Quotes About Science

if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant—or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it were ever published.

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish's finding.

Brian Aldiss

And as you are about to see, it not only produces the best science, but also some of the very best science writing.

Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. (Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and was, conveniently, a typically sized human.)

a nivel atómico, en cierto sentido somos eternos.

It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.

bodies are a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all the time.

Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected.

Instead, we look for patterns in the facts, and some of these patterns we have come to call the laws of Nature, while others have achieved only the status of by-laws.

It is an extraordinary fact that having good and loving relationships physically alters your DNA.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

What's now known as the Haber-Bosch process made it possible to create synthetic fertilizer, greatly expanding both the amount of food that could be grown and the range of geographies where it could be grown.

How quickly do we need to get to zero? Science tells us that in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, rich countries should reach net-zero emissions by 2050. You've probably heard people say we can decarbonize deeply even sooner—by 2030.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more.

TerraPower's

Nuclear fusion. There's another, entirely different approach to nuclear power that's quite promising but still at least a decade away from supplying electricity to consumers. Instead of getting energy by splitting atoms apart, as fission does, it involves pushing them together, or fusing them.

If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to worry as much about getting a magic battery.

CGIAR is the world's largest agricultural research group: In short, it helps create better plants and better animal genetics.

What's most important is that the world get serious once again about advancing the field of nuclear energy. It's just too promising to ignore

seawater expands when it gets warmer.

seas getting warmer, they're also bifurcating—developing some places where the water has more oxygen and others where it has less oxygen.

Those skills [to test the veracity of news produced], however, can be identified. If we look at those who have been in the business of empiricism - people in journalism, law, intelligence, science, medicine, and elsewhere - we will see a set of common concepts and skills that have developed over generations.