A sign by the highway said DON’T LITTER, KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. ‘OK, I the will,’ I replied cheerfully
A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the sculptor admitted that he...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does do is take, and give, a positive sati...
99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
3.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was much closer, volcanic eruptions commonplace (because of the thinness of the crust), meteor impacts routine and the air thick with acidic vapours. Remarkably, i...
His house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England),
Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren’t.)
When authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the po...
Well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.
Was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included
Untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?
The mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—under water.
The favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again)
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.
The Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English—Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into t...
Tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius, one cubic centimetre of ai...
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
Since for forty years every study of lead’s effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives. In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology17...
Pyrrhic victory is not, as is sometimes thought, a hollow triumph. It is one won at a huge cost to the victor.
Published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn’t believe in plate tectonics. Today