My Blog

Did you enjoy learning about the Gila monster last week? I’m still in a Halloween mood. Let’s talk about spiders. First, I must confess I love spiders. They are such wonderful engineers. Did you know that, as they are spinning their web threads, they can modify the...

Halloween is coming! Let’s talk about monsters. Everyone’s heard about the amazing new GLP-1 weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and others. But did you know there’s a monster involved? Before we go further, a little refresher is needed. These drugs were...

It’s football season, and in the South, there is no other topic this time of year! American gridiron football evolved from soccer and rugby and was first played in 1869, in a game between Princeton and Rutgers. By the 1890s it had become a game we would easily...

Graham crackers in S’mores. Graham crackers and peanut butter, the perfect after-school snack. Teddy Grahams for toddlers. What could be more wholesome? Their origin was quite different from their current use. Let me tell you more. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) is...

In one of the first great battles of the Civil War, Grant’s Union Army was pitted against Johnston’s and Buell’s Confederate forces at Shiloh, in Tennessee. A now bucolic place in Tennessee, Shiloh is near the southern Tennessee border with Mississippi and Alabama, on...

Do you still have your kids’ baby teeth in the back of the jewelry box somewhere? Does your mom still have yours? Do you know there was a time when baby teeth changed world political policy? It all goes back to the 1940s-1950s. The first nuclear bomb test blast was in...

People like to characterize present-day parents as helicopters, always hovering over their children, children who have every moment of their day scheduled and supervised. Those same people think of Boomer Babies as free-range kids, who were kicked out of the house in...

The late 19th and early 20th Century was a time of optimism about many things, but not about premature babies. In an era that celebrated healthy babies, with Better Baby contests, awarding prizes to the biggest, fittest, best-looking babies, there was little to offer...

Horseshoe crabs have been around for 450 million years. They’ve survived several mass extinctions and have outlived the dinosaurs. Arthropods more related to spiders than crabs, these primitive, resilient sea creatures are coastal dwellers, preferring the ocean...

Perhaps your travels are taking you abroad this summer. And you’re still looking for those unusual medical museums. I have more suggestions for you. More years ago than I want to admit, I was a hippie with a backpack, hitchhiking around Europe. Even then, I wanted to...