I imagine we all take kissing for granted in our romantic lives, but according to a recent report in the February, 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine, kissing is a fairly recent development in human history. This conclusion is based on a study from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the University of Nevada,
One of my favorite authors in Edgar Allan Poe, not because I like horror, but because he wrote my favorite poem, “The Raven”. So it caught my eye when I read that April 20, 1841, was considered the first appearance of the modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by… Edgar Allan Poe.
I’ve been traveling recently, and when I travel I catch up on reading. This has included some fiction, both classic and contemporary. It’s gotten me to thinking — when books, whether they be classic like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or contemporary like the Harry Potter series, are adapted for movies (or I suppose when
If current trends continue, we will have at least two billion more mouths to feed by 2050. That’s in addition to the almost 800 million people who are currently underfed worldwide. How are we going to manage this without a global catastrophe? Actually, there is a simple way — eliminate food waste. I’ve been seeing
I remember teaching a high school English class on Friday afternoon. Since it was Friday, they were allowed to pick and analyze songs on the Internet. One girl selected a tearjerker entitled “Why Tears Fall.” At the end of this discussion, one of the boys piped up, “I know why tears fall — gravity!” Although
Recently I wrote about how the best place for finding alien life might be an exoplanet’s moon. But there is a flip side — what if we decide we don’t want alien life to find us? Contacting us first means they assuredly have the more-advanced technology. Maybe much more advanced. Would they be friendly? And
If you are a science fan, you know many people are going to great lengths to find life on other planets. And there are plenty of candidates. So far, we have found about 1600 planets of various sizes, with an estimated 100 billion planets thought to be in our Milky Way galaxy. But are planets
Everyone who knows me personally knows I’m a Disney fan and collector. I belong to a club, the Disneyana Fan Club, that has a convention in Southern California every July to coincide with Disneyland’s birthday. I’ve been attending these conventions since 1988 and they have given me many great memories. Here are some of my
Have you ever wondered how fish in a school synchronize their movements perfectly while swimming? According to the April-May 2016 issue of the Nature Conservancy Magazine (page 12), a 2013 study from biologist Iain Couzin’s labs at Princeton University and the Max Planck Institutes in Germany shows that schooling fish respond quickly to movements of
Today I’m reprinting a poem from my book Some Poems About Life (available on this website). On Challenge What do you think is a challenge? Is it running as fast as you can? Coming in first in the big race and showing you’re that much a man? Or is it much more academic? Being the