Miscellaneous
Endeavour finally launches
After many delays and malfunctions, the space shuttle Endeavour was launched early this morning to a large crowd at Cape Canaveral. “The mission was delayed six times since its first scheduled target date, last July.”1 If you haven’t been keeping track, budgetary cuts and a poor economy had practically shelved the entire NASA program, and [...]
New meaning to a “fresh set of eyes”
The next time you need a fresh set of eyes to look at something, you might not even need another person present. In a remarkable experiment, scientists used embryonic stem cells from mice to create a portion of an eye (called the “optic cup”).1 That’s right, a simple eye has grown from stem cells carefully [...]
Conflicting population stories
In that news slideshow which can be constantly found on Yahoo!’s homepage, there were two conflicting stories about desperate population shifts side by side today, making for an interesting Dinner Topic. If you are in the camp that believes our world can’t sustain itself as we grow, then you’ll enjoy the story about our planet [...]
Fire Engine or Fire Truck?
You hear them used interchangeably all the time: fire truck and fire engine. This is one Dinner Topic my kids taught me. After a trip to the fire station, I learned that there are specific differences between a fire truck and a fire engine and that they are completely separate vehicles. A fire truck is [...]
New meaning to four weddings and a funeral
The story is weeks old and isn’t the typical kind of post you’d find here, but I found it too interesting not to pass on. If nothing else, it makes for great dinner conversation which is the main point of this site. USA Today ran a story a couple weeks ago about the slow increase [...]
New Year’s Resolution #3: Eat like a Neanderthal
Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions, and a common one to make the Top 10 list is losing weight. By now, you’ve probably become familiar with diets like the South Beach Diet, Nutrisystem, and Atkins…but what about the Paleo Diet? The Paleolithic Diet (a.k.a. Paleo, Caveman, Primal, NeanderThin) has made a resurgence since the [...]
Bamboo bicycles?
They’re making a comeback! Bamboo bicycle manufacturing dates back to the late 1800′s, where the first patented bamboo bicycle was displayed at the London Stanley Show in 1894. 1 Bamboo bikes may not be the hottest topic at the water cooler at the moment, but with the ‘green’ attributes of bamboo, bicycle frames made of [...]
What is Boxing Day?
How soon you forget: Dinner Topics covered Boxing Day last year, but since the networks refuse to run new programming this week, DT will provide this “rerun” for you as well. The original post can be found here, but the details are below as well. The exact reason for the term “Boxing Day” is unclear, [...]
