Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know.
Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
Whatever was on your shopping list—linseed oil, two-inch masonry nails, coal scuttle, small can of Brasso metal polish—Mr. Morley had it. I am sure if you said to him, I need 125 yards of razor wire,...
When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A midd...
When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The...
When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.
When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff t...
When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably oppo...
When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.
Whereas the food debris of the Neanderthals shows a wide variety of animal bones, suggesting that they took whatever they could find, archaeological remnants from Homo sapiens show that they sought ou...
Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence...
Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company),
With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on N...
Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt an...
Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy—the removal of a kidney stone—in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the...
Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical e...
You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life. But I tell you one thing. What’s that? It sure makes you appreciate something like this when you know it could a...
Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too s...
Yucatán in Mexico means What? or What are you saying?—the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The
Activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: ‘The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region’ (Independent). Just make it ‘a week of earthquakes’.
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