I’m sure you’re familiar with the tale of Clarence Darrow hiding a wire in his cigar to keep the ash from falling and thus distracting the jury during the DA’s […]

Are there really bus-size nuclear reactors all over Europe (especially in France), that can safely power small towns? If so, why don’t we have them? -Keith Runfola If by “bus-size” […]

  I’ve seen pictures of Pangaea, the giant land mass that eventually separated into the continents we know today. But why were the continents smushed together like that in the […]

Superman is able to use his super strength to squeeze coal into diamonds. Theoretically, if someone had unlimited strength in real life, would it be possible to do this?-marcusbrute You […]

What’s the final word about Y2K? We were told this was a serious problem, and that huge dollars and man-hours were needed to head off trouble. Why didn’t the sky […]

Almost nightly, it seems, we hear on the news that a drunk driver killed one or more people in another car but the drunk survived, sometimes without injury. A family […]

I read a speech by Noam Chomsky in which he says during the Vietnam war “soldiers were fragging officers.” I, a man too young to have served in that conflict, […]

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond claims, “When NASA wanted to find some place on Earth resembling the surface of the Moon, so that our astronauts preparing for the first […]

My son just finished a three-month karate class. Last night he asked me if karate really would help someone defeat a larger, stronger opponent. I told him I honestly never […]

I recently discovered your site/column, and after spending days and nights reading, I’m convinced you are indeed the world’s smartest person and so best qualified to answer my question: Who […]

I once heard NASA was the only government department to show a profit due to patents on things such as Teflon, Velcro, and Tang. Any truth to this? – Michelle, […]

With the dearth of good real estate on Earth, I’ve been considering alternatives. How much energy would it take to move Mars into Earth’s orbit? Would it work better if […]