In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a….

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 ea….

Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It's so bad that you think he's going to announce in a minute that it's ….

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle o….

"Croissant": However you choose to pronounce it at home, it is perhaps worth nothing that outside the United States, the closer you can come to sayin….

Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of ….

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the poin….

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off vie….

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes y….

Book tours are really kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much m….

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to….

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hy….

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them..

From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material..

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty mile….

The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus.

Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen..

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed mor….

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it..

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely ext….

I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my ki….