Zitat des Tages von Sam Kean:
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.
We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.
The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents.
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.
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.
Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all.
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.
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.
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.
Junk DNA - or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA - remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life.
Things look especially bleak for common killers such as diabetes and heart disease. Those ailments clearly have a genetic component. But when scientists survey genes looking for which mutations patients have in common, they come up empty.
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.
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.
Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.
Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.
Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds.
We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.
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.
