Jithu Gopal

“At depth, microbes shrink in size and become extremely sluggish. The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century18, some no more than perhaps once in five hundred years. As The Economist has put it: ‘The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much19.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its ‘Radio-active mineral springs27’. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 193828. By this time it was much too late for Mme Curie, who died of leukaemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact, is so pernicious and long-lasting that even now her papers from the 1890s – even her cookbooks – are too dangerous to handle. Her lab books are kept in lead-lined boxes29 and those who wish to see them must don protective clothing.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use ‘was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11’. For the next half-century it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, the Askesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theatres put on ‘laughing gas evenings’12 where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhalation and then entertain the audience with their comical staggerings. It wasn’t until 1846 that anyone got around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, as an anaesthetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessary agonies under the surgeon’s knife because no-one had thought of the gas’s most obvious practical application.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything