To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. - David Attenborough

How is it that [birds] can withstand the pull of gravity that keeps the rest of us tied so firmly to the ground? The secret is a wing with a thick, rounded front edge that curves gently downwards toward the back edge which is very thin. As thin, in fact, as a feather. As the bird glides forward, the air flowing under the wing is impeded by the wing's downward curve so it becomes slightly compressed, and that pushes the wing up. At the same time, the air flowing across the top of the wing is deflected upwards by the wing's front edge, so reducing its pressure. If the air is moving fast enough, then the slight suction from above, combined with the push from beneath will be enough to lift the bird into the air [...] and ample to keep it aloft.

At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.

Just as the human population was starting its unprecedented growth spurt in the late eighteenth century, this was published. It's a first edition of an essay on population by the English clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus made a very simple observation about the relationship between humans and resources and used it to look into the future. He pointed out that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man. "Food production can't increase as rapidly as human reproduction. Demand will eventually outstrip supply. Malthus goes on to say, if we don't control human reproduction voluntarily, life could end in misery, which earned him a reputation as a bit of a pessimist. But Malthus' principle remains true. The productive capacity or the Earth has physical limits and those limits will ultimately determine how many human beings it can support. m10s58-m12s18