The people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one
The beaver and bear nearly
The atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.
Supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets and, eventually, us. (credit
Shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally
Second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: ‘Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States’ (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs...
Radiocarbon dating works only for objects up to forty thousand or so years old. Curiously,
Personal, personally. When it is necessary to emphasize that a person is acting on his own rather than as a spokesman or that he is addressing people individually rather than collectively, personal an...
Paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue.
Pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand’s Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper’s cat.
One cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
Ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.
Ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a puzzle because continental rocks were often billions of years old...
Nemesis. ‘Instead, the unions directed their wrath toward another nemesis, the European Community’s Executive Commission …’ (Time magazine). A nemesis (from Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance) is...
Meat was any food (the sense is preserved in meat and drink and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).
Journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.
In the words of Carl Sagan.
Get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect. I’m afraid we always used to adopt—let’s say a patronizing attitude toward her, Crick later recalled. Two of these men w...
Further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 – heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorder...
Designed and built the world’s first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.