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. Sam Kean Read Quote
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. Sam Kean Read Quote
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. Sam Kean Read Quote
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. Sam Kean Read Quote
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. Sam Kean Read Quote
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. Sam Kean Read Quote
Over the years, humans have managed to incorporate nearly every element, light and weighty, common and obscure, into our daily lives. And given how small atoms are and how many of them there are all around us, it’s almost certain that your body has at least brushed against an atom of every single natural element on the periodic table. Sam Kean Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Despite what you might guess, when monitoring your breathing, your body doesn’t care whether you’re inhaling enough oxygen. It cares only whether you’re expelling enough carbon dioxide – that’s the gas that sets off the panic button when you’re suffocating. Sam Kean Read Quote
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 Read Quote
