What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

It's important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future.

What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

For much of this decade, both Congressional and administration budget projections showed a decline in science and technology accounts of between 20 and 30 percent in real dollars. The real impact to date has been far less severe.

Even in technology, you have the freedom to solve a problem your way, you see. But it naturally sits in a certain framework whereas, in the physics, everybody had to come up with his own idea what he was going to do.

I want to find the intersection between digital media and traditional media and be pioneering the endeavor to merge the two worlds.

The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.