Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest.
Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.
The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.
It turns out, from what I hear, that roasted fruit bats are delicious.
The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us.
He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.
You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.
Green darners never attack people, but they have been seen bringing down hummingbirds. They are the Bengal tigers of the microworld.
Though the redwoods in Muir Woods are hauntingly beautiful trees, they are relatively small and not very tall, at least for redwoods.
I don't believe in a biological apocalypse, but I think there is stormy biological weather ahead as the human population continues to grow.
I happen to love science... Scientists are all slightly mad. There is truth in the stereotype of the mad scientist. They are mad with curiosity.
I think we sometimes give ourselves a little too much credit as humans, as being able to control and understand nature, when in fact we do neither.
Redwood rainforest has five to 10 times the biomass - that's the sheer weight of living material - of, say, deep tropical rainforest in the Amazon basin.
The annual flight of the dragonflies goes mostly unnoticed, though it is one of the great migrations of flying creatures that occur across North America.
Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants.
Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope's mirror is capturing primeval light... galaxies that existed before our time.
The crown of a supertall redwood has a towering, cloudy, irregular form, and the crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.
If you want to survive Ebola, you need to be young. If you're in your late 30s, the death rate is about 80 percent, and if you're over 45, then the death rate goes up to about 90 percent.
No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.
If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.
'First Light' has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends.
During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.
I'm all in favor of looking deeply into as much as we possibly can. I'm not afraid of knowledge... With all new technology, weapons inevitably emerge... Evil comes out of the human heart. It doesn't come out of nature.
There may be a little bit of finger-pointing - there always is in a situation like this - but I think of Ebola as an act of nature. It's the biological equivalent of a tsunami, and yes, we are having trouble handling it.
The seeds of a redwood are released from cones that are about the size of olives. The heartwood of the tree is a dark, shimmery red in color, like old claret. The wood has a lemony scent and is extremely resistant to rot.
Dragonflies kill their prey in the air and eat it on the wing. They feed on aerial plankton, which consists of any sort of small living thing that happens to be aloft - mosquitoes, midges, moths, flies, ballooning spiders.
In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.
The redwoods you can see in Muir Woods are nothing like the redwood titans that stand in the rainforest valleys of the North Coast, closer to Oregon. These are the dreadnoughts of trees, the blue whales of the plant kingdom.
The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.
'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.
A football player is often bigger than a basketball player - more massive, that is. The basketball player is taller and more slender. So it is with redwoods. The tallest redwoods are often slender, and so they aren't the largest ones.
Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don't like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to be stroked but are shy to the touch.
If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, miles deep, around a focus of a virus.
We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb.
An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.
Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the redwood.
Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders.
What the experts are telling me is that there's very little chance that Ebola is going to mutate into something that could spread directly through the air. The real concern is not whether Ebola could go airborne, but whether it could spread faster.
Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them.
The problem with Ebola is that it makes mistakes while it copies itself. The mistakes are actually good for Ebola because they help Ebola change, and as a result of this, as it jumps from one human body to the next, roughly half the time, it's got a mutation.
The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.
Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12)
Fox bought the rights to the book way back when, and there was this attempt by Fox to make a movie out of 'The Hot Zone,' and it tended tragically in a Hollywood disaster involving Robert Redford and Jodie Foster and Ridley Scott. But the rights have been sitting at Fox ever since.