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 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: 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,...
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: 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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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: 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 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...
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 coming ice age
By John Silveira
Issue #86 • March/April, 2004
As little as 30 years ago the talk wasn't about global warming, it was about an imminent ice age. Is an ice age likely? Even possible? Consider this:...
