Even in the years when we don’t have much in the way of crops around these parts, we always have wind–which got me thinking, isn’t it a shame there’s no way to farm the wind? (It’s not a new notion; after all, even the Bible says, in Hosea 8:7, “They sow the wind and reap …
Category: Blog
Megaliths
As we lie on our couches and flick our TV remotes, we tend to think we are far more advanced than our distant ancestors, who mostly just struggled to stay alive. But every so often we run across something that reminds us that lack of technology does not equal stupidity. An example recently turned up …
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
People in Sudbury are used to the idea of digging hundreds of metres underground and finding all sorts of valuable things, such as nickel and copper. But scientists hope to find something even more valuable in the rock beneath Sudbury over the next few months: namely, answers to some of the most vexing questions …
Hackers and crackers
In the1983 movie WarGames, a teenager with a modem nearly triggered World War III. It was pure fiction, of course. Then, just last week, a group calling itself Masters of Downloading claimed it had stolen a suite of programs used to run classified US military networks and satellites from the Defense Information Systems Agency. Previously, most …
Crickets in space
One of my favorite sketches on the original Muppet Show as “Pigs in Space,” in which the intrepid crew of the starship Swine Trek faced danger, excitement and bad writing while exploring the final frontier. As far as I know, no real pigs have yet flown into space, but many other animals have made the …
Clouds
Cloud-watching is a favorite pastime of prairie people, probably because you can see them coming a long way off (clouds, that is, not people). “Nasty looking clouds over there,” we say, or “Looks like snow clouds blowing in,” or “I see a puppy dog. What do you see?” Whether you’re using clouds to forecast the …
Supersonic airliners
The Concorde supersonic airliner first flew almost 30 years ago, and entered regular service more than 20 years ago. By now, the skies should be full of sleek supersonic jets ferrying people rapidly all around the globe. Instead, the Concorde only services a few high-profile routes–Paris to New York and the linke–while most of …
Anesthetics
When I was seven years old, my big brother broke my arm (he fell on it). At the hospital, someone stuck a mask over my face. I saw a spinning pattern of black and white stripes and heard, above a loud buzz in my head, doctors and nurses talking about fishing…then I woke up to …
High-altitude physiology
It’s called the Death Zone: the region on Mt. Everest above 25,000 feet where the risk of dying is highest. Those risks include hypothermia and frostbite, but the greatest risk of all would exist even if the top of the mountain were as balmy as the Bahamas: high-altitude sickness. Human beings evolved as sea level, …
Pheremones
So, you think your emotional and physical responses are under your conscious control, that you only get mad or feel happy for good, logical reasons? Think again. You could be being led around by your own nose. I’ve written before about how the smell of baking bread can transport you to your grandmother’s kitchen, or …
Detergents
Keeping clean has been a preoccupation of humans for millennia (well, some humans, anyway; there were those unfortunate few centuries in Europe when it wasn’t high on anyone’s list of priorities). Since water is essential to life, people settled near water, and soon learned that it could clean things, too, like clothes (once clothes were …
Asteroids
Most of the time, they’re harmless. Innocuous, really. They tumble along, minding their own business, not hurting anybody. But every once in a while–BOOM! “They” are asteroids, and when they go boom, it’s because they’ve run into something. When that something is Earth…well, you’ve got trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with E, …
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