Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Wherever David Rockefeller went in the world — and in his 35 years at Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1946 to 1981, he ran up 5m air miles — Da­vid Rockefeller carried a small jar in his pocket. It was in case he found a beetle on the way. From the age of seven, partly from his own soli­tary, careful catching, partly from expeditions he sponsored, he built up a collection of 90,000 specimens from 2,000 species, carefully labelled and stored in airtight hardwood boxes at the 3,400-acre family place in Pocantico Hills. His preference was for wood-borers, leaf-cutters and tunnellers, whose industrious activity changed the world in ways few people saw. His discreet gathering of contacts had started in the war, when he was sent to Algiers to work for army intelligence: though of junior rank, he soon assembled a list of people who knew what was re­ally going on. He also collected 131 beetles in his jars.

At the heart of myriad devices, from computers and smartphones to drones and dishwashers, a microprocessor can be found bus­ily crunching data. Switch the power off, though, and this chip will forget everything.

No one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the first place. Regardless of any practical benefit, though, the three researchers, are surely contenders for an Ignobel prize. That award is made every year for work which "first makes you laugh, and then makes you think". Their study of laces looks like a shoo-in.

Dolly the sheep was cloned from an udder and named after a singer noted for her ample bosom as well as her talent.

You know, young man, one day all of these will be replaced by quantum computers.

If the history of human civilisation is of the collapse of distance — from walking to horses to carriages to motorised transport to jet engines — then what happens when you take that thread to its logical conclusion, when it becomes possible to move from any one place on Earth to another simply by walking through a door?

People could spot bacteria, but not viruses, which are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, influenza was, like the Higgs boson before 2012, a theoretical entity: its existence was deduced from its effects. In the face of such uncer­tainty, public faith in medicine wavered. People reverted to superstition: sugar lumps soaked in kerosene, and aromatic fires to clear "miasmas".

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers," Voltaire advised.

As Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said: "If quantum physics hasn't pro­foundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."

Most of the people who buy computers don't even know what a transistor does.

By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur — gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide — than all the world's cars put together.

You can't flush your toilet over the internet.

Once upon a time the space race was driven by the competition between capitalism and communism. Now it is driven by the competition between individual capitalists.

Almost 1.1 billion websites are currently online; global internet traffic will surpass 1 zettabyte for the first time this year, the equivalent of 152m years of high-definition video.

Science is an intellectual dead end.

A 300-qubit quantum computer could represent 2³⁰⁰ different strings of Is and Os at the same time, a number roughly equiva­lent to the number of atoms in the visible universe. And because the qubits are entangled, it is possible to manipulate all those numbers simultaneously.

But untangling voodoo's spiritual and political significance from its practices was hard. Zombie powder, according to a book written by a Harvard ethnobotanist, Wade Davis, with Mr Beauvoir's help, contained a hallucinogenic plant called datura, crushed skull from a toddler's de­composing corpse, freshly killed blue lizards, and a large dried toad with a dried sea worm wrapped around it. Later research cast doubt on the efficacy of this preparation in producing lasting trances.

Amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.

It is hard to get a scientific grant for treating faeces.

A modern Intel Skylake processor contains around 1.75 billion transistors — half a million of them would fit on a single transis­tor from the 4004 — and collectively they deliver about 400,000 times as much computing muscle. This exponential progress is difficult to relate to the physical world. If cars and skyscrapers had improved at such rates since 1971, the fastest car would now be capable of a tenth of the speed of light; the tallest building would reach half way to the Moon.