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Shakespeare mused that "it is beyond the power of man to bring love and wisdom to an union."
A newly-discovered scrap of one of holy texts which seems to quote Jesus speaking of "my wife." Karen King of Harvard University presented a translation at a conference in Rome on September 18th. Churches that believe their priests must be celibate in order to be like Jesus are not about to change their rules, though. Assuming the fragment is genuine, it shows only that others talked about Jesus using that word. The definition of "wife" is open to question too: Gnostic writing also features terms such as "bridal chamber", used without any connotation of sexual intimacy.
The vagina is not nearly as free today in the West as we are led to believe.
The problem with penises, as Richard Rudgley, a British anthropologist, admitted on a television programme some years ago, is that once you start noticing them, you "tend to see willies pretty much everywhere".
The euro was supposed to be the manifestation of a grand political project. It feels more like a loveless marriage, in which the cost of breaking up is the only thing keeping the partners together.
When he reads obituaries he looks not for the age of the deceased but the length of their marriages, and envies those who had more time than he did.
After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads for suspiciously cheap "Viagra"?
One Chinese billionaire has particular requirements for a matchmaking agency: suitable candidates should be aged 20–26, weigh less than 50kg (110lb) and have no sexual experience. So far more than 5,000 young women have applied.
"Customer 360" is due to be tested in the new London store next spring. It will mean that Burberry keeps a detailed database on each customer's spending habits. That could cause embarrassment, for example if a customer who has bought racy gifts for his mistress enters a Burberry store with his wife and is enthusiastically ushered to the skimpy bikinis.
Are there no American children who have broken a leg at camp, suffered psychological trauma by coming last in a race, or been discriminated against by competing against stronger boys?
Finding a nice Jewish girl in Mississippi isn't easy.
Beautiful flowers – like beautiful women – can separate the most sensible men from their money. In the 17th century Holland, tulips grew so expensive that people exchanged them for houses.
In early imperial Rome, when the emperor Augustus put a tax on celibacy in response to anaemic marriage rates, he faced a spate of betrothals to underage women, an open revolt from his senators – and a decline in his citizens' conjugal appetites.
Are you cheating on your spouse? If so, please stand up and declare it. Total silence? What virtuous readers The Economist has.
The latest survey of time use in America suggests women still shoulder most of the housework, spending on average an hour a day scrubbing, hoovering and shopping, compared with barely 20 minutes for the unfairer sex.
Performing a Mozart quartet takes just as long in 2012 as it did in the late 18th century.
Defining rape, or trying to, is a sure-fire way to start a row. Does age matter? (In some countries, sex with minors is automatically rape; in others, it is not.) Must it involve violence? What kind of sex is involved? Is the victim by definition a woman and the perpetrator a man? Do time, location or the parties' sexual histories play any role?
I don't know any successful women who haven't had a powerful sponsor in their organisation to give them their first big break.
Marriage is a surprisingly good predictor of management style, reckon Nikolai Roussanov and Pavel Savor of Wharton Business School. The average unmarried boss invests 69 % more than his married counterpart, they find.
Lillian Hellman was a hypocritical "bitch with balls", in the words of Elia Kazan.
When Theits, Achilles's mother, dipped her baby in the river Styx to give him her gift of invulnerability, she had to hold him somewhere.
The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar's Benison club in Scotland, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings were brought to a fitting climax, as it were, when they would communally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter.
Americans need to vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.
Medically, it was possible to make a woman speak, but there was no medical way of making one silent.
As someone who has studied Mandarin for years, I can tell you that the most difficult aspect of any language to master is neither tone, grammar, nor spelling, but rather how to use it to communicate with a woman.
A golden wedding is a terrible time for a marital crisis.
The happy life seems to be lived in accordance with goodness, and such a life implies seriousness and doesn't consist in amusing oneself.
The judges decided that a child who has been brutalised becomes freer to make sexual choices. So a child prostitute is somehow no longer a child.
People inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, which is why only the female line of descent can be tracked using them.
Being liked is not the same as doing shit.
Being gay-friendly can attract gay customers, too. Witeck-Combs Communications, a consultancy, estimates that gay Americans spend $835 billion a year. But But homosexuality is still illegal in 76 countries – including such vibrant business hubs as Dubai and Singapore – and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Nigeria. 29 US states still allow discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.
"As part of their daily lives, children across Europe and the world continue to be spanked, slapped, hit, smacked, shaken, kicked, pinched, punched, caned, flogged, belted, beaten and battered in the name of discipline, mainly by adults whom they depend on."
Ali Hili, head of a group called Iraqi LGBT, (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) says that since the 2003 invasion more than 700 people have been killed because of their sexuality. Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth conviction.
