In 1990, three former Apple employees launched a company that epitomized the Silicon Valley dream. What they invented looked like an iPhone--more than a decade earlier. The device never came to be. Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an public. A "concept IPO," they called it. Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom--software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson--were already Silicon Valley legends for their work creating the Apple Macintosh. Atkinson's prolific inventions included the double click and the drop down menu.

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The skills needed for wrapping up aren't always what you expect. My house contains a vaguely defined room--a parlor-like space that was created by a renovation decades ago. After my son was born, it served as a playroom, full of baby and toddler toys. Then it became a nook where, late at night, my wife and I could listen to music and read. That equilibrium held until the Legos and board games arrived; their incursion was the beginning of the end.

Snowpack levels across a wide swath of western US states are among the lowest seen in decades, even as regulators struggle to negotiate water rights in the region. States across the western US are facing record low snowpack levels in the middle of the winter season. The snowpack crisis, which could mean a drier, more wildfire -prone summer, is coming as states are racing unsuccessfully against a deadline to agree on terms to share water in the Colorado River Basin, the source of water for 40 million people across seven states in the West. "Barring a genuinely miraculous turnaround" in the remainder of the winter, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, the low snowpack "has the potential to worsen both the ecological and political crisis on the Colorado Basin, and then also produce really adverse wildfire conditions in some parts of the West." Data provided by the US Department of Agriculture show that as of February 12, snowpack was at less than half its normal level in areas across nine Western states--some of the lowest levels seen in decades.

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