Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it.
Hoyle also realized that if starts imploded they would liberate huge amounts of heat—100 million degrees or more, enough to begin to generate the heavier elements in a process known as nucleosynthesys. In 1957, working with others, Hoyle showed how the heavier elements were formed in supernova explosions. For this work, W. A. Fowler, one of his collaborators, received a Nobel Prize. Hoyle, shamefully, did not.
Although there was no reliable ways of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC [...]
p 104
Even the Reverend Buckland, as pious a soul as the nineteenth century produced, noted that nowhere did the Bible suggest that God made the Heaven and Earth on the first day, but merely ‘in the beginning’.
Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called ‘strange quarks’ [...] If you are reading this, that hasn't happened.
[...] even a small asteroid —the size of a house, say— could destroy a city. The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth-crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.
p 255
In 2001, researchers at the California Institute of Technology [...] concluded that [the later KT impact] affected the Earth's climate for about ten thousand years.
Every human body consists of about ten quadrillion cells, but is a host to about a hundred quadrillion bacterial cells.
[...] life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having got going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
p 459
At any given moment, a typical cell in your body will have about one billion ATP molecules in it, and in two minutes every one of them will have been drained dry and another billion will have taken their place. Everyday you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight.