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Entomologically speaking...... this Challenge shouldn't be that difficult. But as we've seen, sometimes these things can spiral out of control and present real challenges. This summer has been a series of insect encounters. Luckily, few of them have b...

Once again, the reality is more complex... ... than I thought. If you're like me, you thought that there might be as many as 24 time zones. You probably knew that China was all one giant time zone, and that Newfoundland (Canada) was a bit odd. Tim...

As you've probably noticed, once you've spent some time on a topic--like our Search Challenges--you start to notice these things in your daily life. Comet tales: I know a lot of you have been watching the saga of Rosetta / Philae and the story of Com...

Time zones... ... are a 19th century invention, really. TIME has always been around, of course, and for the largest part of human history, time was defined by whenever noon happened locally. That's easy to figure out, but as tech advanced, we suddenl...

Three different building shapes... How hard can it be to give names to these? Here's what I did to figure these out... 1. What is this kind of building called? Why does it have this distinctive shape? Building Type A: It's located at 47.5529417,-12...

I have to admit... ... that figuring out Building Type A was a little tricky. It took me about 90 minutes of searching before I found the path that worked. But I WILL tell you that between the post and the comments, you have all the information you n...

As you know, my MOOC ("Massive Open Online Course") called PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com has been fairly successful. We opened it a little over two years ago, and it's had a bit more than 600,000 students go through the materials. I'm happy to say tha...

I have to admit that I'm fascinated... ... by old industrial buildings. Maybe it's a side-effect of having grown up in Los Angeles, where there were many older buildings from the industries that abounded in south-central LA. I saw all of these buildi...

This kind of question comes up all the time... HOW do you find official information sources, especially for events happening outside of your normal information channels? The Challenge for this week was pretty easy to state--the Challenge is all about ...

The Greeks voted no... ... on the July 5, 2015 referendum about whether to accept (or reject) the austerity conditions for continued fiscal support from EU to Greece. This led Regular Reader Miguel to pose the following question as this week's Challen...

This is our mission... To figure out the story lurking behind the star window at the main entrance to the old Spanish Mission at Carmel. Here's a picture to get you started... I was wondering about that prominent star-shaped window over the arched do...

Sometime you wonder... What's the story behind this beautiful thing? I was recently down in Carmel, visiting the old Spanish Mission there. It really is a beautiful place--the courtyard is full of flowers and thousands of hummingbirds. It's the kind ...

This was fun, but then again, sharks are always interesting... Here's that picture again... The Challenges are: 1. What kind of shark is right in front of me? Am I crazy? Should I be worried about this apex predator? By the way, please don't tell m...

I hope you saw the recent announcement about the newest Streetview images. A few crazy people climbed El Capitan... WITH all of the gear for taking Photospheres (Google's 360 spherical zoomable/pannable images). Here's the YouTube announcement: I tho...

Once in a while I go diving... ... being a curious sort of fellow, I sometimes find fairly remarkable things. And being a SearchResearcher, I wonder about these things I find. Not long ago a friend of mine took this photo of me on a dive, hanging ont...