“No matter where she lives or what she does, a woman should never need her partner’s permission to save her own life.”
Bill Gates at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, on funding research into microbicides that women can use as protection against HIV (The Guardian, London, 15 August)
“We are confident that they are stored at Goddard Space Flight Center… we just don’t know where precisely.”
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John Sarkissian of the Parkes Observatory in Australia on reports that NASA has lost the tapes of the first moon landing (SPACE.com, 13 August)
“He looked like Rasputin, with long hair and fingernails.”
Mathematician Robert Greene on unworldly Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, whom he met in the 1990s. Perelman is widely tipped to win a Fields medal next week for solving the Poincaré conjecture (The New York Times, 15 August)
“The rationale for why a woman’s sex drive declines may be down to supply and demand. If something is in infinite supply, the perceived value would drop.”
George Fieldman of Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, UK, on a report suggesting that a woman’s sex drive plummets once she is in a secure relationship (BBC online, 14 August)
“I dare you to point at [any] group that wouldn’t be aggressive as a result of being treated that way.”
New Zealand’s Maori minister Hone Harawira arguing that severe poverty and high unemployment are to blame for the violence in Maori communities, and not a “warrior” gene as claimed by geneticist Rod Lea (AFP, 9 August)
