Sam Kean Quotes
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Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all.
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I was reading this story about these people who suffered from brain injuries, and then their behavior changed kind of drastically afterward, and I just said to myself, 'There's no way that that can possibly be true.'
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The humped bladderwort has yellow, snapdragon-like flowers, and it's actually carnivorous, capable of trapping and eating not just insects but even tadpoles and tiny fish.
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DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers.
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Those of us raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations. In contrast, people raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles, since Mother Nature tends to work with a wider array of lines than most architects.
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One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.
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I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.
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When first presented with the jumble of the periodic table, I scanned for mercury and couldn't find it. It is there - between gold, which is also dense and soft, and thallium, which is also poisonous. But the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don't even appear in its name.
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It's often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don't work at all until the environment awakens them.
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There are a few elements - especially platinum and palladium - that have the amazing ability to absorb up to 900 times their own volume in hydrogen gas. To get a sense of the scale there, that's roughly equivalent to a 250-pound man swallowing something the size of a dozen African bull elephants and not gaining an inch on his waistline.
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The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.
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Whereas recessive traits require two bad copies of a gene to become noticeable, a dominant trait expresses itself no matter what the other copy does. A benign example of dominance: If you inherit one gene for sticky wet earwax and one gene for dry earwax, the sticky earwax gene wins out every time.
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The idea of critical windows extends beyond just vision, of course: almost every system in the brain has a critical window when it needs to experience certain stimuli, or it won't get wired up properly. The most obvious example is language: if you don't learn a language early on, it's nigh impossible to become truly fluent.
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Although it's the hub of the nervous system and the ultimate terminus of every nerve, the brain itself lacks enervation and therefore cannot feel pain.
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To be sure, ASPM isn't the gene responsible for building big brains - there's no such single gene. But it's critical to the process, and the primate line has almost certainly benefited from distinct changes in ASPM.
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If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.
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Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder.
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The amygdala is indeed crucial for monitoring our environment and deciding what's worth getting worked up over. Once the amygdala determines this, however, it merely trips another circuit to actually produce the panic.
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A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage's brain. It's kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It's not a part of the brain that's necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality.
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We really should be grateful to the people who participate in research and allow certain details to be published about themselves. Because if they didn't, we wouldn't have nearly the understanding of the brain that we do.
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If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless.
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Polonium is, frankly, pretty useless, and no country in the world except Russia bothered to refine it by the late 2000s.
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The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth.
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All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.