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: 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...
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...
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: Insects
By O. E. MacDougal
November/December 2015, Backwoods Home
Some 400 million years ago, in the Devonian Period, insects evolved from crustaceans. Since that time, they have been one of the most successful life forms on the...
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: Presidents
By O.E. MacDougal
November/December 2016, Backwoods Home
I could spend all day coming up with interesting trivia about the Presidents and those who surround them — wives, children, assassins, etc. I could literally fill this magazine...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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: 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...
Three more ways the world can end … and I’m not kidding
By John Silveira
Issue #155 • September/October, 2015
"What are you doing?" a voice asked.
I looked up and saw O.E. MacDougal, Dave's poker-playing friend from Southern California, and he's now my friend, too. Accompanying him was...