Why, though, allow yourself to be ambushed if you are a female? Why mate with a second-class beau who cannot be bothered to bring you the fishy equivalent of roses and diamonds? No matter how hard males compete, they will always be outwitted by the wiliest, most subversive competitors of all: females.
With their talk of placing stability and growth above individual rights, Communist officials sometimes make human rights sound like air conditioning, or colour television: a luxury you can afford once you acquire a certain level of wealth.
Women can be required to lift their veils "if necessary" – would that be before or after a veiled suicide-bomber detonates her (or his) device?
It is particularly striking in a Stockholm playground filled with Somali toddlers, squeaking as they queue for sledge-rides.
When most people talk about "broken Britain" they mean whether someone stands for a pregnant woman on a train or fears being stabbed for asking kids to throw their litter in a bin.
In 1849 George Bancroft, an American historian and diplomat, said that for a man to have two countries was as intolerable as for him to have two wives.
It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in turn have a further 50m regular partners.
Sharing a womb is not an ideal start to life.
To Mr Santorum the Supreme Court's ruling in 2003 that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional was a bad mistake: this was a slippery slope that would establish a right to bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery – "anything".
When Iranians say "Death to America" they sometimes mean "Please America, show me more love".
"Pre-salt oil is like a pretty woman on a dance floor full of men," Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, put it bluntly. "Everybody wants a go."
Relatives, friends, children and dogs are du, everyone else is Sie.
"Bin Laden", he said, "is the illegitimate child of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher".
To Edward Weston Charis Wilson was a landscape – in the repeated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells, with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every follicle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains.
Any Mohawk who marries a non-native must leave. "Everyone knows the law: if you marry out, you stay out".
Mr Ahmadinejad compared Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, who has asked Syria to distance itself from Iran, to "the daughter-in-law's mother", in the Iranian family a symbol of easily ignored powerlessness.
Greater promiscuity in females does, indeed, lead to bigger testes, presumably because a male needs to make more sperm to have a fighting chance of fathering offspring, if those sperm are competing with sperm from a lot of other males. Gorillas, which discourage dalliances between other males and the females of their harem, have small testes. Chimpanzees, among whom females mate widely, have large ones. Human testes lie between these two extremes.
If America stood for anything, it was to kick Communist butts.
Her passage through the family was like the river Rhône flowing through the lake of Geneva "without mingling any part of its streams with that lake".
In 2000 the census takers in China reported an undercount of 1.81 %. Officials deemed this to be within acceptable limits. To compensate, they added more than 22m notional people to the total, to produce a population of 1.27 billion. Many of the uncounted were so-called "black children", ie, those born in breach of regulations that limit urban couples to a single child. From sample surveys, officials estimate the population at the end of 2009 to have been 1.33 billion.
She accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful.
By riding on the coat-tails of his wife's brother-in-law, Nathan Rothschild.
Durex, Trojan and Australia's Ansell offer chiefly condom brands that appeal to men, with names such as "Performa", "Magnum", and "Jissbon", whose name in Chinese means "James Bond". Safedom, by contrast, sells "Elegant Winter" condoms under brands such as "Beautiful Girl" and "Green Lemon" in oval-shaped, paisley-patterned tins. Its marketing emphasises female health benefits. Whether or not Safedom goes all the way in Europe and other markets will, as usual, depend on the womenA short man, and a serial fornicator, Koestler, it seems, used his conquests as a kind of self-validation.
A trait is sexually selected if it evolved specifically to enhance mating success. They come in two main forms: weapons, such as an elk's horns are used to fight off competitors; and ornaments, like a peacock's tail, which are used to advertise genetic fitness to attract the opposite sex.
“ Nature
Why not name storms after senators instead?
On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040.
Sharks kill jast 10–20 people worldwide each year while humans kill around 73m sharks.
How did the world get from bacteria to Bach, from fungus to fugues?
In August 2016 the result of the Great Elephant Census, the most extensive count of a wild species ever attempted, suggested that about 350,000 African savannah elephants remain alive. This is down by 140,000 since 2007.
If Mr Xi were a bird, he would be a swan.
The body had decided that the pink dolphin, a rare type sometimes seen cavorting in the territory's harbour, would be a mascot of the handover festivities.
Of the millions of animal species on Earth, only one has built a spaceship and flown to the Moon.
By the middle of the century the ocean could contain more plastic than fish by weight. There are estimated to be 5trn bits of plastic in the ocean, with over 8m tonnes of the stuff added every year.
How much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the 297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. Tusko should have had a few milligrams, not several hundred.
If Britain had a favourite wild animal, it was probably not the fox, gallant but verminous, or the hare, magical but moonstruck, but the bright-eyed pointy-nosed hedgehog, suddenly appearing on lawns at dusk like the head of an old brush.
There are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals. Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth.
You cannot negotiate with nature.
Scientists expect almost all corals to be gone by 2050.
In 563 AD a tsunami devastated Geneva.
IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the "digital universe" (the data created and copied every year) will reach 180 zettabytes (180 followed by 21 zeros) in 2025 (see chart). Pumping it all through a broadband internet connection would take over 450m year.
Many male mammals have a bone, known as a baculum, in their penises to add to stiffness. What is surprising is that many others – men included – do not. What causes a baculum to evolve is not clear.
The ocean covers almost three-quarters of the planet. It is divided into five basins: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic and the Southern oceans. Were all the planet's water placed over the United States, it would form a column of liquid 132km tall.
Biology's biggest division is not between plants and animals, nor even between multicellular and single-celled creatures. It is between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
A tiger's stripes are as unique as a human's fingerprints.
The dolphin is clever, cute, kind, active and inoffensive. Exactly the character of Hong Kong.
The new law that declares the Whanganui river, New Zealand's third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.
Intriguingly, though, Komodo dragons appear to be resistant to bites inflicted by other dragons.
Nature never decieves us.
If, in tens of thousands of years, a future Finn digs a 400-metre-deep well and draws water contaminated with 21st-century nuclear waste, it will be safe to drink.
An octopus's body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same as a dog's, but most of these reside in the cephalopod's arms and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain (their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of consciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to humans.
A butterfly's wingbeat in one part of the world causes a hurricane in another.
The breast of the standard American turkey has become so enlarged by selective breeding that it can no longer mate because the male's breast gets in the way. Mr Singer describes how thousands of such sexually disabled male turkeys are masturbated by workers and the females artificially inseminated using the tube of an air compressor (at the rate of one every 12 seconds at one turkey farm).
He wouldn't know the difference between a bulldog and a billy goat.
Human neurons are distant relatives of tiny yeast cells, themselves descendants of even simpler microbes.
Why humans became naked apes is still a mystery.
"When elephants mate," says a South-East Asian diplomat, "we ants get trampled." "But when elephants fight," an Australian strategist retorts, "the ants get trampled even more."
Why is bird poo white?
A mammalian brain uses about 70 % of its volume for moving information around, 20 % for processing it and the remaining 10 % to keep everything in the right place and supplied with nutrients. In doing all these things, a human brain consumes about 20 watts of power. That makes it roughly 10,000 times more efficient than the best silicon machines invented by those brains.
At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental challenge facing the world's big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to 100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of muck when it rained, and fly-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At the first international urban-planning conference, held in New York in 1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found, and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early.
The UN's Environmental Programme also estimates that the harsh climate claims 230,000 lives annually in west Asia (the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent), making it a bigger killer than war. Things are so bad that even Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group, is preaching the virtues of solar panels.
Even the gentle triceratops sometimes used its horns to charge predators.
Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?
Over half of the 1,400 known human pathogens have their origins in animals such as pigs, bats, chickens and other birds.
Success is a delicate flower that can easily be killed.
Giant clams, Tridacna gigas, up to a metre across, required two or even four men to carry. The bivalves spilled out of the holds. Giant clams are one of Buddhism's "seven treasures", along with gold and lapis lazuli. China's new rich prize their shells as showy ornaments.
What is the IQ of a chimpanzee? Or a worm? Or a game-show-winning computer program?
"When you open the window, both fresh air and flies come in," said Deng Xiaoping.
People shed bacteria – from their skin, mouths, noses and other orifices – at a rate of about 1m an hour.
There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of Onthophagus Sagittarius, each female constructs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours' underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?
Take leafcutter ants. They have four distinct castes, each with their own life tasks. They practise agriculture with a species of fungus that they have domesticated to the point that it can no longer survive without the ants' care. Their agricultural ways resemble an assembly line, with different ants doing different jobs. The ants have huge colonies with millions of citizens all co-operating. One found in Brazil covered 500 square feet and extended 26 feet below the surface.
If you poke a bear you had better show up with the right sort of stick.
In a competition to find the world's least-loved animal, the mosquito would be hard to beat.
The dinosaurs, as every schoolchild knows, died out 66m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. But there is an argument about whether they went with a bang or a whimper.
A Go board's size means that the number of games that can be played on it is enormous: a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10170. Analogies fail when trying to describe such a number. It is nearly a hundred of orders of magnitude more than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is somewhere in the region of 1080.
"First, get the cow out of the ditch. Second, find out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, make sure you do whatever it takes so the cow doesn't go into the ditch again." This is the homely advice that Anne Mulcahy, the former boss of Xerox, says became her mantra as she fought (successfully) to revive the fortunes of the copying and printing.
