A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.
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...
A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence.
22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.
There are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
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...
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.
Past. Often a space-waster, as in this example: ‘She has been a teacher at the school for the past 20 years’ (Independent). In this sentence, and in countless others like it, ‘the past’ could be delet...
Loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
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 is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell disappointed even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level. Trawling
Contagious, infectious. Diseases spread by contact are contagious. Those spread by air and water are infectious. Used figuratively (‘contagious laughter’, ‘infectious enthusiasm’), either is all right...