We should have a definitive total for insects in a little over fifteen thousand years.
Was headed for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is p...
Wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different languag...
Two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn’t show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging le...
Tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.
Tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four
There are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At
Second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: ‘Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States’ (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs...
Replica. Properly, a replica is an exact copy, built to the same scale as the original and using the same materials. To use the word when you might better use ‘model’, ‘miniature’, ‘copy’ or ‘reproduc...
Plan ahead. ‘[The] keys to success are to plan ahead, to choose manageable recipes and to cook in batches’ (The New York Times). Always tautological. Would you plan behind?
Pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. Our
Paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue.
Nemesis. ‘Instead, the unions directed their wrath toward another nemesis, the European Community’s Executive Commission …’ (Time magazine). A nemesis (from Nemesis, the Greek goddess of vengeance) is...
Meat was any food (the sense is preserved in meat and drink and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).
Headed instead across the field to the Magna Carta memorial, a little open-air rotunda erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association and memorable today as the only decent thing ever done by lawyers...
He was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a ‘degree bordering on disease’19. Any human conta...
Hadrons—a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force.
Future. As an adjective, the word is often used unnecessarily: ‘He refused to say what his future plans were’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘The parties are prepared to say little about how they see their future...
Clearly no thinking presence behind any of the actions of the cells. It all just happens, smoothly and repeatedly and so reliably
Camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning to blow smoke up someone’s nose, a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French),