Quotes from Bill Bryson

With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is 'less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground'2, in the words of Carl Sagan. In

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. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But - and here's an interesting point - for the most part it doesn't want to be much.

Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.

The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome.

To function, a protein must not only have the necessary chemical components, properly assembled, but then must also be folded into an extremely specific shape. "Folding" is the term that's used

The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

Even thinking, it turns out, affects the ways genes work. How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).

Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy.

The field attracted many extraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards.

the average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.

if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But

Seldom – perhaps never – has science been driven forward more swiftly and successfully by animosity.

Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth today would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.

when we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light.

we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

dark matter," which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky

One planet, one experiment." If

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events—frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals—that are mostly impossible now.

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.

dihydrogen oxide

Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite.