It’s the holiday season, and you’re likely looking for some great gifts for your family, friends, significant other and so on. If you’re hunting for options in the $50-250 range, these are some of our favorite gadgets, games, and services (doggy DNA tests, anyone?) to gift someone this year.

Embark Dog DNA Test Kit

Many animal lovers prefer to rescue dogs from shelters rather than shell out for a purebred. Now, adopted dogs can trade in their “mutt” moniker for something far more precise. Through Embark, a doggy DNA test kit, a simple cheek swab revealed that our toast-colored rescue dog Fawn was not a mini Golden Retriever, as we had suspected. Instead, she’s a surprising blend of about 10 different breeds: 16.8% Chow Chow, 16.3% Cocker Spaniel, 14.9% German Shepherd and more. Embark also tests for certain health conditions and offers to connect pups who are genetically related, arming pet lovers with more knowledge about their companions. ($199, Embark) — Mandy Oaklander

Rothy’s Shoes

Rothy’s makes the rare “it” shoe that’s actually comfortable and stylish. These flats’ flexible knit outsole makes them a blister-free (and machine-washable) choice for commuters and kids alike, while their classic designs and wide range of colors and patterns promise a worthy addition to any wardrobe. The cherry on top? Each pair is sustainably made using recycled plastic water bottles, vegan and non-toxic adhesives and foam from other recycled shoes. (From $125 for adults and $65 for kids, rothys.com) — Jamie Ducharme

Monoprice Sous Vide

Sous Vide cooking is all the rage, and rightfully so. The process, wherein cooks put food in a plastic bag, dunk it in water and heat the water around it, can result in far better meals than with typical cooking methods. Get the home chef on your list a Monoprice Sous Vide, one of the most-recommended models, and they won’t be disappointed. Just make sure they invite you over to dinner as a thank-you. ($80, Amazon) — Alex Fitzpatrick

Google Home Hub

Google’s Home Hub is a perfect gift for someone new or just getting started with smart home gadgets. A smart speaker with a screen, it can show YouTube videos (like cooking instructions), the weather forecast or display your favorite photos. It’s also voice-controlled, making it a handy kitchen assistant. ($149, Google) — Patrick Lucas Austin

Kano Harry Potter Coding Kit

With the Harry Potter Coding Kit from Kano, kids can assemble and program their own wand while tackling challenges set in the Potterverse. It’s the perfect STEM gift for kids who love all things Potter. ($80, Amazon) — Patrick Lucas Austin

Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic

Like vinyl records and denim jackets, instant film is suddenly cool again. Fujifilm makes some of the best instant cameras around, including the Mini 90, which uses the company’s popular and easy-to-find Instax film. It’s beginner friendly but has options for more “serious” instant photographers too, like a double exposure mode that produces creative results. ($120, Amazon) — Alex Fitzpatrick

Philips Hue Lights

Philips and its Hue smart home lights are compatible with every voice assistant, and feature a variety of styles, price points, and extra features that let users customize the colorful LED bulbs. They even connect with Siri and other digital assistants for voice-activated controls. ($90, Amazon) — Patrick Lucas Austin

Beasts of Balance

It’s 2018. Ditch the Jenga and gift someone Beasts of Balance, which uses stackable animal figurines, cards, and a companion app to encourage both cooperative and competitive play. ($100, Amazon) — Patrick Lucas Austin

Anker PowerCore+ 20100

The gift of power when someone needs it is always appreciated. Anker’s PowerCore+ 20100 gives users more than enough juice to recharge their smartphone a few times over, and can charge the notoriously finicky Nintendo Switch without issue. ($70, Amazon) — Patrick Lucas Austin

Photobook of the Month Club

Got a photographer who’s serious about their hobby on your shopping list? Ignore all those lenses and tripods they want and get them a subscription to Charcoal’s Photobook of the Month Club instead. They’ll get a curated selection of the latest and greatest photography books across a variety of genres, a far better gift than new gear to help inspire up-and-coming shutterbugs’ creative streak. ($180 for three months, CharcoalBookClub.com) — Alex Fitzpatrick

A data breach at an online customer services vendor may have exposed the credit card information of hundreds of thousands of customers at Delta Air Lines and Sears, the companies said this week.

