For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created...
For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet,
For scientific convenience, the atmosphere is divided into four unequal layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere (now often called the thermosphere).
For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were,...
From almost nothing, France in four years built up an aircraft industry that employed nearly 200,000 people and produced some 70,000 planes. Britain built 55,000 planes, Germany 48,000, and Italy 20,0...
Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always...
Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it—not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.
Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.
HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess...
He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would co...
He was taken to St. Lawrence Hospital and died the next day. He never regained consciousness.
Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s memoir of 1925.
His colleague Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons16, as in Dolly, but was over-ruled. Instead they became known as quarks.
History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that ‘once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38’. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English...
How fast a man’s beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).
How stupid of me not to have thought of it! T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has been echoed ever since. Interestingly,
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obse...
I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one’s poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expen...
I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.
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