What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tran...
Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool then because the sun was much weaker.’ (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as ‘the Chinese restaurant pr...
We need to understand why in a society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results of engineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn’t percei...
We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals.
We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At
We have a universe. It is a place of most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
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...
We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested3 – probably once belonged to Shake...
Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit
Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the...
To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others.
To get from protoplasmal primordial atomic globule (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner fo...
Though banned in most of the developed world, millions of pounds of destructive CFCs, often made by Western companies, are still legally sold in the third world each year.
This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong.
This is one reason that some experts believe there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist...
They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six
They simply exist, Attenborough adds, testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.
They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as white dielectric material, or what is known more commonly as...
They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare...
They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough – the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off....