万物简史 第402期:浩瀚的海洋(21)

It is now thought that the larvae of certain organisms may drift through the water until, 现在认为，某些生物的幼体可能在水里漂动， by some unknown chemical means, they detect that they have arrived at a food opportunity and fall o

万物简史 第317期:地下的烈火(25)

Ninety minutes after the blast, ash began to rain down on Yakima, Washington, 爆发90分钟以后，灰烬开始雨滴般地洒落在华盛顿州的亚基马。 a community of fifty thousand people about eighty miles away. 那是个有5万人口的社

万物简史 第314期:地下的烈火(22)

Almost the only person who believed that something really bad might happen was Jack Hyde, a geology professor at a community college in Tacoma. 几乎只有一个人认为真的快出大问题了，他就是塔科马一所社区学院的地质学教授

万物简史 第313期:地下的烈火(21)

At that time, the lower forty-eight United States had not seen a volcanic eruption for over sixty-five years. 当时，美国本土的48个州在过去的65年里没有见过火山爆发。 Therefore the government volcanologists called in to monitor

万物简史 第312期:地下的烈火(20)

We may be going through a reversal now. 我们现在也许正经历一次逆转。 The Earth's magnetic field has diminished by perhaps as much as 6 percent in the last century alone. 仅仅在过去的一个世纪里，地球的磁场就减弱了大约

万物简史 第311期:地下的烈火(19)

The outer core is in many ways even less well understood, though everyone is in agreement that it is fluid and that it is the seat of magnetism. 外核在许多方面被了解得更少，虽然大家都认为它是液态的，是产生磁力的地方。

万物简史 第308期:地下的烈火(16)

How and when the Earth got its crust are questions that divide geologists into two broad camps, 地球如何有了地壳，何时有了地壳，这两个问题把地质学家分成两大阵营， those who think it happened abruptly early in the Eart

万物简史 第303期:地下的烈火(11)

The most notorious such quakes ever to hit the United States were a series of three in New Madrid, Missouri, in the winter of 1811-12. 在美国经历过的这类地震当中，最著名的要算是1811-1812年冬发生在密苏里州新马德里的一

万物简史 第294期:地下的烈火(2)

Working alone in the lab on the morning I passed through was a cheerfully grizzled, looking fellow in a blue work shirt 一天上午，我从里面经过，只见一个身穿蓝色工作服、头发灰白的人独自在实验室里忙碌。 whom I re

万物简史 第289期:砰!(24)

Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, 要是有人比如说在奥马哈或得梅因的高楼上， who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. 恰好看着那个

万物简史 第285期:砰!(20)

Hildebrand traveled to the site and decided fairly swiftly that they had their crater. 希尔德布兰德来到该地，很快就得出结论，他们找到了想要找的大坑。 By early 1991 it had been established to nearly everyone's satisfacti

万物简史 第260期:大地在移动(14)

It was equally dismissive of convection and seafloor spreading. And in Basin and Range, published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. 它同样不承认对流理论和海床

万物简史 第264期:大地在移动(18)

The outline of Gondwana, a once-mighty continent connecting Australia, Africa, Antarctica, and South America, was based in large part on the distribution of a genus of ancient tongue fern called Glossopteris, which was found in all the right places.

万物简史 第255期:大地在移动(9)

It was scored everywhere with canyons, trenches, and crevasses and dotted with volcanic seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist named Arnold Guyot. All this was a puzzle, but Hess had a war to take part in, and put such t

万物简史 第254期:大地在移动(8)

There was one other major problem with Earth theories that no one had resolved, or even come close to resolving. That was the question of where all the sediments went. Every year Earth's rivers carried massive volumes of eroded material500 million to

万物简史 第198期:威力巨大的原子(12)

Let us pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now. Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and

万物简史 第517期:丰富多彩的生命(13)

This was an amazing disclosure. 这句话里包含着丰富的历史内容。 Joseph Banks was England's greatest botanist, and the Endeavour voyage that is the one on which Captain Cook charted the 1769 transit of Venus 约瑟夫班克斯是英国最伟

万物简史 第185期:爱因斯坦的宇宙(28)

This was truly startling. The universe was expanding, swiftly and evenly in all directions. It didn't take a huge amount of imagination to read backwards from this and realize that it must therefore have started from some central point. Far from bein

万物简史 第525期:丰富多彩的生命(21)

Goodness knows what the results would be if anyone attempted a similar exercise with the planet's estimated 20,000 types of lichens, 50,000 species of mollusk, or 400,000-plus beetles. 要是有人试图对这颗行星上的大约2万种地衣、5万多

万物简史 第524期:丰富多彩的生命(20)

In principle you ought to be able to go to experts in each area of specialization, ask how many species there are in their fields, then add the totals. 原则上，我们可以去找一找每个专门领域的专家，问一问他们的领域里有多少