And this is good news, because it implies that impossible missions might not be so impossible after all, if we are guided by our intuition, somehow leading us to trigger a positive chain reaction.

You might have a lobar pneumonia, for example, and they could give you an antiserum, an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus, if the intern sub-typed it correctly.

For example, our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack.

These signals start a chemical cascade that floods the body with several different stress hormones, causing physiological changes that prepare the body to defend itself.

It was on those two ideas, Henderson's idea of increasing returns to scale and experience, and Porter's idea of the value chain, encompassing heterogeneous elements, that the whole edifice of business strategy was subsequently erected.

Now, those falling transaction costs have profound consequences, because if transaction costs are the glue that hold value chains together, and they are falling, there is less to economize on.

In particular, it then becomes possible for a competitor in one business to use their position in one step of the value chain in order to penetrate or attack or disintermediate the competitor in another.

So basically what was happening was that one layer of this value chain was becoming fragmented, as individuals could take over where organizations were no longer needed.

And, I'm still striving to be a poet for the hardworking migrants and their struggle to break free of the cycle of poverty.

This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters where they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which forms the base of all marine food chains.

And then we've got to be able to have systems that can find every single case, every contact of those cases, and begin to track the transmission chains so that you can stop transmission.

It's all connected, and one of the wonderful things that we've been able to do is to be able to show the value of partnering together -- community, law enforcement, private sector, the city -- in order to reduce violence.

Mankind, according to Pico, could crawl down the chain and behave like an animal or crawl up the chain and behave like a god, it's our choice.

All detritus is ultimately consumed by microbes and other scavengers, so it actually forms the base of the brown food chain that supports many other organisms, including us.

This culminated in a sort of domino effect with local tribes in the Southwest -- including the Navajo Nation, one of the largest tribes in the country -- putting a moratorium on genetic research.

What's shielded me from hatred and wanting retribution, what's given me the courage to say: this ends with me is love.

I believe matter begets life; life becomes single cells; single cells become strings; strings become chains; chains network.

Instead, way off in the distance was a librarian who was going to find the chain of consequences that we had set in motion, a source of inspiration so that she in this case could do her work really well.

They've been happening for more than 10 years now, so those librarians have kind of turned on a generation of children to books and so it's been a thrill to find out that sometimes unintended consequences are the best consequences.

Plastic makes them feel full when they're not, so they starve to death and pass the toxins from the plastic up the food chain.

But Shakespeare knows that power is always a moving target; and as he reveals these characters’ dark histories, we begin to wonder if this vicious cycle will ever end.

They ranged from top predator to bottom-feeder, big to small, marine to freshwater.

When our Paleolithic ancestors first settled Eurasia roughly 100, 000 years ago, wolves were one of their main rivals at the top of the food chain.

There are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too, whether it's the deforestation in the Amazon or making more protein available to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day, not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have.

Barbarically, we're killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle -- our life support system.

NB: Yeah, so think back to the 1930s where for the first time we make some breakthroughs in nuclear physics, some genius figures out that it's possible to create a nuclear chain reaction and then realizes that this could lead to the bomb.

Sitting at the top of the local invertebrate food chain, these insects keep spiders, mites, and centipedes, in check.

So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now -- streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant -- because we won't be here. But if we are -- (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria.

They cannot feed their offspring, their children, their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain, in their part of the world's ocean pyramid.

As it turns out, marine mammals are at the top of this food chain that we're pouring millions of tons of toxic substances into every year.

So we've started roundtables where we bring together the entire value chain, from producers all the way to the retailers and brands.

Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes.