Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be--I weep to say it--Elizabeth I.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not...
Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These
Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun.
But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.
Bradford hat die Rolle seines Lebens darin gefunden, jeden anderen Ort auf diesem Planeten im Vergleich besser abschneiden zu lassen, und es spielt sie sehr gut.
Bill Tilden was the greatest—and most improbably great—tennis player of the age.
Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coc...
As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that h...
As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years5.
Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had be...
Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not could have had absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children.
And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else mu...
And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to g...
Although the Principia has been called ‘one of the most inaccessible books ever written’7 (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn’t be pestered by mathematical ‘smatterers’, as he ca...
All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.
All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory.
Ah, he said in a tone of genial wisdom, a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for. A chancellor is nominally the head of a universi...