A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
118 Headlines, names and quotes by pages 023 ... 594 of the book
copy-typed with illustrastions and links
by Hans A Loeffler March 23, 2008

the StoneHarpMan bookshelf


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Page 023 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
We mustn't swoon over every extraordinary number that comes before us, but it is perhaps worth latching onto one from time to time just to be reminded of their ungraspable and amazing breadth.

Ok, lets finish up the Elizabeth Murray train of thought I started Wednesday, about the extraordinary number of influences that went into producing her pictures.

Page 046 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The term supernova was coined in the 1930s by a memorably odd astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky - a fitness fanatic, who would often drop to the floor of the Caltech dining hall and do one-armed push-ups to demonstrate his virility.

Fritz Zwicky is not a household name in science today. He was not a super star of the likes of Einstein, Hubble or Oppenheimer. Yet his influence was significant — far more so, I believe, than his present-day lack of fame would suggest. He was one of the broadest and most inventive scientists of his time, and combined theoretical studies with eminently practical, humanitarian activities. Zwicky was born in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1898, the son of a Swiss merchant. At the age of 6 he was sent to his father's ancestral district in Switzerland, Glarus, for schooling. Although expected to take up a career in commerce, Fritz' early bent for science apparently persuaded his father to allow him to study engineering instead. In 1914 he moved to Zürich where he subsequently enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. There he switched to mathematics and experimental physics, wrote his examination essay for no one less than Herman Weyl, and in 1922 took his doctorate with a dissertation on ionic crystals. Three years later he moved to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena to work with, among others, the great experimental physicist Robert Millikan.

Page 049 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Looking for a supernova a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.

A violent and chaotic-looking mass of gas and dust is seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image of a nearby supernova remnant. Denoted N 63A, the object is the remains of a massive star that exploded, spewing its gaseous layers out into an already turbulent region. The supernova remnant is part of a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), an irregular galaxy 160,000 light-years from our own Milky Way galaxy and visible from the southern hemisphere. Supernova remnants have long been thought to set off episodes of star formation when their expanding shock encounters nearby gas. The Hubble images show that N 63A is still young, and its ruthless shocks are destroying the ambient gas clouds, rather than coercing them to collapse and form stars.

Page 057 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Fred Hoyle suggested at one point that humans evolved with the nostrils underneath as a way of keeping cosmic pathogens from allying into them.

Sir Fred Hoyle, a world-renowned astronomer, is acknowledged to be one of the most creative scientists of the 20th century. He has held the position of Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, and was also the founder of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge. He is currently an Honorary Fellow of both Emmanuel College and St. John's College Cambridge and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University of Wales. He is best known for his seminal contributions to the theory of the structure of stars and on the origin of the chemical elements in stars. He is a joint proponent of the Steady-State model of the Universe, and in collaboration with Chandra Wickramasinghe he has pioneered the modern theory of panspermia. Amongst the numerous awards and distinctions bestowed on him are the UN Kalinga Prize, 1968, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1997 he was awarded the highly prestigious Crafoord Prize by the the Swedish Academy in recognition of outstanding basic research in fields not covered by the Nobel prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has published over 40 books, including technical science, popular science and science fiction.

Page 062 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Eighteenth-century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

PEOPLE GENERALLY ASSUME that our beliefs and attitudes determine our actions. So if we want to change the way people act, their hearts and minds had better be changed. This assumption lies behind most of our teaching, preaching, counseling and child rearing. But if social psychology has taught us anything during the last twenty years it is that the reverse is equally true: we are as likely to act ourselves into a way of thinking as to think ourselves into action.

Page 066 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
A couple of brief multiplications, a simple division and, bingo, you know your gravitational position wherever you go.

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. --Alexander Pope

Page 068 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
This was not good news for those people whose measurements of the planet were based on the assumption that is was a perfect sphere, which was everyone.

A sphere is a symmetrical geometrical object. In non-mathematical usage, the term is used to refer either to a round ball or to its two-dimensional surface. In mathematics, a sphere is the set of all points in three-dimensional space (R3) which are at distance r from a fixed point of that space, where r is a positive real number called the radius of the sphere. Thus, in three dimensions, a mathematical sphere is considered to be a two-dimensional spherical surface embedded in three-dimensional space, rather than the volume contained within it (which mathematicians would instead describe as a ball). The fixed point is called the center or centre, and is not part of the sphere itself. The special case of r = 1 is called a unit sphere.

Page 076 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The successful charting of a Venusian's transit fell to a little-known Yorkshire-born sea captain named James Cook, who watched the 1769 transit from a sunny hilltop in Tahiti, and then went on to chart and claim Australia for the British crown.

In 1769 Captain Cook went to Tahiti to observe a Venusian Transit of the Sun. His mesurements were to be compared to other observations made in England and the resulting information would help create better navigaion instruments. This didn't workout but, making a long story short, he discovered California, Alaska, Hawaii, Tasmania and almost reached Antartica before his life ended.

Page 078 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Hotton noticed that if he had used a pencil to connect points of equal height, it all became much orderly. Indeed, one could instantly get a sense of the overall shape and slope of the mountain. He had invented contour lines.

The shape of land is shown by means of very detailed contours, aided by the special symbols for small knolls, depressions, etc. This is complemented in black by the symbols for rock and cliffs. Orienteering terrain is normally best represented with a 5 m contour interval.

Page 083 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Not a whisper of disturbance could be allowed into the room containing the apparatus, so Cavendish took up a position in an adjoining room and made his observations with a telescope aimed through a peephole.

English chemist and physicist, elder son of Lord Charles Cavendish, brother of the 3rd Duke of Devonshire, and Lady Anne Grey, daughter of the Duke of Kent, was born at Nice in October 1731. He was sent to school at Hackney in 1742, and in 1749 entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, which he left in 1753, without taking a degree. Until he was about forty he seems to have enjoyed a very moderate allowance from his father, but in the latter part of his life he was left a fortune which made him one of the richest men of his time. He lived principally at Clapham Common, but he had also a townhouse in Bloomsbury, while his library was in a house in Dean Street, Soho; and there he used to attend on appointed days to lend the books to men who were properly vouched for. So methodical was he that he never took down a volume for his own use without entering it in the loan-book. He was a regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1760, and he dined every Thursday with the club composed of its members. Otherwise he had little intercourse with society; indeed, his chief object in life seems to have been to avoid the attention of his fellows. With his relatives he had little intercourse, and even Lord George Cavendish, whom he made his principal heir, he saw only for a few minutes once a year. His dinner was ordered daily by a note placed on the hall table, and his women servants were instructed to keep out of his sight on pain of dismissal. In person he was tall and rather thin; his dress was old-fashioned and singularly uniform, and was inclined to be shabby about the times when the precisely arranged visits of his tailor were due. He had a slight hesitation in his speech, and his air of timidity and reserve was almost ludicrous. He was never married. He died at Clapham on the 24th of February 1810, leaving funded property worth £700,000, and a landed estate of £8000 a year, together with canal and other property, and £50,000 at his bankers.

Page 090 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Lyell had the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture - lying across two chairs at once or "resting his head on the seat of chair, while standing up" (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in the thoughts he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor.

nitially recognized by James Hutton in the late 1700s, but defined and interpreted in more detail by John Playfair in 1802, and then further elaborated by the writer of the first geology textbook, Charles Lyell, during the 1830s. In Hutton's concept (he was a plutonist), intrusive rocks or other geologic features, such as faults that cut across pre-existing rocks must be geologically younger than the rocks that they cut across. That is, they must form more recently that the rocks through which they pass or cut across.

Page 114 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Capitalizing on Mantell's enfeebled state, Owen set about systematically expunging his contributions from the record, renaming species that Mantell had named yers before and claiming credit for their discovery for himself.

Gideon Mantell, a physician of Lewes in Sussex in southern England, had for years been collecting fossils in the sandstone of Tilgate forest, and he had discovered bones belonging to three extinct species: a giant crocodile, a plesiosaur, and Buckland's Megalosaurus. But in 1822 he found several teeth that "possessed characters so remarkable'' that they had to have come from a fourth and distinct species of Saurian. After consulting numerous experts, Mantell finally recognized that the teeth bore an uncanny resemblance to the teeth of the living iguana, except that they were twenty times larger. In this paper, the second published description of a dinosaur, he concluded that he had found the teeth of a giant lizard, which he named Iguanodon, or ''Iguana-tooth.'' He speculated that if the teeth bore the same relative proportions in the living and fossil animals, then the Iguanodon must have been upwards of sixty feet long.

