Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

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 final 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 CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750.

Left-handed snails avoid the attentions of right-handed crabs be­cause these dexterous crustaceans find it tricky to eat lefties. For humans, the equivalent is probably those really annoying pista­chio nuts that accumulate at the bottom of the bag. They are sim­ply more trouble to open than they are worth, and are thus likely to be tossed aside.

Among spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. Lady arachnids have a well-deserved reputation for polishing off their suitors, post copula, in a manner that Hannibal Lecter might have admired. But it has never been clear why this happens. Some biologists believe it is simply a mixture of female hunger and the availability of a meal that is in no position to run away. Others suspect that the male is actually sacrificing his life for the good of his genes. In other words, his becoming a meal for his paramour somehow helps the offspring of their union.

Pull a spring, let it go, and it will snap back into shape. Pull it further and yet further and it will go on springing back until, quite suddenly, it won't. What was once a spring has become a useless piece of curly wire. And that, in a nutshell, is what many scientists worry may happen to the Earth if its systems are over­stretched like those of an abused spring.

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will al­ways glorify the hunter.

People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But only Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. Call it diploma­cy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the things that makes the world go round.

He was a socially dangerous warm.

The old saying that where there's muck, there's brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, re­ceived wisdom was that most of the human genome — perhaps as much as 99% of it — was "junk". If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus, more than a century and a half after Charles Dar­win published "On the Origin of Species", biologists do not fully understand how species actually do originate. Work like this sug­gests one reason for this ignorance may be that they have been looking in the wrong place. For decades, they have concentrated their attention on the glittering, brassy protein-coding genes while ignoring the muck in which the answer really lies.

No other season quite captures the imagination as winter does.

Among the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for 56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the Precambrian was not — for neither teeth nor claws existed.

Using Viking epics, whaling and pollen records, log books, the debris shed by melted ice rafts, diatoms (silicon-armoured algae found in ma­rine sediments), ice cores and tree rings, scientists have constructed a record of the Arctic past which suggests that the summer sea ice is at its lowest level for at least 2,000 years. Six of the hottest years on record — going back to 1880 — have occurred since 2004.

The rhino horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff as finger nails, has no pharmacological value. Yet its street price has soared to over $60,000 a kilo, more than for the same weight of cocaine or gold — a proven aphrodisiac.

New Zealand still has seven times as many sheep as people.