A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [258]
23 “It's not a biodiversity crisis, it's a taxonomist crisis!” Ken Maes, interview with author, National Museum, Nairobi, October 2, 2002.
24 “many species are being described poorly . . .” Nature, “Challenges for Taxonomy,” May 2, 2002, p. 17.
25 “an enterprise called the All Species Foundation . . .” The Times (London), “The List of Life on Earth,” July 30, 2001.
26 “your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 16.
27 “to quote the man who did the measuring . . .” New Scientist, “Bugs Bite Back,” February 17, 2001, p. 48.
28 “These mites have been with us since time immemorial . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 15.
29 “Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts . . .” National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.
30 “If over 9,000 microbial types exist . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 144.
31 “it could be as high as 400 million.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 8.
32 “discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.
33 “tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.
34 “over three and a half billion years of evolution.” Economist, “Biotech's Secret Garden,” May 30, 1998, p. 75.
35 “found on the wall of a country pub . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 75.
36 “about 500 species have been identified . . .” Ridley, The Red Queen, p. 54.
37 “all the fungi found in a typical acre of meadow . . .” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 176.
38 “the number could be as high as 1.8 million.” National Geographic, “Fungi,” August 2000, p. 60; and Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 117.
39 “The large flightless New Zealand bird . . .” Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p. 2.
40 “was considered a rarity in the wider world.” New York Times, “A Stone-Age Horse Still Roams a Tibetan Plateau,” November 12, 1995.
41 “a sort of giant ground sloth . . .” Economist, “A World to Explore,” December 23, 1995, p. 95.
42 “A single line of text in a Crampton table . . .” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, pp. 32–34.
43 “he hiked 2,500 miles to assemble a collection . . .” Gould, The Flamingo's Smile, pp. 159–60.
CHAPTER 24 CELLS
1 “about the same number of components . . .” New Scientist, title unnoted, December 2, 2000, p. 37.
2 “no more than about 2 percent . . .” Brown, p. 83.
3 “scientists began to find it all over the place . . .” Brown, p. 229.
4 “It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream . . .” Alberts et al., Essential Cell Biology, p. 489.
5 “‘some few hundred' different types of cell . . .” De Duve, vol. 1, p. 21.
6 “If you are an average-sized adult . . .” Bodanis, The Secret Family, p. 106.
7 “Liver cells can survive for years . . .” De Duve, vol. 1, p. 68.
8 “not so much as a stray molecule . . .” Bodanis, The Secret Family, p. 81.
9 “Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork . . .” Nuland, p. 100.
10 “After he reported finding ‘animalcules' . . .” Jardine, p. 93.
11 “there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings . . .” Thomas, p. 167.
12 “He called the little beings ‘homunculi' . . .” Schwartz, p. 167.
13 “In one of his least successful experiments . . .” Carey (ed.), The Faber Book of Science, p. 28.
14 “all living matter is cellular.” Nuland, p. 101.
15 “The cell has been compared to many things . . .” Trefil, 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either, p. 133; and Brown, p. 78.
16 “a jolt of twenty million volts per meter.” Brown, p. 87.
17 “approximate consistency ‘of a light grade of machine oil' . . .” Nuland, p. 103.
18 “up to a billion times a second . . .” Brown, p. 80.
19 “the molecular world must necessarily remain . . .” De Duve, vol. 2, p. 293.
20 “100 million protein molecules in each cell . . .” Nuland, p. 157.
21 “At any given moment, a typical cell . . .” Alberts et al., p. 110.
22 “Every day you produce and use up . . .” Nature, “Darwin's Motors,” May 2, 2002, p. 25.
23 “On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy . . .” Ridley, Genome,