The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignor...
The process became known as sea-floor spreading. When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction.
The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is eno...
The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.
The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.
The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. ‘No thank you,’ I said through a thin smile, ‘I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.
Then much later—about four or five years ago—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness t...
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratifi...
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here no...
We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare—Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585—but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the c...
We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank – micro-finance institution is the formal term – that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea o...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million—much less than three h...
The only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I...
Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight...
To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement.
To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited,
There are two problems with notions of panspermia, as extraterrestrial theories are known.
As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia, where the leading families had a special fondness...
There is something about the pace and scale of British life - an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking - that makes life strangely agreeable. T...
There are some things in life that just have to be faced up to, whether you want to or not.
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