Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coc...
At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians tha...
At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson, by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on.
At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn’t even actually known that she was a female.
Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
As time has shown, it wasn’t nearly so simple. Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953—and
As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.
As the economist Herman Daly once put it: The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.
As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang...
As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that h...
As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so every...
As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer. All
Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had be...
Anyway, we did it, Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression.Hiked Maine, I mean.I looked at him. Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin.He dismissed this as a petty quibble....
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, painted here by his friend Jan Vermeer, was a self-taught instrument maker.
Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble’s breakthroughs possible.
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza
And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else mu...
And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice.