Quotes from Alice Roberts

I have family connections with Salisbury through my godmother. Her sister lived there, so I have very fond memories of visiting the city as a child.

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.

I grew up in the Seventies; my dad is an aeronautical engineer and my mum was an English and arts teacher and for a while my family had to exist on one salary.

Whatever happens to science in schools, there's something peculiar going on if students don't see it as creative.

I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress.

When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!

Spiders are always big in the autumn: they've had all summer to grow.

Stonehenge is famously aligned with midsummer sunrise, and possibly also intentionally with midwinter sunset.

I was a goth in my student days. I dyed my hair black, but it came out grey, with a blue scalp. Then I dyed it red and it came out fuschia pink.

Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.

Embryology reveals surprising similarities between early embryos of seemingly quite different animals. And it also shows that some structures that may look very different later on have fundamental similarities in the way they form.

I suppose the thing I'm quite pleased about is that I am, I would hope, a role model for girls and younger women who are thinking about doing science.

The science of being healthy is well-known. It is not esoteric. There are no magic bullets. If you want to live a long life, we've known the answers for more than a hundred years. It's a wide-ranging diet with as much fruit and veg as you can stuff into yourself, and plenty of exercise. It doesn't even matter what kind of exercise.

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.

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.

Then the BBC approached me in 2005 and asked me to be one of the presenters of the series 'Coast', which turned into a very long-running series.

Science plays a huge role in our lives. We're surrounded by technology, we depend on it.

I love Roger Deakin's writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, 'Waterlog'.

My mum was an art teacher, so we used to have fantastic dressing-up costumes when we were little.

The real hallmarks of humanity are: curiosity and an amazing ability to cooperate.

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.

We have been talking about public engagement for a decade. For me it is about recognising that the mission of science has to be embedded within our culture - the direction in which science is going has to be determined by all of us, and so we need a dialogue with the public.

You're not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you're shutting some people out of particular careers.

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!