More students of English in China than there are people in the United States.
Mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen. Since c2 (the speed of light times itself) is a truly enormou...
Like physics before it, Woese wrote, has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation. In
His facetious grace in writing, and much else.
Explanations, like dreams, only make sense while they’re happening.
Exception proves the rule, the. A widely misunderstood expression. As a moment’s thought should confirm, it isn’t possible for an exception to confirm a rule – but then that isn’t the sense that was o...
Different. Often used unnecessarily. ‘He plays milkmaid to more than 50 different species of poisonous snake’ (Observer); ‘The phenomenally successful Rubik Cube, which has 43,252,002,274,489,856,000...
Arachibutyrophobia.
Aposiopesis.
Ancient light in
Among them Pleistocene (most recent), Pliocene (more recent), Miocene (moderately recent) and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene (but a little recent).
Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillow-case will make a difference... Indeed, if your pillow is six y...
Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too s...
Years ago, when my wife and I were dating, she took me on a day trip to the seaside at Brighton. It was my first exposure to the British at play in a marine environment. It was a fairly warm day--I re...
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. I
Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.
When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.
When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex—up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can’t find a female, he will happily—or at least willingly—find relief in a m...
When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The...
When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically...