Odds

No one knows for certain when the next ice age will begin, but geological evidence indicates that it could start within two thousand years. During the past 2 million years, ice ages have been coming and going according to a fairly regular schedule. They seem to last about 100,000 years or so, and are usually … Read more

In any given year, advertising rates for the Super Bowl are set by the network that owns the broadcast rights for that year’s game. There are no strict equations for setting a price. Instead, the network will decide what price it thinks the market can bear and charge accordingly. In 1991, ABC figured $800,000 was … Read more

Calculating how much to pay the richest woman (and fourth richest person) in the world is a job which may seem akin to deciding how much sand to take to the beach, but HRH Elizabeth II, and the whole Windsor clan, take the matter quite seriously. In fact, despite complaints and resistance from Labour party … Read more

Under the Federal bankruptcy code, administrative costs of running a bankruptcy are given priority over debt owed to creditors. Therefore, both the counsel for the debtors and the official committees representing the creditors are ensured payment because technically they constitute an administrative expense of running the case. A lawyer cannot represent a bankrupt entity. So, … Read more

The Egyptian Plover (Pluvianus aegyptius) has long been called the crocodile bird for its symbiotic relationship to this most ferocious of reptiles. Sitting coolly in the gaping mouth of a basking crocodile, the bird picks leeches, flukes and tsetse flies from the animal’s gums to eat. In nearly all other circumstances the crocodile is an … Read more

A one-hundred-meter race lasts about ten seconds, so the difference between first and last place may be mere tenths of a second. The incentive is high to get out of the starting blocks as fast as possible, but if a sprinter false-starts more than once in a race, he is automatically disqualified. False starts just … Read more

In very cold climates, the easiest way to keep Coca-Cola from freezing is to store it inside, in a heated shop or home. Exposed to the elements for an extended time, Coke would freeze, causing an indefinite postponement of the pause that refreshes. Actually, before the soda could freeze, the can itself would burst. The … Read more

The answer is, not very well. Ridding the earth of nuclear waste that continues to emit radioactivity is a formidable, if not impossible, task, and experts disagree over how it should be packaged and where it should be put. There are two general types of nuclear waste, low-level and high-level. Low-level waste is composed mainly … Read more

Most laundry bleaches, including the household wizard Clorox bleach, are oxidizing agents. In the washing machine they release free-roving molecules of sodium hypochlorite or peroxide. The color of a stain or spot is made up of a group of atoms and molecules linked together by a pattern of double and single bonds. The oxidizing agent … Read more

Unless you spend a lot of time flying airplanes, you probably haven’t given a great deal of thought to the subject of wind shear. Wind shear is the phenomenon of radically differing wind velocity and direction at slightly different altitudes. The occurrence of an adjoining northerly twelve-knot wind, say, and a southerly twenty-knot wind would … Read more

If you’ve ever found yourself alone at the breakfast table without a newspaper, you’ve probably resorted to reading the cereal box for diversion. There, along the side of the box, buried deep within the fine print, lies the cryptic notation, “Reg. Penna. Dept. of Agri.” What, you may have wondered, does the Pennsylvania Department of … Read more

We grow up absorbing explicit illustrations from picture books of sauropods nibbling leaves and tyrannosaurs ripping flesh, and yet some paleontologists maintain that these images are largely conjecture. We can speculate about what the dinosaurs ate, but in fact no one knows for sure, just as we can only imagine what color the dinosaurs were … Read more

When you look at the grill on an electric stove as it heats up, you see it turn from black to bright red, and you know by the color that it’s hot enough to blister your fingers. Astronomers determine stars’ temperatures in much the same way, by studying their colors. Of course, stars are a … Read more

When you hustle to the bank for some quick cash, it’s easy to wish that that anonymous machine would just once spit out a few extra bills, or accidentally hand out fifties instead of tens. But such fortuitous errors are rare. Why? Inside an automatic teller machine, or ATM, are bricks of cash in various … Read more

Energy is trapped in the molecular bonds inside food, and used by the body for all sorts of physical activities: shopping, studying, jogging, reading this book. A calorie is a way to measure that energy, both as it is supplied, and as it is burned. Energy is discussed in terms of heat. One calorie, the … Read more

The old way, and the way most of us still use to measure a second, is derived from the time it takes for a complete day to pass. For centuries we have split a day into twenty-four hours, an hour into sixty minutes and a minute into sixty seconds. But though the Earth’s movements from … Read more

It all depends on the ship and its location in the water. If the main deck of a stranded vessel is above water, salvagers patch the holes that caused the ship to sink and pump out the water. The lightened ship will then refloat. If the main deck is submerged, but not deeply, it is … Read more

A staple on the American breakfast table for decades, good old wholesome shredded wheat dates back a century. The story goes that at a small-town hotel in Nebraska in 1892, lawyer and inventor Henry D. Perky was suffering from indigestion one morning when he noticed a fellow guest eating an oddity for breakfast: boiled wheat … Read more

When we think of skywriting, most of us picture a small airplane looping-the-loop to scrawl advertising slogans or “I love you’s” with a vanishing vapor trail. But such laborious acrobatics are almost a thing of the past. Since the wind can wipe out a letter even before the daring aviator finishes it, an imaginative skywriter … Read more

High-definition television, the experts tell us, will deliver pictures up to five times sharper than the current standard, with a larger field of vision and with sound comparable to that produced by a compact disk. The new system, which should be commercially available by the mid-1990s, will mark the first real change in television since … Read more

Inside trading, the illicit profiteering by brokers on stock sales based on advance information about companies, is illegal because it gives the guilty trader an unfair advantage over his competitors; it can also lead to a fiscally damaging betrayal of trust. A lawyer, for instance, retained by Huge Company to assist in its secret buyout … Read more

IF you have ever read Spy magazine you are probably familiar with doctored magazine cover photos. The satiric New York monthly once ran, for instance, a cover that included a picture of Henry Kissinger wantonly dancing the hula. It was not really a picture of Dr. Kissinger. Rather, it was a picture of Dr. Kissinger’s … Read more

Concern about the depletion of atmospheric ozone really took off in the mid-eighties when scientists of the British Antarctic Survey first detected an ozone “hole” over their research station on Halley Bay. They found that the springtime quantity of ozone over Antarctica had decreased by more than 40 percent between 1977 and 1984. The “hole,” … Read more

Bear cubs and humans cubs are built in kind of the same way: they’re sturdy, fairly well balanced, and capable of walking upright. In addition, they both put their heels down first when they walk. So for trainers at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, where bears have been performing since the turn … Read more

There’s an old formula at People magazine called the Law of Covers: “Young is better than old,” it goes. “Pretty is better than ugly. Rich is better than poor. TV is better than music. Music is better than movies. Movies is better than sports. And anything is better than politics.” The Law was conceived by … Read more

E. I. Du Pont De Nemours and Company, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, was among the first companies to come up with a new technology for making stain-repellent carpets. In the early eighties one of du Pont’s research chemists, Armand Zinnato, was developing a nylon fiber that could be dyed at room temperature. He worried that … Read more

A romantic interlude isn’t the only time people worry about condoms breaking. Manufacturers worry about it all the time. So they put the condoms through elaborate tests to make sure they’re leakproof and strong. The key ingredient in the success of the multimillion-dollar modern condom industry, Americans buy some 420 million of them a year, … Read more

Despite what certain nostalgia-happy entrepreneurs would have you believe, ice cream production is a big, industrial business. The United States produces more than 900 million gallons of ice cream every year. During the first half of this century ice cream tycoons opened vast plants where noisy stainless steel machines replaced the old hand-cranked wooden ice … Read more

The bitter, white substance caffeine makes up only about one percent of the composition of coffee beans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires 97 percent of that tiny amount to be removed before the label may say “decaffeinated,” and some manufacturers do even better than that. The difficult part of the decaffeination process, as … Read more

In yet another clever ploy to attract customers, Madison Avenue invented the scratch-and-sniff ad. Used mostly by the cosmetics industry to sell perfumes and colognes, the ads are inserted into magazines, so you can get an idea of what the product smells like before buying it. Scratch-and-sniff strips are composed of globules of oil-based scent … Read more

