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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 09088c8 | Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship. | David Quammen | ||
| 77c850a | two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These | David Quammen | ||
| f79b827 | Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed. | David Quammen | ||
| 635ef9c | AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908 | David Quammen | ||
| 27dfd82 | When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land." Wilson meant wild animals. He omitted consideration of livestock, such as the domestic cow ( Bos taurus ), of which the present global population is about 1.3 billion. We are therefore only five times as numerous as our cattle (and probably less massive in total, since .. | David Quammen | ||
| 69622a7 | It testified, I suppose, to the genderless ferocity of her mind." "Why" | David Quammen | ||
| 2d07a1f | Soon afterward, in August 2008, another team was dispatched to Uganda, this time including the veterinary microbiologist Tom Ksiazek, a veteran of field responses against zoonotic outbreaks, | David Quammen | ||
| 12f02be | She is one of this new breed of cross-trained disease specialists I've mentioned, veterinarian-ecologists who recognize the intimate connectedness of human health, wildlife health, livestock health, and the habitats we all share. For | David Quammen | ||
| eab331d | The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history. | David Quammen | ||
| bc4afb3 | The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart. | David Quammen | ||
| acb3a79 | Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven't collected a single snake. Maybe it's the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in the north of the island as in the south, has passed the peak of its cycle and declined. Maybe the trap design is no good, or possibly we're using the wrong bait. Temporarily, for whatever reason, B. irregularis has turned invisible. But the con.. | David Quammen | ||
| 9a8541e | Darwin wrote: "organized beings represent a tree." | David Quammen | ||
| 58032f8 | The ribosome did not contain the recipe for the protein; it was a tape reader. It could make any protein so long as it was fed the right tape of "messenger" RNA." | David Quammen | ||
| 961f873 | Later in conversation he corrected himself: It was in fact 1.1 million pigs. The difference might seem like just a rounding error, he told me, but if you ever had to kill an "extra" hundred thousand pigs and dispose of their bodies in bulldozed pits, you'd remember the difference as significant." | virus pigs epidemic | David Quammen | |
| d833f3d | sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych | David Quammen | ||
| cf71de8 | The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years passed after the E notebook entry. The world heard nothing about natural selection. | David Quammen | ||
| 7265e5c | A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames. | David Quammen | ||
| 460db53 | Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps. | David Quammen | ||
| f5f44d4 | Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building. | David Quammen | ||
| a17212b | Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. | David Quammen | ||
| 70b2500 | For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More patient even than rabies, but equally lethal. | David Quammen | ||
| a67afaf | molecular phylogenetics. | David Quammen | ||
| 70f1d74 | Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya, Junin, Borna, the influenzas, and the HIVs (HIV-1, which mainly accounts for the AIDS pandemic, and HIV-2, which is less widespread) are all viruses. | David Quammen | ||
| 3303ec2 | From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time." Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: "From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens." | David Quammen | ||
| d9a7035 | Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers. | David Quammen | ||
| 892d70f | How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly. | David Quammen | ||
| e4b02e0 | Corinne told us that revolution was brewing in the hills to the north, under the leadership of a man named Miranda, who with absurd inevitability had styled himself El Supremo. | Spider Robinson | ||
| f09e5f2 | Smugness was an art invented by the race of imps, no matter what cats might claim, so he did it very well indeed, | Spider Robinson | ||
| 0a1f48b | Noi tendiamo a confondere qualunque numero sufficientemente alto con il concetto d'infinito. [...] amiamo l'idea d'infinito. Un problema che include l'infinito e di facile soluzione. (Elefanti malinconici) | Spider Robinson | ||
| 1ff5a4b | I conclude you must be a natural horses's ass. | Spider Robinson | ||
| a9baad9 | Am I finally addressing a sentient being? | Spider Robinson | ||
| 306dd57 | Why is it," he mourned, "that I will never again see my face in the shaving mirror without wincing?" | Spider Robinson | ||
| 65abbc7 | A surprising percentage of your own society, with all your heritage of murder, would like to believe that Life survives by going to the supermarket. So the ideal would be to train cattle to make butcher knives and take turns cutting each other up at a convenient location. | murder meat-consumption supermarket meat | Spider Robinson | |
| b47e859 | The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten. | murder ethics | Spider Robinson | |
| 29f0459 | Una volta dissi a un tale che non c'e niente d'impossibile. E lui mi chiese se ero capace di passare da una porta girevole con gli sci ai piedi. (Stardance) | Spider Robinson | ||
| 4d35d17 | Although many pairs of lips spoke her name, none ever brought its reality to her. | Spider Robinson | ||
| a41fdb5 | You can show a dozen guys murderin' each other on TV but you can't ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman. | Spider Robinson | ||
| 05f69fd | This is it," said Dad. "Grace Brewster Murray Hopper Hall." They wound their way upstairs and down long hallways to a door that said MATH LAB. "Here we are!" said Dad. A girl with green eyes and a messy ponytail greeted them. "You must be the Moodys." "I'm Richard Moody, and this is my daughter, Judy," said Dad. "Hi, I'm Chloe. Chloe Canfield. My friends call me C-squared, since my name has two Cs and I go to CC. You know, C to the second p.. | Megan McDonald | ||
| 7a5605b | I'm alone," she wrote, "and I want to share something with somebody."4 Loneliness. It's a cry. A moan, a wail. It's a gasp whose origin is the recesses of our souls. Can you hear it? The abandoned child. The divorcee. The quiet home. The empty mailbox. The long days. The longer nights. A one-night stand. A forgotten birthday. A silent phone. Cries of loneliness. Listen again. Tune out the traffic and turn down the TV. The cry is there. Our .. | Max Lucado | ||
| f0f1d3b | A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart. | Toni Morrison | ||
| 3c9b22f | A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart | Toni Morrison | ||
| c8e4f5c | pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole | Julian Barnes | ||
| b77c1f6 | line from a biography of General George S. Patton: "Never take counsel of your fears." | W.E.B. Griffin | ||
| b47d375 | BOOK | W.E.B. Griffin |