On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was de...
Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary.
Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Wester...
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me—and here...
Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And
Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never ‘been a greater botani...
Rat bites are almost certainly underreported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States...
Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exi...
Sheepskin is a marvelously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibers on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboa...
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...
Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.
So you've nearly done it, huh? I said, a trifle inanely but just trying to make conversation. Yes said the girl. She said it slowly, as two syllables, as if it hadn't previously occurred to her. There...
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...
Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.
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...
Sulphuric acid was added to vinegar for extra sharpness, chalk to milk, turpentine to gin. Arsenite of copper was used to make vegetables greener or to make jellies glisten. Lead chromate gave bakery...
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...
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...
The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no—though that was the...
The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As
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