To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.
This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all.
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.
Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods — giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, an...
The ill-fated dodo. Slow, flightless and dangerously trusting, the dodo was driven to extinction just seventy years after first being spotted by European sailors on its island home of Mauritius.
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, o...
The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the ti...
The English team’s revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any d...
That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places - on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubbl...
That is the great thing about being a foreigner—that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth.
Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on...
Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long she...
Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion w...
Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as between bath and bathe and as with the s in house becoming a z in houses. And sometimes, to the eternal confusion of non-English speakers, these things happened...
Some of the changes since Shakespeare’s time are obvious. Thee and thou had already begun a long decline (though they still exist in some dialects of northern England). Originally thou was to you as i...
So it’s not the sight of stromatolites that makes them exciting. It’s the idea of them – and in this respect they are peerless. Well, imagine it. You are looking at living rocks – quietly functioning...
So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember...
So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War....
Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.
Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our under...