Quotes About Research

assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

A typical submersible costs about $25,000 a day to operate, so they are hardly dropped into the water on a whim, still less put to sea in the hope that they will randomly stumble on something of interest. It's rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark.

the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In

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.

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'.

In other words , according to the McMaster study, too little salt is at least as risky as too much.

Although Funk coined the term vitamines and is thus often given credit for their discovery, most of the real work of determining the chemical nature of vitamins was done by others, in particular Sir Frederick Hopkins, who was award the Nobel Prize for his work, a fact that left Funk permanently in one.

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.)

there are about seven thousand rare diseases—so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn't very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people, it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 percent of rare diseases, there are no treatments at all.

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.

It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At

Remarkably, Darwin hadn't finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.

Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing—less than 3 percent of its budget—on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.

TerraPower's

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

In pharmaceutical speak, psilocybin is known as an asshole inhibitor.

As a writer, I believe in going where the evidence takes me rather than coming in with a preconceived notion and forcing the evidence to fit that belief.

presuming, you've thoroughly thought out and researched

Ryan began, on his own, to research how to deal with someone who is amoral and transactional.

he referred to Project Blue Book as going from the investigation of the unexplained to the "explanation of the uninvestigated.

That was the difference between science and the intelligence field. Scientists came up with an answer and used it to find facts while intelligence operatives came up with facts and used them to find an answer.