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Hess elaborated his ideas in an important paper, which was almost universally ignored. Sometimes the world just isn’t ready for a good idea.
Assuming things continue much as at present, the Atlantic Ocean will expand until eventually it is much bigger than the Pacific. Much of California will float off and become a kind of Madagascar of the Pacific. Africa will push northward into Europe, squeezing the Mediterranean out of existence and thrusting up a chain of mountains of Himalayan majesty running from Paris to Calcutta. Australia will colonize the islands to its north and connect by some isthmian umbilicus to Asia.
Earth is alone among the rocky planets in having tectonics, and why this should be is a bit of a mystery.
As late as 1988 more than half of all American paleontologists contacted in a survey continued to believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs was in no way related to an asteroid or cometary impact.
even worse was the realization that the people we thought we’d been collaborating with hadn’t bothered to share with us their new findings.” “Why not?” He shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, it was a pretty good insight into how unattractive science can get when you’re playing at a certain level.”
By early 1991 it had been established to nearly everyone’s satisfaction that Chicxulub was the impact site.
we no longer possess a rocket powerful enough to send humans even as far as the Moon. The last rocket that could, Saturn 5, was retired years ago and has never been replaced. Nor could we quickly build a new one because, amazingly, the plans for Saturn launchers were destroyed as part of a NASA housecleaning exercise.
It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core.
The hour hand on a clock moves about ten thousand times faster than the “flowing” rocks of the mantle.
Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone’s vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots.
The real terror of the deep, however, is the bends—not so much because they are unpleasant, though of course they are, as because they are so much more likely. The air we breathe is 80 percent nitrogen. Put the human body under pressure, and that nitrogen is transformed into tiny bubbles that migrate into the blood and tissues. If the pressure is changed too rapidly—as with a too-quick ascent by a diver—the bubbles trapped within the body will begin to fizz in exactly the manner of a freshly opened bottle of champagne, clogging tiny blood vessels, depriving cells of oxygen, and causing pain so
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The cause of the inebriation is even now a mystery. It is thought that it may be the same thing that causes alcohol intoxication, but as no one knows for certain what causes that we are none the wiser.
It is a curiosity of physics that the larger a star the more rapidly it burns. Had our sun been ten times as massive, it would have exhausted itself after ten million years instead of ten billion and we wouldn’t be here now.
The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t keep us steady
There are ninety-two naturally occurring elements on Earth, plus a further twenty or so that have been created in labs,
Altogether only about thirty of the naturally occurring elements are widespread on Earth, and barely half a dozen are of central importance to life.
oxygen is our most abundant element, accounting for just under 50 percent of the Earth’s crust,
Carbon is only the fifteenth most common element, accounting for a very modest 0.048 percent of Earth’s crust, but we would be lost without it. What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous. It is the party animal of the atomic world, latching on to many other atoms (including itself) and holding tight, forming molecular conga lines of hearty robustness—the very trick of nature necessary to build proteins and DNA.
Selenium is vital to all of us, but take in just a little too much and it will be the last thing you ever do.
Drop a small lump of pure sodium into ordinary water and it will explode with enough force to kill.
By and large, if an element doesn’t naturally find its way into our systems—if it isn’t soluble in water, say—we tend to be intolerant of it.
The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the force they used to be.
When elements don’t occur naturally on Earth, we have evolved no tolerance for them, and so they tend to be extremely toxic to us,
When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.
Warm air can hold more moisture than cool air, which is why tropical and summer storms tend to be the heaviest.
The first person to crack the problem was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a Dutch maker of instruments, who produced an accurate thermometer in 1717. However, for reasons unknown he calibrated the instrument in a way that put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees.
Only about 0.035 percent of the Earth’s fresh water is floating around above us at any moment.
Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.
There are 320 million cubic miles of water on Earth and that is all we’re ever going to get. The system is closed: practically speaking, nothing can be added or subtracted. The water you drink has been around doing its job since the Earth was young. By 3.8 billion years ago, the oceans had (at least more or less) achieved their present volumes.
Geophysicists realized that the vents were acting much like the filters in a fish tank. As water is taken down into the crust, salts are stripped from it, and eventually clean water is blown out again through the chimney stacks. The process is not swift—it can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but it is marvelously efficient as long as you are not in a hurry.
The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales’ stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel No. 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.
It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.
So powerful is this natural impulse to assemble that many scientists now believe that life may be more inevitable than we think—that it is, in the words of the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, “an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise wherever conditions are appropriate.” De Duve thought it likely that such conditions would be encountered perhaps a million times in every galaxy.
“There is nothing special about the substances from which living things are made. Living things are collections of molecules, like everything else.”
if you make monomers wet they don’t turn into polymers—except when creating life on Earth. How and why it happens then and not otherwise is one of biology’s great unanswered questions.
Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know. Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginnings from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence. This much may have happened before, perhaps many times. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary: it cleaved itself and produced an heir. A tiny bundle of
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That oxygen is fundamentally toxic often comes as a surprise to those of us who find it so convivial to our well-being, but that is only because we have evolved to exploit it. To other things it is a terror. It is what turns butter rancid and makes iron rust. Even we can tolerate it only up to a point. The oxygen level in our cells is only about a tenth the level found in the atmosphere.
We now know that there are a lot of microbes living deep within the Earth, many of which have nothing at all to do with the organic world. They eat rocks or, rather, the stuff that’s in rocks—iron, sulfur, manganese, and so on. And they breathe odd things too—iron, chromium, cobalt, even uranium. Such processes may be instrumental in concentrating gold, copper, and other precious metals, and possibly deposits of oil and natural gas. It has even been suggested that their tireless nibblings created the Earth’s crust.
Altogether, only about one microbe in a thousand is a pathogen for humans,
Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around this, we may be in real trouble.
given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks or antidepressants that people will take every day forever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
virus. A virus is a strange and unlovely entity—“a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” in the memorable phrase of the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. Smaller and simpler than bacteria, viruses aren’t themselves alive. In isolation they are inert and harmless. But introduce them into a suitable host and they burst into busyness—into life.
Viruses prosper by hijacking the genetic material of a living cell and using it to produce more virus. They reproduce in a fanatical manner, then burst out in search of more cells to invade. Not being living organisms themselves, they can afford to be very simple. Many, including HIV, have ten genes or fewer, whereas even the simplest bacteria require several thousand.
Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size of dinner plates, writes David Attenborough, are therefore “likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old.” It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence. “They simply exist,” Attenborough adds, “testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.”
Everywhere there was an air of unhurried thoroughness, of people being engaged in a gigantic endeavor that could never be completed and mustn’t be rushed.
At least 99 percent of flowering plants have never been tested for their medicinal properties. Because they can’t flee from predators, plants have had to contrive chemical defenses, and so are particularly enriched in intriguing compounds. Even now nearly a quarter of all prescribed medicines are derived from just forty plants, with another 16 percent coming from animals or microbes,
Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued a hundred billion or so at birth, and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn’t a moment to waste.
Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us—not so much as a stray molecule—that was part of us nine years ago.
One respected Dutch observer, Nicolaus 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—indeed, all creatures—were simply vastly inflated versions of tiny but complete precursor beings.
It wasn’t until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from preexisting cells. The belief became known as the “cell theory,” and it is the basis of all modern biology.
