That history reveals patterns, some of which, the domination of terrestrial flora by the flowering plants, for example, are vast in space and time.

ECONOMIST: A master of evolution takes a last long look at Darwin