The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water—we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it—but curiously we cannot tolerate th...
Before the shift house was pronounced hoose (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced mood, and home rhymed with gloom, which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (Th...
Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought. I
Yugoslavian hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.
By the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants—potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes,...
We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested3 – probably once belonged to Shake...
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...
Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the...
If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on.
Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook),
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.
For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fis...
For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical
Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going wit...
I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly...
The telephone, he wrote, may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried...
It is entirely possible that some terrestrial microbes are the products of different biogenesis events, in effect ‘alien organisms’, constituting a type of shadow biosphere
I had a hangover you could sell to science,
The universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed.
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