They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six
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...
They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as white dielectric material, or what is known more commonly as...
They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare...
These neighborhoods went on for miles—just street after foot-wearying street of trophy homes, with big gates beside broad drives, patios adorned with Grecian urns on ornate plinths, and garages for fl...
There is something about the pace and scale of British life - an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking - that makes life strangely agreeable. T...
There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too...
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.
There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously. The othe...
There are loads of people like us. We are all here because we like it here or are married to Britons or both. If I may say so, you are a little more cosmopolitan, possibly even a little more dynamic a...
The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: My dear...
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 transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A
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...
The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn’t tell us how far away they are to begin with.
The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is eno...
The process became known as sea-floor spreading. When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction.