Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.
Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty.
If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, mil...
The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to liv...
Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into spa...
In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all ove...
... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.
The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a...
Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don't like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be...
The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall. The crown of a tree is...
We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart
The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughte...
Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.
An expansion of pi to only forty-seven decimal places would be sufficiently precise to inscribe a circle around the visible universe that doesn’t deviate from perfect circularity by more than the dist...
When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved wit...
The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worke...
Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't reme...
The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue.
The boy swelled up, and his skin filled with pockets of blood. In some places, the skin almost separated from the underlying tissue. This happened during the last phase, while he was on the respirator...