Deborah Blum Quotes & Sayings

At Stone's direction, Harry removed ovaries, blinded the female rats, and removed their olfactory bulbs. Sightless, hormone-deprived - it didn't matter. The mother rats crawled determinedly toward the baby rats. They were slower, maybe, but the homing instinct was magnetic, needle to the north. — Deborah Blum

Although traditional weapons killed far more people in the Great War, poison gas gave a new nightmare edge to the fighting. — Deborah Blum

We and all the others and everyone - regardless of the lives we'd led, and more than anything else, and beyond the agonies and dangers that attend every act and action of ours in this life, we all wanted to live. And that desire, if not the result, is something to think about. — Deborah Blum

Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult. — Deborah Blum

Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat. — Deborah Blum

We drove through the Old Dominion University campus, where a small permanent lake has formed in the back corner of a huge parking lot. "You can't pave under water," he noted dryly, "so this obviously wasn't under water when this parking lot was paved. — Deborah Blum

Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise. — Deborah Blum

I can't say that exhaustive research and reporting will guarantee a great story, but I've never been able to pull one off without it. — Deborah Blum

Torcida told me a creation story of his people and why they consider Mount Gorongosa sacred. In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid to ask God for special favors. In a drought they would say, Bring us water. The Creator, growing tired of their constant importuning, moved his residence up to heaven. Still the giant people persisted, reaching up from the mountain. At last, to put them in their place, God decided to make them small. Thereafter life became a great deal more difficult - and so it has been to this day. — Deborah Blum

As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don't grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us. — Deborah Blum

Why would we have evolved this way? The most probable answer is that an organism that responds quickly to fast-changing social environments will more likely survive them. That organism won't have to wait around, as it were, for better genes to evolve on the species level. Immunologists discovered something similar twenty-five years ago: adapting to new pathogens the old-fashioned way - waiting for natural selection to favor genes that create resistance to specific pathogens - would happen too slowly to counter the rapidly changing pathogen environment. Instead, the immune system uses networks of genes that can respond quickly and flexibly to new threats. — Deborah Blum

a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans. — Deborah Blum

Two years ago, when leaders in neighboring Mathews County broached the subject of sea-level rise, Tea Partiers packed meetings, warning of an environmentalist plot to "put nature above man." They linked a proposal to build dikes to a United Nations sustainability plan known as Agenda 21, which has inspired a number of conspiracy theories among far-right activists. — Deborah Blum

The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give. Be a mother who listens, a father who cuddles, a friend who calls back, a helping neighbor, a loving child. — Deborah Blum

Even the help wanted ads in the back of Science or Nature can give you a clue as to what technology is hot. — Deborah Blum

And it wasn't just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change's report, an assessment of global warming's impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. "Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened," says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report. — Deborah Blum

In his examination of the young dial painters, he'd discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss. The women were exhaling radon gas. — Deborah Blum

From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal," Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record of fatalities. "No other poison causes so many deaths or leads to or intensifies so many diseases, both physical and mental, as does [this] alcohol in the many forms in which it is taken. — Deborah Blum

He confessed to stalking, torturing, and assaulting 400 children while traveling the country. — Deborah Blum

the best instructional programs help students master a subject by encouraging attentiveness, demanding hard work, and reinforcing learned skills through repetition. — Deborah Blum

That same January the city government had released a report declaring that thanks to ill-informed, corrupt, and occasionally drunken coroners, murderers in New York were escaping justice in record numbers. — Deborah Blum

TV's influence on gender attitudes, social advancement, and fertility rates was equivalent to the impact of an extra five years of female education. — Deborah Blum

In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers' well-being. The government, they added bitterly, was complicit. — Deborah Blum

Government reporters may cover City Hall. Education reporters may write about schools and school boards. Science writers may report on asteroids one day, HIV vaccine experiments the next, sonar technology the next, a universe without boundaries. — Deborah Blum

There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee's Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water). — Deborah Blum

If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do - it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind's normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficits. — Deborah Blum

Bettinger bought his first genetic test in 2003. A few years later he launched a blog - The Genetic Genealogist - with the aim of explaining the science behind the tests in simple language. — Deborah Blum

Other mysteries have been untangled. Redheads are known to feel pain especially acutely. This confused researchers until someone realized that the same genetic mutation that causes red hair also increases sensitivity to pain. One study found that redheaded patients require about 20 percent more general anesthesia than brunettes. — Deborah Blum

But with sea levels rising along the East Coast - a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change - scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen every three to twenty years. — Deborah Blum

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars on disasters after they happen, but it pinches pennies when it comes to preparing for them. — Deborah Blum

Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago. — Deborah Blum

even if a perfect system could be designed, it would still have to operate in an imperfect world. — Deborah Blum

Your subjective experience carries more power than your objective situation. If you feel like you're alone even when you're in a room filled with the people closest to you, you're going to have problems. If you feel like you're well supported even though there's nobody else in sight; if you carry relationships in your head; if you come at the world with a sense that people care about you, that you're valuable, that you're okay; then your body is going to act as if you're okay - even if you're wrong about all that. — Deborah Blum

Learning requires inefficiency. — Deborah Blum

As the mother of the ten-month-old hospitalized in San Diego said, if people want to make that choice, they should go live on an island with its own schools and doctors: "their own little infectious disease island. — Deborah Blum