We seem to have fallen into a trap. The warmer our climate gets, the more refrigeration we need to cool both us and our perishables (already we have an estimated 3.5 billion refrigerators and air conditioners), which means generating more energy, which has always meant releasing more greenhouse gases. What if there was a way
How many unused items do you own? The city of Berlin, Germany estimates that every household has almost 250 unused items. This is a real problem considering Berlin has a goal of eventually becoming a zero-waste city. So how do you get people to reuse items when it’s so easy to find replacements? One idea
It’s pretty much accepted that a mass extinction 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, led to the end of the age of the dinosaurs. This catastrophic event has been blamed on an asteroid impact, although volcanic eruptions and gradual climate change may also have been factors. Of course, this was
We know there were no women in the Continental Congress. And yet, when the Declaration of Independence was printed with the signatures (actually the second printing), at the very bottom is the line “Baltimore, in Maryland: Printed by Mary Katharine Goddard”. How did that happen? Things were not going well for the rebellion in the
In this age of advanced medicine, and especially during a pandemic, there is one medical tool we should be using more, but are not — the autopsy. The truth is autopsies are invaluable for discovering the cause of death, but they are, pardon the expression, dying out. In the late 1960s, the autopsy rate in
Normally I don’t discuss politics here, and I didn’t watch last night’s Presidential Debate. I usually don’t watch speeches, either. I monitor a half-dozen news feeds, and I figure if anything important happens, I’ll learn about it that way. But what these news sources have told me today has caused an assessment of our current
Yesterday, September 28, was the the anniversary of the 1918 parade that turned the city of Philadelphia into a Spanish flu hotspot. “Spanish flu” is a misnomer. The disease probably came from a Midwestern farm animal or bird. The culprit was the H1N1 virus, which moved through various animal populations, then mutated into a strain
The astronomical world never ceases to amaze me. You may have heard about another pending near miss of Earth from an asteroid. Except it might not be an asteroid. Astronomers have identified an approaching “space object” — with the catchy name 2020 SO — heading toward Earth. But this one will not go whizzing by.
On October 12, 2019, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran a marathon (26.2 miles) in 1:59:40. It’s not considered an official record because it involved using every possible advantage — a closed, flat course shielded from the wind and the use of pacers, for example, but it was an incredible athletic feat nonetheless. But if that
How quickly the world changes! At one time, organ transplantation was just a dream. Yet, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), in calendar year 2019 there were 39,719 total transplants in the United States, up 8.7 percent from 2018 (https://unos.org/data/transplant-trends/). Of these, 3552 were heart transplants. The first heart transplant was performed