Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3
Many fishermen fin sharks—that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die.
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,...
Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland.
It wasn’t until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from pre-existing cells.
It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.
It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised...
Isn’t it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and s...
In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.
In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.
I really do think Britain had attained something approaching perfection just around the time of my arrival. It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from cri...
I longed for artificial bacon bits, melted cheese in a shade of yellow unknown to nature, and creamy chocolate fillings, sometimes all in the same product. I wanted food that squirts when you bite int...
For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look...
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.
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...
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
While—for a couple of minutes—it’s actually
To nonlocals
Shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally
Litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, a species we are happy to regard...