Surprisingly, the first impurity to consider in the Hudson is salt, which is easier to avoid altogether than to remove. That’s why the five communities in New York State that draw drinking water regularly from the river, Waterford, Highland Falls, Port Ewen, Rhinebeck, and Poughkeepsie, are all located north of the “salt front,” which floats … Read more

The United States golf association enforces strict standards governing the characteristics of golf balls. An official ball must not weigh more than 1.620 ounces; it must have a diameter of at least 1.680 inches; it must be spherically symmetrical; the velocity of the ball must not exceed 250 feet per second when launched by a … Read more

Sunscreens are classified as drugs and as such are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Manufacturers use FDA-approved chemicals, oxybenzone, padimate-O, octylpmethoxy-cinnamate, and others, in different amounts and combinations, each arriving at its own unique and well-guarded formula. What these chemicals do is absorb or reflect radiation in the ultraviolet spectrum; older products … Read more

Astronomers don’t see black holes, actually. A black hole is created by the collapse of an aged and massive star, and its gravitational force is so strong that it draws in even the light around it that would make it visible. And even if black holes were visible, their small size would still make them … Read more

More than 14,000 hopeful students apply for admission to Harvard each year, competing to fill out a freshman class of about 1,600. In an average year, roughly 15 percent of the applicants will be accepted; about 75 percent of successful applicants matriculate. The basic admissions requirements include graduation from secondary school, and completion of the … Read more

Their lips can turn yellow. Their strange little bodies fade from shoe-leather brown to grass green. The acclaimed herpetologist Angus Bellairs even reported in his 1970 two-volume work, The Life of Reptiles, that “if an object of distinctive shape is held against the flank of a Chameleon for a couple of minutes, its outline will … Read more

When Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses were introduced in 1907, just four years after Milton S. Hershey built his first chocolate factory, the bite-size candies were wrapped individually by hand. In 1921 the chocolate makers added the Kiss’s identification plume, the little paper streamer printed “Hershey’s Kisses” that sprouts from the top of the foil wrapping. The … Read more

It won’t be long before you can carry on lengthy conversations with a computer, schedule business appointments by negotiating with a machine rather than a secretary, even instruct your VCR by voice when to record a certain show. IBM already has a computer in the works that can recognize twenty thousand words. How does it … Read more

In 1980, the television networks caused a bit of a ruckus when they declared, before polls had closed in the West, that Ronald Reagan had won the presidential election. Soon after that announcement was made, with still more than an hour of voting time left on the West Coast, Jimmy Carter conceded defeat on national … Read more

First, what gets them up there at all? “Youth is number one,” says John Kelly, coordinator of the Joint Apprenticeship and Trainee Committee of Ironworkers Locals 40 and 361 in New York. “Adventure is number two. And it used to be a hand-me-down, father-to-son business. Or you’d be hanging around on the street like a … Read more

A computer virus is a piece of written code that copies itself, spreads itself around, and tells a computer what to do. It might, for example, infect all the IBM-compatible computers it can, and on the next Friday the 13th, find all the decimal points in the data where it is and move them one … Read more

The United Nations employs 142 simultaneous interpreters, whose job it is to orally translate speeches at the very moment they are being delivered. A simultaneous interpreter listens to words spoken in one language and instantly relates in another language what is being said. Unlike translating a written document from one language to another, simultaneous interpretation … Read more

To make crack, which is cocaine in a purified, hardened form, it is first necessary to make cocaine. The process begins in the Andes of South America, with the native coca shrub. Incidentally, coca is a different plant entirely from the cacao tree, from which we get cocoa. Coca leaves contain minute amounts of the … Read more

The white rabbit and the black top hat have long been symbols of the magician’s art, his uncanny ability to conjure objects and cause them to vanish again. Rabbits first appeared onstage, popping out of top hats, in the late 1830s. Though the originator of the trick is unknown, John Henry Anderson of Scotland, dubbed … Read more

The obvious obstacle to finding heart and liver donors is the singularity of these organs: a person has only one of each and cannot afford to part with either. A transplanted kidney, by comparison, can come from a live donor, who has two of them but needs only one to survive. The pool of heart … Read more

No, not by machine alone. The beekeeper himself barehanded shoos away the swarming bees to carry off the honey-laden combs. A man-made beehive, which will house a colony of fifteen thousand to sixty thousand bees, is constructed of stacks of wooden boxes, measuring twenty inches by sixteen and one quarter inches each. The uppermost boxes, … Read more

In 1814 Thomas Jefferson, retired from government service and living at Monticello, donated his personal library to Congress, writing, “There is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” The government took Jefferson at his word, and the Library of Congress has since become the world’s most … Read more

If billions of people devoted their lives solely to counting, they could actually count the numbers of stars and sand grains, because neither figure is infinite. The universe and its starry contents come to an end somewhere out there beyond our wildest imaginings. And although it may feel like the number of grains of sand … Read more

“All the news that’s fit to print,” boasts the motto of the venerable New York paper, and the editors there apply the sentiment not only to foreign and domestic bureau reports but also to death notices. An obituary in the Times is the ultimate tribute: it signifies that during his life the deceased made it … Read more

Two secrets apply when putting cork into a bottle of champagne: first, the cork was soaked and thereby softened before being driven into the bottle, and second, the cork was originally a bit slimmer than the one you see fly across the room on a festive occasion, it has expanded over time because of the … Read more

Perhaps you’ve heard, health nuts remark that Twinkies, the ultimate junk food, are so loaded with chemicals they can sit on the shelf for twenty years and the consumer wouldn’t know the difference. Not so. “That’s a popular misconception we’re not too happy about,” says Patrick Farrell of Continental Baking Company, producers of the familiar … Read more

Most of us wouldn’t consider drinking milk that has sat on the supermarket shelf unrefrigerated for some three months. Then again, many people, especially those without small children, have never heard of ultra-high-temperature (UHT) milk. Farm Best milk, made by Dairymen in Savannah, Georgia, is one of a number of long-shelf-life milks now available. You’ll … Read more

Pulitzer prizes are awarded annually for distinguished work in twenty-two categories of journalism, arts and letters, and music. The fourteen prizes in journalism are meritorious public service, spot news reporting, beat reporting, national reporting, international reporting, investigative reporting, explanatory journalism, editorials, editorial cartoons, spot news photography, feature photography, commentary, criticism, and feature writing. The six … Read more

Every month, the Census Bureau surveys 59,500 American households, asking members about their current work habits. Once the data is in, the census takers ship it over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where analysts weigh the figures to project the national rate of unemployment. To arrive at an unemployment figure, labor statisticians first determine … Read more

Making stamps is a function of the federal government, and as is the case with most governmental projects, a committee has been appointed to get the job done. The fourteen members of the Citizens’ Advisory Stamp Committee, representing expertise in American art, business, history, and technology, and sharing an interest in philately, are handpicked by … Read more

The emperor penguin, which happily swims and romps in killing temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, is the only bird that can, and often does, spend its entire life on coastal or shelf ice, without ever coming ashore. Basically, three mechanisms are at work in safeguarding the emperor penguin’s body heat: its feather construction, its … Read more

In show business, getting good seats at a performance is simply a matter of knowing the right people. And celebrities tend to know most of them. Before tickets go on sale for any concert or Broadway show, a certain percentage are put aside as “comps,” or complimentary tickets. Say, for example, Joe Rockstar plays a … Read more

In treating drug addiction, acupuncture is used to suppress the addict’s physical craving for narcotics and also to combat such debilitating side effects of withdrawal as nausea and extreme anxiety. By easing an addict’s symptoms of addiction and withdrawal, acupuncture facilitates the patient’s ability to receive other therapies, including counseling. Acupuncture treatment is based on … Read more

Hoisting the 100,000-ton Nimitz aircraft carrier onto a scale is a formidable idea and not a very practical one. Fortunately, there are less cumbersome ways of determining the weight of such a massive ship. If a new aircraft carrier is being built, technicians simply keep a running tab of all materials that are used in … Read more

“Age,” wrote Francis Bacon, “appears to be best in four things: old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old authors to read.” A fine enough sentiment, but it turns out that most wines, including virtually all rosés and white table wines, peak in taste within a year of being … Read more

