Quotes from Bill Bryson

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook)

The Kuiper belt is the source of what are known as short-period comets—those that come past pretty regularly—of which the most famous is Halley's comet. The more reclusive long-period comets (among them the recent visitors Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake) come from the much more distant Oort cloud, about which more presently.

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 per cent of the dancing static you see9 is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching.

We are actually getting worse at some matters of hygiene. Dr. Maunder believes that the move toward low-temperature washing machine detergents has encouraged bugs to proliferate. As he puts it: "If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.

the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.

Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

In simplest terms, what the equation says is that mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.

Water is everywhere. A potato is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one.

We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch.

What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones?

There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges.

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres—the height of a twenty-storey building—and every coastal city in the world would be inundated.

It's a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly—so far anyway—eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring. And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken.

Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code—the instruction manual for your body—so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body.

To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.

hadrons"—a collective term used by physicists for protons, neutrons and other particles governed by the strong nuclear force.

amoral, immoral. Amoral describes matters in which questions of morality do not arise or are disregarded; immoral applies to things that are evil.

atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. "Rather," as Timothy Ferris explains, "the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Proteins can't exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume then that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.

You have at least 200,000 different types of protein laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do.

Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it.