The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignor...
The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you.
The perils of aviation in the period are neatly encapsulated in the experience of Harold C. Brinsmead, the head of Australia’s Civil Aviation Department in the first days of commercial aviation. In 19...
The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.
The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. St...
The one thing he didn’t do was discover the comet that bears his name.
The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott’s The Potting-Shed Papers.
The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-...
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.
The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.
The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued...
The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper...
The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn’t afford it. In the...
THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY PICTURES ARE FLASHED BY WIRE AND RADIO SYNCHRONIZING WITH SPEAKER’S VOICE COMMERCIAL USE IN DOUBT BUT AT&T HEAD SEES A NEW STEP IN CONQUEST OF NATURE AFTER YEARS OF RESEARCH
Suddenly we were in Hawaii—tropical mountains running down to sparkling seas, sweeping bays, flawless beaches guarded by listing palms, little green and rocky islands standing off the headlands. From...
Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!
Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well...
Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfort...
Rat bites are almost certainly under reported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United State...
People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder theywork, the more labo...