Librarians are more important than ever before ... are uniquely qualified to help all of us separate the digital wheat from the chaff, to help us understand the reliability of the data we encounter.

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

Most of what we know we don't really know first hand. I've never seen a cancer cell. But I trust this community of experts who have, so I believe that cancer exists. But we trust these experts, and we trust that the experts have a system of checks and balances and self-correction. And we have to insist that experts have certain certifications. They're not perfect. Every once in awhile there's an engine falls off the wing of a plane, or a tax audit happens and you find out your expert made a mistake. But it's a pretty good system. It's the best system we've got.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

Librarians are more important than ever before ... are uniquely qualified to help all of us separate the digital wheat from the chaff, to help us understand the reliability of the data we encounter.

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.