The customer services company, [24]7.ai, suffered a malware attack last fall, but did not tell Delta or Sears about the issue until recently, according to Sears. The department store chain said it learned of the breach in mid-March, while Delta said it found out about the attack just last week.

The breach lasted from Sept. 26 to Oct. 12, 2017, Delta said in its statement alerting customers to the incident. Hackers may have accessed names, addresses, credit card numbers, CVV numbers and expiration dates for “several hundred thousand” customers during that time, according to the airline.

“At this point, even though only a small subset of our customers would have been exposed, we cannot say definitively whether any of our customers’ information was actually accessed or subsequently compromised,” Delta said. The company added that other information, such as passports, government IDs, security and SkyMiles data, was not accessed.

On the Sears side, the company said “less than 100,000” customers were impacted, and that those using Sears-branded credit cards did not have their information exposed.

Delta created a website offering customers information about the security breach and Sears said it would have a hotline for customer questions by Friday morning.

[24]7.ai said Wednesday it had “contained” the incident and that its technology was now safe. “We are confident that the platform is secure, and we are working diligently with our clients to determine if any of their customer information was accessed,” the company said in a news release.

This breach represents the latest in a series of data incidents in recent weeks. Under Armour, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and Boeing have all recently seen their data breached as well.

Facebook has announced plans to partner with the German government to target fake accounts and combat misinformation ahead of the European Union elections in May, CNN reports.

The social media giant’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told a conference in Munich Sunday that Facebook will work with Germany’s Federal Office for Information and Security among others to “guide policymaking in Germany and across the E.U. on election interference.” Sandberg said the new initiative would expand upon Facebook’s efforts during Germany’s national elections in 2017, which included removing “tens of thousands” of false accounts.

She did not elaborate further on the upcoming partnership.

According to the company’s head of ad transparency, Facebook will extend new ad-purchasing rules in an effort to protect 2019’s elections, including an upcoming poll in India, CNN reports. The policy, which was implemented last year in the U.S., U.K. and Brazil, requires political ads-buyers to upload personal identifying documents to prevent false accounts from spreading election-related propaganda.

Facebook has long been in hot water over its role in spreading disinformation during elections. The Menlo Park company drew criticism for hosting Russian campaigns to sow discord and influence public opinion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In November, the company admitted that over 600,000 U.S. users followed accounts created by Russian trolls ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Read more: The Fact-Checkers Fighting Fake News

Facebook’s fraught public image was was further rocked by a series of controversies last year, from the mishandling of user information to allegations it exacerbated the spread of hate speech preceding ethnic violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Facebook executives, including Sandberg and founder Mark Zuckerberg, endured questioning by Congressional lawmakers and threats of federal oversight.

The company responded by shoring up its security team and expanding fact-checking efforts. Last week, Facebook said it deleted over 500 Russia-linked pages and accounts, dismantling two disinformation networks targeting European users.

Read more: I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can’t Stay Silent About What’s Happening

“These last few years have been really difficult” for Facebook, Sandberg said Sunday. “We know we need to do better.”

When Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press, he changed the course of history. You could say the same about Thomas Edison’s light bulb, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, and Grace Hopper’s compiler. What will the next great invention to transform history? Here are a few innovations that I think are worth watching.

Better Vaccine Storage

Vaccines have saved millions of lives around the world, but they spoil if they aren’t stored at the right temperature. A group of inventors from Global Good in Seattle have created an innovative new refrigerator called the MetaFridge. It stays cold enough to keep vaccines safe even during long power outages. They’re also working on a portable cooler that enables vaccinators to travel farther and reach kids in the most remote places.

Gene Editing

Imagine a future where we could edit a sick person’s DNA to make them better or remove the genes that enable mosquitoes to transmit malaria. We’re still in the early stages of development with genome editing tools, and I know there are a lot of questions about how to use this technology responsibly. But I’m hopeful about the possibilities.

