Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.
Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn’t have the wherewithal to pay a surgeo...
DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world,
Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.
Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If you follow the mitochondrial DNA backwards, it will take you to a certain place – to an Ursula or Tara or whatever. But if y...
Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If
Dogs don't like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn't act as if it thought I was about to take its Alpo. Dog...
Don't make the extremely foolish mistake of thinking that winning is everything. If there is one person that I would really like to smack, it is the person who said, Winning is not the main thing. It'...
Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the Eng...
E Pluribus Unum, One from Many, was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)
Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not...
Einstein couldn’t bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were for ever unknowable.
Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different—often very different—ways of shaping particular letters.
English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side).
English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist [The Mirac...
Estrada calls the desire to visit an unchanged Cuba patronizing, as if the island is a museum, not a nation entitled to a future.
Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be--I weep to say it--Elizabeth I.
Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn’t bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest...
Farther west, Michigan’s seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century.
Showing 941 to 960 of 1557 results