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Certain businesses thrive on good economies.  Fine dining establishments, tourist trades, and gambling do well when the economy is good, but they tend to tank when it’s bad.  A lot of people are not willing to spend the money when they think their job is on the line. There are certain industries that do just [...]

With Japan’s earthquake-spawned nuclear tragedy gobbling up all the attention in the headlines these days, it’s easy to question why mad scientists ever thought it would be a good idea to boil water with uranium and plutonium? Few natural effects are as misunderstood by the public as radioactivity and radiation. The truth is there are [...]

Fan fiction is perhaps the single strangest method of creative expression ever conceived. Despite the fact that the form is fueled entirely by people incapable of coming up with their own characters, there are works that show a remarkable—and often disturbing—level of creativity. Writers, unchained from the burdens of conventional standards of plot, pacing and [...]

The catalog of medical oddities, miraculous recoveries, open questions and unsolved mysteries is so complex and fascinating, that millions of books and articles have been written. While oddities are not particularly desirable, miracles make us happy and strengthen our faith. Unfortunately, many medical mysteries remain unsolved. They are similar to an intriguing puzzle, but with [...]

How to determine who the greatest inventors in history were is often a passionate and, at times, even a heated debate. Many men can lay claim to having invented or, at very least, perfecting someone else’s obscure invention, making such a listing problematic at best. Fortunately, I don’t maintain any personal favorites, which will hopefully [...]

No matter where you go in the world, vehicles play a major role in almost every aspect of our lives. Vehicle ownership is seen by most as an essential part of existence in the modern world. Whether for pleasure or economic necessity, just about all of us will want or need to own a vehicle [...]

A format war occurs when two incompatible versions of a similar technology begin to compete against one another in the market.  In almost every case, one of the two formats wins out in the end, either because of a better marketing strategy or a superior product, leaving groups of unlucky consumers with an obsolete technology [...]

While we often imagine that the twentieth century was the era in which the greatest advances in technology and science occurred, many often overlook the remarkable advances that came out of the preceding century—advances which in themselves were equally as astonishing in their era as those of the twentieth century were for us. It’s also [...]

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question “How?” but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question “Why?” (Erwin Chargaff, biochemist) We all know that scientific experiments are meant to be conducted in a way so that they provide some sort of useful information. Whether it be an experiment to test a cure [...]