Page 125 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Scheele was both an extraordinary and an extraordinarily luckless fellow. A humble pharmacist with little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements - chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen and oxygen - and get credit for none of them.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786): We will begin our history of organic chemistry with Lavoisier in 1789, a year that was as revolutionary in chemistry as it was in politics. But we must realize that all of chemistry did not spring suddenly from Lavoisier's brow. He and his colleagues built on a long tradition of practical chemistry in such fields as metallurgy, dyeing, preparing alcoholic beverages, and, particularly, medicine. As an exemplar of the tradition of empirical chemistry upon which Lavoisier built we can consider the Swede Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who refused numerous offers of university professorships in order to continue his chemical research undisturbed in conjunction with his practical occupation as an apothecary in Stockholm, Uppsala, and Köping. Though he was only a year older than Lavoisier, his scientific style was completely different. Still, his contributions would prove crucial for the development of organic chemistry in the next century.

Page 130 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Using Avogadro's mathematics, chemist were eventually able to work out, for instance, that the typical atom had a diameter of 0.00000008 centimeters, which is very little indeed.

Avogadro graphical goodies: Marcus continued to work on the Avogadro 3D molecule visualisation library and its integration in Kalzium. Chemical data is in good hands on the KDE desktop these days, seeing how also Strigi also received support for chemical files.

Page 133 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Mendeleyev used a slightly different approach, placing his elements into groups of seven. Because the properties repeated themselves periodically, the invention became known as the Periodic table.

One of the most unlikely success stories in the history of chemistry is that of Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev (also Mendeléev, Mendeleef and Mendeleeff). Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk in western Siberia on February 8, 1834. He was the youngest child in a family of either 14 or 17 children (records do not agree). His father, a teacher at the Tobolsk gymnasium (high school) lost his job after he became blind when Dmitry was still quite young. His mother tried to take over support of the family by building a glassworks in the nearby town of Axemziansk.

Page 138 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Marie Curie found that that certain kinds of rocks poured out constant and extraordinary amounts of energy, yet without diminishing in size or changing in any detectable way. She dubbed the effect "radioactivity".

Marie Curie was born in 1867 in Warsaw to two Polish schoolteachers. She was the youngest of five. She loved traveling with her family to the country to visit their relatives often during her childhood. Having schoolteachers as parents, Curie got an early start to education at age six. She learned physics and math easily and received much help from her father in the sciences, which he loved. Her oldest sister's death when Curie was nine began the hardships in her childhood Her mother, stricken with guilt over her sister's death, died two years later. Her mother had always been the one keeping the family together, and her father took her death very hard. He focused on work and his children's studies, so school became an important part of her life. Curie finished school at fifteen and took time of to become a governess. She moved back in with her father and began working in a laboratory. She also studied science, literature, and sociology on her own. With the help of her father, she moved to Paris to live with her sister. She moved from her sister's house to the heart of Paris to go to school and be less distracted by social scenes in her sister's part of town.

Page 146 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
For reasons that defy speculation Gibbs chose to publish these landmarks observations in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, a journal that managed to be obscure even in Connecticut, which is why Plank did not hear of him until too late.

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903): was born in New Haven, Connecticut on February 11, 1839 the only son of Josiah Willard Gibbs. His father was a Yale University professor best known for finding translators for the mutineers of the Amistad slave ship. He had done so in order to help the mutineers tell their side of the story, which was very controversial at that time. In 1873, his first published work entitled ''Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids'' was released. He was 34 years of age at the time and was just starting to reveal his genius to the rest of the world. His first paper included the formula which he is probably most famous for: dU = T dS — P dV. His second published work came out that same year with the title of ''A Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces''.

Page 156 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Space-time is usually explained by asking you to imagine something flat but pliant - a mattress, say, or a sheet of stretched rubber - on which is resting a heavy round object, such as an iron ball.

The four dimensional space-time continuum itself is distorted in the vicinity of any mass, with the amount of distortion depending on the mass and the distance from the mass. Thus, relativity accounts for Newton's inverse square law of gravity through geometry and thereby does away with the need for any mysterious ''action at a distance.''

Page 162 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Half of the finest minds available were directed to work that would otherwise have attracted little reflective attention and women ended up with an appreciation of the fine structure of the cosmos that often eluded their male counterparts.

Leavitt began work in 1893 at Harvard College Observatory as one of the women

Page 168 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
We are so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

Welcome to the latest edition of Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet. Newcomers should subscribe to the RSS feed and read the Introduction for an explanation of the way things are arranged. In addition to the RSS feed, the What's News page describes new links, ideas and features, along with current events and other Shakespearean news.

Page 174 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
An atom, Rutherford realized, was mostly empty space, with a very dense nucleus at the center. By all the laws of conventional physics, atoms shouldn't therefore exist.

Ernest Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Nelson, New Zealand, the fourth child and second son in a family of seven sons and five daughters. His father James Rutherford, a Scottish wheelwright, emigrated to New Zealand with Ernest's grandfather and the whole family in 1842. His mother, née Martha Thompson, was an English schoolteacher, who, with her widowed mother, also went to live there in 1855.

Page 180 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
An atom, if you could see it, would look more like a very fuzzy tennis ball than a hard-edged metallic sphere, but not like either ...

Atoms are made of even smaller particles. The center of an atom is called the nucleus. It is made of particles called protons and neutrons. The protons and neutrons are very small, but electrons are much, much smaller. Electrons spin around the nucleus in shells a great distance from the nucleus. If the nucleus were the size of a tennis ball, the atom would be the size of the Empire State Building. Atoms are mostly empty space.

Page 188 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1944, he became in the cords as the machine went into action und was strangled.

In 1921, after a long string of inadequate solutions, a clever but chronically catastrophic chemist named Thomas Midgley developed a fuel additive which eliminated ping problems while increasing fuel efficiency. Though the chemical agent eventually gained worldwide acceptance, it left a rash of psychosis, a trail of bodies, an epidemic of crime, and an irreparably damaged environment in its wake.

Page 190 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Some carbon-14 dates are mor dubious than others. Among the more dubious are dates just around the time that people first came to the Americas, which is one of the reasons the matter is so perennially in dispute.

Most students have heard of Carbon-14; yet, it doesn't appear in the table of isotopes used to date rocks and minerals. Why not? Carbon-14 is not appropriate for rocks because it must involve organic carbon. Rocks are made of minerals that are by definition inorganic. The discussion of 14C below is a great way to illustrate important points of how to choose a system.

Page 193 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Really ancient rocks are only rarely found on Earth. We would be well into the space age before anyone could plausibly account for where all the Earth's old rocks went.

Odd-shaped rocks in the Pilbara region of Western Australia offer compelling evidence they were built by microbes 3.43 billion years ago, scientists say. The structures, known as stromatolites, could only have taken the forms they have if bacteria had been present, a Sydney-led team tells Nature journal. The rocks' origin is disputed, with some claiming purely chemical processes could have made them. But the Nature study suggests the biological explanation is the simplest.

Page 206 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Richard Feynman wanted to call these new basic particles partons, as in Dolly, bus over-ruled. Instead the became known as quarks.

Richard P. Feynman was born in New York City on the 11th May 1918. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained his B.Sc. in 1939 and at Princeton University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1942. He was Research Assistant at Princeton (1940-1941), Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University (1945-1950), Visiting Professor and thereafter appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (1950-1959). At present he is Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Page 218 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Animal fossils repeatedly turned up on opposite of oceans that were clearly too wide to swim. How, he wondered, did marsupials travel from South America to Australial? How did identical snails turn up in Scandinavia and New England?

Animal fossils are often bones that have been turned to rock. Sometimes part of the flesh is preserved, but most of the time only skeletons remain. Because of this, it is more difficult to find fossils of invertebrates. (Invertebrates are animals that don’t have bones.) We have discovered several types of animal fossils, including bones, skin, teeth, claws, eggs, nests, muscles, and organs. We have also found lots of fossils of footprints, which tell us how much animals and dinosaurs weighed and how they might have walked.

Page 228 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Well into the 1970s, on of the most popular and influential geological textbooks, The Earth by the venerable Harold Jeffreys, strenuously insisted that plate tectonics was a physical impossibility, just as it had in the first edition way back in 1924.

British mathematician, astronomer, geophysicist, and philosopher Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891-1989) was one of the great original applied-mathematical thinkers of the 20th century. He is noted for his wide variety of scientific contributions. Harold Jeffreys was born on April 22, 1891, in Durham, England. He graduated from Durham University and then carried out research in chemistry and photography. He won major prizes at the University of Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1917, in mathematics, astronomy, and geophysics. At Cambridge he was a lecturer in mathematics, reader in geophysics, and Plumian professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy from 1946 to his retirement in 1958. In 1940 he married Bertha Swirles, a talented mathematician and a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.

