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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children
sperm from a lot of other males. Gorillas, which discourage dalliances
between other males and the females of their harem, have small testes.
Chimpanzees, among whom females mate widely, have large ones. Human testes lie between these two extremes.
If America stood for anything, it was to kick Communist butts.
Her passage through the family was like the river Rhône fl owing through
the lake of Geneva “without mingling any part of its streams with that
lake”.
In 2000 the census takers in China reported an undercount of
1.81%. Offi cials deemed this to be within acceptable limits. To
compensate, they added more than 22m notional people to the total, to produce a population of 1.27 billion. Many of the uncounted
were so-called “black children”, ie, those born in breach of regulations that limit urban couples to a single child. From sample
surveys, offi cials estimate the population at the end of 2009 to
have been 1.33 billion.
She accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render
him eternally faithful.
By riding on the coat-tails of his wife’s brother-in-law, Nathan
Rothschild.
Durex, Trojan and Australia’s Ansell offer chiefl y condom brands that
appeal to men, with names such as “Performa”, “Magnum”, and “Jissbon”,
whose name in Chinese means “James Bond”. Safedom, by contrast, sells
“Elegant Winter” condoms under brands such as “Beautiful Girl” and
“Green Lemon” in oval-shaped, paisley-patterned tins. Its marketing
emphasises female health benefi ts. Whether or not Safedom goes all the
way in Europe and other markets will, as usual, depend on the womenA
short man, and a serial fornicator, Koestler, it seems, used his conquests
as a kind of self-validation.
A trait is sexually selected if it evolved specifi cally to enhance
mating success. They come in two main forms: weapons, such as
an elk’s horns are used to fi ght off competitors; and ornaments,
like a peacock’s tail, which are used to advertise genetic fi tness to
attract the opposite sex.
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Часть I
Nature
“
Why not name storms after senators instead?
On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in
summer by 2040.
Sharks kill jast 10–20 people worldwide each year while humans kill
around 73m sharks.
How did the world get from bacteria to Bach, from fungus to
fugues?
In August 2016 the result of the Great Elephant Census, the most extensive count of a wild species ever attempted, suggested that about 350,000
African savannah elephants remain alive. This is down by 140,000 since
2007.
If Mr Xi were a bird, he would be a swan.
The body had decided that the pink dolphin, a rare type sometimes seen
cavorting in the territory’s harbour, would be a mascot of the handover
festivities.
Of the millions of animal species on Earth, only one has built a
spaceship and fl own to the Moon.
By the middle of the century the ocean could contain more plastic than
fi sh by weight. There are estimated to be 5trn bits of plastic in the ocean,
with over 8m tonnes of the stuff added every year.
How much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel
minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the
297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called
Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. Tusko should have
had a few milligrams, not several hundred.
If Britain had a favourite wild animal, it was probably not the fox, gallant
but verminous, or the hare, magical but moonstruck, but the bright-eyed
pointy-nosed hedgehog, suddenly appearing on lawns at dusk like the
head of an old brush.
102
Nature
There are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m
tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same
predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group.
Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of
400m tonnes of other animals. Somewhere between 400m and
500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive
on Earth.
You cannot negotiate with nature.
Scientists expect almost all corals to be gone by 2050.
In 563 AD a tsunami devastated Geneva.
IDC, a market-research fi rm, predicts that the “digital universe” (the
data created and copied every year) will reach 180 zettabytes (180
followed by 21 zeros) in 2025 (see chart). Pumping it all through a
broadband internet connection would take over 450m year.
Many male mammals have a bone, known as a baculum, in their penises
to add to stiffness. What is surprising is that many others— men included— do not. What causes a baculum to evolve is not clear.
The ocean covers almost three-quarters of the planet. It is divided into fi ve basins: the Pacifi c, the Atlantic, the Indian, the
Arctic and the Southern oceans. Were all the planet’s water
placed over the United States, it would form a column of liquid
132km tall.
Biology’s biggest division is not between plants and animals, nor even
between multicellular and single-celled creatures. It is between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
A tiger’s stripes are as unique as a human’s fi ngerprints.
The dolphin is clever, cute, kind, active and inoffensive. Exactly the character of Hong Kong.
The new law that declares the Whanganui river, New Zealand’s
third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented.
New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui
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Часть I
might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged
with murder if a swimmer drowns.
Intriguingly, though, Komodo dragons appear to be resistant to bites infl icted by other dragons.
Nature never decieves us.
If, in tens of thousands of years, a future Finn digs a 400-metre-deep well
and draws water contaminated with 21st-century nuclear waste, it will
be safe to drink.
An octopus’s body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same
as a dog’s, but most of these reside in the cephalopod’s arms
and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain
(their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of consciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to
humans.
A butterfl y’s wingbeat in one part of the world causes a hurricane in
another.
