Science

The first trillionaires are going to be created through space exploration. Imagine the mineral wealth on planet Earth, and then realise that Earth is just a tiny blue dot in our whole galaxy… which is just one galaxy in a universe, which could be part of many universes. Everything we think is rare on Earth, is abundant in space.

Entrepreneur & Founder of Moon Express, Infosys Technologies Co-Founder

Every human being on the planet- genetically- is 99.9 percent identical. Of the remaining 0.1 percent, only 10-15% accounts for the differences we see between asserted 'races' of humans.

The people of the world are gambling for colossal stakes. Two centuries of scientific enquiry, founded in basic physics and powerful evidence, indicate that the risks from a changing climate over the next hundred years and beyond are immense.

Economist & Author of Stern Review on Climate Change Economics

Diversity brings interesting ideas, interesting challenges and creativity. If there are too many females in a field, then get more men! If there are too many men in a field, get more women!

Neuroscientist; Nobel Prize for discovering brain's positioning system cells

The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world.

British actress known for "Born Free" and animal welfare advocacy

We need to change our hearts and minds, not just our behaviours. Forget even the moral argument, discriminating is such a waste. It is from our diverse cultures and communities that we could find the cure for cancer, where we could find all of the solutions for some of our most pressing problems.

British TV Presenter, Diversity Advocate & Commonwealth Games Federation Official

There are two key advantages of thinking of guns as a public health issue. First of all, it removes some of the emotion from the issue. Secondly it moves the debate to be about evidence; where we can empirically show what works, at what cost.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & New York Times Columnist

If we want to live and become 100 years old, we need to have parents and grandparents that have lived that long- that's it. There's not much we can do in terms of environmental influence, eating well, and living well – those things help of course but to get to great age, you need the genes.

You can't just roll out of bed and be the best in the world at something, you need to have great genes and put in the hard-work, get the breaks, and really have that balance of nature and nurture.

I remember one day though, conversing with a primatologist and saying, 'oh, animals are just like us… we're not that special…' and he said, 'well, when did chimps build their own large hadron collider?' – I was gob smacked. That one comment made me realise how absurd it is to claim we aren't that different from other animals because, clearly, we're amazingly different.

In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we observe a consequential 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a corresponding 21% reduction in heart attacks.

Sleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep

Lack of sleep is like a broken water pipe in your home, it leaks water into every nook and cranny, and erodes the fabric of your DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.

Sleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep

Limiting sleep to just 4-5 hours for one single night will drop levels of critical anti-cancer fighting cells, called natural killer cells, by 70%. That's a rather alarming state of immune deficiency, and it happens after just one night of short sleep.

Sleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep

Every single process in the body, and every operation of the brain, is powerfully enhanced when we get sleep, and demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough sleep.

Sleep scientist and author of "Why We Sleep

Much of the pushback against science is related to a distrust of the establishment and of multinational corporations and their profit motive. It's easy to spread fear; as humans we're very tuned and sensitive to it.

Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry for Ribosome Structure Studies

My impression however is that the rate of change in society is accelerating as a result of rapid developments in science and technology. Science today is a huge, industrial scale activity and has a far greater impact on society than it did a few hundred years ago.

Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry for Ribosome Structure Studies