Science and Education Archives - Backwoods Home Magazine

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...

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 doomsday scenario to sleep on

By John Silveira Issue #109 • January/February, 2008 I once wrote a science fiction novel that I never tried to sell. Titled The Perfect Defense, its first chapter appeared in the premier issue of BHM in...

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...

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: 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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 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...