Solar Fuel

If we’re going to end our dependence on fossil fuels and curb climate change, we need a lot of different approaches. I recently visited a lab at Caltech where researchers are exploring ways to turn the sun’s energy into fuel. We’re still a long way off from the day you can fill up your car with solar fuel, but Caltech’s creative approach gives me hope that we’ll achieve an energy miracle in the near future.

mRNA Vaccines

Most vaccines use weakened or inactivated forms of a virus to help your body create immunity and prevent disease. Scientists are studying how to use genetic material instead, which would make it quicker and less expensive to develop new vaccines. If we can teach the body to create its own natural defenses, we can revolutionize the way we prevent disease.

Improved Drug Delivery

If you’ve ever had to take a medication at the same time every day, then you know how easy it is to miss a pill. A company called Intarcia wants to change that. They’ve created a small device that gets implanted under your skin and slowly releases medication over time. There are a number of ways this technology could be used to better treat and prevent disease, but the one I’m most excited about is an HIV prophylactic. One implant could protect a person at risk for HIV for up to a year.

Artificial Intelligence

Of all the innovations on this list, this one seems like the surest bet to transform the way we live. Although AI will create new challenges that we need to address – including how to retrain workers who lose their jobs to automation – I think it will make our lives more productive, more efficient, and easier overall.

When President Donald Trump announced on Friday night that he had ordered airstrikes on Syria, he explained the decision with an appeal to a longstanding international consensus that the use of chemical weapons — such as were used a week ago on Syrian opposition forces and civilians in Douma, per the assessment of the U.S., despite denials from the Syrian regime — is a wrong that merits such a forceful response. France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May have made it clear that they essentially feel the same.

“Following the horrors of World War I a century ago, civilized nations joined together to ban chemical warfare,” Trump noted in his speech, later adding that the world never wants to see the “ghastly specter” of those weapons return.

The indications that such an announcement might be coming had been present for days since the initial report of the attack, which left Trump once again considering how such news might change his plans, as he had formerly expressed a desire to get the U.S. out of Syria.

The news follows a similar pattern to the events of about a year ago, when the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the resulting horrific imagery of the dead seemed enough to prompt a reversal in President Trump’s stated aversion to U.S. intervention there.

And yet noncombatants are killed in the course of war in countless other fashions, and attempting to rank the cruelest ways to kill is an exercise in both futility and inhumanity. So why is it that chemical weapons spark such automatic revulsion when years of bombs and bullets have not? Though Trump correctly pinpointed World War I as a turning point, in fact the story is even older than that.

Early Developments

Chemical and biological weapons predate even our modern understanding of what those terms mean; there’s evidence of the use of noxious gas as a weapon in the ancient world and, as TIME has pointed out, the purposeful spread of smallpox in the 18th century as a tactic against American Indians was its own kind of biological warfare.

The feeling that such poisons are not an appropriate or honorable tactic of warfare is also an old one. As Julian Perry Robinson has written in his history of the subject, the earliest example of that idea might possibly be found in ancient Indian epics. And in Greek mythology, the use of poison as a weapon of war was often considered cowardly, a tricky technique used by those who were not heroes. By 1675, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, France and Germany had signed what was the first international treaty that limited such weapons (in this case, poisoned bullets).

So it should be no surprise that in 1899, during a conference at the Hague on the laws of war, it was decided by the signatory nations that it would be “especially” prohibited “to employ poison or poisoned arms.” Though the convention they signed did not come with any enforcement mechanism, the moral imperative to avoid using poison during wartime had been established by that point.

But, during the 19th century, the technology that could be deployed in the use of chemical weapons underwent a shift. Pressurized canisters of noxious gas could replace the poisoned arrow tips of the past. As Robinson describes, Germany had an “industrial edge” in the development of such technology, and soon enough a reason to want to take advantage of that edge. The infamous trench-based stalemates that quickly set in after the 1914 beginning of World War I made the combatants eager to try something new — and that something included gas, even despite those centuries of history condemning such an idea.