The breast of the standard American turkey has become so enlarged by selective breeding that it can no longer mate because
the male’s breast gets in the way. Mr Singer describes how thousands of such sexually disabled male turkeys are masturbated by
workers and the females artifi cially inseminated using the tube
of an air compressor (atthe rate of one every 12 seconds at one
turkey farm).
He wouldn’t know the difference between a bulldog and a billy goat.
Human neurons are distant relatives of tiny yeast cells, themselves descendants of even simpler microbes.
Why humans became naked apes is still a mystery.
“When elephants mate,” says a South-East Asian diplomat, “we
ants get trampled.” “But when elephants fi ght,” an Australian
strategist retorts, “the ants get trampled even more.”
Why is bird poo white?
104
Nature
A mammalian brain uses about 70% of its volume for moving information around, 20% for processing it and the remaining 10% to
keep everything in the right place and supplied with nutrients. In
doing all these things, a human brain consumes about 20 watts of
power. That makes it roughly 10,000 times more effi cient than the
best silicon machines invented by those brains.
At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental challenge facing the world’s big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was
horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs
and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp
of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to
100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of
muck when it rained, and fl y-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At
the fi rst international urban-planning conference, held in New York in
1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found,
and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early.
The UN’s Environmental Programme also estimates that the
harsh climate claims 230,000 lives annually in west Asia (the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent), making it a bigger killer
than war. Things are so bad that even Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist
group, is preaching the virtues of solar panels.
Even the gentle triceratops sometimes used its horns to charge predators.
Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?
Over half of the 1,400 known human pathogens have their origins in animals such as pigs, bats, chickens and other birds.
Success is a delicate fl ower that can easily be killed.
Giant clams, Tridacna gigas, up to a metre across, required two or even
four men to carry. The bivalves spilled out of the holds. Giant clams are
one of Buddhism’s “seven treasures”, along with gold and lapis lazuli.
China’s new rich prize their shells as showy ornaments.
What is the IQ of a chimpanzee? Or a worm? Or a game-showwinning computer program?
“When you open the window, both fresh air and fl ies come in,” said Deng
Xiaoping.
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Часть I
People shed bacteria— from their skin, mouths, noses and other
orifi ces— at a rate of about 1m an hour.
There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives
around faeces. In the case of Onthophagus Sagittarius, each female constructs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in
the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards
the entrance, fi ghting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and
cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other
females may break in to their neighbours’ underground, to try to steal
dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in confl ict with other females,
which is why they need horns. This is no struggle to possess the opposite
sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?
Take leafcutter ants. They have four distinct castes, each with
their own life tasks. They practise agriculture with a species of
fungus that they have domesticated to the point that it can no
longer survive without the ants’ care. Their agricultural ways
resemble an assembly line, with different ants doing different
jobs. The ants have huge colonies with millions of citizens all cooperating. One found in Brazil covered 500 square feet and extended 26 feet below the surface.
If you poke a bear you had better show up with the right sort of stick.
In a competition to fi nd the world’s least-loved animal, the mosquito would be hard to beat.
The dinosaurs, as every schoolchild knows, died out 66m years ago, at
the end of the Cretaceous period. But there is an argument about whether they went with a bang or a whimper.
A Go board’s size means that the number of games that can be
played on it is enormous: a rough-and-ready guess gives around
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10
. Analogies fail when trying to describe such a number. It is
nearly a hundred of orders of magnitude more than the number
of atoms in the observable universe, which is somewhere in the
region of 1080.
“First, get the cow out of the ditch. Second, fi nd out how the cow got into
the ditch. Third, make sure you do whatever it takes so the cow doesn’t
go into the ditch again.” This is the homely advice that Anne Mulcahy,
106
Nature
the former boss of Xerox, says became her mantra as she fought (successfully) to revive the fortunes of the copying and printing.
Interestingly, the genetically modifi ed mice still showed the classic male-mating repertoire— mounting, penetration and ejaculation. But the researchers noted that they mounted less often,
were less apt to penetrate and did not stick at it for as long as the
normal mice.
Trees can fall as well as rise.
An average elephant living in and around Samburu National Reserve, in northern Kenya, ranges over 1,500 square kilometres
during the course of a year, and may travel as much as 60km a
day.
Despite its ambitious title, Charles Darwin’s master work did not really
explain “the origin of species”. Rather, it explained how species change,
which is not quite the same thing.
Shave a chimpanzee and you will fi nd that beneath its hairy
coat its skin is white. Human skin, though, was almost always
black.
Perhaps it was also because she was a woman, expected to keep her
house spotless, that she so lamented the despoiling of Everest by climbers. She became a director of campaigns to get their rubbish and, especially, their deep-frozen sewage moved off the mountain. The urine
left behind by climbers, she pointed out, could fi ll 3,300 bathtubs, and
11,800kg of faeces were dug out of the snow every season.
