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This One Is For The Birds

17 Mar 2023

Pet birds are very popular and loads of people have bird feeders in their back yards. That makes for birdseed being a huge business! Most people of course don’t give much thought to what it...

Dowsing: Dowse It Work?

17 Mar 2023

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose. Although we live in a world driven by technology, we are always one cataclysm away from retreating to magical notions. Climate change is...

The Curious Sexual and Asexual Habits of the Mighty Mite

3 Mar 2023

Have you ever heard of pancake syndrome? No, it’s not the medicalization of having breakfast for dinner, nor is it a skin rash reminiscent of those delicious flat cakes. It’s a severe allergic...

The Little Ice Age That Made Christmas White Forever

23 Dec 2022

Our collective vision of Christmas landscapes is so immersed in snow that the very phrase “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” conjures up imagery that is nearly all frosted, sparkling and...

Is it true that no two snowflakes are identical?

9 Dec 2022

Snow crystals—better known as snowflakes—are intricate, delicate, tiny miracles of beauty. Their very existence seems unlikely, yet incomprehensible numbers of them fall every year to iteratively...

Look But Don’t Lick

7 Dec 2022

We are used to getting warnings. The bisphenol A in canned foods will do you in. So will artificial sweeteners. Sugar too. Those yoga pants you wear? They may be rubbing those nasty perfluoroalkyl...

When It Comes to Avoiding Flies, Stripes Are In, Solids Are Out

25 Nov 2022

Fairy tales about the origin of zebra stripes are abundant. Some blame sunlight filtered through tree leaves for tanning the zebras hide, others claim the dark lines are scorch marks, acquired...

When the Cows Come Home to Radioactive Ranches

18 Nov 2022

A magnitude 9.1 earthquake occurred just off the northeast coast of Japan on March 11th, 2011, at 14:46 local time. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, like all nuclear power plants in Japan...

How does snake venom kill a human?

11 Nov 2022

There are more than 3000 species of snakes on Earth, ranging from the Barbados threadsnake at roughly 10 cm long (about the same as a deck of cards) to the reticulated python at around 6 m in...

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