Page 238 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The Manson impact was the biggest thing that ever occurred on the mainland United States. Of any type. Ever. The crater if left behind was so colossal that if you would stood one edge you would only just be able to see the other side on a good day.

Did you know a crater 24 miles in diameter lies hidden by glacial sediment under crop fields centered in Pocahontas County. This Impact occured over 70 million years ago and most likely killed everything within 850 miles of the impact site.

Page 248 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
After much thought, the Alvarezes concluded that the most plausible explonation - plausible to them, at any rate - was that the Earth had been struck by an asteroid or comet.

One of the boldest assertions ever published in the scientific literature started with a single modest observation. In the late 1970s, geologist Walter Alvarez of the University of California at Berkeley and his father Luis, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, found an unusual chemical signal in an ancient layer of Italian clay. The clay was enriched in iridium, a rare metal that comes mostly from meteorites, interplanetary dust, and other cosmic debris. The iridium spike appeared in sediments 65 million years old, at the so-called K-T boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary periods. It coincided with the demise of the dinosaurs.

Page 253 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
If you are a geologist employed by the state of Iowa, a big part of the work you do is to evaluate Manure Management Plans, which all the state's "animal confinement operators" - pig farmers, to the rest of us - are required to file periodically.

Precision Management Services is a company that specializes in precision agriculture products and services. We offer GPS soil testing, fertility mapping, yield map processing, crop scouting, site-specific record-keeping, nutrient and manure management plans, and other services that can be customized for your business. We are also an authorized AgLeader Technology dealer.

Page 255 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The first Anderson or Witzke learned of the setback to their careers was when they arrived at a conference in South Dakota, and found people coming up to them with sympathetic looks and saying: "We hear you lost your crater."

LEAD: AN analysis of samples extracted from wells has convinced geologists that a crater 20 miles wide was formed some 66 million years ago when an object two miles in diameter struck what is now Iowa. The crater, long since filled in, is the largest known impact structure in the United States. --- AN analysis of samples extracted from wells has convinced geologists that a crater 20 miles wide was formed some 66 million years ago when an object two miles in diameter struck what is now Iowa. The crater, long since filled in, is the largest known impact structure in the United States.

Page 258 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the Earth and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness. And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colors of light and reflect none.

Page 264 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Nebraska's huge ash deposits had been known about for long time. For almost a century they had been mined to make household cleaning powders like Comet and Ajax.

The Interior Plains is a vast region that spreads across the stable core (craton) of North America. This area had formed when several small continents collided and welded together well over a billion years ago, during the Precambrian. Precambrian metamorphic and igneous rocks now form the basement of the Interior Plains and make up the stable nucleus of North America. With the exception of the Black Hills of South Dakota, the entire region has low relief, reflecting more than 500 million years of relative tectonic stability.

Page 269 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Since the Great Kanto quake of 1923, Tokyo has been eerily quite, so the strain beneath the surface has been building for eighty years. Eventually it is bound to snap.

Could there be a better motif for the 20th century than that of “collapse”? Discourses of ideology, religion, aesthetics, even vision itself, have all in some sense, at some point, ‘collapsed’. Yet, despite the conceptual lure cast by the exhibition title, a “sense of collapse” seemed clearer in my mind only due to that which seemed lacking in pieces, ‘reinterpreted’ from the MOMAT collections.

Page 271 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Drilling from a ship in open waters is, in the words of one oceanographer, "like trying to drill a hole in the sidewalks of New York from atop the Empire State Building using a strand of spaghetti.

Most geotechs get involved with drilling holes into the ground in order to do tests in situ and to take samples to do various tests on them. Drilling holes into the ground is a common activity for us geotechs. We routinely decide how deep the hole should extend; of course, it all depends on the project.

Page 275 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
No one knows how hot the Earth core is, but estimates range from something over 4,000 to over 7,000 degrees Celsius - about as hot as the surface of the Sun.

The Earth formed in such a way as to create several layers. The innermost layer, or core, is under such intense pressure that it has remained partly solid at the centre. It is made up of nickel and iron and has an estimated temperature of 4 000 kelvin. around 2 500 kilometres (1 600 miles) in diameter and accounts for just 1.7% of the total mass of the planet. Outside the solid inner layer of the core, a molten outer level has a thickness of 2 200 kilometres (1,400 miles) making up about 31% of the mass.

Page 295 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The last major Teton quake was somewhere between about five thousand and seven thousand years ago. The Tetons, in short, are about the most overdue earthquake zone on the planet.

I first went to the Tetons when I was seven years old. I grew up in Wyoming and when I was a little kid, our family used to take at least one vacation in the Tetons every year. One of my most vivid childhood memories is pulling into Jenny Lake campground, finding the world's best campsite, setting up our antique, 100 pound, canvas umbrella tent and listening to the sound of stakes being pounded into the ground, loud in the still, sweet, pine scented air of the Tetons. I remember the quietness of the Teton forest, the absolute crystalline clarity of the waters of Jenny Lake, boat trips on the lake, hikes around the lake, fishing in CottonwoodThe Tetons from the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park Creek, Crandall's black and white photography studio, and most of all the towering, hulking, brooding, presence of the Tetons on the other side of the Jenny Lake. When I was maybe twelve or so, I promised myself that I would be back and that I would climb these mountains one day. And I did; I have returned to the Tetons many times and I did climb a number of the Tetons including the Grand in my young manhood.

Page 304 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Put the human body under pressure, and if the pressure is changed too rapidly - as with a too-quick ascent by a diver - bubbles of nitrogen trapped within the body begin to fizz in exactly the manner of a freshly opened bottle of champagne.

How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I had, for they are kinder to me than your fellow-beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me: listen to me; and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.

Page 306 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
To understand more exactly how carbon monoxide leaks killed miners, Haldane methodically poisoned himself, carefully taking and measuring his own blood samples the while.

Beginning January 1, 2007, a new Illinois state law entitled "Carbon Monoxide Alarm Detector Act" goes into effect. The new law requires single family and multiple family residences, with few exceptions, to have at least one approved and operating carbon monoxide alarm within 15 feet of each bedroom. Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless gas produced during incomplete combustion of fuels – for example, natural gas, LP gas, kerosene, oil, wood, and charcoal. The gas is lethal to humans if it builds up in the home. The law states it is the responsibility of the owner of the structure to supply and install all required alarms, along with written instructions for alarm testing and maintenance. In the case of rental property, it is the responsibility of the tenant to test and to provide general maintenance of the alarm(s), including battery replacement, and to notify the owner of any defects in writing that the tenant cannot correct.

Page 311 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Our knowledge of Venus's surface is based on distant radar imagery and some squawks from an unmanned Soviet probe that was dropped hopefully into the clouds in 1972 and functioned for barley an hour before permanently shutting down.

The Planet Venus is the second closest planet to the sun. It is located between our Earth and Mercury. It is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Venus is covered with thick clouds that create a greenhouse effect that makes it very hot. Venus has no moons.

Page 312 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Without the Moon's steadying influence, the Earth would wobble like a dying top, with goodness knows what consequences for climate and weather.

The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. The Moon's diameter is 3,474 km,[6] a little more than a quarter that of the Earth. This means that the Moon's volume is about 2 percent that of Earth and the pull of gravity at its surface about 17 percent that of the Earth. The Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth every 27.3 days, and the periodic variations in the geometry of the Earth–Moon–Sun system are responsible for the lunar phases that repeat every 29.5 days.

Page 323 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The Sun is 93 million miles away. To move a few hundred meters closer to it is like taking one step closer to a bushfire in Australia and expecting to smell smoke when you are standing in Ohio.

The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. The Moon's diameter is 3,474 km,[6] a little more than a quarter that of the Earth. This means that the Moon's volume is about 2 percent that of Earth and the pull of gravity at its surface about 17 percent that of the Earth. The Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth every 27.3 days, and the periodic variations in the geometry of the Earth–Moon–Sun system are responsible for the lunar phases that repeat every 29.5 days. The Astronomical Unit A.U. The most practical units we can use are related to the distance from the Sun to the Earth. This is the A.U. or Astronomical Unit. 1 Astronomical Unit = 149 598 000 km

Page 327 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The Coriolis effect is what gives weather systems their curl and send hurricanes spinning off like tops. It is also why naval guns firing artillery shells have to adjust to left or right.

Air movement along 'isobars' = Why does wind blow around isobars rather than directly from high to low pressure? Imagine you are looking down from above one of the poles of the earth as if it were a merry-go-round, with you at the centre at point A. If you threw a ball directly to a friend on the rim at point B you would miss, because by the time the ball reached the rim the rotation of the merry-go-round would have taken your friend to point C. To people on the merry-go-round the ball would appear to have been deflected to the left and to have followed a curved path. To people not on the merry-go-round the ball would appear to have followed the straight path.

Page 331 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Every day, the Gulf Stream carries an amount of heat to Europe equivalent to the world's output of coal for ten years, which is why Britain and Ireland have such mild winters compared with Canada and Russia.

This map of the North Atlantic highlights the relationship between ocean currents and the distribution of cold climate environments. Click on green dots to access live weather information from Hopedale and Stornoway. Note these location lie at the same latitude but have very different climates, partly in response to the effect of the ocean current heat tranfer.

Page 336 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
A glass of water may not appear terribly lively, but every molecule in it is changing partners billions of times in a second.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has spent a considerable amount of time and resources examining the safety and security of assets associated with critical infrastructure systems across the country. Based in part on intelligence reports documenting the types of targets of interest to terrorist groups, the federal government determined that threats to potable water systems pose a credible risk to the safety and security of our nation.

Page 340 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The first bathysphere was a tiny and necessarily robust chamber, made of cast iron 1.4 inches thick. It held two man, but only if they where prepared to become extremely well acquainted.

Luckily scientists like David Thistle value such an approach and find creative ways to fund and carry out such a project. Thistle et al. report on a similar study to the Gallucci et al. study we reported on recently. Gallucci et al. focus on the impacts of megafauna (those large organisms easily seen in video and collected in trawls) on nematodes. Thistle et al. focus on large, mobile epifaunal (LME, e.g. sea cucumbers, seastars, and demersal fish) effects on polychaetes, kinorhynchs, nematodes, and copepods. Five cages were deployed in the San Diego Trough to exclude LME from certain areas. In general, the abundances of the groups were lower in the cages than in the background.

Page 344 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
In January 1960 Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh of the US Navy sank slowly to the bottom of the ocean's deepest canyon, the Mariana Trench. It was the only occasion in which human beings gone so deep.

Jacques PICCARD: Scientist and explorer, worked with his father Auguste to build what was to become the bathyscaphe Trieste. Holds the World Record for the deepest ever dive, 10'740 meters down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Father of Bertrand Piccard Born July 28, 1922 in Brussels (Belgium)

Page 352 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Australia is a large net importer of seafood. This is because much of Australia's water is, like much of Australia itself, essentially dessert.

Adelaide Weather, Albany Weather, Alice Springs Weather, Ballarat Weather, Brisbane Weather, Broome Weather, Cairns Weather, Canberra Weather, Darwin Weather, Fremantle Weather, Geelong Weather, Gold Coast Weather, Gosford Weather, Hobart Weather, Kalgoorlie Weather, Melbourne Weather, Sydney Weather, Townsville Weather, Wollongong Weather, Yeppoon Weather.

Page 355 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Trawlers are sometimes now as big as cruise ships and haul behind them nets big enough to hold a dozen jumbo jets. Some even use spotter planes to locate shoals of fish from the air.

31 hours, 4 minutes. Blowing the doors off the previous record of 32 hours, 7 minutes, Alex Roy of Team Polizei and co-pilot Dave Maher set a new transcontinental driving record in a modified BMW M5. Of course, to pull off such a feat today required a modest collection of equipment: thermal night-vision camera, binoculars, radar detector, radar jammer, CB and police scanners, oh, and a spotter airplane. As you might expect, not everyone is celebrating.

Page 357 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
New England fishermen continue to receive state and federal tax incentives that encourage them - in some cases all but compel them - to acquire bigger boats and to harvest the seas more intensively.

Native Americans were the first “wreckers” in the Florida Keys. When Spanish ships got driven on the reef, Indians would canoe out to scavenge everything that looked useful—including survivors, who could be ransomed or used as slaves. The natives traded salvaged items and prisoners for supplies. Many of Spain’s treasure galleons were lost in the dangerous waters of the Florida Keys. Aware of this hazard, the Spanish made a serious effort to salvage their own ships, and set up encampments, some of which stayed in place for several years. They built diving bells and imported pearl divers from Brazil; they also trained Keys natives to help. Salvage was urgent—the losses of treasure seriously damaged Spain’s economy and eventually contributed to the decline of her empire.

Page 363 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Pluck any atom from your body abd it is no more alive than is a grain of sand. It only when the come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life.

DNA, proteins, and the other components of life couldn’t prosper without some sort of membrane to contain them. No atom or molecule has ever achieved life independently. Pluck any atom from your body, and it is no more alive than a grain of sand. It is only when they come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life.

Page 364 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
There may or may not be a great deal of life in the universe at large, but there is no shortage of ordered self-assembly, in everything from the transfixing symmetry of snowflakes to the comely rings of Saturn.

On March 20, 2008, scientists analyzing small variations in the rate of rotation of Saturn's moon Titan announced findings (Science) which suggests that an ocean of liquid water lies between 30 to 90 miles (50 to 150 kilometers) beneath its icy surface, and which could possibly host Earth-type life (Lorenz et al, Science, March 21, 2008). Titan is about 3,200 miles (5,150 km) in diameter with a relatively low density and so may be composed mostly of water and rock.

Page 367 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Well into the 1950s, it was thought that life was less than hundred million years old. The present date of 3.85 billion years is stunningly early. The Earth's surface didn't become solid until about 3.9 billion years ago.

he Earth formed simultaneously with the other Solar System planets and the central Sun. Accretion of planetesimals produced a large body which assumed a spherical shape. Probably cool at the outset, this proto-Earth rapidly heated up, formed its metallic core within 100 million years, and was subjected to continuous impact bombardment by asteroids, comets, and meteorites. It may have had a molten exterior which quickly cooled to a crust. Very early in earth history, its Moon was produced from a glancing collision with another planetlike body. A second period of bombardment helped destroy the early crust.

Page 369 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Everything that has never lived, plant or animal, dates his beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginable distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to be life.

One of the main open questions of modern astrophysics and cosmology is how and when galaxies formed and evolved starting from the primordial gas that filled the early Universe. In the most popular current theory, galaxies in the local Universe are the result of a relatively slow process where small and less massive galaxies merge to gradually build up bigger and more massive galaxies. In this scenario, dubbed 'hierarchical merging', the young Universe was populated by small galaxies with little mass, whereas the present Universe contains large, old and massive galaxies - the very last to form in the final stage of a slow assembling process.

Page 370 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
In practice, the process [of rock-dating] seemed to involve about the same level of scattered activity, and about as much stimulation, as a trip to a launderette.

Paranoia in the Launderette by Bruce Robinson: Explores the depths of a paranoid writer who is terrorised by visions of deadly attackers and their horrifying crimes. A call from his literary agent, a possible plot on his life and a disastrous trip to the launderette ensue.

Page 374 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
For two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, the reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

Okay, so this is not a great movie, but I have to admit I was engaged through the whole 90 minutes. It was also one of those rare creatures in that it was made for TV and never made it to TV, it went straight to the Movie Channel. You have to be tipped off by the size of the budget when the 'big' confrontation scene should have thousands of extras milling around but you can actually count them- less than 30 by my count. I'm a fan of any mutated creature film: fish, insects, rodents, whatever, so I HAD to watch this one. The special effects were pretty good for the most part but not great. The acting is also not great but less wooden that in all those '50's movies I love like Them and Kronos. There are holes in the plot you could drive a wasp through but without them there wouldn't be a movie. And by 'them' I mean both plot-holes and wasps. I think if you are a fan of mutated creature movies it won't supplant your favorites but because there aren't that many made you have to see it. If you aren't a fan, give it a pass because it doesn't have any interesting sub-plots (it doesn't actually have any sub-plots) to keep you interested.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437498/

Page 376 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
We couldn't live for two minute without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they thinks things might not work out between us.

In cell biology, a mitochondrion (plural mitochondria) is a membrane-enclosed organelle found in most eukaryotic cells.[1] These organelles range from 1–10 micrometers (μm) in size. Mitochondria are sometimes described as "cellular power plants" because they generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), used as a source of chemical energy. In addition to supplying cellular energy, mitochondria are involved in a range of other processes, such as signaling, cellular differentiation, cell death, as well as the control of the cell cycle and cell growth.[2] Mitochondria have been implicated in several human diseases and may play a role in the aging process. The word mitochondrion comes from the Greek μίτος or mitos, thread + χονδρίον or khondrion, granule. Their ancestry is not fully understood, but, according to the endosymbiotic theory, mitochondria are descended from ancient bacteria, which were engulfed by the ancestors of eukaryotic cells more than a billion years ago.

