It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay...
Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In
Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600...
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, wa...
Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.
What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plu...
It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feel...
Today’s mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to pe...
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....
London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places.
The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don’t actually know what is in our own solar system. Now,
There are many other tree museums in the world – including the fine United States National Arboretum in Washington, DC
It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a...
He also engaged in many charitable works, notably the building of one of the world’s largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere)
When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work,...
For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.
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