Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Science is about questioning things.
I'm a firm believer in teaching children to manage risk.
The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.
In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.
Spiders are always big in the autumn: they've had all summer to grow.
After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.
The real hallmarks of humanity are: curiosity and an amazing ability to cooperate.
Look what consumer power has done with organic food; we can do the same with clothes.
Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.
The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.
The environment would be better off and everyone would be healthier if we stopped eating meat.
My mum was an art teacher, so we used to have fantastic dressing-up costumes when we were little.
From a very young age, parents are pushing their boys to achieve in a way they don't always do for girls.
If we don't concentrate on resurrecting science, we're not going to be able to compete in a global economy.
Stonehenge is famously aligned with midsummer sunrise, and possibly also intentionally with midwinter sunset.
Whatever happens to science in schools, there's something peculiar going on if students don't see it as creative.
I'm slightly obsessed with Moomins. They were my specialist subject on BBC's 'Celebrity Mastermind' a few years ago!
You're not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you're shutting some people out of particular careers.
You don't need to go to Rome, Prague or Vienna to find wonderful architecture, amazing stories and suprising, hidden gems.
When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!
It's incredible that the layout of the centre of Chester, for instance, is still essentially that of the original Roman fort.
More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.
I'm strict about taking nuts and dried fruit with me and, if I have access to milk, small packets of porridge to eat in a break.
But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that's really important.
You can somehow get access to what is perceived to be a better school by either being religious or appearing to be religious. That is unfair.
Then the BBC approached me in 2005 and asked me to be one of the presenters of the series 'Coast', which turned into a very long-running series.
I was a goth in my student days. I dyed my hair black, but it came out grey, with a blue scalp. Then I dyed it red and it came out fuschia pink.
I was a fairly strict vegetarian - I ate eggs and dairy products but nothing that would involve killing an animal to furnish the food on my plate.
Our ape legs make us great generalists - we can walk, run and climb. But when you try to do too many things at once, you can end up with problems.
I have family connections with Salisbury through my godmother. Her sister lived there, so I have very fond memories of visiting the city as a child.
Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places - packet meals. I'm veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.
I suppose the thing I'm quite pleased about is that I am, I would hope, a role model for girls and younger women who are thinking about doing science.
Did people's attitudes towards me change after I appeared on TV? Yeah, definitely. During my career I've had some flak - particularly doing television.
The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn't about aptitude.
I love Roger Deakin's writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, 'Waterlog'.
As well as tasting fantastic, blackberries are good for you. Anthocyanin isn't just a pigment, it's a flavonoid, a heroic antioxidant! The stuff of superfoods!
I grew up in the Seventies; my dad is an aeronautical engineer and my mum was an English and arts teacher and for a while my family had to exist on one salary.
I know a bit about vertebrate anatomy and I'd like to think that I'd spot if a skeleton was entirely fabricated or cobbled together from existing bits and pieces.
I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it's not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.
The human knee is complex and prone to failure in a variety of ways; there's a lot of muscle mass low down in the legs which makes moving them fairly inefficient.
Science offers us the possibility of understanding natural rhythms and events that must have seemed like the work of angry and unpredictable gods to our ancestors.
As an anthropologist, I believe strongly in our common humanity. We can rise above the tribal divisions that have caused so much anguish and real damage in the past.
Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.
The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.
I've wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.
In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.
I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress.
We need to stop being so profligate with fossil fuels, to rein back climate change and protect biodiversity. We need to work together, globally, and I'm optimistic that we will.
So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.
Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.