Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rates on forested land. Because those soil erosion rates are so much higher than soil formation rates, that means a net loss of soil. For instance, about half of the top soil of Iowa, the state whose agriculture productivity is among the highest in the U.S., has been eroded in the last 150 years. On my most recent visit to Iowa, my hosts showed me a churchyard offering a dramatically visible example of those soil losses. A church was built there in the middle of farmland during the 19th century and has been maintained continuously as a church ever since, while the land around it was being farmed. As a result of soil being eroded much more rapidly from fields than from the churchyard, the yard now stands like a little island raised 10 feet above the surrounding sea of farmland. 

Whether you've been traveling, focusing on your family, or going through a busy season at work, 14 days out of the gym takes its toll―not just on your muscles, but your performance, brain, and sleep, too. ① Most experts agree that after two weeks, you're in trouble if you don't get back in the gym. “At the two week point without exercising, there are a multitude of physiological markers that naturally reveal a reduction of fitness level,” says Scott Weiss, a New York-based exercise physiologist and trainer who works with elite athletes. ② After all, despite all of its abilities, the human body (even the fit human body) is a very sensitive system and physiological changes (muscle strength or a greater aerobic base) that come about through training will simply disappear if your training load dwindles, he notes. Since the demand of training isn't present, your body simply slinks back toward baseline. ③More protein is required to build more muscles at a rapid pace in your body. ④ Of course, how much and how quickly you'll decondition depends on a slew of factors like how fit you are, your age, and how long sweating has been a habit. “Two to eight months of not exercising at all will reduce your fitness level to as if you never exercised before,” Weiss notes.

Before the fifteenth century, all four characteristics of the witch (night flying, secret meetings, harmful magic, and the devil's pact) were ascribed individually or in limited combination by the church to its adversaries, including Templars, heretics, learned magicians, and other dissident groups. Folk beliefs about the supernatural emerged in peasant confessions during witch trials. The most striking difference between popular and learned notions of witchcraft lay in the folk belief that the witch had innate supernatural powers not derived from the devil. For learned men, this bordered on heresy. Supernatural powers were never human in origin, nor could witches derive their craft from the tradition of learned magic, which required a scholarly training at the university, a masculine preserve at the time. A witch's power necessarily came from the pact she made with the devil.

Fortunately, however, the heavy supper she had eaten caused her to become tired and ready to fall asleep.

Various duties awaited me on my arrival. I had to sit with the girls during their hour of study. ( ① ) Then it was my turn to read prayers; to see them to bed. Afterwards I ate with the other teachers. ( ② ) Even when we finally retired for the night, the inevitable Miss Gryce was still my companion. We had only a short end of candle in our candlestick, and I dreaded lest she should talk till it was all burnt out. ( ③ ) She was already snoring before I had finished undressing. There still remained an inch of candle. ( ④ ) I now took out my letter; the seal was an initial F. I broke it; the contents were brief.

Fear and its companion pain are two of the most useful things that men and animals possess, if they are properly used. If fire did not hurt when it burnt, children would play with it until their hands were burnt away. Similarly, if pain existed but fear did not, a child would burn himself again and again, because fear would not warn him to keep away from the fire that had burnt him before. A really fearless soldier―and some do exist―is not a good soldier, because he is soon killed; and a dead soldier is of no use to his army. Fear and pain are therefore two guards without which human beings and animals might soon die out. 

I remember the day Lewis discovered the falls. They left their camp at sunrise and a few hours later they came upon a beautiful plain and on the plain were more buffalo than they had ever seen before in one place.

(A) A nice thing happened that afternoon, they went fishing below the falls and caught half a dozen trout, good ones, too, from sixteen to twenty-three inches long.
(B) After a while the sound was tremendous and they were at the great falls of the Missouri River. It was about noon when they got there.
(C) They kept on going until they heard the faraway sound of a waterfall and saw a distant column of spray rising and disappearing. They followed the sound as it got louder and louder. 

Novelty-induced time expansion is a well-characterized phenomenon which can be investigated under laboratory conditions. Simply asking people to estimate the length of time they are exposed to a train of stimuli shows that novel stimuli simply seem to last longer than repetitive or unremarkable ones. In fact, just being the first stimulus in a moderately repetitive series appears to be sufficient to induce subjective time expansion. Of course, it is easy to think of reasons why our brain has evolved to work like this—presumably novel and exotic stimuli require more thought and consideration than familiar ones, so it makes sense for the brain to allocate them more subjective time.