Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
A Simple Way to Feed the World
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
The Science of…Crying?
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
The Flip Side — Hiding From Aliens
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
The Best Place to Find Extraterrestrial Life?
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
Some of My Favorite Disneyana Convention Memories
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
How Do Fish Schools Synchronize Their Swimming?
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
A Poem About Challenge
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
Happy Birthday, Pencil Eraser
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
Are You Ready For Some Good News?
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
What is a Superbloom?
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.