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 …
Tag: science
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, …
Cockroaches
Steven Spielberg missed a bet with his movie, Jurassic Park. He focused on the age of dinosaurs. If he really wanted to freak people out, he’d focus on a much earlier era, the Carboniferous Period: a.k.a. “The Age of Cockroaches.” Yes, cockroaches, those scuttling, light-fearing pests we’ve all encountered at one time or another, were once …
Multiple births
In 1934, an Ontario farmer asked his local newspaper if a birth announcement for five babies born at once would cost the same as a birth announcement for a single baby. A local reporter filed a wire story about the farmer’s suddenly expanded family, and almost overnight, the Dionne quintuplets became media celebrities–to the point …
Adapting to space
In the movies, spaceships have artificial gravity, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to film that way. Real-life astronauts aren’t so lucky. The men and women who inhabit the Mir space station spend months in weightlessness. Sure, it’s a lot of fun–flying around, leaving objects hanging in mid-air–but inside those cosmonauts’ and …
Icebergs
They say that a movie is only as good as its villain, and the new movie Titanic, now packing people into theatres all over the world, has a whopper: a giant block of ice that tears open the “unsinkable” ship’s hull and, a couple of hours later, send it to the bottom. Icebergs have bedevilled ships …
Quantum teleportation
“Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here!” How often have you wished you could escape unpleasant situations just by flipping open a communicator and asking to be instantaneously whisked away? (Using your cell phone to have yourself paged doesn’t count.) Well, teleportation of human beings–causing them to vanish in one location and instantaneously …
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