Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed,
Does anyone really need 50 percent more of plenty? The
Despite the ambiguities I have just confessed to, most of me wants very badly not to die just yet, and I am sure the majority of writers and scientists working in this area agree.
DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world,
Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of that year, according to a report written in A...
Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode.
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...
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,...
By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist.
But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where this thought most recently occurred to me was in a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore, where I...
But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, des...
Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you...
As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?
Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister She sells seashells on the seashore.)
Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, You k...
Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them.
Among skilled craftsmen—a category that included John Shakespeare—some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.
Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago.
85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of wor...
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything – It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked.