"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.