Read More: These Battlefields Were Devastated in World War I. See What They Look Like Today

The World Wars

On April 22, 1915, “German infantrymen gave the world its first whiff of poison-gas warfare,” as TIME later recalled, “by sending a huge, grey-green cloud of noxious chlorine rolling over two French divisions in the trenches at Ypres, killing 5,000, incapacitating 10,000, and cutting a 31-mile swath in Allied lines.” Chlorine, phosgene, chloropicrin and mustard gas were all used during the Great War, though all involved — both sides developed and used chemical weapons — discovered that gas could be a difficult tool to use well, as the wind had to cooperate to make it work and developments such as increased use of tanks mitigated some of the chemicals’ impacts.

By TIME’s later estimate, that war saw 124,000 tons of chemical weapons used, between both sides, and the resulting deaths of 91,000 soldiers.

So it was that, in the wake of that conflict, the Treaty of Versailles included a ban on Germany manufacturing any poison gas. In addition, as members of League of Nations met in Geneva in 1925, delegates from 45 countries sought to find a out a way to come up with what TIME called back then “a protocol generally prohibiting chemical and bacteriological warfare.”

“[The] use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world,” the protocol proclaimed. The Geneva Protocol, however, did not end the history of chemical weapons. It had “no teeth,” per TIME, and allowed nations to make and keep such agents as long as they promised not to use them. (The U.S., which had not actually ratified its membership in the League, did not sign the Geneva Protocol at the time.)

And, before the League of Nations participants would have hoped, the world had cause to put the Protocol to the test. The Great War turned out not to be, as had been hoped, the “war to end all wars.”

When World War II began, as TIME noted in 1944, “the horror and repugnance aroused by the use of gas in World War I [was] still alive,” though some Americans argued that using chemical weapons would be a more modern and humane approach to warfare. Yet, though soldiers had gotten much better prepared to withstand a gas attack since the 1915 Ypres battle that was still so fresh in humanity’s collective memory, chemical weapons still held the deadly threat of death for civilians. Nor was it necessary to use chemical weapons, one military official told the magazine: in order to really make a difference the gas must be used by a combatant with a superior air force, and having a superior air force meant there was no reason to use gas.

In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt warned the Axis powers not to use poison gas during war, and promised that the U.S. would only do so in retaliation:

Even as Nazi scientists were experimenting with new and potent poison gases, including nerve agents like sarin, some of which were manufactured by concentration camp prisoners, Hitler chose not to endorse their use against Allied soldiers. (“Although many senior military officers encouraged Hitler to deploy their powerful new chemical weapon, he waffled, likely for two reasons,” according to Sarah Everts’ summary of the history for the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Those reasons were Hitler’s own experience as a victim of battlefield gas in World War I and his worry that the Allies might have developed similar technology and would retaliate in kind.)

But despite what happened on the battlefield, deadly chemicals were widely used by the Nazi regime as part of their effort to wipe out the population of Jews and other minorities from the area they controlled. For example, in 1944, when TIME’s Moscow Correspondent Richard Lauterbach visited the Majdanek concentration camp and reported on the tour he received from Dmitri Kudriavtsev, Secretary of the Soviet Atrocities Commission, he saw the bathhouses in which Nazis had used Zyklon B to kill as many as 250 people at a time. He was told that on Nov. 3, 1943, alone, “they annihilated 18,000 people — Poles, Jews, political prisoners and war prisoners” with the gas.

New Agreements, New Trespasses

After World War II, as proud as the world powers may have been to have avoided the use of chemical weapons during the battles, the Cold War arms race extended to chemical-weapons research competition, too. One rationalization for that research was helped along by the widespread Cold War idea that, as long as one didn’t strike first, any weapon could be on the table. Plus, the Geneva Protocol only prevented the use of those weapons, not the creation or storage of them.

So it should perhaps be no surprise that the late 20th century was a time of both new diplomatic advances and new uses of new weapons, despite those advances.

On the one hand, the U.S. — after decades of supporting the doctrine voiced by Roosevelt — signed agreements that barred the use of chemical weapons, as did other nations. On the other hand, research continued apace, and the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons did not completely stop them from being put into action.

