BIG QUESTIONS

If you’re a member of my generation or the one that raised it, your house was probably full of all sorts of glow-in-the-dark stuff in the 80s and 90s. Yo-yo's, stickers, action figures, clothing, you name it. As a kid, I thought it was just short of magic

Let’s picture a typical moment in my day: I’m minding my own business, with my iPhone in my back pocket. Suddenly, my left cheek is shaking as the phone vibrates and does the bzzt, bzzt, bzzt-ing dance of its people on my backside. I check the phone, and

The very first traffic light, installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London in December 1868, had red and green gas lamps for nighttime use. The device was pretty crude, and less than a month after it went operational, it exploded and killed the un

Truman isn’t just gleeful in that famous photo because he won the election, but because it was egg on the face of a paper he hated, the Chicago Tribune. The paper had a conservative bent, disapproved of most of his policies, and had once even called him a

The sugars in beans are far too big to slip though the intestinal wall on their own, and our guts’ enzymatic tool kit doesn’t have the right stuff to break the big things apart into more manageable pieces.

Well, they're not dyed for St. Patrick’s Day. These are just from potatoes in which chlorophyll had started to form. This can happen when potatoes, which grow underground, are exposed to too much light in the field or factory, in storage, on the store she

I know I’m only about a decade late, but I recently, finally, watched the entire run of The Sopranos. Tony and his crew get their hands into plenty of different moneymaking schemes, but throughout the series one character or another (Tony, Richie Aprile,

Smelling image via ShutterstockI’m perfectly suited to answer the Big Question that reader Katie posed the other day, because I have anosmia, which means I can’t smell. At all. Every diaper my two-year-old has ever filled has been totally odorless to me.

Image credit: NASALet's start with the bad news: Remember that hole in the ozone layer that scientists discovered over the Antarctic in 1985? The one we worried would give us all skin cancer and cataracts with its unshielded bursts of UV rays? It’s still

Some animals have it made. Their whole day revolves around eating and having sex (and, to be fair, trying not to get eaten themselves). And when winter arrives, they get to curl up somewhere and wait things out until the weather is nice again. Can humans

Trauma, that’s what. It’s the smell of chemical defenses and first aid. The fresh, “green” scent of a just-mowed lawn is the lawn trying to save itself from the injury you just inflicted.

Let’s say that the conspiracy theorists are right...