NATIONAL BRIEFING / AND FINALLY . . .

Teeth are chattering in New England, where scientists just spent about a month scrutinizing weather data before proclaiming that, yes, Maine has pulled even with Vermont in bragging rights for the region’s lowest recorded temperature -- 50 degrees below.

That’s wicked cold, as a New Englander might say.

The frigid Fahrenheit reading was recorded about 7:15 a.m. Jan. 16 at a remote data-collection station in Big Black River, about four miles from the Canadian border.

It ties the record set in 1933 in Bloomfield, Vt., for New England’s lowest temperature in roughly a century of record-keeping, and reflects the actual air temperature, not the wind chill factor.

The lowest temperature in North America -- 81 below -- was recorded on Feb. 3, 1947, at Snag, Yukon Territory.