…a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread.What's this? I asked.It's bread, she replied.But it's in a...
Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf.
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured...
Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin t...
Isn´t it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?
Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia becaus...
Bayes’s theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes’s theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions—or inverse probabilities, as they are someti...
Vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.
For you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has...
Dark matter, which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky,
Centre round or around. ‘Their argument centres around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’ (The Times). Centre indicates a point, and a point cannot encircle anything. Make it ‘centre on’ or ‘r...
Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because...
Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world’s total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately,...
The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course,...
The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a sto...
Television didn’t attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen two inches high by three inches wide—roughly the dimensions o...
Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.
Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase o...