When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

Here's the thing - if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, in a kind of historical way, it's exciting because we will see the actual last president of the United States. It just won't work after that.

Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won't primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.

Never say never, but the thought of electively cutting oneself is beyond my grasp, and I also object to it politically. Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don't care to make.

God forbid I do the 'Electric Slide' at a wedding or something. People would lose their minds.

What an electric thrill it sends up and down the spine, how it sets the heart racing: A Royal Romance! A Royal Wedding! The pomp and the pageantry!

There is no way in the world anyone else could do my wedding other than myself, along with whomever I select to do various things.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

There's a truth about public service that is often unspoken and rarely understood - that the role of our elected officials is about much more than balancing budgets and ensuring the delivery of essential services.

When political and business leaders tell the public - any public - 'We don't trust you to make the right decision' - they prejudice that electorate against the very proposals they want it to accept and undermine public confidence in themselves.

Not everyone can be trusted. I think we all have to be very selective about the people we trust.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

There is nothing better than playing a scene with John Cleese or Maggie Smith. It's electric. But I don't think I'm the sort of person who needs to have an outer ego in order to produce something. I realised that through the travel programmes.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

Japan, not only a mega-busy city that thrives on electronics and efficiency, actually has an almost sacred appreciation of nature. One must travel outside of Tokyo to truly experience the 'old Japan' and more importantly feel these aspects of Japanese culture.

Anytime a member of Congress wants to travel abroad - which we do from time to time as part of our official duties - we are required to check with the House Committee on Ethics as to whether the trip follows the ethics rules by which federally elected officials are bound. Not so with Supreme Court justices.

Regardless of who wins, an election should be a time for optimism and fresh approaches.

I want to explain to everyone that during election season, a politician is always short of time. We are thankful to any politician who takes out time for an interview.

Al is, and always has been, the person who has been the candidate - the elected official. And he is the one who makes policy. As his wife, I have the wonderful opportunity to advocate for causes that I am passionate about, and I'm thankful for that.

Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.

It's very strange how electronic music formatted itself and forgot that its roots are about the surprise, freedom, and the acceptance of every race, gender, and style of music into this big party. Instead, it started to become this electronic lifestyle which also involved the glorification of technology.

I have always been interested - indeed, waylaid - by the leading edges of technology, even during my Ph.D. years when I pioneered (but did not publish) agarose gel electrophoresis for RNA fractionation. Also, much later, I was instrumental in showing that Green Fluorescent Protein and RNAi could be made to work in mammalian cells.

I think that social media platforms and technology have been the accelerator for the push for the populist-style administrations in democratically elected presidents.

Essentially, every technology you have ever heard of, where electrons move from here to there, has the potential to be revolutionized by the availability of molecular wires made up of carbon. Organic chemists will start building devices. Molecular electronics could become reality.