Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most...
One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept, he says, is that we are not the culmination of anything.
One of Milton’s poems contains the well-known line Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.
On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.
Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of geneti...
MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).
Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding,...
Like all limestones, the famous White Cliffs of Dover, on England’s south coast, are made from numberless trillions of tiny marine organisms compressed over time into stone, and exist now as huge rese...
Life, in short, just wants to be.
Life, in short, just wants to be. But—and here’s an interesting point—for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambition...
Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous.
It was one of those buildings that you don't so much as look at as bathe in.
In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres—the height of a twenty-storey building—and every coastal city in the world would be inundated.
I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and m...
Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings—bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano—to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a do...
Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again....
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.