5 THINGS WE LEARNED THIS WEEK

1 This weekend’s Storm Kathleen is the 11th named storm in eight months and only the second time in a UK storm season that the letter K has been reached in the alphabet. The first time K was used was in March 2016, with Storm Katie.

2 Australian film-maker F. W. Thring is credited with creating the clapperboard in the early days of cinema sound – a combination of the chalkboard slate identifying the next scene and the clapstick which was used to align sound and picture.

3 Despite its association with New Zealand, the kiwi fruit is indigenous to the forests of south-west China. Specimens were sent from China to Britain at the turn of the 20th Century, says Country Life, but people were unimpressed. New Zealanders didn’t make the same mistake – establishing orchards and exporting the fruit for the first time in 1952 – 13 tons of it, to England. Originally called ‘Chinese gooseberry’, they were given the name kiwi as they looked like the bird New Zealand has as its national symbol.

4 The White House has given America’s space agency Nasa until 2026 to devise a time zone for the Moon – Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC). With less gravity than on Earth, Moontime moves 58.7 microseconds quicker a day, presenting a potential challenge to the ‘extreme precision’ needed for lunar missions.

5 Britons’ wages lag so far behind those in the US that American firms are increasingly outsourcing jobs to the UK. Unlike the way call centres were relocated to India, says The Wall Street Journal, high-skilled workers, software developers, consultants, lawyers and film producers are being hired. The Wall Street Journal also cited the UK’s ‘stagnating post-Brexit economy’ as a reason for the outsourcing. Finance giants JPMorgan and BlackRock now employ large technology teams in Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively.