It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth’s tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confr...
It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare’s plays are full of ocean metaphors (take arms against a sea of troubles, an ocean of salt tears, wild sea of my conscience) and that every one of his...
It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world...
It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it c...
It seemed such an extraordinary notion—that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the f...
It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a 50-t...
It turned out that under the western United States there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was...
It was Broom’s habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractab...
It was accepted wisdom almost everywhere in the nineteenth century that the poor were poor because they were born to be. Although a few impoverished people might generously be described as undeserving...
It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinati...
It’s a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind...
John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and...
Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly...
Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O’Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
My favourite animal disappearance story, however, harks back to a somewhat earlier age. It concerns a nineteenth-century naturalist named Gerard Krefft, who in 1857 caught two very rare pig-footed ban...
My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a...
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the time American consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then almost instantly wished he hadn’t, for the book was universally regarded by reviewers as preposterous ho...
Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton
Showing 1041 to 1060 of 1557 results