“If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene, you don’t say, ‘I read a science fiction novel that says it’s not a problem.'â€
Al Gore, testifying to the US Congress on the need for a bold agenda to tackle climate change (San Jose Mercury News, 22 March)
“It makes me wonder whether the current classification of twins is an oversimplification.â€
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Vivienne Souter of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, on a rare case of “semi-identical†twins in which an egg was fertilised by two sperm, split and formed twins who are identical – but only on the maternal side (BBC online, 27 March)
“They probably won’t even be able to tell it’s from panda poop.â€
Liao Jun, a researcher at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base in Sichuan province, China, which plans to recycle panda droppings by turning them into paper (Associated Press, 26 March)
“If I can take off my left arm and connect it to my right arm, I can [write on the whiteboard] without standing up or leaving my chair.â€
Wei-Min Shen, director of the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, on how robotics researchers think and why copying nature can be limiting when designing robots (The New York Times, 27 March)
“This isn’t a gay issue. It’s in society’s interest to give couples a safe method of reproduction.â€
State senator Carole Migden on a bill being debated in California to permit the use of washed sperm from an HIV-positive donor to impregnate a consenting woman (San Francisco Chronicle, 27 March)