The world is coming to an end… and this time, I’m not kidding
By John Silveira
Issue #114 • November/December, 2008
If you haven't already heard, on September 10, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located on the border of France and Switzerland, was turned on for a test...
Gee-Whiz: Dinosaurs
By O.E. MacDougal
July/August 2014 Backwoods Home
Biologists and paleontologists are now pretty certain that birds are part of the dinosaur lineage. Their extinct relatives include the T-Rex and velociraptors. So, dinosaurs are not really extinct,...
The gee-whiz! page — Cats: Why they rule our world
By O. E. MacDougal
Issue #170 • March/April, 2018
House cats
A recent Gallup poll showed that cat ownership is pretty much evenly distributed between men and women, and that roughly 34 percent of all U.S. homes...
Zombie Apocalypse
By John Silveira
Issue #134 • March/April, 2012
"Can you survive a zombie apocalypse?" a familiar voice asked.
I turned in my seat to see O.E. MacDougal, Dave Duffy's poker-playing friend from Southern California, walking toward me....
Science and truth. Are they related?
By John Silveira
Issue #46 • July/August, 1997
It was an argument about science. Dave and I were on one side, Dave's friends Tom and Bill, though curiously nonallied, were on the other. I say nonallied...
The ‘risks’ with Swine Flu
By John Silveira
Issue #118 • July/August, 2009
Do we have anything to worry about the reemergence of Swine Flu Novel Influenza A (H1N1) this fall? The short answer is: Probably not. There are...
The world is ending! … Again?
By John Silveira
Issue #85 • January/February, 2004
People love to talk about scary stuff. Especially when it's end-of-the-world scary, such as the big asteroid recently in the news that was supposed to hit Earth and...
Gee-Whiz: Bad Fish, Big Fish
By O.E. MacDougal
January/February 2015, Backwoods Home
Fish were the very first vertebrates. That is, they were the first animals with backbones, the purpose of which is to sheathe and protect the nerves in the spinal...
Gee-Whiz: Sleep
By O.E. MacDougal
November/December 2017, Backwoods Home
For thousands of years, sleep has been one of life’s great mysteries. As humans, we spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, though as babies we spent about 16...
The many benefits of garlic
By Joe Knight
Issue #113 • September/October, 2008
Garlic, used throughout the world for the taste it adds to foods, is also well known for its medicinal benefits. Known as Allium sativum in the botanical world,...
The threat of electromagnetic pulse!
By John Silveira
Issue #132 • November/December, 2011
I like "doomsday" scenarios even ridiculous ones, such as the supposed Mayan calendar prophecy for 2012 or what had been Y2K doom-and-gloom leading up to the year...
A brief history of health and medicine
By John Silveira
Issue #100 • July/August, 2006
As little as a century ago, the average life span in the United States was 49 years. Today it is 77. Fifty years ago, the average life span...
Subduction zone tsunami — What the residents of the Pacific Northwest have to fear
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Subduction zone tsunami
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By John Silveira
Issue #94 • July/August, 2004
I was sitting in my cubicle poring over a map of the Oregon coastactually, just that part of the coast that is Gold Beach where Backwoods...
The coming ice age
By John Silveira
Issue #139 • January/February, 2013
I'm putting my apocalyptic ice age novel, Danielle Kidnapped, on Amazon's Kindle and also producing a paperback version on Amazon's website. (See the ad on page 65.) The...
Gee-Whiz: Trees
By O. E. Macdougal
September/October 2015, Backwoods Home
We’re told they include some of the oldest and largest living organisms on the planet. But do they? The fact is, only about one percent of a...
Gee-Whiz: From Paper to Canning
By John Silveira (aka O.E. MacDougal)
May/June 2017 Backwoods Home
The greatest inventions in history are the ones we now take for granted. Fire and the wheel-axle combination are among them. If we weren’t taught in...
