Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Another Way to Help Mother Nature
This is a story about how an educator thought outside the box. Each year, Katie Martin-Meurer, an art instructor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, saw something that disturbed her. The students in her three-dimensional design course would simply toss their projects into the trash after they had been graded. What a waste! Her first
How Babies Develop a Sense of Time
Families with newborns know babies follow their own schedule. But after a while, about the time a baby starts to smile, a rhythm develops. So babies do develop a sense of time. Research suggests this happens about the one-month mark. For example, in a 1972 study, researchers placed month-old infants in a dark room. A
The Benefits of Fake Pills
Human nature never fails to amaze me. I’m sure you’ve all heard of placebos, those fake pills that are used as real drugs in scientific studies. The complication is doctors have been giving placebos to patients as a beneficial treatment for centuries, and their patients usually improve, even though there is no medicinal value. The
Bad News For Herpetophobes
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, scientists have discovered something new about snakes. Snakes have a creepy enough reputation. There is something about an animal without limbs and slithers on the ground that elicits a primal fear. And of course there is a word for that — herpetophobia, or fear of reptiles.
Why Can’t People Find Work When Unemployment Is Low?
On the surface, it’s a real mystery. The nation’s unemployment rate has been below five percent for months, but as of April, 2017, 1.6 million people have been out of work for six months or longer; almost a million of them have been without jobs for a year. Economists call it “long-term unemployment”; they calculate
How To Clean Up The Ocean
The oceans are huge, right? Unfortunately, they’re not big enough, because the trash we’ve been dumping into these largest of waterways is becoming a real problem. In fact, there is an area of floating junk that’s become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ( https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/). Except there is actually more than one. But how
A Better Way To Budget
For many people, making a budget — and trying to stick to it — is one of the most frustrating experiences of day-to-day life. But in an article on the Science of Us website, Brad Klontz, a psychologist and certified financial planner, says the main problem with budgeting is its approach. “I think the entire
The Bank That Was Small Enough To Jail
If you’ve been losing faith in our judicial system, I have good news. Today I learned that one bank was actually charged with fraud in conjunction with the mortgage scandals of 2008. Abacus Federal Savings Bank was founded in 1984 to serve the Chinese-American community in New York City. In May, 2012, the bank and
A Word For Today — Retronym
I have on occasion written about the English language, especially how it morphs to keep up with changing times. Today I have another example — The relentless advance of technology has necessitated the creation of a new word — retronym. Google it, and you get this definition — a new term created from an existing
Definitely Not Fading Away
The June 2017 issue of Runner’s World magazine has an article that caught my eye. It’s entitled “Not Fading Away” about runners age 50 and older, which is definitely me. Included are “Tips for Running In Your Later Years”, like “Backing Off” and running on soft surfaces. But what really got my attention was that