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: Alcohol
By O.E. MacDougal
Backwoods Home
Did early man first cultivate grains just to get drunk?
The brewing of beer is older than civilization and goes back at least 9,000, and perhaps more than 12,000, years. Evidence of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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,...
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...
Subduction zone tsunami — What the residents of the Pacific Northwest have to fear
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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...
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...
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...
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...






























