Rachel

“In his 1973 “literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”
― Donnie Eichar, Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

“A lot of these viruses, a lot of these pathogens that come out of wildlife into domestic animals or people, have existed in wild animals for a very long time,” he said. They don’t necessarily cause any disease. They have coevolved with their natural hosts over millions of years. They have reached some sort of accommodation, replicating slowly but steadily, passing unobtrusively through the host population, enjoying long-term security—and eschewing short-term success in the form of maximal replication within each host individual. It’s a strategy that works.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Thus, helium became the first and only element in the chemist’s Periodic Table to be discovered someplace other than Earth.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“Each element has a characteristic atomic spectrum, due to the absorption and emission of light associated with the unique energy levels of its orbiting electrons.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc