Para que estés ahora aquí, tuvieron que agruparse de algún modo, de una forma compleja y extrañamente servicial, trillones de átomos errantes. Es una disposición tan especializada y tan particular que...
It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be notic...
I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
Catachresis,
When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—w...
We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespear...
They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development. But
The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.
The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.
Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for chalk) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J. J. d’Omalius d’Hal...
One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers place...
Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the fir...
Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws.
In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.
I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right i...
A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the Unit...
I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and t...
Întrebarea care se naşte în mod firesc este următoarea: ce s-ar întâmpla dacă ar exploda o stea prin apropiere? Cel mai apropiat vecin stelar al nostru, după cum am văzut, este Alpha Centauri, la 4,3...
The basement. Katz