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Soundbites

“The Bush administration is busy scouring the American landscape for more places to set up oil rigs when we should be investing in renewable energy and working to protect special places.”

Sierra Club lobbyist Melinda Pierce (The New York Times, 18 January)

“We tell them if you leave the country, there’s a risk you can’t get back in.”

Candelaria Zapata of the National Institutes of Health on how the US security clampdown is affecting its scientists from abroad (The Wall Street Journal, 20 January)

“What’s going to be a struggle is convincing people in security that a lot of what was written about me is not true, and what is true, I’m sorry about.”

Hacker Kevin Metnick, back online after a five-year ban on using computers (Reuters, 19 January)

“[Boffins] conjures up images of weird old men in flapping lab coats, pouring strange chemicals into test tubes. Just call them scientists.”

Chris Fell of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, who is campaigning against the word “boffin” (Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January)

“I saw a tentacle through a porthole. It was thicker than my leg
 I don’t know what we’d have done if it hadn’t let go. We weren’t going to attack it with our penknives.”

Round-the-world yachtsman Olivier De Kersauson on the 8-metre-long squid that grabbed his boat’s rudder in the Atlantic (BBC Online, 15 January)