Quotes About Science

Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.

we now know that most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.

Similarly, no one has ever come close to explaining why our fingers wrinkle when we have long baths. The explanation most often given is that wrinkling helps them to drain water better and improves grip. But that doesn't really make a great deal of sense. Surely the people who most urgently need a good grip are those who have just fallen in water, not those who have been in it for some time.

However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves.

Skin flakes are properly called squamae (meaning "scales").

Was das Leben sonst auch sein mag, auf der Ebene der Chemie ist es erstaunlich profan: Kohlenstoff, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff und Stickstoff, ein wenig Calcium, ein Schuss Schwefel, eine kleine Prise von ein paar anderen ganz gewöhnlichen Elementen - nichts, was man nicht in jeder normalen Apotheke finden würde -, das ist alles, was man braucht. Das einzig Besondere an den Atomen, die Sie bilden, besteht darin, dass sie Sie bilden. Und das ist natürlich das Wunder des Lebens.

The idea was to help women produce babies of genius by giving them the very best sperm modern science could provide. Some two hundred children were born as a result of the bank's efforts, though none, it seems, proved to be an outstanding genius or even an accomplished eyeglass engineer.

No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.

Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost.

Bacon's dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim 'there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied'.

It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial

But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.

Some years ago, Pearce made a curious discovery—that people who had had a cat early in life seemed to derive lifelong protection from getting asthma.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

Cancer is the price we pay for evolution.

but it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do.

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

A woman endows all her children with her mitochondria, but only her daughters have the mechanism to pass it onward to future generations.

Hemoglobin has one strange and dangerous quirk: it vastly prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen. If carbon monoxide is present, hemoglobin will pack it in, like passengers on a rush-hour train, and leave the oxygen on the platform. That's why it kills people.

Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.

That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us - that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt.

successfully. 'Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide' (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe

But one must be careful when speaking of 'experimental science' before the Enlightenment, for it often meant demonstrating what one already knew to be the case – and if experiment seemed to contradict axiomatic reason, so much the worse for experiment.