To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s prob...
To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue An important city in Czechoslovakia instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. A seed you put in the garage is caraway, while HIJKLMNO is...
This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, ‘That’s £4.20, love,’ or whatever, they suddenly loo...
This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world’s other species of animals abruptly vanish from the foss...
Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land ma...
Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate the non-intuitive nature...
They were all women’s magazines, but they weren’t like the magazines my mother and sister read. The articles in my mother’s and sister’s magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. The...
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.
There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.
There are two problems with notions of panspermia, as extraterrestrial theories are known.
There are some things in life that just have to be faced up to, whether you want to or not.
The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick’s husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen...
The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.
The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. ‘No thank you,’ I said through a thin smile, ‘I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.
The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in...
The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.
The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A
The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying i...
The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the othe...