Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Seeing the Face That Isn’t There
In addition to cat videos, a favorite social-media meme is portraying faces in everyday objects. They’re always good for a smile. But everything in this world has a name and imaginary faces are no exception. This phenomenon has been labeled pareidolia — “the illusory perception of meaningful patterns or images of familiar things in random
How Will Aliens Find Us?
Contact with alien civilizations from somewhere else in the universe has been a topic of fascination for most of human civilization. (Considering what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas after European contact, whether or not this would be a good idea is a whole different topic, but let’s press on.) Theoretically, there could be
Faking It In Wartime
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best ideas. Today I happened to find an article on Yahoo that brought back some Air Force memories — “True to Life But Without the Price Tag: The Decoy Weapons Ukraine Wants Russia to Destroy” by Melissa Bell, Daria Martina Tarasova and Pierre Bairin, CNN (https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/true-life-without-price-tag-051313104.html). In the late
Living in a Dementia Village
Modern medicine has extended human life expectancies, and that’s certainly a good thing. But as people live longer, age problems multiply. According to Alzheimer’s Disease International, a nonprofit federation of Alzheimer and dementia associations, there were about 35 million people living with dementia around the world circa 2009. Unfortunately, today that number is over 55
Navigating Barbie’s Monochromatic World
The dictionary definition of color is “the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way the object reflects or emits light.” Color is important in our lives because it helps our brains digest information and it also facilitates memory. But it isn’t easy; comprehending an entire scene requires seeing an object’s
Is It Possible To Think Too Hard?
Have you ever felt exhausted at the end of a day when all you did was sit at a desk? It could be that you thought too hard. In a recent study, researchers from Pitie-Salpetriere University Hospital in Paris organized two groups of people. One group was given easy cognitive assignments, while the other group
Never Cry to a Crocodile?
You’ve heard of “never smile at a crocodile”? You may not want to cry around one either. A new study of Nile crocodiles has found they respond to the sound of human babies crying, as well as infant chimpanzees and bonobos. Researchers played cries from human, chimpanzee and bonobo infants to a group of Nile
What’s Curly Hair Got To Do With It?
Our bodies are pretty complicated mechanisms, and they’re complex in ways we don’t fully understand. For example, why do some people have naturally curly hair? According to new research, there may have been a good evolutionary reason. A recently published research article by Tina Lasisi and her colleagues at Pennsylvania State University examined how hair regulates scalp
How to Relocate a Pest
Beavers are nature’s master builders. Their dams can change a landscape, creating wetlands and enriching the habitats of other species. They’re also cute, with fur that’s been highly prized in other eras. But frequently they get in our way. Our developments don’t utilize dams made of trees and saplings. We like our land dry and
What is the World’s Oldest Color?
It’s probably pink. The success of the new movie Barbie has created a wave interest in the color most associated with girls (and yes, Barbie Pink is a Pantone color), but like so much in life, its complicated. According to a 2018 research article, bright-pink pigments have been found in 1.1 billion-year-old rocks, the result of