Controversy over whether the U.S. was using gas in Vietnam raged during the 1960s — that the U.S. was using chemicals such as Agent Orange was clear, but whether that herbicide counted as a chemical weapon as governed by the Geneva Protocol was disputed — and by the end of that decade the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its chemical and biological weapons program, stockpiling the results. Then, in the wake of that controversy, President Nixon resubmitted the Geneva Convention to the U.S. Senate, shortly before the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention — which strengthened the biological-weapons portion of the Geneva protocol — was submitted, too. Both were approved by the Senate in late 1974 and ratified by President Ford in early 1975.

In 1988, Iraq used poison gas on Kurdish towns during the course of its war with Iran. “The bloated bodies of Kurdish residents littered the silent streets of the northern Iraqi town of Halabja. A dead turbaned man who had tried to shield a porcelain-faced infant in his arms from a cloud of poison gas lay frozen in time on a road. Families died together in their homes or in cars. The dead were among the hundreds and possibly thousands of victims of one of the worst chemical-warfare attacks since World War I,” TIME reported. The weapons used were primarily mustard gas. The world’s response was somewhat muted — perhaps due to a lack of desire to take the side of Iran among many of the Geneva Protocol signatories who might have otherwise spoken up — but President Ronald Reagan said in a speech that year that the use of those weapons “jeopardizes the moral and legal strictures that have held those weapons in check since World War I.”

In 1993, after the fall of the Soviet Union, an even tougher U.N. Chemical Weapons Convention was created. This agreement prohibited stockpiling. At the time of the signing, both the U.S. and Russia had tens of thousands of metric tons of chemical weapons in store. Following through on the timely destruction of the chemical agents, as required by that agreement, has proved difficult.

And yet one question, raised by Julian Perry Robinson, has remained unanswered through these many decades: if chemical weapons were more tactically useful, easier to control and harder for armies (if not civilians) to guard against, would those who make such decisions have come up with justifications for their use?

After all, as a TIME essay in 1969 began, “The dark side of progress is man’s spectacular skill at devising better and better ways to kill other men.”

Good news for sky watchers and selenophiles, tonight’s full moon is set to be the biggest and brightest of the year, according to NASA. The “super snow moon” as it is being called, will cross the skies this Tuesday evening, Feb. 19.

While the “super snow moon” won’t be the extravagant astronomical spectacle that January’s “super blood wolf moon eclipse” was, it will be larger and brighter, and definitely command attention in the sky. If that isn’t enough, the subsequent full moon in March will also be a “supermoon,” rounding off 2019 with a total of three “supermoons.” In a given year, between two and four full moons can be classified as “supermoons.”

While much of the world has already gotten a chance to see the biggest full moon of the year, for those in the U.S. it’s not too late. Here’s what to know about tonight’s “super snow moon” — and when the best time is to see it.

What is the super snow moon?

A “supermoon” is when a moon is simultaneously full and at its perigee, the point in its orbit when it is closest to Earth. When this happens, the moon appears larger and brighter in the sky. The moon’s orbit is not a perfect circle, due to gravitational forces from both the sun and the Earth, and thus varies in distance from the Earth throughout the year. The point in its orbit when the moon is farthest from Earth is known as the apogee, and appears to be smaller in the sky.

The term “snow moon” is the historic name given to the second full moon of winter by certain Native American tribes in the U.S., according to NASA. It is called the snow moon due to typical snowfall during this time of year. Heavy snowfall is also the reason for its alternative and more grim name, the “hunger moon.”

When can people see the super snow moon?

The moon technically reached peak fullness this morning, Feb. 19, 2019, at 10:54 a.m. EST, but wasn’t be visible to at that time for those in the U.S. Instead, you will have to wait for moonrise, which will occur between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. local time (for precise timing go here). If you are hoping to capture a good “supermoon” photo, catching the moonrise is your best bet. Due to an optical illusion, the moon appears larger to us the closer it is to the horizon.

What does the ‘super snow moon’ look like?

