Life + Outdoors

Most researchers believe that all our ancestors lived in Africa 70,000 years ago. Soon after, our species started to spread out across the globe, meaning that here in California, we humans are a non-native species … just like the eucalyptus. OK, not quite like the eucalyptus, which only arrived here 160 years ago — but […]

Dec. 21, 2012, marks a happy coincidence of the winter solstice with a notable turning of the Mayan calendar. The "long count" calendar, used from approximately 200 to 900 A.D., can be found represented on literally hundreds of Mayan stelae in Mexico and Central America. It’s a remarkable system for designating the exact date by […]

We may appear to be a manufacturing company, but in fact we are a marketing company. — John S. Barry, president of the WD-40 Company, Forbes interview It’s been said the only two absolute essentials in any toolkit are duct tape and WD-40. John S. Barry, the man who figured out how to turn a […]

At 8.15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, a tiny amount of uranium-235, weighing no more than a single sheet of paper, transformed into energy above the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The resulting explosion was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, causing about 60,000 immediate deaths and perhaps three times that number over the next few […]

He is the Copernicus of language studies, and by extension, of much of what goes on in the human brain. Until Noam Chomsky (now 80) came along in the late 1950s, linguistics mostly consisted of cataloging and comparing languages from remote parts of the world, attempting to discover family trees and perhaps — in the […]

Have you heard of the invisible ships phenomenon, cited in several new-age books and movies? It goes like this: When Captain Cook/Columbus/Magellan (depending on the version of the story you’re hearing) arrived at the coast of Australia/Cuba/South America, the native people completely ignored them, presumably because huge ships were so alien to their experience that […]

Quite possibly the greatest book ever written on the subject of turtle stacking. — Lisa Simpson on Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss   A well-known scientist — Bertrand Russell, in one version of the story — was giving a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun, which, in […]