Tagged: NPR Diversions

This tweet from the National Weather Service caught our attention, today:

"More than 80% of lightning victims are male. Be a force of nature by knowing your risk, taking action and being an example"

Eighty percent seemed to us pretty significant, so we turned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and asked, "Why?"

Whether or not you realize it, you see Dan Winters' photos all the time: Brad Pitt on the cover of Wired magazine, Elijah Wood on Esquire, etc.

Here's a nightmare come true: a group of Indian villagers were gathered for a festival last month when they were attacked by a swarm of large, biting spiders. They're hairy, have fangs, and apparently latch on when they sink their teeth into their prey.

Calling Peter Parker.

No, the Unabomber won't be attending his 50th class reunion at Harvard this week.

But Ted Kaczynski has updated his former classmates about what he's been up to all these years.

We've all been there: Banging the back of a glass ketchup bottle, begging it to give you a dollop of the good stuff or battling with a plastic bottle coercing it into giving up the last of its contents.

Maybe that will be a thing of the past.

Six MIT researchers say they've solved that problem as part of an entrepreneurship competition. The result is a bottle coated with "LiquiGlide," a non-toxic material so slippery that the ketchup or for that matter mayonnaise just glides out when you turn it over.

A ship sinks. A hundred years pass. What remains? Look down, down to your feet while I tell you this tale.

The sudden national fame for 85-year-old North Dakota newspaper columnist Marilyn Hagerty because she wrote last week that the new Olive Garden restaurant in Grand Forks is "impressive ... welcoming ... [and] is the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating" in the city reinforces two things for this blogger:

1. Almost everyone loves a story about someone who seems to be just so darn nice and who's still going strong at an age when many of us will just be glad to still be around.

Live stream videos at Ustream

By Linda Holmes / NPR

Discovery's series Frozen Planet, the latest BBC co-production in the same series as Planet Earth and Life, premieres on March 18. But they've already found the best promotional tool imaginable.

Penguins.

Photographer Piotr Naskrecki presented a hypothetical: "If someone said, 'We have a dinosaur in Central Africa!' — would you consider that worthy of conservation? If so, why?"

That was his way of putting me in place for asking why anyone would care about a creepy grasshopper in South Africa.