An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year.
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, lea...
Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakes...
All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn’t so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very...
All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers—indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the p...
About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the ma...
About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it—99.9 percent of the mass of th...
A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altog...
A mesma ignorância predominou em relação a muitas criaturas maiores, inclusive um dos mais importantes e menos compreendidos de todos os animais que por vezes se encontram nas casas modernas: o morceg...
A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in th...
A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man...
3.18-million-year-old australopithecine found at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson. Formally known as A.L.
If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's...
The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some uncharacteristic indecisiveness on Davy’s part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For some reas...
Not incidentally, lead’s symbol is Pb, for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.) The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the
Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities),
For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like 49 cents or 99 cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, obviatin...
The slight evolutionary change that pushed man’s larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.
Successfully. ‘Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide’ (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had n...
Revert back is commonly seen and always redundant: ‘If no other claimant can be found, the right to the money will revert back to her’ (Daily Telegraph). Delete back.