From dinosaurs to lego ghosts, from stickers to yo-yos, a battery of toys now add a cool greenish glow to their attraction. The key ingredient that causes the glow is a phosphor (from the Greek for “light-bearer”), which has the ability to phosphoresce: it glows when exposed to visible light energy, and continues glowing for … Read more

The truth is dry cleaning is not entirely dry. Dry cleaners do apply liquids to silk dresses, it’s just that the stuff contains no water and furthermore dries quite rapidly. It doesn’t cause clothes to shrink or colors to run. Routine dry cleaning is done in large, closed machines using a volatile chemical called perchloroethylene … Read more

A caste, from the Portuguese word casta, meaning race, is a group of people sharing racial characteristics; in India the term is applied to the smallest endogamous groups existing within the general population. There are thousands and thousands of castes and subcastes in India, as many as thirty thousand by some estimates, which would make … Read more

You don’t get the oat bran out of oats, but off of oats. The bran is the husk, or outer covering, which is removed during the milling of oats. First the oats are cleaned to remove foreign matter and inferior specimens. Then the grain goes through a drying and roasting process to reduce their moisture … Read more

There are no real tricks to staying on a tightrope. One does it the same way one gets to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. Angel Quiros, a high-wire artist for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus has been walking the wire for sixteen years. One must be in good physical condition, he says, “but … Read more

How do you keep Fido faithful to the homefront in the face of overwhelming temptation, a female trotting by or the cat next door? Traditional fencing is pricey, and furthermore, some dogs dig under a fence or even scale the chain-link type. An alternative solution is invisible fencing. The system consists of a thin antenna … Read more

In the warm, murky waters of the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers of South America lives a sluggish fish with a shocking capability. The electric eel can emit an electrical discharge of 550 volts. In the animal kingdom, fish alone can produce electricity, and of the 250 species that do so Electrophorus electricus is the most … Read more

At about two in the afternoon on July 30, 1975, former head of the Teamsters Jimmy Hoffa left his suburban home in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit, and drove to a nearby restaurant called Machus Red Fox. Some forty-five minutes later, witnesses say, several gentlemen in a maroon Mercury sedan arrived at the restaurant, picked up … Read more

For years, mountains of old newsprint were blithely tossed out along with other household and commercial waste. Today, as we slowly realize our natural resources are less than infinite, we are recycling about a third of the country’s newspapers. In order to reuse paper, one must first return it to the consistency of virgin wood … Read more

A car thief can break into your car all too easily, according to the New York FBI Auto Theft Task Force. It should know. In the city with by far the largest number of vehicle thefts in the nation, the FBI grapples with the large-scale professional syndicates that enjoy most of the profits of this … Read more

An English chemist by the name of Joseph Priestley bears the distinction of having invented seltzer water, in itself a popular beverage and the precursor of the ubiquitous soft drink. One day in 1772, Priestley mixed up a solution of baking soda, vinegar, and water, a combination that produced carbon dioxide, which created a fizzing … Read more

Since dogs are believed to be color blind, teaching a canine to cross at a green light sounds like a very difficult task. In fact, guide dogs don’t look at the traffic light at all. They learn to stop at curbs so that their master may listen carefully for traffic before crossing. Training a guide … Read more

In the early decades of the twentieth century many scientists and philosophers speculated upon the nature of our dreams but could not study them scientifically. Researchers could wake up volunteers at different times in the night and ask them whether they had been dreaming and for how long. But the propensity of dreams to vanish … Read more

In the early history of humankind, before the advent of microwave dinners and Food and Drug Administration product labeling requirements, hungry men and women had to work hard to find a nutritious meal. Conceivably, to learn which plants and animals were edible and which were to be avoided, food pioneers scoured the earth like teething … Read more

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has 4,830 members, each with expertise in some branch of the film industry, who nominate their peers for the various Oscars. Cinematographers nominate cinematographers; directors nominate directors; actors nominate actors; and everyone nominates movies for the Best Picture Award. The nomination process begins at the end of … Read more

In the movie business, as in every other industry, profit equals gross revenue minus costs. For movies, the biggest money maker is box office ticket sales. Additional income is derived from video sales and rentals. Other movie markets include cable and free TV, airlines, and shiplines, but in general these ancillary outlets provide only a … Read more

