Science and Education Archives - Backwoods Home Magazine

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: 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: 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...

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...

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...

Avian Flu — How afraid of this

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...

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 ‘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...

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 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...

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

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...

How big is the solar system?

By John Silveira Issue #60 • November/December, 1999 In artists' renderings of the solar system we often see the sun represented by a small sphere with the planets drawn fairly close by. In truth, drawings like...

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,...

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...