万物简史 第28期:走进太阳系(6)

So if Pluto really is a planet, it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one-quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forty-eight states. 因此，如果冥

万物简史 第27期:走进太阳系(5)

As for Pluto itself, nobody is quite sure how big it is, or what it is made of, what kind of atmosphere it has, or even what it really is. A lot of astronomers believe it isn't a planet at all, but merely the largest object so far found in a zone of

万物简史 第25期:走进太阳系(3)

One nice touch about Christy's discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. 克里斯蒂

万物简史 第24期:走进太阳系(2)

This was actually something of a blow to Pluto's status as a planet, which had never been terribly robust anyway. Since previously the space occupied by the moon and the space occupied by Pluto were thought to be one and the same, it meant that Pluto

万物简史 第17期:如何营造一个宇宙(9)

The eventual result was the inflation theory, which holds that a fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflatedin effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every 10-34seconds. The

万物简史 第405期:浩瀚的海洋(24)

Nothing, however, compares with the fate of cod. 然而，命运最惨的要算是鳕鱼。 In the late fifteenth century, the explorer John Cabot found cod in incredible numbers on the eastern banks of North America, 15世纪末，探险家约翰卡伯

万物简史 第460期:生命在前进(2)

Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. 据认为，在10亿根骨头当中，只有大约l根能变成化石。 If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive todaythat's 270 mill

万物简史 第468期:生命在前进(10)

With his supervisor, Harry Whittington, and fellow graduate student Derek Briggs, Conway Morris spent the next several years making a systematic revision of the entire collection, and cranking out one exciting monograph after another as discovery pil

万物简史 第465期:生命在前进(7)

Dismounting to assist her, Walcott discovered that the horse had turned a slab of shale that contained fossil crustaceans of an especially ancient and unusual type. 沃尔科特跳下马来扶她，却发现马将一块页岩圈了个身。页岩里有

万物简史 第464期:生命在前进(6)

As a boy Walcott discovered that he had a knack for finding fossils, particularly trilobites, 沃尔科特还是个孩子的时候就发现自己具有寻找化石的本领，尤其是三叶虫。 and built up a collection of sufficient distinction t

万物简史 第457期:小生物的世界(28)

From time to time certain strains of virus return. 有几种病毒不时重复出现。 A disagreeable Russian virus known as H1N1 caused severe outbreaks over wide areas in 1933, then again in the 1950s, and yet again in the 1970s. 一种名叫H1N1的

万物简史 第462期:生命在前进(4)

As with all extinct creatures, there is a natural temptation to regard them as failures, but in fact they were among the most successful animals ever to live. Their reign ran for 300 million yearstwice the span of dinosaurs, which were themselves one

万物简史 第446期:小生物的世界(17)

The most rampantly infectious organism on Earth, a bacterium called Wolbachia, doesn't hurt humans at all, 地球上最具传染性的生物，一种名叫沃尔巴克体的细菌，根本有伤害人类， or, come to that, any other vertebratesbut

万物简史 第449期:小生物的世界(20)

One of the odder aspects of infection is that microbes that normally do no harm at all sometimes get into the wrong parts of the body and go kind of crazy, 感染有许多古怪的方面。其中之一是，有些在正常情况下完全无害的微生

万物简史 第435期:小生物的世界(6)

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. 我们现在知道了，有大量微生物生活在地球内部的深处，其中许多与普通的有机世界毫

万物简史 第434期:小生物的世界(5)

They have been found living in boiling mud pots and lakes of caustic soda, deep inside rocks, at the bottom of the sea, 我们还发现细菌生活在沸腾的泥潭里和烧碱池里，岩石深处，大海底部， in hidden pools of icy water in t

万物简史 第432期:小生物的世界(3)

Bacteria do it all the time without fuss, and thank goodness, for no larger organism could survive without the nitrogen they pass on. 而细菌一直在不慌不忙地干这件事。谢天谢地，要是没有它们来传送氮，大的生物就活不下

万物简史 第428期:生命的起源(22)

Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. 线粒体支配着氧，释放食物中的能量。 Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth today would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes. 没有

万物简史 第424期:生命的起源(18)

Even we can tolerate it only up to a point. 连我们对氧的耐受力也是有限度的。 The oxygen level in our cells is only about a tenth the level found in the atmosphere. 我们细胞里的氧气浓度，只有大气里的大约十分之一。

万物简史 第414期:生命的起源(8)

As one leading biology text puts it, with perhaps just a tiny hint of discomfort, 正如一篇重要的生物学文章所说，说得也许有点儿令人不大舒服： Researchers agree that such reactions would not have been energetically favorabl