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,
The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: ‘I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God....
The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.
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 hard and unexpected part is the realization not just that my son is not here but that the boy he was is gone forever. I would give anything to have them both back. But of course that cannot be. Li...
The fact that ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science are useful and meaningful terms seduces us sometimes into thinking that they are real, absolute and distinct categories.
The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes,
The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold i...
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.
That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The
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...
Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year.
She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury...
La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggì destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruot...
Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.
It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.