My father remembers well the first time he saw a curveball: at the time he was a mere 13 years old, and a pretty good hitter as he recalls it. That year he was selected to play in the league all-star game, lending some credence to his remembered skill, and on the mound for the other team was a tall right-handed youth who appeared a bit older and bigger than the other players. When he first came up to bat, my father recalls that the pitcher “had good speed on his fastball, and I managed to foul the first one off.” He took a ball outside to even the count,…

Most people have been told this maxim at one point in their lives, usually by their mother or another older, wiser adult: breakfast is the most important meal of the day and skipping it can lead to weight gain, heart disease, and even diabetes. This claim makes sense rationally. If you eat a meal earlier in the day, the calories you intake will supply your body with fuel to burn off as you walk around and engage in other strenuous activities. However, many young people today typically skip this morning meal, not consuming anything besides coffee until lunchtime or later. This disparity got me to wondering how much of this…

With all the recent news concerning honey bee colony collapse disorder, I have been a bit worried about what would happen to the agricultural system that we have in place if this trend were to continue and the honey bees were to die out; so I did some research! In the biology classes I took in school I was led to believe that honey bees were far and away the primary pollinators of flowering plants (angiosperms), and while other creatures such as butterflies and hummingbirds play a somewhat more minor role in pollination, without honey bees humans would be hosed.                      …

This is a piece written by yours truly after I was inspired by Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire. Please leave me comments on what I can do to improve it! ‌ Oh, the Lord is good to me. And so I thank the Lord For giving me the things I need: The sun and the rain and the apple seed; The Lord is good to me. This song is probably best remembered from the Walt Disney short The Legend of Johnny Appleseed. First released as part of the 1948 animated film Melody Time and then again in 2002 in Disney’s American Legends, it tells the sunny tale of young John…

Thank goodness for Norway. While in the US we can’t seem to find enough money to adequately pay for proper healthcare or education for our citizens, Norway has reportedly found the money to allocate around $13 million to upgrade the the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository that it built in the Arctic some ten years ago to ensure continued worldwide access to these building blocks of life in the event of a global catastrophe. Storing seeds in this vault is free for anyone in the world, with the costs being covered by Norway in conjunction with other private donors. The seeds are stored in a large building that looks…