万物简史 第148期:基本物质(20)

For most of us, the periodic table is a thing of beauty in the abstract, but for chemists it established an immediate orderliness and clarity that can hardly be overstated. Without a doubt, the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements is the most eleg

万物简史 第144期:基本物质(16)

Despite the occasional tidyings-up, chemistry by the second half of the nineteenth century was in something of a mess, which is why everybody was so pleased by the rise to prominence in 1869 of an odd and crazed-looking professor at the University of

万物简史 第79期:敲石头的人们(1)

5 THE STONE-BREAKERS 5 敲石头的人们 At just the time that Henry Cavendish was completing his experiments in London, four hundred miles away in Edinburgh another kind of concluding moment was about to take place with the death of James Hutton. T

万物简史 第78期:事物的测定(26)

Delicacy was the key word. Not a whisper of disturbance could be allowed into the room containing the apparatus, so Cavendish took up a position in an adjoining room and made his observations with a telescope aimed through a peephole. The work was in

万物简史 第66期:事物的测定(14)

Bouguer and La Condamine thus had spent nearly a decade working toward a result they didn't wish to find only to learn now that they weren't even the first to find it. Listlessly, they completed their survey, which confirmed that the first French tea

万物简史 第57期:事物的测定(4)

Newton was a decidedly odd figurebrilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the

万物简史 第54期:事物的测定(1)

PART II THE SIZE OF THE EARTH 第二部分 地球的大小 Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; 大自然和大自然的法则藏匿于黑夜之中； God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. 上帝说，让牛顿出世吧！于是世界一片

万物简史 第507期:丰富多彩的生命(3)

We wandered through a confusion of departments where people sat at large tables doing intent, 我们漫步穿过一个又一个部门，只见人们坐在大桌子跟前， investigative things with arthropods and palm fronds and boxes of yellowed bo

万物简史 第456期:小生物的世界(27)

Much about the 1918 flu is understood poorly or not at all. 对于1918年的那场流感，人们了解甚少，或者根本不了解。 One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges, and other earth

万物简史 第454期:小生物的世界(25)

Some went on in this manner for months before dying. 有的几个月处于那种状态，然后死去。 A very few survived and regained consciousness but not their former liveliness. 极少的人幸免于难，恢复了知觉，但不再像以往那样

万物简史 第437期:小生物的世界(8)

In 2001, a team from Tel Aviv University argued that B. permians were almost identical to a strain of modern bacteria, Bacillus marismortui, found in the Dead Sea. 2001年，以色列特拉维夫大学的一个小组认为，二叠纪芽孢杆菌与一

万物简史 第431期:小生物的世界(2)

Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. 每个人体大约由1亿亿个细胞组成，但它却是大约10亿亿个细菌细胞的寄主。 They are, in short, a big part of us. 总而言之，

万物简史 第220期:把铅撵出去(9)

Holmes was heroic as much for the obstacles he overcame as for the results he achieved. By the 1920s, when Holmes was in the prime of his career, geology had slipped out of fashionphysics was the new excitement of the ageand had become severely under

万物简史 第381期:进入对流层(22)

By 1958, when people in lab coats started to pay attention to it, it had risen to 315 parts per million. 到1958年实验室人员开始重视这个问题的时候，那个数字已经上升到百万分之三百一十五。 Today it is over 360 parts

万物简史 第383期:浩瀚的海洋(2)

Almost nothing about it can be used to make reliable predictions about the properties of other liquids and vice versa. 它的身上几乎没有哪一点可以用来对别的液体的性质进行可靠的推测，反之亦然。 If you knew nothing of

万物简史 第387期:浩瀚的海洋(6)

Nearly 90 percent of the planet's ice is in Antarctica, and most of the rest is in Greenland. 地球上将近90%的冰在南极洲；剩下的主要在格陵兰。 Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on nearly two miles of ice, at the North

万物简史 第365期:进入对流层(6)

People who habitually live at altitude have often spent thousands of years developing disproportionately large chests and lungs, increasing their density of oxygen-bearing red blood cells by almost a third, though there are limits to how much thicken

万物简史 第369期:进入对流层(10)

At the equator the convection process is generally stable and the weather predictably fair, but in temperate zones the patterns are far more seasonal, localized, and random, which results in an endless battle between systems of high-pressure air and

万物简史 第374期:进入对流层(15)

To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard's system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloudstratocumulus,

万物简史 第329期:美丽而危险(12)

Once it is in place, the idea is that three people, 计划问世以后，打算这么做：3个人， Christiansen in Menlo Park, California, Professor Robert B. Smith at the University of Utah, and Doss in the park, 加利福尼亚门洛公园的克里