Deborah Blum Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. He confessed to stalking, torturing, and assaulting 400 children while traveling the country.

Deborah Blum

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Learning requires inefficiency.

Deborah Blum

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Deborah Blum

#23. 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

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

Deborah Blum

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Deborah Blum