The Vikings were seafaring north Germanic people who raided, traded, explored, and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia, and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries. The Vikings employed wooden longships with wide, shallow-draft hulls, allowing navigation in rough seas or in shallow river waters. The ships could be landed on beaches, and their light weight enabled them to be hauled over portages. These versatile ships allowed the Vikings to travel as far east as Constantinople and the Volga River in Russia, as far west as Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, and as far south as Nekor. This period of Viking expansion, known as the Viking Age, constitutes an important element of the medieval history of Scandinavia, Great Britain, Ireland, Russia, and the rest of Europe.

Conan of Aquilonia is a collection of four linked fantasy short stories written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter featuring Robert E. Howard's seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. The stories were originally published in Fantastic for August 1972, July 1973, July 1974, and February, 1975. The collected stories were intended for book publication by Lancer Books, but this edition never appeared due to Lancer's bankruptcy. The first book edition was issued in paperback by Ace Books in May 1977 and the first British edition was published by Sphere Books in October 1978.

A utility cooperative is a type of cooperative that is tasked with the delivery of a public utility such as electricity, water or telecommunications to its members. Profits are either reinvested for infrastructure or distributed to members in the form of "patronage" or "capital credits", which are essentially dividends paid on a member's investment into the cooperative. Each customer is a member and owner of the business with an equal say as every other member of the cooperative, unlike investor-owned utilities where the amount of say is governed by the number of shares held.

A perennial stream or perennial river is a stream or river (channel) that has continuous flow in parts of its stream bed all year round during years of normal rainfall. "Perennial" streams are contrasted with "intermittent" streams which normally cease flowing for weeks or months each year, and with "ephemeral" channels that flow only for hours or days following rainfall.

The expert predicted that America's gross domestic product will return to more than 3 percent yearly expansion. For example, Dow Chemical is investing $4 billion in Texas plastics production that will be operational by 2019. Such growth requires cheap oil and natural gas - and "by 2022 or so, the United States will surpass Saudi Arabia in oil output, and Russia in gas." He continued: "The big attraction is the low price of natural gas, the lowest-carbon fossil fuel, which can be produced profitably at about a third the price per unit of energy as other hydrocarbons. That is particularly attractive to chemical companies. It is the raw material for plastics, Styrofoam, tires, sealants, adhesives, films, liquid crystal screens, nylons, polyesters - nearly everything around us."