Author Archives: Bob Welbaum

Revisiting President Eisenhower

During my recent trip to Asia, I was able to read Eisenhower: Soldier and President by Stephen E. Ambrose.  Dwight Eisenhower was the first president I remember, and the only presidential library I ever visited.  His presidency is easy to overlook, coming between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman on one side and John Kennedy

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Saving the World, One Cauliflower Stem at a Time

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but on April 20, 2016, I wrote “A Simple Way to Feed The World.”  Based on a National Geographic magazine cover story of March 2016 (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/03/global-food-waste-statistics/ ), “Too Good To Waste: How Ugly Food Can Help Feed the Planet,” it discussed the challenges of having two billion more

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Where is Pumbaa When We Need Him?

Maybe I’ve spent too much time around teenage boys, but an April 6, 2018 podcast segment of the NPR program Science Friday got my attention — an interview with Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti, authors of Does It Fart? The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence. Yes, this is serious science.  Specifically, it’s called “flatology” —

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How Do Birds Synchronize Their Movements?

Something else you might have wondered about in your spare time — how do large flocks of birds seem to move in perfect synchronization? Are they following a leader?  No, the reaction time would simply be too short.  The best explanation is what scientists call a “maneuver wave.”  Wayne Potts, a zoologist who published in

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R.I.P. — Spider Number 16

Something I heard on the radio today — the world’s oldest spider’s death has been announced.  The exact date is unknown, but it was sometime in 2016.  Known to science as Number 16, this female trapdoor tarantula somehow lived an incredible 43 years.  Its home was in Western Australia’s Central Wheatbelt region and it should’ve

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How Winning a Court Case Cost 10,000 Lives

With all the heat about illegal immigration, it’s refreshing to find an occasional point of light.  One such point (three points, actually) is the “Border Trilogy”, a series of three podcasts from National Public Radio’s Radiolab.  It goes a long way toward explaining how we got to where we are today, including a court case

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