The empires were like tigers, which even when threatened with
extinction will not co-operate.
If a big wave is coming, running from it is not enough. You also have to
know how far to run before it is safe to stop.
People and bees are more or less the only animals a full-grown
elephant is scared of.
By 1881, the monster was winning. Jumbo came into season, a “tsunami of testosterone” known as musth, when the penis emerges, tinged
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Часть I
with green, in four-foot, S-shaped erections. Hardly family entertainment.
Overpriced homes are like the extravagant plumage of a peacock,
an eye-catching encumbrance that only the most resourceful
males can put on display.
What’s a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might
seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a
fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A
growing band of biologists, however, think this defi nition incomplete.
They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their
view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of
the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person’s gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin
and all of the crevices and orifi ces that subtend from his body’s surface.
Storms that lash the modern American coastline cause more economic damage than their predecessors because there is more to
destroy. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, a Category 4 storm,
caused $1 billion-worth of damage in current dollars. Were it to
strike today the insured losses would be $125 billion.
Ask a typical American what he thinks of goat and he’ll imagine “a
gnarly-looking old billy goat with long horns on top of a car chewing
on an old tin can.
As a saying widely attributed to Don Quixote put it, “let the dogs
bark, Sancho, it’s a sign that we’re advancing”.
What is the commonest living thing on Earth? Tracking down aparticular virus in the ocean makes fi nding a needle in a haystack look a trivial
task. A litre of seawater has billions of viruses in it.
Elephants rumble at 33Hz when they hear bees (the researchers
used tape recordings, rather than releasing actual bee swarms)
and at 39Hz when they hear Samburu.
The two researchers collected pieces of plastic from various sites in the
North Atlantic. They then examined each using DNA analysis, and also
an electron microscope, to see what was living on it. Lots of things were.
108
Nature
Altogether, they discovered about 50 species of single-celled plant, animal and bacterial life. Each bit of debris was, in effect, a tiny ecosystem.
From the womb comes a warrior, a king, a rich man, a criminal
and akiller.
Life in the world of dung beetles is fi ercely competitive. After rolling up
a ball of highly nutritious dung, the beetle must race off with it or risk
having the ball stolen by other beetles. Strength is important, but so too
is the route taken. When allowed to see only the 18 brightest stars or
immersed in total darkness, the beetles took more than twice as long to
exit the arena.
The new studies suggest they are right if you are a frog or a small
bird. If you are a coyote or a raccoon, though, buckthorn is a good
thing.
The need to identify a suitable mate is such a strong biological urge
that the animal kingdom has spawned a bewildering array of courtship
rituals. Hippo males fl ing their faeces; fl atworms have penis-jousting
contests; and humpback whales sing and leap above the ocean surface.
Such competitive displays depend on the speed, strength and size of an
animal, which is why they convey a measure of reproductive fi tness.
Female bats maintain viable sperm inside themselves for months.
So do salamanders. And a female shark once gave birth after six
years in captivity.
Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.
A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his
gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells
descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs,
moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body’s commensal bacteria are
collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly,
many of those millions are variations on common themes, but
equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds
something to the body’s genetic mix.
The coyote are opportunistic eaters and will eagerly consume rabbits,
rats, Canada geese, fruit, insects and family pets.
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Часть I
Pigeons form a far richer picture of the world than a person can
manage, through three senses unavailable to humans: an instinctive ability to navigate by the sun, an ability to detect magnetic
fi elds that provides them with an inbuilt compass, and an ability
to hear infrasound. But if local conditions mean they cannot hear
their destination, they are as lost as a driver whose satnav has
suddenly failed.
Polar-bear watchers do sometimes spot their quarry chasing snow
geese during the summer, when these birds have moulted and are unable to fl y. However, a quick calculation comparing the cost of doing
so with the energetic gain from success suggests such hunts are not
usually worth the effort. To make a profi t, the argument goes, a polar
bear weighing 320kg (700lb, the average for an adult) must, if hunting
a 2kg goose, make its kill in less than 12 seconds. If it does not do so,
then the calories it expends running after its prey will exceed those it
gains from catching it— and the calculation is tipped still further in the
birds’ direction if the cost of the ones that get away is included. Geese
and other waterfowl do, nevertheless, seem to form a signifi cant part
of polar bears’ diets, for studies done in the 1960s found a lot of bird
remains in the animals’ faeces.
In 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted
an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random
people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to acquaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages
closer to their intended fi nal recipients. His famous result was
that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between
any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of
its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops
could link any two of them via mutual friends. A small world is
now, it seems, even smaller.
The 30-metre, 190,000-tonne Chelyabinsk rock came close: 27,700km
(17,200 miles) above the surface, inside the orbit of some satellites. It was
the nearest ever recorded for an asteroid that size.
A camel is a horse designed by committee.
The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere
between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO
humanity since 1750.
put there by
2
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