Life + Outdoors

The bicycle population of the planet is about one billion, two bikes for every car. It’s easy to see why they’re so popular: They’re cheap, human-powered, low-maintenance, easy to repair,and super-efficient. In terms of energy expenditure, if humans could drink gasoline for fuel (admittedly an apples-to-oranges comparison), a cyclist would get 1,000 miles per gallon. […]

When I interviewed double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling 20 years ago, he was taking 18 grams of vitamin C a day, 300 times the Recommended Dietary Allowance at that time. It didn’t seem to be doing him any harm. As I wrote then, “Pauling is a walking advertisement for his dietary and vitamin recommendations. […]

Everyone knows the highest mountain in the world is Mount Everest, 29,028 feet above sea level. That’s pretty straightforward until you ask, “What do you mean by highest?” Everest wins if you’re talking about altitude, but you can also make a pretty good case for Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, 13,796 feet above sea level, which would […]

We know that Columbus wasn’t the first non-native to visit the Americas, since we have hard evidence that Vikings under Leif Ericson created an exploration base on the Atlantic shore of Canada around 1000 C.E. “L’Anse aux Meadows,” situated on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, is evidence of the earliest incontrovertible pre-Columbian discovery. Which leaves […]

Even as MacGuffins go, the unobtainium in the hit movie Avatar was, to be charitable, a pretty thin plot device. As movie fans know, a MacGuffin is a Hitchcock-style catalyst that drives the plot of a film forward without really adding anything, such as “government secrets” in North by Northwest or the stolen 40 grand […]

Sixty years ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked his lunch companions at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, “Where is everybody?” They had been discussing the odds of finding signs of extraterrestrial life, when a paradox occurred to Fermi: On the one hand, many technologically advanced ET civilizations should exist, given the size and age […]

In 1671, in a fit of reductionism, Isaac Newton famously split light from the sun with a prism and announced that white light was composed of seven colors. You probably memorized them as ROYGBIV when you were at school, although most of us can’t readily pick out the “I” (as in Indigo), distinguishing only Red, […]

“Criticism flows off him like water off a duck’s back,” we say, referring to someone who is incapable of hearing feedback. Water does indeed flow readily from the oily feathers of a duck, and not just off its back. Its breast feathers are equally water resistant, so most ducks can happily paddle around in cold […]

You walk into work one morning and your boss says, “You know the meeting we were going to have next Wednesday? We’ve moved it forward a couple of days.” Question: Is the meeting now scheduled for Monday or Friday? Think about this for a moment before reading on. We envisage time metaphorically, usually in relation […]