Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.
Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.
Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.
Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.
DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers.
We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.
Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.
Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do.
The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents.
X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine.
Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.
If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.
Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.
Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy.
Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.
Polonium is, frankly, pretty useless, and no country in the world except Russia bothered to refine it by the late 2000s.
Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all.
In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.
Junk DNA - or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA - remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life.
America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.
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.
Among physicists and chemists, cold fusion - nuclear fusion at close to room temperature - enjoys a reputation about on par with creationism.
Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell's elbow as it's copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet - CAG becomes CCG.
After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together.
The inability to trace DNA to actual diseases has serious consequences. As does the opposite problem - not being able to trace diseases back to DNA.
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.
Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.'
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.
What I find fascinating is the idea that we all have a physical brain, but we also have this mental part, and we have to figure out how they work together.
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.
Your body thinks radium is a great thing to pack into bone - where it kills some cells outright and scrambles the DNA of others, causing problems like cancer.
Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale.
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.
If stem cells divide equally, so both daughter cells look more or less the same, each one becomes another stem cell. If the split is unequal, neurons form prematurely.
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.
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.
In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason.
Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature.
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.
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.
Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.
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.
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.
Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you’ll find them.
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.
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.
I think it's a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines - it has fashions; things change.
Lithium makes a fine battery because it's a scarily reactive metal. Pure lithium ignites on contact if it touches water - a flake of it would sizzle and fry on the water-rich cells of your skin.
I didn't mind staying home from school and medicating myself with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. Being sick always gave me another chance to break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, too.
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.