Popular Essays

Here are short essays covering interesting facts, eschewing math above the level of arithmetic.  The page will be populated shortly with additional topics.

Why are plants green?

My answer melds the physics and chemistry of light-driven chemical reactions - photosynthesis - with evolutionary biology and some properties ...

You make more heat than the Sun

Say what?  The sun's temperature is surely very much higher than our temperature - in fact, in absolute units, it ...

Are you a big corn chip?

How much corn, or maize, do you eat?  You can probably count up the number of ears of corn on ...

How do we know how far away the Sun is?

We need a big distance scale to do this, and a good one is the diameter of the earth.  How ...