Katabatic Winds What is wind? The question seems simple, but I cannot recall learning about this topic in science classes in school. In simplest terms, wind is the movement of air. But why does air move? What causes wind? The simple concept bleeds into complexity rather quickly, as new questions emerge. Wind occurs because of […]
The Coriolis Effect Perhaps you’ve heard that your toilet water spins clockwise or counterclockwise depending on whether you live in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. This phenomenon is supposedly the result of the Coriolis effect. My next sentence might be the oddest I’ve ever typed: Unfortunately, your hemispherical location does not influence your toilet, but the
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Mount Elbrus – Russia and Europe’s High Point When it comes to mountains, Europe is nearly synonymous with the Alps. Those majestic, stark crags might be the world’s most beautiful and they include the planet’s most recognizable peak, the Matterhorn. Despite its robustness, Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps, is not the highest point in Europe.
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Lava-Fired Pizza Objectively, a top-five human creation is the pizza. It helps when one of the constituent parts is also an all-timer, the wheel of the culinary world, a miraculous building block: bread. Whoever figured out, accidental or not, how to create bread is one of the greatest humans to have ever lived. Paired with
Mistletoe “the Yule clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe, with its white berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids.” — Washington Irving, Christmas Eve One of the strangest Christmas traditions I recall learning as I grew up was both ubiquitous and absent. The notion of kissing under
I Ran a 50k A few weeks ago, I traveled to New River Gorge National Park to run in a 50-kilometer race. I had never run anywhere near this length, but the challenge seemed fun. Who wants to run a repetitive marathon on random roads when you can do it through a gorgeous forested gorge? Did I
Four Different Mountains Are the Tallest on Earth What’s the highest point on our planet? This bit of trivia is likely known by many humans, not just fans of mountains. If you went into Final Jeopardy! with the lead, you would confidently scrawl “What is Mount Everest?” on your lectern and toast yourself to becoming a
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Giving Tuesday Since the 1950s, we’ve called the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday.” After gathering to offer orisons for all the things we value, we kick off the holiday gifting season with a bang. On the surface, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are compatible; giving gifts to loved ones is a wonderful way to give
Mashed Potatoes As humans gather around Thanksgiving tables in late fall, their feasts often include a common palette of foodstuffs, from turkey to corn to cranberry sauce to pumpkin pie. Uncle Jimmy might put a personal spin on a dish, but, odds are, he’s making it with a traditional ingredient list. Most years, Uncle Jimmy whips up a batch of mashed potatoes. Sometimes
Periwinkle There is a cornucopia of oddly named, obscure colors out there – incarnadine, filemot, and smaragdine, for example. As a toddler begins to amass a vocabulary, these hues likely won’t beat blue, red, or green into the stable. Some colors with strange monikers are more familiar, perhaps because they found a spot in Crayola’s box at some