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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Cox
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December 9 - December 24, 2022
Reaching up to 6 m in length and weighing over 2,000 kg, it has been calculated that this creature bites with a force three times that exerted by the jaws of a fully grown African lion.
The word ‘plankton5 comes from the Greek planktos, meaning errant. These are organisms that float with the currents, drifting passively along the shifting highways that carry life around the seas.
Although plankton are unable to control their horizontal position, they can and do adjust their vertical position.
One gets the impression that the scientists and sailors aboard the Endeavour didn’t believe a word of this, but in a noble tradition that continues to this day, they put their scepticism to one side and took the politicians’ cash in the name of science.
Cook recorded the name of the animal after hearing it spoken by the Aboriginal people who lived along the northeast coast; gangurru, which Cook translated as kangaroo’.
While the weight of a structure increases with the cube of its dimensions, the area of the load-bearing sections increases only with the square of its dimensions. Any structure scaled upwards on Earth will eventually fail under its own weight.
If the size of an animal is doubled, then its mass will increase by a factor of 8, and this changes the structural demands on the animal’s skeleton dramatically because the force of gravity acts in proportion to the mass.
But the diprotodon wasn’t one of Owen’s ‘terrible lizards’; rather, it was the largest marsupial ever to have lived.
Some 50,000 years ago, along with almost all the other Australian giants, the diprotodon disappeared, which corresponds roughly to the arrival of humans across the shallow seas and island chains that would have linked Australia to Eurasia after the last glacial maximum.
animals get bigger, an increasing amount of their body mass is made up of bone.
Around 300 million years ago, our atmosphere was 35 per cent oxygen, rather than the 21 per cent today.
Insects don’t have lungs and don’t transport oxygen around in the blood as we do. Instead, they rely on a system of tubes, called trachea, connected to holes in their bodies known as spiracles.
Insects in the Paleozoic era could afford a smaller tracheal system, relative to their volume, to deliver oxygen around their bodies, simply because the oxygen content of the gas passing through the tubes was higher.
insects still dominate the planet. Over a million different species have been discovered, but entomologists believe that there maybe 10 million more awaiting discovery.
This means that over 75 per cent of all known animal species are insects, and the true figure may well be significantly greater than 90 per cent.
Of all the insect groups, it is the Coleoptera, commonly and collectively known as beetles, which boast the greatest number of species. Over 400,000 different species are known,
The robber crab’s relatively low metabolic rate is thought to contribute to its longevity: it can live to over 80 years old.
The Christmas Island robber crab is the largest land crab anywhere on the planet and is so supremely adapted to life on land that it can even climb trees.
There is a minimum size, which is set ultimately by the size of atoms and molecules, and there is a maximum size, which on land is set by the size and mass of our planet, because the force of gravity restricts the emergence of giants.
Although there is no substantiated record of Franklin actually performing his experiment, it is thought that he may have conducted the kite test in Philadelphia in June 1752, and successfully extracted electrical sparks from the gathering clouds.
As Don described it to me, catfish are effectively large swimming tongues, despite the fact that they have no tongue inside their mouths. Catfish don’t have scales to protect their skin; instead every available bit of their surface is covered in thousands of taste receptors.
Evolution is sometimes less of a watchmaker than a tinkering odd-job man with oily overalls and a dirty face, mixing and matching as best it can to get a job done by modifying the available parts.
The most obvious are a thickening of the legs, the modification of their abdominal gills into book lungs, and the emergence of a preoral chamber in the mouth necessary for feeding in air. With these minor alterations, the scorpions are masters of the desert, able to survive for over a year without food or water.
The crescent-shaped hairs at the top are the sterocilia, which bend when sound waves enter the inner ear, triggering the release of neurotransmitter chemicals that generate nerve impulses.
Around 210 million years ago, the first mammals appeared. While the reptilian jaw is composed of several bones fused together, mammals have only single upper and lower jawbones.
The octopus has a highly complex nervous system, though it is only partly located in the brain; two-thirds of its neurons are located in its arms.
The octopus is a strange and wonderful thing. Part of the mollusc family, it is a cousin of the slugs and snails in your garden.
Similarly, if toads are placed in tanks full of dead worms, they will starve because they do not register them as worms.
A recent estimate put the number at 8.7 million, but the literature is replete with criticisms of the methodology, illustrating how far away we are from a consensus view. Other estimates range from 3 million to 100 million extant species.
What is known is that 1.3 million species have been catalogued, of which we are one, and that number is climbing at a rate of approximately 15,000 per year.
Around 1 per cent of Madagascar’s forests are destroyed every year, primarily through the practice of ‘Tavy’, slash and burn agriculture aimed at clearing land for rice farming and charcoal production.
The web of Caerostris darwini (Darwin’s bark spider) spans the upland rivers and streams of Madagascar, and its silk threads are ten times stronger than Kevlar.
Madagascar is home to over a quarter of a million species, 90 per cent of which are found nowhere else.
Whenever a new species is discovered and named it joins a system of classification that has been in existence for almost 300 years, a system that began with the work of one man Carl Linnaeus.
Nils didn’t have to look far for inspiration. A giant lime tree (Latin name ‘Linnaeus’) sat proudly on the family’s land and so this was the name he chose.
Classifying humans was another contentious part of Linnaeus’s early work, with humans being organised in the same grouping as other primates, a bold statement over one hundred years before Darwin published his heretical work.
Our genus Homo also included another species, Homo troglodytes, a caveman-like creature, and Homo lar, a human-like form covered in fur that is today known as the lar gibbon.
Every protein, carbohydrate and fat molecule in your body is constructed around carbon; from the 100 billion neurones in your brain, to the muscle behind every beat of your heart, to the architecture of DNA, you are rightly described as ‘carbon-based’.
That is roughly the size of our Milky Way, which contains almost half a trillion stars.
Nebulae are interstellar clouds of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionised gases.
The Universe began at the Big Bang, 13–75 billion years ago. Or maybe it didn’t.
Around one second after the Big Bang, the Universe had cooled to a relatively chilly 10 billion degrees – cool enough for the building blocks of the chemical elements, protons and neutrons, to form.
Just take a moment to think about a single fact – the fact that each of the trillion or so cells in your body was created from a single cell that formed at the moment of your conception.
IBM has suggested that every computer and mobile phone on the planet suffers on average one error per 256 MB of memory per month as a result of cosmic ray strikes. This means that the information in your DNA is suffering a similar fate.
The overwhelming majority of these damaging events are corrected by the body’s in-built repair mechanisms, but the success rate is not 100 per cent, and if uncorrected damage occurs to the DNA contained within an egg or sperm cell, then the resulting mutation maybe passed on to the next generation.
Given there are over half a trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, the idea that there are no other planets out there with webs of life at least as complex as our own seems to me to be an absurd proposition.
