When I was in kindergarten, I was one of New Hampshire’s winners of an annual EPA award. It was an award given to students between kindergarten and sixth grade who demonstrated concern about the environment and used their creative skills to express their concern. My environmental efforts continued throughout my youth, with varying effectiveness. I vaguely recall crouching behind a rusty swing set after [...]
I was introduced to gothic literature late in life, but it wasn’t until I read Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla that I really fell in love with the genre. Published about 25 years before Dracula, Carmilla is the story of Laura, a young girl who lives in an ancient castle in Styria. After Laura learns an expected visitor, Bertha Rheinfeldt, has fallen mysteriously ill and died, she and her [...]
When I was in elementary school, I was one of those kids who got overly excited for the annual book fair. The night before, I’d spend a lot of time perusing the fair’s flier, looking at all the books that were going to be offered. Being the age that I was, I figured every school had a book fair each year. I didn’t [...]
Google Glass seems like something out of a Star Trek episode, but, amazingly, this example of augmented reality exists today. Merriam–Webster defines augmented reality as “an enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device (such as a smartphone camera).” Although Google Glass may have seemed like the only technology of its [...]
Sometime over 30 thousand years ago, prehistoric humans found their way to a limestone cave in the Ardèche region of southern France. Here they drew more than one thousand images in what is believed to be the oldest cave art in the world. Around 20 thousand years ago, a rockfall covered the entrance and the cave remained undisturbed until December of 1994, when Eliette Brunel [...]
When I was a little, my mom would read me a story every night after dinner. I always had a stack of my favorite titles ready to go, but it’s probably safe to say that I never asked her to read me a bedtime math problem. However, a recent study suggests that doing bedtime math problems can be beneficial for developing a child’s [...]
In late 2014, a 12-part podcast focusing on a high school murder case called Serial became mainstream news. Serial reached 5 million downloads faster than any podcast before it. But it wasn’t just radio and podcast fanatics who tuned in. English teacher Michael Godsey decided to use Serial in his tenth and eleventh grade classes. Students were instantly hooked on the murder mystery. They held mock debates, examined evidence gathered [...]
Ever since the creation of automated machines, the fears of an artificial intelligence (AI) takeover (or cybernetic revolt, as more professional futurists call it) have been growing. From the minds of science fiction greats Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley to 2015’s blockbuster films Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ex Machina, culture shows that people are fascinated with what machines could someday be. This potential future has long [...]
What does have six arms and two legs and a brain in each one? An octopus! Three-fifths of an octopus’s brain is found in its eight appendages. The largest octopus on record, a giant Pacific octopus, reportedly weighed 600 pounds and was nearly 30 feet wide. Think of all that brain room! As if the brains-in-their-appendages fact weren’t strange enough, octopuses have additional unique characteristics that make them truly amazing [...]
Neuschwanstein Castle is nestled into a mountainside in Bavaria (not too far from Munich) and even from far away it looks like it belongs on the pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In fact, it was the inspiration for the Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland. On a high school trip to Germany, I was lucky enough to visit Neuschwanstein Castle and the whole experience was [...]