Islomjon

“Bacteria simply divide themselves in two when the time seems right, as can many single-celled eukaryotes. Many plants and animals have the ability to reproduce themselves on their own quite comfortably. Even among the species that do reproduce sexually, many can switch over to cloning. If you walk through a stand of hundreds of quaking aspen trees on a Colorado mountainside, you may be walking through a forest of clones,
produced not by seeds but by the roots of a single tree that come back up out of the ground to form new saplings.
Hermaphrodites, such as sea slugs and earthworms, are equipped with male and female sex organs and can fertilize themselves or mate with another. Some species of lizards are all mothers: in a process called parthenogenesis, they somehow trigger their unfertilized eggs to start developing. Compared with these other ways to reproduce, sex is slow and costly. A hundred parthenogenetic female lizards can produce far more offspring than fifty males and fifty females. In only fifty generations, a single cloning lizard could swamp the descendants of a million sexual ones.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“There is much creativity underlying math and science problem solving. Many people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, but there are often a number of different solutions, if you have the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean theorem.”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“Today we experience oxygen in the most intimate exchange. With every breath we take, a tiny portion of the air becomes a part of us, even as a tiny part of us becomes the air. As days pass, our bodies melt away and form again in moment-by-moment chemical reactions with oxygen. Our tissues are replaced over and over again throughout our lives, Earth’s finite store of atoms recycling among air, sea, land, and all its living forms. Most of the atoms that formed your infant body at birth are now dispersed, as your present atoms will be again, if you have the good fortune to live a few more years on this oxygen-rich planetary home.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.
Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself