Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
—Mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (Born Nov. 20, 1924; died Oct. 14, 2010)
It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.
—Columbia University mechanical engineer James Hone, describing the properties of the material discovered by 2010 Nobelists Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim
In a way the impact of biology has had a curious set-back as a result of the magnificent victories of molecular biology....We will have to make a double effort to restore the influence of organismic biology and to make better known the evolutionary trends that culminated in that unique psycho-social organism Man.
—Ernst Mayr to Julian Huxley, October 1967, quoted in Erika Lorraine Milam’s Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology
To read the full, original article click on this link: Eavesdroppings - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences
