After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian...
A. L. Rowse—who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion—in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians,...
A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.
A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds...
A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn’t get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 de...
1. Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By t...
It occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
I would submit that if you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot.
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything – It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked.
When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and...
Although scientists were in an internationally co-operative mood, nations weren’t.)
Мода часто кажется чем-то совершенно непонятным. Если рассмотреть большинство исторических периодов, может показаться, что целью моды было сделать внешность как можно более смешной; чем неудобней, тем...
When a person says to you, How do you do? he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, How do I do what? The complexities of the English language are
We should have a definitive total for insects in a little over fifteen thousand years.
Unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a vo...
Obligatory
No small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, p...
Loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
Isotopes and a type of phosphate called apatite, which together provide strong evidence that the rock once contained colonies of living things.
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...