Needless to say is a harmless enough expression, but it often draws attention to the fact that you really didn’t need to say it.
Catachresis,
Affect, effect. As a verb, affect means to influence (‘Smoking may affect your health’) or to adopt a pose or manner (‘He affected ignorance’). Effect as a verb means to accomplish (‘The prisoners eff...
Worse still, it isn’t actually necessary to look to space for petrifying danger. As we are about to see, Earth can provide plenty of danger of its own.
The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t keep us steady and we will have to come up with some ot...
People want everything. That’s their problem.
No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case o...
Lord Kelvin, who throughout his career produced revolutionary scientific theories and was arguably the first scientist to become wealthy by patenting his work. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he was...
If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms...
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As...
From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatte...
As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen...
And it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the aut...
You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.
And let's face it, the French Army couldn't beat a girls hockey team
[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of...
Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.
We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall...
We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch.