A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at...
A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, ope...
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...
Albert Snyder’s mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secre...
All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.
Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they r...
Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts. Martin
Among skilled craftsmen—a category that included John Shakespeare—some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.
Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them.
Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, You k...
Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan and nearly all the nations of Europe.
An upright hominid could see better, but could also be seen better. Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is strong...
And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains...
As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer. All
As a rough rule, I would suggest that a company’s orthographic eccentricities should be noted, possibly even observed, but never overindulged. Just because a company chooses to put a backward letter i...
As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so every...
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.
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 the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang...
As the economist Herman Daly once put it: The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.
Showing 901 to 920 of 1557 results