Quotes from Bill Bryson

Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble's breakthroughs possible.

Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that it is all just random frantic action, a sequence of endless encounters directed by nothing more than elemental rules of attraction and repulsion.

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 percent of the dancing static you see 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

The more or less universal belief that we should all walk ten thousand steps a day—that's about five miles—is not a bad idea, but it has no special basis in science. Clearly, any ambulation is likely to be beneficial, but the notion that there is a universal magic number of steps that will give us health and longevity is a myth. The ten-thousand-step idea is often attributed to a single study done in Japan in the 1960s, though it appears that also may be a myth.

an atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules. And yet right there"—she tapped the stromatolites—"you have organisms almost at the surface. It's a puzzle.

Though you tell yourself it's preposterous, you can't quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it's just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jumpier than Don Knotts with pistol drawn.

He left to do whatever editors do.

There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten.

3.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was much closer, volcanic eruptions commonplace (because of the thinness of the crust), meteor impacts routine and the air thick with acidic vapours. Remarkably, it was in such an unpromising environment that life first got going.

Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code. Taxonomy

General admission for groundlings—those who stood in the open around the stage—was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that—all this at a time when a day's wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping—the box office.

Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn't even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably.

Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature.

But even men far tougher and more attuned to the wilderness than Thoreau were sobered by its strange and palpable menace. Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as "so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror." When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step.

I was pretty certain that the man in the seat across the aisle was a smoker—he looked suitably out of sorts—and even more sure that the young man ahead of me must be. I have yet to meet a grown-up reader of comic books who does not also have an affection for tobacco and tattoos.

two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

How stupid of me not to have thought of it!" T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has been echoed ever since. Interestingly

As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." All

there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

The best way to reduce snoring is to lose weight, sleep on your side , and not drink alcohol before retiring.

In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him.

Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy—the removal of a kidney stone—in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. (That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.)

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of