If I take a chicken breast and process it into a paste, is it worse for my health than if I ate the chicken whole? Please help before I get […]
Cecil Adams
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Do woodpeckers sustain brain trauma?
Woodpeckers show a number of anatomical adaptations that help distribute the energy of repeated high-intensity impact
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What is the significance of the gavel in a courtroom?
What is the significance of the gavel in a courtroom? How did it originate? —Adams WE’RE not too sure where the word gavel comes from, much less the path by […]
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Will bacteriophages save us from the antibiotics crisis?
Worldwide, we’re already losing 700,000 people a year to infections that won’t respond to antibiotics
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What’s the environmental impact of road salt?
Roadways being designed to repel water and drain it off, salt readily makes its way into the local streamflow, which is where the most serious trouble begins
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When animals disappear, how are humans affected?
Are there extinct species that we really wish we hadn’t wiped out? I don’t mean we now say, “Gee, what a shame.” I mean, is there anything where we now […]
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What’s the life span of a skyscraper?
An engineering professor used to tell our class, “Everything eventually fails. The question is, when?” What happens with a mammoth building? What’s the intended life span of, say, the Willis […]
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What happens to birds during a hurricane?
The bottom line is that these birds don’t really go anywhere when they feel a storm coming—which, by the way, they’re able to do
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Is the fatberg apocalypse upon us?
We have the Brits to thank for the evocative term “fatberg,” which was added to the OED in 2015
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Is music universal?
We’ve been at it a long time, creating tunes for at least 50,000 years—possibly as long as 250,000, if you count our a cappella period.
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How credible are the new blood-pressure guidelines?
What with the fast food, the sedentary lifestyles, and the increasingly hair-raising national politics, we Americans shouldn’t really need help getting diagnosed with high blood pressure—doing just fine, thanks
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Do black dogs experience prejudice?
In a 2016 article, the ASPCA looked at shelter records for nearly 300,000 dogs and cats in 14 communities. Again, the black dogs did better than the general population.