Words matter. These are the best Sam Kean Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000.
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.
Atoms of Element 118 fill an outer shell with electrons, creating a special type of element called a noble gas. Noble gases are natural turning points on the table, ending one row and pointing to the next.
Most people, even most doctors, learn that the placenta is a nice, tight seal that prevents anything in the mother’s body from invading the fetus, and vice-versa. That’s mostly true. But the placenta doesn’t seal off the baby perfectly, and every so often, something slips across.
Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex – pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.
As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth – food, dentist’s tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever – and if no one else was around, I’d talk anyway.
Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature – in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes – would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.
The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It’s how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.
No one knows quite the reason, but surgically severing the corpus callosum can reduce the rate and intensity of seizures. So in the early 1960s, a few patients with severe epilepsy had their corpus callosums cut, turning them into split-brain people.
Animal vision – including human vision – is so biased toward movement that we don’t technically see stationary objects at all.
Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently.
Aluminum is the most common metal in the earth’s crust, almost twice as abundant as iron. And one common class of aluminum minerals, collectively called alum, has been in use since at least Greek and Roman times.
Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.
While our amplified knowledge of genetics – and the increasing precision of the field – does make it tempting to take on celebrity cases, retro-genetics can’t always provide clear answers.
Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.
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.
The price of diamonds can vary greatly depending on size, cut, color, and other factors, including whether they have a history. But because of the rarity of blue boron diamonds, they often fetch more money than gems of similar quality.
Carbon’s eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as ‘champagne.’
The mutated Marfan gene creates a defective version of fibrillin, a protein that provides structural support for soft tissues like blood vessels. Marfan victims often die young, in fact, after their aortas grow threadbare and rupture.
Except for certain moments – when cells are dividing, for instance – chromosomes don’t form compact, countable bodies inside cells. Instead, they unravel and flop about, which makes counting chromosomes a bit like counting strands of ramen in a bowl.
Genes work with probabilities; they don’t work with certainties. So most things that you’re looking at with these genetic tests, it’s not like you’re condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There’s a lot of factors in play there.
Some scientists claim – although these claims are contentious – that they can form deadly isomers with simple X-rays and that hafnium can multiply the power of these X-rays to an astounding degree, converting them into gamma rays up to 250 times more potent than the X-rays.
The grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some amendments and annotations – rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere.
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.
The density of space junk peaks around 620 miles up, in the middle of so-called low-Earth orbit. That’s bad, because many weather, scientific, and reconnaissance satellites circle in various low-Earth orbits.
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.
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.
X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine.
After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together.
Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization’s table weren’t plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements.
Polonium is, frankly, pretty useless, and no country in the world except Russia bothered to refine it by the late 2000s.
Among physicists and chemists, cold fusion – nuclear fusion at close to room temperature – enjoys a reputation about on par with creationism.
Something funny certainly happens when palladium and platinum come into contact with hydrogen gas; it’s one of the great mysteries still waiting to be solved on the periodic table. But it’s quite a leap from ‘something funny’ to cold fusion.
Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy.
Atoms consist of a positive nucleus and negative electrons flying around outside it. Electrons closest to the nucleus feel a strong negative-on-positive tug, and the bigger atoms get, the bigger the tug. In really big atoms, electrons whip around at speeds close to the speed of light.
Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.
We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.
Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second – and might therefore be turned into weapons.
No element gets people telling crazy stories like mercury does. People have told me tales about pharmacists waxing floors with mercury, mothers rubbing it into babies’ skin to kill germs, and 10-year-olds coating dimes in it to make them shine, then blithely carrying them around in their pockets.
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.
The hippocampus helps record both types of memories initially, and it helps retain them for the medium term. The hippocampus also helps us access old personal memories in long-term storage in other parts of the brain.
The noble gases, which reside on the East Coast of the periodic table, are its aristocrats – detached and aloof, never bothering to interact with the rabble of common elements that make up the vast majority of the world.
Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was especially popular: the ‘it’ element of its day. Radium glows an eerie blue-green in the dark, giving off light for years without any apparent power source. People had never seen anything like it.
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.
On a submicro scale, pure diamond is billions of billions of carbon atoms bonded to one another. If you shrunk yourself down and stood inside the diamond, you’d see nothing but carbon in a perfect pattern in every direction.
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