Interestingly, the genetically modified mice still showed the classic male-mating repertoire – mounting, penetration and ejaculation. But the researchers noted that they mounted less often, were less apt to penetrate and did not stick at it for as long as the normal mice.
Trees can fall as well as rise.
An average elephant living in and around Samburu National Reserve, in northern Kenya, ranges over 1,500 square kilometres during the course of a year, and may travel as much as 60km a day.
Despite its ambitious title, Charles Darwin's master work did not really explain "the origin of species". Rather, it explained how species change, which is not quite the same thing.
Shave a chimpanzee and you will find that beneath its hairy coat its skin is white. Human skin, though, was almost always black.
Perhaps it was also because she was a woman, expected to keep her house spotless, that she so lamented the despoiling of Everest by climbers. She became a director of campaigns to get their rubbish and, especially, their deep-frozen sewage moved off the mountain. The urine left behind by climbers, she pointed out, could fill 3,300 bathtubs, and 11,800kg of faeces were dug out of the snow every season.
The empires were like tigers, which even when threatened with extinction will not co-operate.
If a big wave is coming, running from it is not enough. You also have to know how far to run before it is safe to stop.
People and bees are more or less the only animals a full-grown elephant is scared of.
By 1881, the monster was winning. Jumbo came into season, a "tsunami of testosterone" known as musth, when the penis emerges, tinged with green, in four-foot, S-shaped erections. Hardly family entertainment.
Overpriced homes are like the extravagant plumage of a peacock, an eye-catching encumbrance that only the most resourceful males can put on display.
What's a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person's gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body's surface.
Storms that lash the modern American coastline cause more economic damage than their predecessors because there is more to destroy. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, a Category 4 storm, caused $1 billion-worth of damage in current dollars. Were it to strike today the insured losses would be $125 billion.
Ask a typical American what he thinks of goat and he'll imagine "a gnarly-looking old billy goat with long horns on top of a car chewing on an old tin can.
As a saying widely attributed to Don Quixote put it, "let the dogs bark, Sancho, it's a sign that we're advancing".
What is the commonest living thing on Earth? Tracking down a particular virus in the ocean makes finding a needle in a haystack look a trivial task. A litre of seawater has billions of viruses in it.
Elephants rumble at 33Hz when they hear bees (the researchers used tape recordings, rather than releasing actual bee swarms) and at 39Hz when they hear Samburu.
The two researchers collected pieces of plastic from various sites in the North Atlantic. They then examined each using DNA analysis, and also an electron microscope, to see what was living on it. Lots of things were. Altogether, they discovered about 50 species of single-celled plant, animal and bacterial life. Each bit of debris was, in effect, a tiny ecosystem.
From the womb comes a warrior, a king, a rich man, a criminal and a killer.
Life in the world of dung beetles is fiercely competitive. After rolling up a ball of highly nutritious dung, the beetle must race off with it or risk having the ball stolen by other beetles. Strength is important, but so too is the route taken. When allowed to see only the 18 brightest stars or immersed in total darkness, the beetles took more than twice as long to exit the arena.
The new studies suggest they are right if you are a frog or a small bird. If you are a coyote or a raccoon, though, buckthorn is a good thing.
The need to identify a suitable mate is such a strong biological urge that the animal kingdom has spawned a bewildering array of courtship rituals. Hippo males fling their faeces; flatworms have penis-jousting contests; and humpback whales sing and leap above the ocean surface. Such competitive displays depend on the speed, strength and size of an animal, which is why they convey a measure of reproductive fitness.
Female bats maintain viable sperm inside themselves for months. So do salamanders. And a female shark once gave birth after six years in captivity.
Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.
A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body's commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds something to the body's genetic mix.
The coyote are opportunistic eaters and will eagerly consume rabbits, rats, Canada geese, fruit, insects and family pets.
Pigeons form a far richer picture of the world than a person can manage, through three senses unavailable to humans: an instinctive ability to navigate by the sun, an ability to detect magnetic fields that provides them with an inbuilt compass, and an ability to hear infrasound. But if local conditions mean they cannot hear their destination, they are as lost as a driver whose satnav has suddenly failed.
Polar-bear watchers do sometimes spot their quarry chasing snow geese during the summer, when these birds have moulted and are unable to fly. However, a quick calculation comparing the cost of doing so with the energetic gain from success suggests such hunts are not usually worth the effort. To make a profit, the argument goes, a polar bear weighing 320kg (700lb, the average for an adult) must, if hunting a 2kg goose, make its kill in less than 12 seconds. If it does not do so, then the calories it expends running after its prey will exceed those it gains from catching it – and the calculation is tipped still further in the birds' direction if the cost of the ones that get away is included. Geese and other waterfowl do, nevertheless, seem to form a significant part of polar bears' diets, for studies done in the 1960s found a lot of bird remains in the animals' faeces.
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.
