Our evolution could have gone in different directions a lot of times. We could have gone extinct at some points. We might not have gotten our big brains, or Neanderthals might have made it while we did not. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There’s almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn’t leaned heavily on one animal or another. – Sam Kean
Carbon’s eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as ‘champagne.’ – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
Junk DNA – or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA – remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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.’ – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
In ‘The Violinist’s Thumb,’ I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean
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. – Sam Kean