Can we make a Tyrannosaurus rex from a chicken?
By John Silveira
Issue #169 • January/February, 2018
Do you have chickens, ducks, turkeys, or geese in your yard? They’re not “just birds” because scientists now realize birds are dinosaurs. Real dinosaurs! For 150 million years,...
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...
Gee-Whiz: Ice Ages, Past and Future
By O. E. MacDougal
January/February 2016, Backwoods Home
Most people don’t know that we’re currently in an ice age and have been for the last 2.58 million years. It’s called the Quaternary Ice Age. Again and...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
The MTHFR mutation and why it may matter to you
By John Silveira
Issue #170 • March/April, 2018
This is an article with both anecdotal evidence and science. It is about me, anxiety and depression, a gene mutation, and a 17-cent-a-day “treatment” that works (for me).
All...
Gee-Whiz: Coffee
By O.E. MacDougal
May/June 2018, Backwoods Home
Every second of every day about 26,000 cups of coffee are drunk around the world. That’s about 2¼ billion cups a day. But it’s still not the most widely...
Avian Flu — How afraid of this
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Avian Flu
How afraid of this chicken should you be?
By John Silveira
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Issue #97 • January/February, 2006
There's been a lot of talk in the mass media recently about Avian flu, also known as Bird flu and...
Testing Soil
By Tom Kovach
Issue #119 • September/October, 2009
Testing the soil content of a garden is very important and is quite easy to do. Soil tests are needed because some plants prefer slightly acidic soil, while...
Gee-Whiz: Time
By O.E. MacDougal
July/August 2016, Backwoods Home
Time. We can’t see, feel, hear, smell, or taste it, but we can measure it and we break it up into smaller and smaller increments. We’ll probably never know...
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...
Theories of the universe
By Dave Duffy
Issue #66 • November/December, 2000
In a relatively short span of time, mankind has travelled from profound ignorance of our planet and the world in which we live to a rather detailed picture...
