MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).
Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist who became the most outspoken advocate of the idea that much of Earth had once been covered in ice, but alienated many in the process.
Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.
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. 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...
It was one of those buildings that you don't so much as look at as bathe in.
In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.
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.
His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart t...
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....
If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a complet...
Were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A secon...
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight, he would say. Isaw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of licenseplates in the state, what was the chanc...
We live in a world that doesn't altogether seem to want us here.
These are all just informed guesses.
There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten.
Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it.
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.