I recently had a useless discussion with someone who was unwilling to either wear a mask or vaccinate and took the position: “If the vaccines work why the fear, and if they do not work why take the risk of getting them?” His refusal to wear a mask was based on his trust in his immune system “I’m healthy and if you wear a mask you are living in fear and halfway dead already.

It has been known for a long time that wombats produce cubical poo. Zoologist Eric Guiler noted it in 1960, but I think it is a safe bet that Tasmanian inhabitants knew a long time before that. Finally scientists have figured out how they do it. Historically scientists have said “that’s weird” but never looked into how a round tube could create cubes. As so often happens in science, the discovery of “how” was accidental.

For quite a while now, the earth’s rotation has been slowing just slightly. This year, it sped up. July 19 last year was the shortest day ever was recorded — it was 1.4602 milliseconds shorter than the standard. No one is sure why. If you think of an ice skater, they spin faster if they pull in their arms to preserve angular momentum. The earth doesn’t have arms, but in theory the same thing could happen if global warming means enough water in the mountains has melted down to the sea or if heavy material in the mantle has subsided towards the core.

There is general agreement that the word “scientist” was coined by William Whewell (May 24, 1794 - March 6, 1866), a carpenter’s son who won a scholarship to Trinity College and eventually became the Master of Trinity College. He was a polymath and John Herschel described him as “… a more wonderful variety and amount of knowledge in almost every department of human inquiry was perhaps never in the same interval of time accumulated by any man.

So we know that life has existed on Earth for billions of years (think bacteria, not dinosaurs) but we also know that bacterial life existed for 1.5 billion years before there was free oxygen present. Life as we generally know it requires oxygen serve as a vehicle for electrons gained and lost through various metabolic processes. How did it all work pre-oxygen? There have been various theories posited, including life processes using hydrogen or sulfur or iron.