Messing about with empathy
Did you hear that a mummy talked? No, this isn’t from one of the great Brendan Fraser Mummy* movies. Thanks to science, a 3,000-year-old mummy spoke for the first time since his death (one assumes.) It’s not easy to get a mummy to talk. Vocal cords are made up of soft tissue and don’t preserve…
I’ve always liked earthquakes. That probably makes me weird, but growing up in Southern California gave me several opportunities to experience some rocking and rolling, which I loved. Of course, none of them were the Big One. Now, I don’t want millions of dollars of property damage to happen and people to die, but the…
My hubby is cleaning razor clams, and it’s stinking up the kitchen. I like to eat clams, so I only complained a little (well, maybe more than a little.) To get out of the kitchen, I hid in my office and researched clams. That is where I learned about the giant clam. I’m happy my…
This post comes from a conversation I had with a friend at a writing event. He was telling me about a woman he knew who canned water during the Y2K scare. I had all sorts of questions about that, so I googled “canning water”. Unfortunately, I didn’t get my questions answered (most of the sites…
I’m fighting fleas right now. We’ve made progress since we fogged the house while the kittens were at the vet. They also have flea collars and have stopped scratching. I realized I know nothing about fleas. They may be a pest, but they’re still animals just trying to live and reproduce. I hope these flea…
I love reading an article and repeating, “I didn’t know that.” That’s what happened when I read a post about the Bering Strait from Alaska Life. I know a little about the Bering Strait. I know it’s narrow and separates Russia from Alaska. I know that when sea level dropped, it became a land bridge,…
I tend to be a skeptic, especially about online items. When I read the heading “Dinosaurs Lived On the Other Side Of the Galaxy,” I assumed it was clickbait nonsense. But then I noticed that it was sent by IFLScience!, so I delved deeper. This heading is both true and misleading, which I suppose is…
Let’s talk about dirt. Soil, earth, mud. I don’t play in the dirt as much as I used to, but when we went to Alaska last August, our white truck turned brown from all the dirt on the roads we traveled. It was quite a transformation. How interesting can dirt be? Very interesting is the…
We’re having a beautiful autumn in the northwest. The days have been sunny and bright, yet quite chilly. We haven’t been out of the fifties for the last few days. I haven’t adjusted to jackets yet, so I’m layering t-shirts and sweatshirts. Just right during the day, but I feel a bit cold in the…