One of the reasons the Mona Lisa looks enigmatic is that she has no eyebrows.
The idea was to help women produce babies of genius by giving them the very best sperm modern science could provide. Some two hundred children were born as a result of the bank’s efforts, though none, it seems, proved to be an outstanding genius or even an accomplished eyeglass engineer.
No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.
The answer is a complicated, dramatic one. I can tell you at once that nothing you touch today will have more bloodshed, suffering, and woe attached to it than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper set.
Realizing they had no clear notion of how far it was from New York to Paris by the great circle route, they went to a public library and measured the distance on a globe with a piece of string. By such means was one of history’s greatest planes built.
In the United States, plasma sales make up 1.6 percent of all goods exported, more than America earns from the sale of airplanes.
We had remained friends in a kind of theoretical sense, but our paths had diverged wildly.
Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more will have it without knowing it and will die of something else first.
Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race – nothing in terms of skin colour, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples. And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the colour of their skin.
Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can’t have done much for their spirits either.
The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.
In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods – bread and water chiefly – to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.
What genes specifically do is provide instructions for building proteins. Most of the useful things in the body are proteins. Some speed up chemical changes and are known as enzymes. Others convey chemical messages and are known as hormones.
By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world.
It was made completely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards – a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot.
People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.
We may know nothing of their beliefs, but we still pay homage to three of their gods – Tiw, Woden, and Thor – in the names of our three middle weekdays, and eternally commemorate Woden’s wife, Frig, every Friday.
The problem is that the test for prostate cancer, called a PSA test, is not trustworthy.
In the United States, melatonin is commonly taken as a treatment for jet lag or insomnia. It is, as James Hamblin has written, “one of the very few hormones that you can purchase in the United States without a prescription. It is considered a dietary supplement and therefore held to essentially no premarket standards of quality, safety, or efficacy.
Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named;.