Tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius, one cubic centimetre of ai...
Since for forty years every study of lead’s effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives. In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology17...
Pyrrhic victory is not, as is sometimes thought, a hollow triumph. It is one won at a huge cost to the victor.
Published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics. Today
Polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.
Period of time. A curiously irresistible expression for many writers, as here: ‘Marcos claimed that the seizures could be expected to continue for a considerable period of time’ (Sunday Times). Make i...
Noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much...
Nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms
Lifelong. ‘Jesse Bishop was a lifelong drug addict who had spent 20 of his 46 years in prison’ (Guardian). You might be a lifelong resident of New York or a lifelong church-goer or, at a stretch, a li...
If you make monomers wet they don’t turn into polymers—except when creating life on the Earth.
If we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.
Hostile
Growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: ‘It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring’ (Observer); ‘… with the economy moving into a negative growth...
Even a modest dilution of the ocean’s salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance—could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The
Disturb, perturb. They can often be used interchangeably, but generally the first is better applied to physical agitation, the second to mental agitation.
Coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or—more familiarly...
A Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovičić was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary be...
With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them
Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction of the...
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...