Page 382 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene can reproduce in nine minutes and then begin at once again. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe.

Gangrene refers to the decay and death of tissue resulting from an interruption in blood flow to a certain area of your body. Some types of gangrene also involve a bacterial infection. Gangrene most commonly affects the extremities, including your toes, fingers and limbs, but can also occur in your muscles and internal organs.

Page 386 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
When genetic testing arrived, people in lab coats were surprised to find that slime moulds were so distinctive and peculia that they weren't directly related to anything else in nature, and sometimes not even to each other.

Fungi are a diverse group of organisms that typically share some ecological features, i.e., they have the same life style, but they have a number of evolutionary origins. They include the true fungi (Eumycota) and other fungal-like organisms (Pseudomycota). Slime molds differ from most fungi in their ingestive nutrition; typical fungi absorb nutrients.

Page 391 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
It is a natural human impuls to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity - in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves.

The Marie Antoinette Syndrome: A short while ago I wrote about my concerns that, with a growing drum roll of articles decrying the use of coal, we might find ourselves short of power, at a time when we have a real need. The tone of articles written about the mining industry are virtually all negative, with very few counter-arguments being made to demur at the emotive tone of the language used in writing about this subject. The thought returned today as I read the article in the Guardian that Leanan had highlighted in Wednesday’s Drumbeat. The piece, by George Monbiot, bemoans the creation of a new surface mine in Wales.

Page 396 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
By one estimate some 70 per cent of the antibiotics used in the developed world are given to farm animals, often routinely in stock feed, simply to promote growth or as precaution against infection.

It is apparent that while medical use of antibiotics is a major contributor to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans, agricultural use also poses a significant problem. There is a compelling link between antibiotic treatment in farm animals and resistance in humans, and it is this link that is causing significant alarm among medical researchers. Antibiotics are not only utilised in the treatment of humans, but also by agribusiness in treating animals. Both domestic and farm animals are treated with antibiotics, when they are afflicted with bacterial diseases. Bacteria have a life cycle of approximately 2 to 3 weeks. Antibiotic use for domestic animals generally requires a prescription by a veterinarian; however antibiotic use in animal husbandry does not, and it is this that is a cause for concern, particularly as there is little information and statistics on the quantity and range of antibiotics used in this industry. It is recognised that the majority of antibiotics sold in the developed world are used in the agricultural industry, and that they are widely available.

Page 399 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Much about the 1918 flu epidemic is understood poorly or not t all. A virus can survive for no more than a few hours outside a host body, so how could it appear in Madrid, Bombay and Philadelphia all in the same week?

The devastating effects of cholera and typhoid fever were experienced on Gross Île roughly 150 years ago. This was not the worst epidemic in recorded history, however. There are historical reports of the Black Plague or Black Death that swept through Europe and the British Isles and outbreaks of Bubonic Plague that were devastating. But none of these were the worst. That title belongs to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic known as the Spanish Flu outbreak at the tail end of the First World War. During the War, soldiers and civilians in conflict areas lived through horrific physical conditions but this was not the cause of the pandemic. The massive mobilization of armies and people displaced, however, increased the rate of infection. The Influenza Epidemic is estimated to have affected roughly five percent of the world’s population and although no accurate numbers pertaining to the death toll have been recorded, it is thought that up to 100 million people died. There were many anomalies connected to this pandemic. In particular, it severely affected those in age from 20-40, just the opposite of common flu outbreaks that normally target the very young or the elderly whose immune systems are not as resistant to any given flu strain.

Page 405 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
As with all extinct creatures, there is a natural temptation to regard trilobites as failures, but were in fact they were among the most successful animals ever to live.

Enjoy collecting these middle cambrian fossils with us in our freshly dug quarry! These sea going creatures are among the oldest living arthropods on the fossil record. There are literally thousands of varieties of these interesting extinct species. Many different types can be found in our area, here in the west desert of Utah. Here at our quarry we can show you how easy it is to find your own trilobites, where one of our staff will always be there to show you how!

Page 407 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
If you cold fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, but it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.

The Cambrian Radiation may have been Genetically Inspired: The second gateway is the evolution of the versatile homeotic gene protocols for developing the metazoan body plan. The consolidation of these genes appears to be the very event which led to the Cambrian radiation, since it is common to animals down to the Coelenterates and has conserved function across all phylla. This would give the most succinct explanation of the differing pictures given by genetic sequence and fossil evidence. That is evolution occurred over long time scales but an explosion of body plans happened in the narrow window of the Cambrain radiation.

Page 409 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
What was most surprising, however, was that there were so many body designs that had failed to make the cut, so to speak, and left no descendants. Evolutionary success, it appeared, was a lottery.

Natural hand carved wooden figurines from South East Asia, handicraft garden or home decor wholesale A beautiful and exentric piece of art which suits any animal lover's home, creating a welcoming atmosphere. Wholesale hand crafted wooden figuirine products from Bali Indonesia. Every individual item is handpainted and crafted with excessize detail Great for country or urban home or office decoration or giftware for animal lovers.

Page 411 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The distinction between plant and animal are not always clear even now. The modern sponge spends its life fixed to a single spot and has no eyes or brain or beating heart, and yet is an animal.

People have used sponges for various tasks dating all the way back to ancient times. While the world might be a different place now, there is still nothing that rivals the quality characteristics of the natural sea sponge. The natural sponge is still harvested in many different parts of the world today. The sponge is harvested off of the bottom of the sea floor by hand. After undergoing a process of treatment and cleaning, the sponge is then prepared for use. The amazing sponge can absorb the dirtiest of water and grime yet with a simple rinse and squeeze, the sponge releases the debris and is ready for use again. This is the same type of material that our grandparents used and the same type of material that was used in ancient times. The natural sea sponge is simply a wonder of the natural world.http://www.natural-sea-sponge.com/

Page 415 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
If you considered the elephant's large size and striking trunk you may conclude that it could have little in common with a tiny, sniffling shrew. But if you compared both of them with a lizard, you would see that the elephant and shrew were in fact built to much the same plan.

Let's start at the very beginning. Homo sapiens (modern humans) evolved from a little creature that looks a whole lot like this little fellow (the tree shrew). You can see that some were our evolutionary grandparents and parents (and eventually we evolved at the highest point of the tree) whereas other branches died off and that's called extinction.

Page 417 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The little copepod numbers in the trillions in modern seas and clusters in shoals large enough to turn vast areas of the ocean black, and yet our total knowledge of its ancestry is a single specimen found in the body of an ancient fossilized fish.

Some organisms leave information about their activities in rocks. Paleontologists use these clues to recreate how the organisms may have lived. These clues are called trace fossils. There are several main types of trace fossils. Tracks and trails are produced by an organism walking, crawling, foraging, or resting. Many dinosaur tracks tell us something about how large the dinosaur was, how fast it walked, and who walked with it.

Page 420 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't.

Lichens maintain a symbiosis with cyanobacteria which photosynthesise for the lichen in return for safe housing and a supply of nutrients. Many lichens are extremophiles. Great word, isn’t it? Extremophile: lover of extreme conditions. Whether the hottest, driest, wettest or coldest place on earth, lichens can be found. Shows what level of protection living with a partner can provide.

Page 422 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
I don't wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth, it goes extinct. Quite regularly.

The cover of ''The World of the Penguin'' by Jonathan Chester, published by the Sierra Club in 1996, features Emperor penguins with orange and bright yellow neck and ear patches. The book is one of four used to judge the attractiveness to humans of various penguin species.

Page 427 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
For a time, perhaps a touch improbably, turtles appeared poised to predominate as the planet's most advanced and deadly species, before an evolutionary lurch let them settle for durability rather than dominance.

As global temperatures rise, male turtles may start to lose their cool. Many reptiles, including most turtles, display temperature-dependent sex differentiation. In other words, the temperature that an egg incubates at determines the sex of hatchlings. In the case of turtles, warmer temperatures yield more female offspring, and cooler temperatures yield more males.

Page 429 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Even after stripping out the crackpot notions, there are still more theories for what caused the extinction events than there have been events.

Investigating Africa's Mysterious Cave Crocodiles: Brady Barr with a crocodile in a cave system beneath the Ankarana nature reserve in Madagascar. The crocs that inhabit this cave may perhaps be a subspecies of the Nile Crocodile. Photograph copyright Brady Barr/NGT&F

Page 434 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
In a sense, an even greater question than "What wiped out 70 per cent of the species that were existing at the time?" is "How did the remaining 30 per cent survive?"