Before putting a painting on the auction block, the auction house responsible for selling it and the consigner (the owner of the painting) decide upon a reserve price. A reserve price is the price below which the owner is unwilling to part with his painting. It is frequently set at about 60 percent of the … Read more

All batteries work by converting chemical energy into electric energy. The difference between primary, or non-rechargeable, and secondary, or rechargeable, batteries lies in the specific chemical reactions each battery type uses to produce an electron flow, which in batteries is electricity. In primary batteries the chemical reactions cannot be reversed, thus a primary battery can … Read more

Cosmopolitan cartoons have long been a trademark of The New Yorker. You can find the cartoonists’ names listed modestly at the end of the magazine’s table of contents under the heading “Drawings.” The term is a holdover from the late 1920s and ’30s, when New Yorker cartoons were sometimes written by one person and drawn … Read more

Legally speaking, in the United States there is no such thing as nonalcoholic beer. According to government definition a nonalcoholic drink is a beverage that contains no alcohol of any sort. The law also maintains that a beverage containing less than 0.5 percent ethanol cannot be called beer. The end result is a semantic issue, … Read more

A telecommunication device for the deaf, or TDD as they are commonly called, allows a conversation to be typed over the phone lines, permitting people with impaired hearing to read incoming messages. The devices, which resemble portable electric typewriters, are equipped with keyboards, light-emitting diode (LED) character displays that show the text electronically, and modems … Read more

Gallstones develop when bile in the gallbladder, a muscular little digestive organ tucked away behind the liver, becomes oversaturated with cholesterol. The gallbladder stores digestive bile from the liver, and too much cholesterol causes the bile to crystallize, a condition that leads to gallstones. Without treatment, gallstones can reach a size of two inches in … Read more

Everybody has a different interpretation of butter flavor,” says Dr. Peter Freund, manager of product applications at Chr. Hansen’s Laboratory, Inc., in Milwaukee. Your interpretation is influenced by the butter you were raised on, the type of dairy cows bred where you grew up, the fodder they ate, and even the amount of time butter … Read more

The most obvious clue to ice ages past is that in some parts of the world, things seem markedly out of place. This is how, in the late eighteenth century, Swiss peasants discovered that there had been ice ages past. Noting that glaciers in the Alps were slowly transporting and depositing rock masses down-valley, they … Read more

Like any other big business, professional baseball is divided between labor and management. Players are labor; they belong to the Major League Baseball Players Association, a trade union. Baseball team owners represent management. The Commissioner of Baseball oversees an organization called Major League Baseball, which acts as the governing body of the professional sport. Basically, … Read more

Headlines sell the New York Post. A good one can boost sales by thirty thousand copies in a single day. At forty cents an issue, that’s $12,000 in additional revenue for Manhattan’s highest street-sale-circulation tabloid. Even more, a well-received “wood”, an idiom dating back to when headlines were carved from blocks of oak, massages the … Read more

As the self ordained Arbiter of canine society, the American Kennel Club maintains standards that would be the envy of the Gilded Age’s Newport set. Of the four hundred and fifty or so dog breeds that exist in the world today, the AKC deigns to recognize only one hundred and thirty. For a breed to … Read more

A remarkable feat of engineering, the Panama Canal covers a distance of fifty-one miles and lifts a ship as high as a nine-story building in order to overcome the high terrain of the Isthmus of Panama. The canal was built to provide a shortcut for ships traveling from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific or … Read more

In 1974, a Soviet ophthalmologist named Svyatoslav Fyodorov developed a surgical procedure that has proved a speedy and sometimes very effective method for correcting nearsightedness. The basic idea is to alter the curve of the cornea, which is the window into the eye, by means of tiny surgical scars. Performed under local anesthesia, the procedure, … Read more

Golf has become something of a national pastime in Japan, claiming more than 12.5 million enthusiasts. They vie for playing time on the land-starved country’s few courses, which offer about as much elbow room as Grand Central Station at rush hour. These Japanese golf courses are unfathomably expensive, membership at Koganei Country Club in Tokyo … Read more