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Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.
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Bill Bryson |
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stromatolites--a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things.
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Bill Bryson |
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As time has shown, it wasn't nearly so simple. Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953--and
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Bill Bryson |
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The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.
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Bill Bryson |
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For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability--like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet,
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Bill Bryson |
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As Davies puts it, "If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?"
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Bill Bryson |
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if you make monomers wet they don't turn into polymers--except when creating life on the Earth.
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Bill Bryson |
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There are two problems with notions of panspermia, as extraterrestrial theories are known.
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Bill Bryson |
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When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.
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Bill Bryson |
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a little change in the Earth's dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining.
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Bill Bryson |
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Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.
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Bill Bryson |
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We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At
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Bill Bryson |
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ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.
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Bill Bryson |
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can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean--but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps
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Bill Bryson |
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the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In"
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Bill Bryson |
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Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites--almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.
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Bill Bryson |
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Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan and nearly all the nations of Europe.
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Bill Bryson |
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galaxies of the universe are racing away from us, but that they are doing so at a rate that is accelerating.
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Bill Bryson |
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Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week.
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Bill Bryson |
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They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six
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Bill Bryson |
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Like all limestones, the famous White Cliffs of Dover, on England's south coast, are made from numberless trillions of tiny marine organisms compressed over time into stone, and exist now as huge reservoirs of carbon. (credit 17.13)
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Bill Bryson |
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The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water--we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it--but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input.
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Bill Bryson |
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In the winter of 18077, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemasons Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club to be called the Geological Society. The idea was to meet once a month to swap geological notions over a glass or two of Madeira and a convivial dinner. The price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty 15 shillings to discourage those whose qualifications were merely cerebral. It soon ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Nearly 90 per cent of the planet's ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland.
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Bill Bryson |
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Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not could have had absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children.
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Bill Bryson |
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John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution--the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money-lending, both highly illegal activities.
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Bill Bryson |
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supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets and, eventually, us. (credit
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Bill Bryson |
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Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead--all at least mildly toxic, sometimes very much more so--for pale skin was a sign of supreme loveliness. (Which makes the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets an exotic being in the extreme.)"
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records.
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Bill Bryson |
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Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy's house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare's, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot.
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Bill Bryson |
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By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.
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Bill Bryson |
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What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays--all of them but one or two--thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death--the justly revered First Folio.
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Bill Bryson |
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The body is in constant danger of being depleted by a greedy brain, but cannot afford to let the brain go hungry as that would rapidly lead to death.
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Bill Bryson |
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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,"
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Bill Bryson |
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MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects--really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).
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Bill Bryson |
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vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.
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Bill Bryson |
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The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine,
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Bill Bryson |
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person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are"
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Bill Bryson |
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The marriage license itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare's name is rendered as "Shagspere"--the first of many arrestingly variable renderings."
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Bill Bryson |
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Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.
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Bill Bryson |
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We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare--Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585--but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple's relationship--whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting.
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Bill Bryson |
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John Prescott, during the last Labour government, had a mad plan, called the Pathfinder Initiative, to tear down 400,000 homes, mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, in the north of England. Prescott claimed, on no evidence, that house prices there were too low because of an oversupply of stock. Mercifully, Prescott didn't have the brains or focus to complete the plan, but he still managed to spend PS2.2 billion of public money an..
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Bill Bryson |
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Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction of the countryside. A high-speed rail line offers nothing in the way of charm. It is a motorway for trains. It would create a permanent very noisy, hyper-visible scar across a great deal of classic British countryside, and disrupt and make miserable ..
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Bill Bryson |