Alice Roberts

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There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded.
- Alice Roberts
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People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that.
- Alice Roberts
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Science is about questioning things.
- Alice Roberts
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I'm strict about taking nuts and dried fruit with me and, if I have access to milk, small packets of porridge to eat in a break.
- Alice Roberts
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Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places - packet meals. I'm veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.
- Alice Roberts
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After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.
- Alice Roberts
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When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!
- Alice Roberts
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The human knee is complex and prone to failure in a variety of ways; there's a lot of muscle mass low down in the legs which makes moving them fairly inefficient.
- Alice Roberts
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Our long, flexible lumbar spines are great in many ways - they help us to run efficiently, for instance. But they have their drawbacks. The lumbar vertebrae are under great strain, and as we age, the ligaments that hold the pulpy centres of the intervertebral discs in place dry out.
- Alice Roberts
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Our ape legs make us great generalists - we can walk, run and climb. But when you try to do too many things at once, you can end up with problems.
- Alice Roberts
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From a very young age, parents are pushing their boys to achieve in a way they don't always do for girls.
- Alice Roberts
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I don't think anyone is saying that we should be treating boys and girls exactly the same and that we should try to eliminate all differences. What the psychologists who do this work are saying is we should be aware of it and careful about it, especially if we think it could be limiting choices.
- Alice Roberts
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The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn't about aptitude.
- Alice Roberts
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One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she's invited to a princess party, of course I'm not going to stop her going.
- Alice Roberts
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The real hallmarks of humanity are: curiosity and an amazing ability to cooperate.
- Alice Roberts
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Look what consumer power has done with organic food; we can do the same with clothes.
- Alice Roberts
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Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.
- Alice Roberts
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Of course 'Horizon' had made an impact on me from a young age, but it was also humbling to meet and interview eminent scientists, and hear their high opinion of the series and of the science presented on the BBC more generally.
- Alice Roberts
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I'm a firm believer in teaching children to manage risk.
- Alice Roberts
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My mum was an art teacher, so we used to have fantastic dressing-up costumes when we were little.
- Alice Roberts
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I've always loved the seaside and I used to be a fairly keen surfer, but it's a solitary activity so when my husband and I had children, we bought sit-on-top kayaks. Whenever possible, we escape to the coast or explore rivers with them.
- Alice Roberts
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I love Christmas. At this very special time of year, when the sun appears only fleetingly to those of us living in the northern hemisphere, I feel a deep connection with ancient ancestors.
- Alice Roberts
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In Luke, shepherds go to find Jesus. In Matthew, an unspecified number of wise men, sometimes portrayed as kings, arrive. Nativity plays usually throw all the elements together, with kings and shepherds beating a path to the stable.
- Alice Roberts
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Pagan Romans started their midwinter celebrations with the feast of Saturnalia on 17 December, ending them with a new year festival, the Kalendae Januariae, at the start of January - both were celebrated with parties and the exchange of gifts.
- Alice Roberts
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Stonehenge is famously aligned with midsummer sunrise, and possibly also intentionally with midwinter sunset.
- Alice Roberts
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Around 4000BC, the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherer way of life here gave way to a more settled, farming existence. Those Neolithic people built wooden trackways across the salt marshes and reed beds.
- Alice Roberts
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Science offers us the possibility of understanding natural rhythms and events that must have seemed like the work of angry and unpredictable gods to our ancestors.
- Alice Roberts
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While planting woodlands along rivers has been shown to work in small areas, it has been unclear whether it would be effective on a larger scale. But computer modelling indicates that restoring forests on floodplains could slow floodwaters and reduce the height of the flood downstream.
- Alice Roberts
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Always attempting to tame and subjugate nature is not the solution. But the latest science is helping us to map out a path across this shifting landscape in uncertain times, showing us how to work with natural forces, not against them.
- Alice Roberts
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In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.
- Alice Roberts
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If a group of humans began to run regularly, perhaps allowing them to hunt or scavenge more effectively, anatomical changes would follow, especially among the still-developing youngsters.
- Alice Roberts
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I gave up meat when I was 18, and it was an ethical decision. I loved the taste, and went on holiday to Greece, fairly gorging myself on lamb souvlaki before taking the plunge into a meatless existence.
- Alice Roberts
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I was a fairly strict vegetarian - I ate eggs and dairy products but nothing that would involve killing an animal to furnish the food on my plate.
- Alice Roberts
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Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.
- Alice Roberts
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Later, I found it too hard to give up, and so I've continued eating fish and other seafood, while trying to ensure it's sustainably sourced. This means I'm now one of those vegetarians I used to frown at - one who occasionally eats fish.
- Alice Roberts
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The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn. But there are splashes of crimson or rust-red colours from a few indigenous trees, like the rowan, as well as from introduced species, like the North American red oak.
- Alice Roberts
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And when you take something like the changing colour of autumn leaves and start to ask why, you're starting off on an intellectual journey which will take you beyond that moment of visual satisfaction, while robbing nothing from that experience.
- Alice Roberts
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Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the phenomenon of the changing colours of autumn leaves. It's possible that the red pigments are manufactured in the leaf as a side-effect of something else that's happening at this time.
- Alice Roberts
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Autumn is much redder in North America and east Asia than it is in northern Europe, and this can't be explained by temperature differences alone. These areas also have a greater proportion of ancient tree lineages surviving: trees have gone extinct at a higher rate in Europe compared with those other areas.
- Alice Roberts
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We're not the only mammals who are partial to blackberries, far from it. Foxes and badgers will also gobble them up, helping to distribute the seeds, which survive the transit through the gut.
- Alice Roberts
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As well as tasting fantastic, blackberries are good for you. Anthocyanin isn't just a pigment, it's a flavonoid, a heroic antioxidant! The stuff of superfoods!
- Alice Roberts
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It seems that humans have been enjoying the taste and health benefits of blackberries for thousands of years. Gathered blackberries have been found at Neolithic sites, while a preserved iron age bog body, known as Haraldskaer Woman, provides definite evidence of blackberry ingestion.
- Alice Roberts
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When I was in my 20s, and even though I was studying medicine, I didn't ever really think that my body would fail. Now I'm in my 40s, I have to face a different reality - I, like everyone else, am slowly falling apart.
- Alice Roberts
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The history of palaeontology is littered with examples of famous frauds and fakes, often with eminent researchers in the field being thoroughly hoodwinked by some fairly shoddy fabrications.
- Alice Roberts
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I consider myself to be a relatively sceptical person. I like to see evidence for myself, and try to avoid speculating beyond available evidence. But I also have to accept some things on trust.
- Alice Roberts
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I've seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.
- Alice Roberts
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I know a bit about vertebrate anatomy and I'd like to think that I'd spot if a skeleton was entirely fabricated or cobbled together from existing bits and pieces.
- Alice Roberts
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Spiders are always big in the autumn: they've had all summer to grow.
- Alice Roberts
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Whatever happens to science in schools, there's something peculiar going on if students don't see it as creative.
- Alice Roberts