If you haven’t heard, we’re in the peak period for the Perseid meteor shower. The shower was predicted to peak this morning, August 12th, but is continuing on Saturday morning, August 13th. Meteors are visible anywhere on Earth, but came best be seen in the Northern Hemisphere. For more information, visit EarthSky.org at http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-perseid-meteor-shower#outburst
It’s called “The Promise”. Any high school graduate in Kalamazoo, Michigan gets to go to college for free. The website Kalamazoo Promise lays it out clearly — 1. The Kalamazoo Promise is for ALL students of the Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS). 2. You must reside within the boundaries of KPS. 3. You must have at
When I opened my email today and saw this, I thought it might be a come-on for a self-improvement course. But the source is “The Brief” daily news summary from Time magazine for July 29, 2016 and it sounds worth repeating. The Five-Hour Rule is credited to Benjamin Franklin’s practice of investing about an hour
There are many things in this world I don’t understand. How women can walk in high-heeled shoes, for example. Now I can add tree communication to the list. Recently I ran across a TED Talk by a forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard. She has been researching Canadian forests for thirty years, and she’s concluded that
Have you ever thought about egg production? Only female chickens — hens — can lay eggs. So if you are breeding chickens for egg production, what do you do with the males, or roosters? The sad fact is that the roosters have no use, so they are usually put to death very quickly after hatching.
There are all kinds of video games. Yet normally they are pretty devoid of emotion. But there is a new genre of games that tries to tap into our most primal feelings. The best example is That Dragon, Cancer, created by Ryan & Amy Green and Josh Larson, and published by Numinous Games. (The cover
Economists have a different way of viewing the world. Take the Italian economist, engineer and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto, who lived from 1848 to 1923. Among his other accomplishments, he discovered what is known today as Pareto’s Principle, or Pareto’s Rule. He realized that 20 percent of the people controlled 80 percent of the wealth in
Have you ever wondered why zebras have stripes? I was catching up on my reading during my recent trip to California, and I ran across a blurb in the July 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine entitled “Patterns Puzzle Predators”. It begins by saying — “If a zebra zigs, with its stripes make a predator
July 10 was the birthday of Nikola Tesla, born in 1856 in what is now Croatia. You may have heard of the Tesla coil, but he also was responsible for alternating current. Unfortunately, his business ventures weren’t always successful, and he died alone and impoverished in 1943. The PBS Newshour website has a feature “8
According to Science magazine, (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768), eight million metric tons of plastic waste enter the oceans every year. The ocean now has at least 700 pieces of plastic for every person on earth. Is there any way we could ever clean up this mess? A twenty-one-year-old man from the Netherlands has an idea. Realizing that plastic