From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!
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!
Humans are now more numerous than any large land animal ever to walk the Earth, and the combined weight of our fleshy biomass outstrips that of most other larger animals put together, with the single exception of our own livestock.
My observation is if we make a parallel between biology and economics, the role of the economy is like the role of metabolism in an organism. Because what does the metabolism do? It takes in food, resources from the environment, and breaks them down and rearranges them to make other things that we need. Similarly, the economy takes in natural resources from the environment, combines them with labour to make goods and services that we use.
We could partly predict where people will come from for future events.
One of the amazing things is how adaptable our brains our – and by day 2, I was feeling really good. NASA is pretty good at understanding how to keep you healthy in space; and so you go through sleep-shifts to help you stay rested, and to make sure you don't get a drop in performance from being tired.
There's so much data that's been collected around fitness, but a lot of this has been based on male subjects and isn't always right to apply to women. Having been through the journey myself, I want to help more women become body-literate and motivated to enjoy exercise.
Music ties into memory in two ways. First, music itself can be tremendously impactful, so we remember it — and we also remember everything happening around us when we heard it.
I think of creativity very broadly, for me it's about solving problems. A lot of people put creativity into the narrow bucket of artistic expression; including film-making, creative writing, music and so on- but there are many who understand that if you look at science and engineering, there are many very interesting problems that require creativity and you see a great outpouring of new ideas.
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.
Engineering life is often less demanding than creating a nuclear weapon, making monitoring more challenging. This complexity underscores the need for the scientific community to actively engage in establishing robust safeguards and developing strategies to prevent bioterrorism.
In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.