The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and no...
The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That
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....
Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.
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...
Stairs incorporate three pieces of geometry: rise, going, and pitch. The rise is the height between steps, the going is the step itself (technically, the distance between the leading edges, or nosings...
Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and norther...
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
Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascina...
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...
Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.
Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.
Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on...
Più che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo così bravo a nascondere ciò che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualco...
Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: And afterwards I did send for a...
On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later.Instinctively Katz put...
Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.
Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code. Taxonomy