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...
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,...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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 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: 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...
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 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...
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: 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...
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: 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...
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...