In other parts of the world, people have already captured incredible photos of the “super snow moon” and shared them across social media:

When is the next full moon?

The next full moon will be on March 20, and while it is also going to be a “supermoon” it won’t be quite as big as this one. And while you will have to settle for normal-sized full moons for the rest of 2019, there are still a few more moon-related astronomical events to look out for this year.

July 2: If you happen to find yourself in Chile or Argentina in early July you can catch a glimpse of a total solar eclipse (just be sure to wear eclipse glasses.)

July 16: A partial lunar eclipse will be visible to people in much of Europe, Asia, and in regions of North and South America as well.

Dec. 26: The day after Christmas (also known as Boxing Day) there will be an annular solar eclipse visible in Eastern Europe, Asia and parts of Africa. An annular solar eclipse is similar to a total solar eclipse, but the moon is too far away to completely obscure the sun. As a result the eclipse looks more like a “ring of fire,” with a thicker ring of light visible in comparison to a total solar eclipse.

While criticism over Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data breach has continued to plague the tech giant, it seems Mark Zuckerberg is keen to turn over a new leaf.

Facebook announced Monday that users across the world will soon see more stories from local news outlets in their News Feed. The change aims to “prioritize local news,” so that users can “see topics that have a direct impact on their community” and learn more about local events, according to Facebook.

“Now, people around the world will see more news on Facebook from local sources covering their current city and other cities they may care about,” Alex Hardiman, Facebook’s Head of News Product, and Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships, said in a statement.

The change aims to help local publishers reach more of their target audience by increasing the chance of someone from the publisher’s community picking up on relevant stories. Many local news outlets have struggled to adapt to the era of online publishing.

The announcement follows a series of missteps for Facebook. The company acknowledged Sunday that it has for years been collecting the call and text history of many users who own Android phones.

The #DeleteFacebook hashtag also continues to trend more than a week after news broke about the Cambridge Analytica data breach, and the company’s stock has dropped more than 14%.

Amazon.com Inc. is cutting hundreds of jobs at its headquarters in Seattle, paring back older departments focused on selling goods online while hiring in newer lines of business like cloud computing and its Alexa platform.

The reductions are part of a broader reorganization at the company, but some see the moves as a shift toward using more robots and computers for functions once performed by humans.

Amazon is automating tasks such as forecasting demand for new products and negotiating their prices, said Michael Lagoni, chief executive officer of Stackline, an e-commerce data analytics firm that helps brands and manufacturers sell on Amazon.

For instance, someone selling televisions would have to call an Amazon buyer, show them the product and negotiate terms for selling it on the platform. Now, those functions have been mostly automated, Lagoni said. Amazon is also making manufacturers and suppliers do more work — such as coordinating marketing and promotions — things that Amazon used to handle internally, he said.

“Amazon’s business is growing, not declining,” said Lagoni, who spent a year at Amazon before launching his company. “They are either automating the work or passing it back to manufacturers to do themselves.”

The reduction in positions is modest for Amazon, which counted 566,000 total employees at the end of 2017, up 66 percent from the previous year due largely to its acquisition of Whole Foods.

Amazon didn’t comment specifically on the use of automation.

“As part of our annual planning process, we are making headcount adjustments across the company – small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others,” the company said in an emailed statement. “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

Amazon has 3,900 corporate jobs open in Seattle, part of 12,000 such positions open worldwide, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Amazon has been expanding in e-commerce categories such as groceries, fashion and furniture while also building its cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services and finding new uses for its voice-activated Alexa service.

Amazon said last year that it planned to create 100,000 jobs in the U.S. as it bulks up fulfillment centers and adds more customer service representatives. The company is also in the process of choosing a city for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, where it plans to create 50,000 jobs in the next 10 to 15 years.

The Seattle Times reported the job cuts earlier Monday.

Though U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the U.K. this week has sparked protests, with hundreds of thousands planning to demonstrate in London on Friday, the relationship between those nations and their leaders is typically a close and friendly one. In fact, it’s so friendly — and, experts say, so unusual in its specifics — that it has its own name: the “special relationship.”

