Life, it must be said, is a lot like snot.

Squishy. Malleable. But also persistent, tenacious and always around ... even in the most uninviting of habitats.

And when you realize this, said Natalie Angier, you realize something central to science in general.

Angier gave her first lecture as the President's Council of Cornell Women A.D. White Professor-at-Large in Kennedy Hall's Call Auditorium, Sept. 11. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times science writer and author of "Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell" and "Woman: An Intimate Geography," among others, spoke about her latest book, "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science."

Science is not scary, impenetrable or dull and dry, she said. But it must be taken on with all the senses.

"One of the big problems people have about science is they don't feel comfortable with it -- people feel somehow it's different," she said. "I really try to make people feel like science is like someone they know. ... that's how I've become comfortable and come to love science."

"The Canon," she said, is a book of basic, essential elements: a collection, in narrative form, of the ideas and principles deemed most essential to each basic branch of science. And it turns out, she said, that when asked: "What are the concepts you wish people understood about your field?" scientists across the disciplines had many of the same answers.

Statistics, they said. Probability. How to think quantitatively; to isolate the components of a problem and examine each part.

And people need to learn to recognize what is design, scientists told her, and what is merely an apparent pattern -- like a run of heads when flipping a coin, a product of garden-variety randomness.

"What appears to be design can happen through randomness. Real randomness produces patterns," she said. "People start to read a lot into what are really random events, and we get into trouble through that superstitious, supernatural thinking. ... we want to think there is something behind it all."

On the other hand, she said, quantitative reasoning is a kind of anchor, a way to stay grounded against the winds of hysteria and rumor. Learn the basics of scientific thought, she said, and the rest -- biology, chemistry, astronomy and everything else -- can become, even to the uninitiated, a little less daunting.

Angier then zipped through each of those disciplines, lingering to muse, for example, about the genius of bacteria -- with their "panplanetary powers and boundless vim" -- and the centrality of chemistry.

Chemistry, she said, seems far more feared by the public than its siblings. Yet it is "a really good bridge between physics and biology," she said. "It starts to make what is this whirligig, this kind of big circle of things moving and being connected."

Regarding evolution, she said, "Life is anything but random. Maybe there's a mutation that turns out to have been random, but the way in which natural selection works is the opposite of random. Life as we see it is designed; it's just not done by some exterior intelligence."

To science writer hopefuls, she cautioned that hers is a brutal profession these days. "Get a Ph.D.," she advised. Consider being a scientist first.

And to potential extraterrestrial observers, she said in closing, "stop by, any time, any stardate. We can't promise, but we will try, with all our heart and hemoglobin and every one of our 90 trillion body cells and our bacterial symbionts, too, to hang on, and dodge our own bullets, and be here when you arrive."