We talk so much about the importance of planning and architecture in the fight against global warming, yet according to Amelia Gentleman in the International Herald Tribune, the United Nations estimates that only 5 percent of the building work under way in the world's expanding cities is actually planned; in many Asian cities, 70 percent of residents are thought to be living in unplanned areas. These are usually the poorest inhabitants, who find themselves in badly built urban sprawls, with poor access to electricity, water and drainage.

Page 439 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closingdoors every time we needed them to.

The Good Marriage Can last a Lifetime The idea of the good marriage is built into our psyches. We want it; we seek it; we enjoy life more and live longer when we are in a good marriage. We are hard-wired to seek communion with another human being.

Page 447 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Modestly, Linnaeus suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum, "Prince of Botanists." It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them.

Carl Linnaeus, or Carl von Linné as he later was called, was born on the 13 of May 1707 at Råshult in the parish of Stenbrohult in Småland, Sweden. His parents were Nils Linnaeus and Christina Brodersonia. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Stenbrohult when his father became a parish priest after his father in law, Samuel Brodersonius, had died. Carl later got four siblings, Anna Maria, Sophia Juliana, Samuel, who later succeeded his father as a parish priest in Stenbrohult, and Emerentia.

Page 448 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
He named one genus of plants Clitoria. Not surprisingly, many people thought him strange.

For an interesting explanation on the the origin of the sexual connotation of the clam to a woman's privates check page 79 of Stephen Jay Gould's Leonardo's Mountain Of Clams And The Diet Of Worms (1998, New York, Harmony Books). The illustration on that page is reproduced above.

Page 453 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The problem is that there are five thousand specie of grass and many of them look awfully alike even to people who know grass. In consequence, some species have been found and named at least twenty times.

Beach Grass is extremely important to the stability of the dunes. It is capable of growing quickly to change with shifting sands. This is a threatened specie in the State of Michigan. Side Oats is also essential to dune stability.

Page 457 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
In principle you ought to be able to go to experts in each area of specialization, ask how many species there are in their fields, then add the totals. Many people have done in fact so. The problem is that seldom do any two come up with matching figures.

More than 30,000 Alaskans went to court after Exxon's supertanker Valdez (skippered by a drunken captain named Joseph Hazelwood) hit a reef in 1989, dumping nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine Prince William Sound; covering 1,300 miles of coastline with oil; killing hundreds of thousands of marine animals, and virtually wiping out the region's fishing industry. The spill area eventually totaled 11,000 square miles.

Page 460 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
If your pillow is six years old - which is apparently about the average age for a pillow - it has been estimated that one tenth of its weight will be made up of "sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung."

Dust mites are everywhere in your home, in your carpet, the clothes in your closet, your couches, and in even your bed. This article will overview various dust mite habitats (with pictures) and what can be done to reduce their population in the specified infestation area.http://www.dust-mites.org/dust_mite_habitats.php

Page 461 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Because they can't flee from predators, plants have to contrive elaborate chemical defenses, and so are particularly rich intriguing chemical compounds. Even now, nearly a quarter of all prescribed medicines are derived from just forty plants.

Chemical communication for the peaceable exchange of information as well as for chemical aggression and defense is by no means restricted to the terrestrial world: pheromones and allelochemicals are well known from fish, marine invertebrates, and algae. The co-existence of immobile organisms such as corals or sponges in complex communities is to a large extent chemically mediated, their defense systems being made up of highly active allelochemicals. Some of these compounds exhibit exciting physiological properties which are of high medical and agrichemical interest. Mechanisms of adaptation, including tolerance and symbiosis, feeding preferences, and chemical mimicry are all among the basic aspects of coevolution which are currently subjects of detailed study.

Page 463 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Without fungi there would be n potato blights, Dutch elm disease, jock itch or athlete's foot. Altogether about seventy thousand species of fungis have been identified.

Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period. Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some fungi have started to fruit twice a year. It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in autumn. "My father was a stonemason, and his hobby was mycology," recounted Alan Gange, an ecology professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. "For 50 years of his life, he went out and recorded the appearance of mushrooms and toadstools around Salisbury, and he also got his friends in the local natural history group to bring back samples they found when they were out walking.

Page 465 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Before his mind became filled with sex, so to speak, Kinsey was an entomologist, and a dogged one at that. In one expedition lasting two years, he hiked 4,000 kilometers to assemble a collection of three hundred thousand wasps. How many stings he collected along the way is not, alas, recorded.

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, June 23, 1894. He attended Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine (1914-1916), graduating magna cum laude with a B.S. in biology and psychology. He received his Sc.D. in biology from Harvard University in September 1919, and came to Indiana University as an assistant professor of zoology in August 1920. He established a solid academic reputation for his biology tests and his research in taxonomy and evolution. By 1937, American Men of Science listed him as one of their "starred" scientists. Then in 1938, Kinsey took over coordination of the new marriage course at Indiana University, and soon after began gathering case histories of sexual behavior. In 1940, President Wells gave Kinsey a choice: to continue either with the marriage course or with his sexuality research project. Kinsey chose to concentrate on his research. Kinsey and his staff collected over 18,000 interviews, and published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. He died in 1956 at the age of 62.

Page 471 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Nicolaas Hartsoecker was convinced he saw "tiny preformed men" in sperm cells. He called the little beings "homunculi," and for some time many people believed that all humans were vastly inflated versions of tiny but complete precursor beings.

The concept of a homunculus (Latin for ''little man,'' sometimes spelled ''homonculus'') is often used to illustrate the functioning of a system. In the scientific sense of an unknowable prime actor, it can be viewed as an entity or agent. The term appears to have been first used by the alchemist Paracelsus. He once claimed that he had created a false human being that he referred to as the homunculus. The creature was to have stood no more than 12 inches tall, and does the work usually associated with a golem. However, after a short time, the homunculus would turn on its creator and run away. The recipe consisted of a bag of bones, sperm, skin fragments and hair from any animal you wanted it to be a hybrid of. This was to be laid in the ground surrounded by horse manure for forty days, at which point the embryo would form.

Page 474 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Your heart must pump 343 liters of blood an hour, over 8,000 liters every day, 3 million liters in a year - that's enough to fill four Olympic sized swimming pools - to keep all your cells freshly oxygenated.

The cardiovascular system is a highly complex part of the human body. The engine, pump or driving force behind all of this is the heart. Measuring about 300g, and about the size of a fist, the heart is an incredibly powerful pump that not only has to pump blood around the body at high pressure, but also has to pump blood to the lungs under low pressure. It is this “double pressure” system that makes the cardiovascular system so effective.

Page 480 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Darwin was invited to sail the naval survey ship HMS Beagle, essentially as dinner company for the captain, Robert FitzRoy, who rank precluded his socializing with anyone other than a gentleman.

The Fuegian and Patagonian People (Chile and Argentina)

Page 456 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Wallace's theory was, by Wallace's own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin's was the the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.

Are we surprised when a president known more for his faith than his intellect advises us that creationism should be taught in public schools? George W. Bush, responding this week to a question about evolution and ''intelligent design,'' gave us his learned scientific opinion: ''Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about. . . . Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.'' (Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)) Widely considered the father of evolution, Charles Darwin is often times a revered figure in scientific circles, and a reviled figure in some religious circles. Particularly Christians who believe in the theory of Creationism, where the universe was for them created in six days by a Christian God. Darwin for a time struggled between the notion of being a country doctor or a clergyman, but an opportunity arose to make a five year long scientific quest around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle. During this long voyage he collected specimens and observed life forms at Pacific coral islands, the Galapagos islands and South America. In On the Origin of Species, one of the most famous scientific texts ever written, Darwin spelled out his notoriously brilliant idea of natural selection, he wrote in 1859: ''As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.'' A myth that still struggles for survival today is that Charles Darwin ''repented'' from Evolution or even converted to Christianity on his deathbed is just that, a myth. Darwin was not an atheist. He was a deist, in other words and quite ironically, a believer in an intelligent designer. Does anyone think Bush really cares about an objective academic debate? Our president, the darling of the Christian right, is simply using his office to legitimize his theistic views, which happen to be the origin myth of the believing bloc that voted him into office. As Christian conservative Gary Bauer pointed out: ''With the president endorsing it, at the very least it makes Americans who have that position more respectable.''

Page 489 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Ironically, considering that Darwin called his Book On the Origin of Species, the one thing he couldn't explain was how species originated.

On June 18th, 1858, Darwin, well launched into writing his long-planned multi-volume work on species, was shocked to receive a letter mailed in February by a fellow-naturalist on his way to New Guinea. The letter propounded a theory of natural selection in species development eerily like the theory he had himself long hugged to himself as the culmination of his researches. Influential allies immediately took charge, and arranged that both theories should be read into the scientific record on July 1st, a bare two weeks after Wallace's bombshell had arrived. Wallace, long an admirer of Darwin, took it all with remarkable good grace, but Darwin had to abandon his full-scale book and instead prepare the preliminary overview of his theory that we know as The Origin of Species.

Page 494 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twenty century, and some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where the babies came from.

So where do babies come from? The answer to this simple question has the ability to totally change a Christians’ view on marriage and family. And if we answer it truthfully and consistently, I believe that many of our questions become much clearer. More than likely, you’ve heard the old pagan legend that babies are brought to your doorstep by a stork. And as humorous as that may seem to some, it may actually be closer to the truth than many evangelicals live out today. If that makes no sense, allow me to explain…

Page 498 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Much has been made in recent years of the piecing together of the human genome. In fact, there is no such thing as "the" human genome. Every human genome is different.

Trouble was, they didn’t know how to make sense of the bewildering clutter of A's, C’s, G’s and T’s in the so-called ''book of life.'' Now the genome project is beginning to bear fruit. A bumper crop of fresh discoveries connects specific bits of DNA to numerous diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness and AIDS. New findings are being published almost weekly in scientific journals. Scientists say they're important steps toward future treatments or cures.

Page 501 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Your body loves to make DNA, and without it you couldn't live. Yet DNA is not itself alive. No molecule is, but DNA is, as it were, especially unalive.

Here is one of the most exciting things to come along in a long time. We are now offering two types of DNA puzzles. Both are 300 piece puzzles and fairly good sized, 38 x 26 cm. If you ever wanted to have just plain fun - or want your kids to remember the shape of DNA, this is it.

Page 505 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Victory fell to an unlikely quartet of scientists who didn't work as a team, often weren't on speaking terms and were for the most part novices in the field.

Ms. Yamamoto, of the International Medical Centre of Japan, won the chemistry prize in the annual spoofs of the real Nobel awards for discovering that vanillin, the main ingredient of vanilla essence, can be synthesized from a wide variety of herbivore animal dung -- from cows, goats, horses and even pandas. It cannot be made, however, from tiger excrement. Although the production cost using dung is less than a half of making vanillin out of vanilla beans, Yamamoto found that her work was ignored by multinational corporations.

Page 511 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Ninety-seven per cent of your DNA consists of nothing but long stretched of meaningless garble - "junk" or "non-coding DNA" as biochemists prefer to put it.

Junk-DNA is clearly going the way of the dodo, in more ways than one. The film Flock of Dodos has become a textbook example of Darwinists attempting to rewrite history to erase their past scientific and textbook mistakes. Now that we're witnessing the apparent death of the ''Junk-DNA'' Neo-Darwinian paradigm, some pro-Darwin bloggers are already trying to rewrite history by claiming that Neo-Darwinism never supported the ''junk-DNA'' hypothesis after all. As one Scienceblogger wrote, ''If you read evolgen you know that the term ‘Junk DNA’ is crap. From an evolutionary viewpoint it also seemed a bit peculiar to relegate most of the genome to non-functional status...'' Just how valid is that statement? In 1995, Scientific American plainly expounded that under the Neo-Darwinian view, ''[t]hese regions have traditionally been regarded as useless accumulations of material from millions of years of evolution.''

Page 514 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
How fast a man's beard grow, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).

Man was given testosterone for a reason. Grow the Best Beard During November and WIN!! Sign up for the Beard-A-Thon Tuesday October 31st in Mitchell Hall and the REC from 10am - 5pm. A clean shaven photo will be taken along with the $5 entry fee. Complete rules will be given at the time of registration. Winner receives 20% of all entry fees collected. Remainder of the proceeds go to the WPBC.

Page 516 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Exultant scientist have at various times declared themselves to found the genes responsible for obesity, schizophrenia, homosexuality, criminality, violence, alcoholism, even shoplifting and homelessness.

Obesity means to be very overweight. Health professionals define "overweight" as an excess amount of body weight that includes muscle, bone, fat, and water. Obesity specifically refers to an excess amount of body fat. Everyone needs a certain amount of body fat for stored energy, heat insulation, shock absorption, and other functions. As a rule, women have more body fat than men. Most health care providers agree that men with more than 25 percent body fat and women with more than 30 percent body fat are obese.

Page 523 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
One French naturalist named de Luc, trying to explain how granite boulders had come to rest high up on the limestone flanks of the Jura Mountains, suggested that perhaps they had been shot there by compressed air in caverns, like corks out of a popgun.

The Emporia State University Kansas Rock Garden is located outside Cram Science Hall as an extension of the geology museum. The idea for a rock garden was conceived in the mid-1980s by Prof. James S. Aber and came to fruition in the early 1990s. The rock garden honors Prof. Charles B. Creager, who was chair of the Division of Physical Sciences (1971-1984). The garden features rocks from the State of Kansas, including glacial erratic boulders, petrified wood, and fence-post limestone. Click on the small images below for full-sized pictures; all images © J.S. Aber.

Page 527 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Eventually Agassiz became convinced that ice had covered the whole Earth, extinguishing all life, which God had then recreated.

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873): I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg, -- that is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

Page 528 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history - the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest - has taken place within an atypical patch of fair weather.

Spring comes early to the South, and at least two regions - the city of Savannah, Ga., and the state of Virginia - will take advantage of the generally good weather and profusion of blossoms on such plants as azaleas and dogwood to offer tours of historic homes and gardens. In Savannah, the 47th annual Tour of Homes and Gardens is scheduled from March 28 to April 1, and in Virginia, the Garden Club of Virginia's 49th annual Historic Garden Week goes from April 24 to May 2.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E1D6123BF932A15751C0A964948260&sec=travel&spon=&pagewanted=all

Page 531 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
One consequence was a drying out of Africa, which caused apes to climb down out of trees and go looking for a new way of living on the emerging savannas.

UNITED NATIONS -- The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says. One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty- one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert since the 1950s.

Page 532 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Temperatures plunged by as much as 45 degrees Celsius. The entire surface of the planet may have frozen solid, with ocean ice up to 800 meters thick even in the tropics.

Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has become a bane of modern society, may have saved Earth from freezing over early in the planet's history, according to the first detailed laboratory analysis of the world's oldest sedimentary rocks. Scientists have theorized for years that high concentrations of greenhouse gases could have helped Earth avoid global freezing in its youth by allowing the atmosphere to retain more heat than it lost. Now a team from the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder that analyzed ancient rocks from the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec, Canada, have discovered the first direct field evidence supporting this theory.

Page 537 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 meters - the height of a twenty-story building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated.

Last Nov. 16, at 8:43 p.m., a magnitude-7.5 earthquake struck deep beneath the ocean near Alaska's Little Sitkin Island, far out in the Aleutian Islands. Within 25 minutes, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists issued a tsunami warning for U.S. Pacific coastal areas. Forty minutes later, a pressure sensor on the seafloor hundreds of kilometers south of Alaska detected the tsunami's vanguard pulses. Data from that instrument—one of six in a network activated just the previous month—indicated that the wave was only 2 centimeters tall there. Simulations previously run on computers suggested that such a wave wouldn't be a danger to Hawaii or other distant shores, and NOAA canceled its tsunami warning less than 90 minutes after the quake occurred.

Page 542 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
OF the Neanderthal specimens, the best preserved as sitting unremarked on a shelf in London, undisturbed but for occasional light dusting for over a half century.

BARSTOW - In the multicolored hills overlooking the Mojave River Valley, the excavation of stone tools and flakes reveals human activities from the distant past. A new system of geologic dating has confirmed that an alluvial deposit bearing the stone tools and flakes at the Calico archaeological site is about 135,000 years old. But the site could even be older. Calico project director Fred Budinger Jr. said a soil sample, taken at a depth of 17 1/2 feet in one of three master pits at the dig near Yermo, verifies that the deposit dates to the Middle Pleistocene Epoch - the Ice Age. ''This new date confirms earlier estimates that humans were in the Manix Basin, near the base of the Calico Mountains, as early as 125,000 to 200,000 years ago,'' Budinger said.

Page 544 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Schwalbe was celebrated nearly as warmly as he had dug up the skull himself. Appalled and embittered, for the next two decades Dubois refused to let anyone examine his precious fossils again.

A candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

Page 547 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Unfortunately, rather than preserving the bones for study, the Chinese ground then up to make medicines. We can only guess how many priceless Homo erectus bones ended up as a sort of Chinese equivalent of Beecham's powder.

The story of Noah, the Flood and his extraordinary ark was once the best known story in the world. More than 200 Flood legends in one form or another have been recorded, and they occur on every continent. Modern ideas about the Flood, nonetheless, assume that the disaster affected only a limited region. During the last century two theories were proposed: one that the Flood took place in Mesopotamia, as indicated in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the other that it took place in the Black Sea area.

Page 550 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
If you correlate tool discovery with the species of creature most often found nearby, you would have to conclude that early hand tools were mostly made by antelopes.

Replica stone tools of the Acheulean industry, used by Homo erectus and early modern humans, and of the Mousterian industry, used by Neanderthals. (Top, left to right) Mid-Acheulean bifacial hand ax and Acheulean banded-flint hand ax. (Centre) Acheulean hand tool. (Bottom, left to right) Mousterian bifacial hand ax, scraper, and bifacial point.

Page 555 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The American Museum of Natural History in New York has an absorbing diorama that depicts life-sized recreations of a male and a female walking side by side across the ancient African plain. The tableau is presented with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration tht virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary.

More than a century ago, Dutch paleontologist Eugene Dubois suggested that human origins lay in Southeast Asia, and he soon found the undeniably earliest hominid skeletal remains on the island of Java. In the 1930s, many more fossils of similar primitive character came to light near Beijing, and the entire Asian collection became known as Homo erectus. Presumably arising from an Asian ape, "upright man" had evidently occupied a great swath of eastern Asia, and provided the logical precursor to the more advanced and younger Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon (Homo sapiens) fossils of Europe. In evolutionary terms, Homo erectus was thought to have emerged in Asia and later dispersed to Europe.

Page 559 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.

I've always loved living things, including insects. The beauty and diversity of life fascinates and astonishes me. Insects first caught my attention, like everyone else, when I was a child. Their small size, intricate body parts, and unpredictable behavior still captivates the kid in me. As a child I was also saddened by our complete disrespect for animals and insects of all kinds. We kill them for fun, pleasure, or just out of boredom. Even today, in the neighborhood I live in west of Denver, people install powerful bug ''zappers,'' set ant traps and hang yellow bee traps outside their homes. For what purpose? Do you really need to kill all of the insects outside of your home? It's even more amazing to think we're killing all of those outdoors insects when we, ourselves, are too wrapped up in television or eating to make our way outside the door to enjoy our surroundings anyway!!

Page 566 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
These early Homo sapiens loved their Acheulean tools, too. They carried them vast distances. Sometimes they even took unshaped rocks with them to make into tools later on. They were, in a word, devoted to the technology.

This article is reprinted from the first publication of the "Modern Lithic Artists Journal." The Lithic Artists Guild is a newly formed society of lithic craftsmen and people who collect their many forms of art in stone.

Page 569 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
These first modern humans are surprisingly shadowy. We know less about ourselves, curiously enough, than about any other line of hominids.

When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere -- except in the public imagination.

Page 571 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The first undisputed appearance of Homo sapiens is in the eastern Mediterranean, around modern-day Israel, where the begin to show up about a hundred thousand years ago.

A sea that lies between Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa and is completely landlocked except for the Strait of Gibraltar, the Bosporus, and the Suez Canal; total water area is 965,000 square miles (2,501,000 square kilometers). An inland sea surrounded by Europe, Asia, Asia Minor, the Near East, and Africa. It connects with the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar; with the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus; and with the Red Sea through the Suez Canal.

Page 573 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Right up until the middle of the twentieth century the accepted anthropological view of the Neanderthal was that he was dim, stooped, shuffling and simian - the quintessential caveman.

With characteristic intelligence, wit, and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, C. Loring Brace brings together 35 years of work into a monumental statement on evolutionary anthropology. An advocate of integrated, four-field anthropology, Brace begins by asking: Which anthropological data can benefit from an evolutionary perspective, and which cannot? Succeeding chapters present path-breaking research on Darwinism, race, cladistics, phylogeny, Neanderthals, dentition, craniometry, fossil evidence, and cultural ecology that raise provocative questions for the entire discipline. Reworked and updated into an accessible whole, the chapters weave analyses of scientific data, intellectual history, and anthropological theory with both grace and rigor. Evolution in an Anthropological View will stand as a milestone of twentieth century anthropology, and essential reading for all anthropologists, and their students.

Page 574 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
Why then, you may well ask, if the Neanderthals were so stout and adaptable and cerebrally well endowed, are they no longer with us? One possible (but much disputed) answer is that perhaps they are.

Dr Markus Bastir was part of an Anglo-Spanish team which studied 43,000-year-old Neanderthal remains at El Sidrón in Spain, revealing significant physical differences between those from northern and southern Europe. Dr Bastir, who was based in the functional morphology and evolution research unit of HYMS (fme) for the last two years, analysed the mandibles of Neanderthals discovered at El Sidrón. The analysis revealed north–south variations, with southern European Neanderthals showing broader faces with increased lower facial heights. The research findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Page 575 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The implication for many people was that some races are inherently more advanced, and that some humans could essentially constitute different species. The view, so instinctively offensive now, was widely popularized in many respectable places until fairly recent times.

Obama: speaking the unspeakable about race ::: This country has so many issues ahead of us, the economy, Iraq, health care, our shredded civil liberties, yet the fact that we as a country still cannot discuss race; we deny the role it plays in the political discourse when discussing Obama. There isn’t a discussion of the tried and true race-baiting tactics that have been used by both parties to stoke fear in the Base of The Black Man at the polls (remember the Harold Ford ads?). Will there be an honest discussion about these political tactics and how they will play out in 2008, or will pundits dance around it, making only veiled references because a frank discussion about race and its toxic role in political elections makes people uncomfortable.

Page 578 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
The Mungo man, according to these findings, was anatomically modern - just like you and me - but carried an extinct genetic lineage. His mitochondrial DNA is no longer found in living humans, as it should be if, like all other modern people, he was descended from individuals who had left Africa in the recent past.

Colin Groves and Alan Thorne have been fighting for years...in the nicest possible way. They argue for the media, but are always very civil. They appear to enjoy one another’s company, and they even share a common intellectual home at the Australian National University in Canberra. Still, each is absolutely convinced the other is completely and utterly wrong. The pair are currently engaged in intense metaphysical fisticuffs about a man who died roughly 60,000 years ago, by the shores of once-verdant Lake Mungo in south-eastern NSW. More specifically, they are arguing about the DNA of this man, known as Mungo Man.

Page 587 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
In 1755 the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution's stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire.

The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) is arguably the most common icon associated with the island nation of Mauritius.Although it was only about 300 years ago that the dodo became extinct, very little is known about this bird. Ironically, even though the dodo lived into the time of written history, more is known about the natural history and behavior of some dinosaurs than is known about the dodo. Its appearance, life history, and the history of its extinction all remain a mystery. The written reports and illustrations of sailors and ship's naturalists who visited Mauritius in the 17th century are the basis of all known information. Primary sources, such as these, should not be accepted without question as they are subject to inconsistencies, elaborations, and artistic interpretation-thus the difficulty in creating a true picture of this unique relative of the pigeon.

Page 591 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
A great deal of extinction hasn't be cruel or wanton, but just kind of majestically foolish.

Glenn Beck's fatuous face expresses the inner soul. That the man is an idiot is apparent within twenty seconds of listening to him and within ten seconds of watching him. It might take as much as 45 to realize he's also a cruel fool, but this latest comment -- that the people whose homes are being lost in Southern California hate America -- takes the prize. We have so many cretins competing to be the Father Coughlin of our time that they might all just cancel each other out and eventually be even less remembered than he is. I look forward to the day.

Page 592 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
In 1907, when a well known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he hat shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest birds that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with "joy".

Extinction is a natural phenomenon which has been occurring since life first started on the planet, and many species were lost in Hawai'i for natural reasons, such as predation by other endemic species or climatic and environmental changes, but one can only imagine how many bird species would still be surviving in the Islands if man had not arrived and rampaged without thought.

Page 594 - A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ISBN 0767923227023
We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a lot more than lucky breaks.

BILL BRYSON
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson
Bill Bryson has been travelling the world for 30 years, and for half that time he's been turning his experiences into the stuff of comedy and bestsellers. But is he losing his touch? What is it about Bill Bryson these days? Is he mellowing with age, getting kinder and more forgiving? Is he - God forbid - getting less funny?
Have beard, will travel
By Jane Sullivan
March 6, 2005