This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

Going into orbit around Earth - where the space station is today, and where the space shuttles and John Glenn and all those folks go-that's three-eighths of an inch above a schoolroom globe, just FYI. That's not very far from Earth. Yes, you are off Earth, but you're not really going anywhere yet. The moon was the only real destination.

Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct.

We went to the moon using just Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newtonian dynamics we call it. So then we find out, "Well, this works because there's certain regimes we've never tested it in." Had we done so, we would show that it didn't work: For example, at very high speeds, very high gravity, Newton's laws fail. They just fail. You need Einstein's laws of motion and gravity. Those would be his special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity. Now you invoke those and it works.

Climate change has taken on political dimensions. That's odd because I don't see people choosing sides over E=Mc2 or other fundamental facts of science.

Wow, monitor lizards are pretty gnarly creatures. I want to go with the monitor lizard. That's just weird enough to be true. No?

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.