Science

The group found that, on average, people living in Manhattan travel 2.5 miles most days, compared to five miles in Los Angeles. But we also found that when you look at the longest trips people make, people that live in New York go significantly further, 69 miles on a weekday compared to 29 in Los Angeles.

Unknown.

It is difficult to imagine a graver threat; or an area of human endeavour or global ecology in which the profound consequences of runaway climate change would not be disastrous. Already, it is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year as a direct result of climate change.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

Animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference- they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Most of our fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.

Psychologist & Founder of Positive Psychology Movement

Life is a masterpiece of complexity. We will never understand, in a near future, the extraordinary complexity of the simplest forms of life.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. For me intelligence is a property of life. Even the most humble unicellular living organism must be intelligent to solve the problems of everyday life.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

DNA is not life. A single chemical molecule has nothing to do with life. DNA is merely a storage system. Nobody would ever say that the 'Divine Comedy' is the actual paper and ink on which one of its copies is printed, however many influential scientists have supported this nonsensical viewpoint.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Our body is a community of cells, in which each cell occupies a place appropriate for its tasks on behalf of the whole. Cancer cells, however, are rogues that trespass aggressively into other tissues. Metastasis is what makes cancer so lethal.

Cell biologist & discoverer of the RGD integrin-binding motif

I made the analogy of earthquake faults- when they get aligned, they either all move, or they don't move- we also have this diversity of micro fault-lines that fail, and I think that's a huge problem.

Hedge Fund Manager & Author of "The Black Swan" Risk Management

The 'black swan' doesn't appear very often in coin-toss land but in agent based complex systems land, it appears quite a lot.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

This is not just about the elephant- it's about there being different types of elephants. Looking at the market in simplistic distribution perspectives misses the true effect, threat and risk of large movements and upcoming changes.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

It's absolutely true that a lot of the time the market is indistinguishable from a coin toss- and we all know that… However, when the system is under some stress, when the market is undergoing changes, the coin toss model just doesn't work.

Physics professor studying complex systems, crowd behavior, and social networks.

In science, one never shows causality. Causality is something philosophers are concerned with, not scientists. I cannot stress this in strong enough words- we have not shown a causal link between the public's mood state as we measured it from twitter data feeds, and the market.

Unknown.

You can't get addicted to drugs unless you're exposed to them. You have to be exposed in situation where you can determine the dose. If you take the drug long enough and in a high-enough dose… most drugs which are addictive, will give you withdrawal symptom… making you feel rotten, and giving you another reason to take more.

Pioneer of addiction medicine and alcohol dependence research; founded modern addiction psychiatry

What's special about it as a science subject is that it is so awkward, it doesn't lend itself to easy solutions. It's a multi-factorial problem, very different to- for example- the question of what causes influenza?

Pioneer of addiction medicine and alcohol dependence research; founded modern addiction psychiatry