Showing results by narrator "Peter Clapperton" in All Categories

In a laboratory in Birmingham in the early 1950s, a mouse was wearing skin that belonged to a different strain of mouse, and was doing so with complete indifference. It should have destroyed the graft within a fortnight. It never destroyed it. The animal had been injected before birth with cells...

In 1965 Vera Rubin became the first woman formally permitted to observe at Palomar, a mountain whose administrators explained that her time there would have to be short because the building had no ladies' room. She cut a small skirt out of paper, taped it onto the stick figure on the men's room door, announced that the facility was now compliant, and went to work. She then spent fifteen years producing one of the most durable measurements in the history of astronomy. The measurement is simple enough to explain at a bus stop.

A bullied boy is forced into war, survives lightning and death… only to wake in a world of monsters and magic. Luca’s Journey: The Awakening Luca has spent his entire life invisible. Bullied at school. Ignored at home. The only people who ever believed in him were his two friends, Bella and...

James Hutton made his fortune out of soot. He and a friend worked out how to cook the black residue scraped from Edinburgh's chimneys into a pale crystalline salt that dyers and metalworkers would pay for, and which had until then come by ship from Egypt. It was a good business. It left him free to spend the rest of his life doing what he actually wanted to do, which was to climb into ditches and look at rocks. Everyone agreed the world was about six thousand years old. This was not superstition. It was arithmetic, done carefully, from the only continuous historical document anyone had.