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If dogs got their paws on the channel selector, what programs would they watch?
When well-known magician and skeptic James "Amazing" Randi got wind of a claim that a poodle named Terr was a big TV watcher, he decided to investigate. First he exposed the dog to neutral non-canine videos, then to ones where Lassie came in after the initial three minutes or so. As Randi observed, Terr lost interest quickly when people were depicted, but when Lassie appeared Terr immediately perked up and began barking. "Terr would never bite at the image of a person, but only the dog," reported fellow-skeptic Al Seckel in "Laser" magazine. "Terr would also follow the dog's image across the screen. Terr was able to distinguish a running Lassie when the image was only an inch across. And Terr went positively berserk when a cat appeared on the screen!" Terr, it turned out, wasn't fond of cartoons but loved nature shows, especially those featuring fellow four-leggers, and would watch for up to an hour. Said an amused Randi: "I wouldn't have believed it! This dog actually watches TV!"

Imagine you stumbled into a time warp and back onto a Mesozoic plain. Could you outrun a dinosaur?
Answer: By analyzing footprint remains and estimated weights of large dinos, zoologist R. McNeill Alexander, in his book "Animals," concludes that a 37-ton brontosaur may well have been about as athletic as an elephant. Elephants can't gallop or jump but can run at least 10 mph, and probably more. The much lighter horned-dinosaur Triceratops, at 7 tons, may have been able to gallop, but probably not as fast as a buffalo, speculates Alexander. A really fast human can run at about 27 mph very briefly, 22 mph averaged over a 100 meter race. But most of us run a lot slower than this, so fleeing a pursuing dinosaur would have been an iffy proposition, depending on one's physical condition, the type of 'saur and terrain, and whether the beast recently had lunch.

Ever had a taste for regurgitated bee spit?
You have if you like honey. To make a pound of it requires some 60,000 nectar loads, or 4 million flower visits by individual bees, totaling 100,000 miles or more, says May Berenbaum in "Bugs in the System." Most nectars are 90 percent water, honeys less than 20 percent. To concentrate honey from nectar, worker bees repeatedly eat and regurgitate it onto their tongues, hundreds of times, aerating it and drying it out, while other bees fan their wings up to 26,000 times a minute to keep air circulating in the hive to facilitate the curing.

Does sexual orgasm for a woman feel like sexual orgasm for a man?
A woman can't get inside a man's skin, and vice versa, so how could anybody ever answer this? Here's one way: Have a sampling of men and women write a detailed description of the experience (with dead giveaway references deleted), then ask a panel of experts to categorize the descriptions by sex. According to E. B. Vance and N. N. Wagner in the "Archives of Sexual Behavior, 5," the experts will be impotent to do so any more reliably than chance guessing.

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