Science

Once you land, it's total excitement, 'I'm on the Moon!' – you're bubbling with enthusiasm like a little kid on holiday.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique.

What makes HIV so challenging is its ability to integrate into the host genome and establish latency. This is why we haven't been able to cure it yet - the virus literally becomes part of us.

Co-discoverer of HIV as the cause of AIDS

One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

Water is the essence of life. On Earth it's used to grow plants and within industrial processes but in space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. One cubic metre of water gives the same protection as Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.

Although, today, the universe appears more bio-friendly than it ever was. That doesn't mean it is inhabited. We still have to prove that.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

Trying to figure out how we fit into the cosmos is old, it's a basic human question.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

....by preventing extreme price variations, random investments [we] also help to identify the equilibrium price.

...adoption of random strategies diminishes the probability of extreme events (in this case large capital increases or great losses) but also ensures almost the same average wealth over a long time period, at variance with other technical strategies...

To break into the chain, you would have to amass 25,000 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That seems completely infeasible. This is one of the big advantages of BitCoin – the ledger is practically unhackable.

Duke Finance Professor & Co-Developer of Campbell Harvey Market Timing Model

We are part of the continuum of evolution, and [we] are not the only beings on the Earth with personalities, minds, thoughts and feelings.

Primatologist & Ethologist Who Revolutionized Study of Wild Chimpanzees

For me, our sophisticated way of communicating- with words- is that crucial difference. It meant that for the first time, we could teach another about something that wasn't present… whereas young chimps just learn by observing. We can read books about the distant past, and plan the distant future.

Primatologist & Ethologist Who Revolutionized Study of Wild Chimpanzees

Transport, natural disasters, the distribution of resources, globalisation – engineers and inventors have the traits and skillset to solve the problems the world faces today. And therefore have the potential to impact the world and economy. The economy can be boosted by exporting tangible technology that is in global demand. This is the hands of engineers.

Inventor & Founder of Dyson Ltd, Bagless Vacuum Pioneer