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...
Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton
Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast...
Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term ice age
It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. ...It is the only sport that incor...
Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to...
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 those days, Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors – 350,000 of them a year – which is of...
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.
If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnin...
If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres.
Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their produc...
As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place.He chuckled rather heartily at my nai...
As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.
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...
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...
The Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don’t ask me why).
One third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
In the words of Carl Sagan.