But why do we call it that? Why not just call it an alliance?

The phrase can be traced back to Mar. 5, 1946, when Winston Churchill addressed Westminster College in Fulton, Miss., where he and President Harry S. Truman received honorary degrees. (This is the same speech in which he famously used the metaphor of the “Iron Curtain” dividing capitalism in Western Europe and Communism in Eastern Europe — though he didn’t invent the term.)

Here’s what he said about the “special relationship”:

Churchill emphasized the need for the two powers to band together against the Soviet Union, rebuilding the ravaged Europe so that it didn’t become one big Soviet satellite.

“The real purpose of the speech, more than anything else in my opinion, was to try to talk about the appalling economic problems that western Europe was suffering in ’46 [between the] terrible winter in Germany, people dying of starvation, Berlin devastated, flattened by bombing,” says historian Warren Kimball, author of Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War. “He’s there to ask the U.S. for economic help but never asks the question in a straightforward way, so he refers to the special relationship that U.S. and Britain had. We demonstrated how well we could work together during the war, so we could work together for the peace, and the peace can include economics.”

Indeed, President Truman would sign into law the Marshall Plan, providing U.S. aid to rebuild Europe, about two years later on April 3, 1948.

Though it wasn’t the beginning of that relationship — after all, Churchill was pointing to something that already existed — that moment started a new way of looking at the relationship between the two countries. It’s come to represent a certain closeness and more than seven decades of sharing intelligence and nuclear relations.

But obviously the history between the two countries is even deeper than that, and it arguably makes the alliance unlike any other in the world.

“There was no special relationship before [World War II]. There was friendly relationship,” according to historian Kathleen Burk, author of Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning. Before the term ‘special relationship’ was coined, “the U.S. and British fought each other as often as they were allies.” Here’s a look at key moments in the evolution of the special relationship throughout history:

In the Beginning…

Of course, the United States of America has always had a unique relationship with Britain, even if it wasn’t called a “special relationship.” The early colonial connection between the two meant a shared language and certain shared cultural elements, but it was also the source of great tension.

Obvious examples of the fighting Burk mentions are the American Revolution — the war against Britain that first established the U.S. as its own country — and the War of 1812. During the Civil War, the British supported the Confederacy rather than the Union, because the South was its connection to cotton.

“During most of the 19th century, a lot of the European powers waited for the U.S. to break apart, and it seemed like that would happen until Gettysburg,” says Burk. “The fact that the U.S. remained a unified power after the Civil War made it clear, [America] was a unified country and [it] wasn’t going to fall apart and [it was] a country you have to pay attention to.”

It’s after the Civil War, she says, that the two nations stopped working against one another, even if they weren’t yet working together. The special relationship was then able to develop “little by little, step by step,” as she puts it, from that period through World War II.

The British supported the Americans during the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the U.S. government — unlike most European nations — supported the British in the second Boer War (1899-1902). The U.S. waded into World War I in the early 20th century, but became more closed off after. “American leaders were disappointed in how [the war] turned out and didn’t see themselves as involved in Europe, so they turned back inside,” as Burk puts it.

The “Special Relationship” During World War II

The “special relationship” that Churchill spoke about continuing is the one that blossomed in a specific context: his alliance with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II.

They didn’t have much of a choice but to work together; as Jon Meacham wrote in TIME, “it was a matter…of life and death.” But they also found out they had the same interests. As he wrote in Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, “They loved tobacco, strong drink, history, the sea, battleships, hymns, pageantry, patriotic poetry, high office, and hearing themselves talk.”

The Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration from the two, spelled out guiding principles for defeating Hitler in August of 1941. After Pearl Harbor, they became even closer, as Churchill literally moved into the White House and stayed through Christmas so that he and Roosevelt could plot strategy in person. “Never before had a wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain visited the U.S.,” TIME reported in Jan. 5, 1942. “This meeting might possibly be the first broad hint that some day the two nations might draw together.” Later that year, FDR did not to hesitate to offer reinforcements when the British troops in Tobruk, Libya, were forced to surrender to German and Italian troops in June 1942. “Churchill is talking to Roosevelt in the White House when they learn the news, and [Roosevelt] basically told Marshall to do what Churchill wanted,” says Kimball.

