Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycle...
Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New...
Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly ta...
Bow was originally billed as the Brooklyn Bonfire, then as the Hottest Jazz Baby in Films, but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the It Girl. It was first a two-part article and then a...
Bobcats—admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain lions—are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you would never guess their existence. Many
At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by...
At Wauchope there’s a Big Bull, he added. I raised my eyebrows in a way that said, Oh, yes? He nodded fondly. Its testicles swing in the breeze. It has testicles? I said, impressed. I’ll say. If they...
As a known entity, DNA has been around longer than you might think. It was discovered as far back as 1869 by Johann Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss scientist working at the University of Tübingen in Germa...
As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for e...
As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time...
As Davies puts it, If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?
And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent. In it the author describes the sc...
And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world’s top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another...
America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn’t always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity....
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...
At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes—oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.