- "You have as much computing power in an Apple iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what is it being used for? It's being used to throw angry birds at pigs; it's being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; it's being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while you're riding a subway from the nineteenth century." (Peter Thiel)
- "Nixon's 1974 call for full energy independence by 1980 has given way to Obama's 2011 call for one-third oil independence by 2020." (Peter Thiel)
- "The Golden Gate Bridge was built in three-and-a-half years in the 1930s. It's taken seven years to build an access road that costs more than the original bridge in real dollars." (Peter Thiel)
- Deep water does not freeze as easily because (a) it takes colder temperatures to freeze water under pressure (b) existing ice will always float at the top and prevent exchange (c) there's geothermal energy from the ocean bed.
- "Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power [...] from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. census, to Turing's relay-based machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the vacuum tube computer that predicted Eisenhower's win in 1952, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer." (Ray Kurzweil)
- "Moore's law" is the observation and forecast (and not a physical or natural law) by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore from 1965, revised in 1975, noticing that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
- "[C]himps and bonobos in particular take pride of place as our nearest living relatives, sharing approximately 99 percent of our DNA, with gorillas trailing at 98 percent. Yet that tiny portion of unshared DNA makes a world of difference: it gives us, for instance, our bipedal stance and the ability to plan missions to Mars." (Kate Wong)
- There are five Nobel Prizes that had been established by Alfred Nobel in his will. Four of those are awarded by Swedish bodies while the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a 5-person committee from Norway.
- Radar (radio detection and ranging), Lidar (light detection and ranging) and Sonar (sound navigation and ranging) are systems for object detection and similar purposes.
- The Doppler effect is the change in frequency of periodic data (e.g. radio waves) that you see when an observer and a source move relatively to each other. You can witness it when an ambulance with a siren approaches (higher frequency), passes (normal frequency), and then departs again (lower frequency).
- Making use of the Doppler effect, you can measure the speed of a target with Radar, Lidar and Sonar.
- "The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere 'behaves' over relatively long periods of time. [...] Some scientists define climate as the average weather for a particular region and time period, usually taken over 30 years." (NASA)