Personal Highlights:

• This inexorable reality defines the second law of thermodynamics, and entropy is the measure associated with this loss of useful energy. While the energy content...
• Candles convert just 0.01% of chemical energy in tallow or wax to light. Edison’s light bulbs of the 1880s were roughly ten times as efficient....
• Bipedalism and efficient heat dissipation explain this feat. Quadrupedal ventilation is limited to one breath per locomotor cycle. The thoracic bones and muscles must absorb...

Personal Highlights:

• In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail...
• There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,”...
• Like arsenic, bismuth was a metallic element used in medicines. In particular, it was a key ingredient in antinausea and antidiarrhea formulas. One of the...

Personal Highlights:

• Any sailor worth his salt can gauge his latitude well enough by the length of the day, or by the height of the sun or...
• The measurement of longitude meridians, in comparison, is tempered by time. To learn one’s longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is...
• And so each hour’s time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude to the east or west.