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
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
If you grew up with Play-Doh, you might be surprised to learn about its original purpose — it was invented as a wallpaper cleaner. In an earlier time, coal was the preferred home-heating method. But burning coal produces soot, which sticks to wallpaper. So Kroger was looking for a product that would clean wallpaper. In
Can you imagine a time when there were no traffic lights? They really weren’t needed until the appearance of automobiles. Roads were crammed with horse-drawn carriages, trolleys, bicycles, and pedestrians, and suddenly you had a vehicle that could go 40 miles an hour. According to an article in the May 2018 issue of Smithsonian magazine,
Think genocide and the first thing you probably think of is the Holocaust. Yet every once in a while, evidence surfaces that the Holocaust was even worse than most of us can imagine. Take the Reverend Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Desbois). His grandfather was a French soldier in World War II who
There’s been a lot of soul-searching among polling professionals since the 2016 election — why was President Trump’s win such a surprise? Since then, political pundits have been looking for better polling methods. They may have found one — social circle polling. Basically, instead of asking how someone plans to vote, people are asked how
What do you really know about our galactic neighborhood? An article entitled “10 surprises about our solar system” by Larry Sessions on the EarthSky website lists some thing you probably haven’t realized. For instance, The hottest planet isn’t the closest one to the sun. Mercury is closest, of course. But the hottest planet is actually
This was a surprise to me — in an article entitled “More than half your body is not human,” James Gallagher writes that there is a “hidden half” to all of us. It’s our microbiome, and it makes up 57% of our total cell count. In other words, only 43% of our body’s cells are
How would you like to wish your grandchild a happy 50th birthday? Not in person, of course, but by email? There is a way. Go to the website FutureMe: Write a Letter to the Future and start composing (https://www.futureme.org/). You can send a letter to yourself, to be delivered in one, three, or five years,
This was written by my niece Stephanie. Once there was a fisherman who lived next to the sea. He loathed his job and longed to move far away to a big city, but was too poor and could barely afford the shack in which he lived. Day after day, he would leave at the crack
