January 6 – Good News, Bad News, Butterfly News
Today’s factismal: The US Fish and Wildlife Service is considering putting the Monarch butterfly on the endangered species list. The Monarch butterfly is one of Nature’s marvels. It flies from where it...
View ArticleJanuary 13 – Leapin’ Rhaphidophoridae!
Today’s factismal: The noise given off by crickets is called stridulation (“shrill sound”). There are a lot of people who don’t like crickets of any sort. They think that the crickets are dirty,...
View ArticleFebruary 3 – Flexing Our BICEP2
Today’s factismal: When one scientist makes a goof, another one catches it. If you watch a typical movie or TV show with scientists in it, you’ll come away with one of two views of how we do science....
View ArticleFebruary 10 – Walking On Air
Today’s factismal: The US government has begun a $3.2 million program to help save the Monarch Butterfly! Today there is good news out of Washington, DC! The US Fish and Wildlife Service has begun a...
View ArticleMarch 10 – Ice, Ice, Baby
Today’s factismal: As a glacier melts, it makes sounds that are louder than a chainsaw. Though landlubbers may think of the ocean as being silent, seafarers know the truth. As early skin-divers and...
View ArticleMarch 31 – What’s Up Doc?
Today’s factismal: The shortest total eclipse of the Moon in a century will happen on Saturday morning. Quick – what are you doing way too early on Saturday morning? If your answer was “sleeping”, then...
View ArticleApril 7 – A Little Buggy
Today’s factismal: Bacteria can tell lies. If you ever think about bacteria, you probably think of them as tiny little critters that can be killed with bleach. But they are so much more and so much...
View ArticleApril 14 – Birds of Pray
Today’s factismal: The largest bird skull ever found was 28 inches long. Eighteen inches of that was the beak, which was used to club prey to death. There is a joke in paleontological circles that...
View ArticleApril 28 – Nepal Event
Today’s factismal: The earthquake that hit Tibet this weekend was the twenty-first most powerful earthquake in the past decade. There is no doubt that the earthquake which hit Tibet this weekend was a...
View ArticleMay 5 – Whole Lot A Shakin’ Goin’ On
Today’s Factismal: There were nearly 4,000 earthquakes today. There was just a Mw 7.5 earthquake off of Papua New Guinea today. And there was a Mw 7.8 temblor in Nepal last week. And they aren’t alone;...
View ArticleMay 19 – All The Way Down
Today’s factismal: Galápagos tortoises are an example of island dwarfism. Quick! What weighs 550 lbs, is big enough to ride on, and is the smallest of its kind? Why, it is the Galápagos Island...
View ArticleJune 16 – My Queen!
Today’s factismal: Female cuckoo bumblebees orchestrate coup d’etats in the hives of other bumble bees and then enslave the workers to feed their meglomaniacal horde. Things get weird in the insect...
View ArticleJune 30 – Whose Fault Is It?
Today’s factismal: The Cascadia fault stretches more than 600 miles from Canada to California. Anything you want to see in Seattle is either uphill or downhill; there are no flat parts to the city....
View ArticleJuly 7 – Overkill
Today’s factismal: On average, sharks kill 17 people each year. And, on average, people kill 100 million sharks each year. One of the big draws of shark week is the recounting of horrific stories of...
View ArticleJuly 14 – Calling All Planets
Today’s factismal: We did it! We have successfully visited all nine classical planets! In lieu of a regular post today (and since I am too busy watching the newsfeed), here are my previous factismals...
View ArticleJuly 21 – Go Away!
Today’s factismal: It once rained for 45 days straight in Texas. One of life’s little ironies is that sometimes you get more than you asked for. That was the situation in Texas in 2007. For three...
View ArticleAugust 11 – Terrible Lizards
Today’s factismal: The most famous paleontologist in the early 1800s was a citizen scientist. Back in the late 1700s and early 1800s, science (or, as they called it, natural philosophy) was a...
View ArticleAugust 18 – Thar She Blows!
Today’s factismal: On average, a volcano erupts somewhere on Earth each week. If you’ve been reading the news, then you may have seen an article about Cotopaxi, a volcano located near the capital of...
View ArticleAugust 25 – Storm of The Century
Today’s factismal: Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. There’s no doubt about it; 2005 was a record year for hurricanes. In the Pacific basin, there were 39 named storms, 20 hurricanes, 5...
View ArticleSeptember 8 – How Thai The Moon
Today’s factismal: A meteorite exploded over central Thailand yesterday. One of the great things about science is that there is always something happening. If it isn’t an erupting volcano, it’s a huge...
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