The universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed.
The state of New York had just one important advantage—an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that...
The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so...
The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was , written in 1841 and now remembered for the line God'...
The people are immensely likable— cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous,...
The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.
The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.
The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn’t actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in...
The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hu...
The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales’ stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you...
The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a...
The World Wide Web is a CERN offshoot. It was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989. 2
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.
The Appalachians are the home of one of the world’s great hardwood forests
The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail—the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer—but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends....
The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.
The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment readin...
Thank you, I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel b...
Steller’s sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, wi...
Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon’s craters were indeed formed by impacts—in itself quite a radical notion for the time—but