Their friendship is enshrined in Westminster Abbey. Unveiled on Nov. 12, 1948, a stone tablet dedicated to FDR reads: “To the honoured memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882 – 1945 a faithful friend of freedom and of Britain. Four times President of the United States. Erected by the Government of the United Kingdom.” It was the first memorial to a foreign head of state in “Britain’s most hallowed shrine,” as TIME reported. In a brief speech, Churchill, “in a voice he could hardly control,” said the tablet “proclaims a growth of enduring friendship and a rebirth of brotherhood between two great nations upon whose wisdom, valor and fortitude the future of humanity in no small degree depends.”

The “Special Relationship” After World War II

What Churchill and FDR began, their successors have largely continued.

American diplomats have long echoed the importance of maintaining the “special relationship” with Britain. “No other country has the same qualifications for being our principal ally and partner as the U.K.,” declared a U.S. State Department policy paper written in 1950, right before the Korean War. “The British and with them the rest of the Commonwealth, particularly the older dominions, are our most reliable and useful allies, with whom a special relationship should exist… We cannot afford to permit a deterioration in our relationship with the British.”

As Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s Ambassador to the U.K., once put it more bluntly, “I have always maintained that England and America belong in bed together.”

Of course, as with any alliance, the “special relationship” has had its ups and downs. Militarily speaking, it doesn’t mean that Britain will always jump when America calls, and vice-versa. The Suez Canal crisis tested the relationship between President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan after Britain and France invaded Egypt in 1956, after Cairo nationalized the Suez Canal. “The British soon withdrew, confronted by the Eisenhower Administration’s objections to the operation and a rising tide of criticism at home,” TIME later reported. “In so doing, they also had to face a fact that they had resisted until then: the sun had set on the British Empire.” John F. Kennedy is crediting with salvaging the “special relationship,” actually becoming friends with Macmillan.

Later, when President Lyndon B. Johnson asked U.K. Prime Minister Harold Wilson to send combat troops to Vietnam in the mid-’60s, Wilson refused. When Britain’s economy hit hard times after “it liquidated its imperial holdings,” TIME’s Feb. 2, 1970, issue reported that the “special relationship” had “grown steadily less special” as well “unbalanced” and “unproductive.”

President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are credited with “reinvigorating the special relationship,” forging arguably the strongest special relationship since the bond between FDR and Churchill. She became “Reagan’s closest ally in placing new nuclear missiles in Europe to counter Soviet deployments in the early 1980s,” as TIME put it in 1990. Robin Renwick, former senior diplomat in the British Embassy during the Falklands crisis, said that if the U.S. Secretary of Defense hadn’t agreed to provide Sidewinder missiles to Britain, “we wouldn’t have been able to re-take the Falkland Islands.” Renwick has recalled that Joe Biden assured him and the British Ambassador to the U.S. Nicholas Henderson, “Forget all this crap about self-determination, we’re going to support you because you are British!”

Prime Minister Tony Blair and George W. Bush also seemed particularly close when both troops invaded Iraq, though a 2016 review of documents suggests Blair was fighting back more behind the scenes than people thought. (The best known pop-culture take on the idea of a British PM being pushed around by a bossy American President is the scene in the 2003 film Love Actually in which Hugh Grant, whose character appears to be modeled after Blair, gives a rousing speech resisting an attempt by a Clinton-Bush hybrid president to steamroll him.)

And the special relationship is more consistent than we realize; a common language facilitates common pop-cultural references, and when the special relationship is talked about, it’s usually in a positive way. A February 2017 Times of London poll expressed that nine out of ten Americans believed that the transatlantic tie was “very important” or “somewhat important.” Perhaps if the above examples throughout history prove anything, it’s that leaders will come and go, but the two nations’ ties and a shared history have withstood the test of time.

As both Kimball and Burk both coincidentally described it to TIME, it’s not just a relationship, but an inclination.