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
Something I ran across last week — March 30 was the birthday of the pencil eraser! According to a Writers’ Almanac entry on that date — “On this day in 1858, Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia patented the first pencil to have an attached eraser. The eraser-tipped pencil is still something of an American phenomenon; most European pencils
If the world seems especially grim right now, let me report some good news. You may have heard of the Guinea worm, a particularly painful parasite with an unusual lifecycle. It’s responsible for the disease dracunculiasis, which historically has sickened about 3.5 million people a year across 20 African and Asian countries. For the
Think Death Valley and you think desert, with an average rainfall less than two inches per year. Yet the ecosystem is surprisingly diverse, even including wildflowers. And in a year of above-average rainfall, the desert can spring to life with such a profusion of flowers it’s known as a superbloom. Seeds can lie dormant for long periods.
The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. That’s 2 billion more than we have today. How will we feed them? National Geographic magazine ran an eight-month series of articles on this subject beginning in May 2014. With some people going hungry now, it’s going to take some creative thinking to accommodate
I was in the classroom earlier this week as an aide in some middle school social studies classes, and they were studying the Underground Railroad. All this week they were watching a movie entitled Race to Freedom about slaves trying to make it to Canada. We hear so much about the Underground Railroad, and movies
Scientists still talk about gravity as a theory because they can’t explain exactly how it works. Albert Einstein hypothesized gravity waves, but there was no way to confirm they existed… until recently. Granted, the science is a bit hard to comprehend because all the numbers are extreme one way or another, but basically, over a billion years ago
On March 20, I had written about our early spring. Today I learned (from the same source, EarthSky News) that this is the earliest Easter until 2035. This is their explanation — Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon in a Northern Hemisphere spring. By ecclesiastical rules, which fixes the
This is an original short story that first appeared on the Bewildering Stories website, issue #585, in August, 2014 (http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue585/combat_fatigue.html) Combat Fatigue by Bob Welbaum “First, let me verify your information. You are Staff Sergeant Stuart B. Jamison, United States Army. You are 24 years old, single, and have completed two tours in