Top 100 Kean Quotes

#1. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #2398
#2. 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

Kean Quotes #12247
#3. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #22996
#4. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #41643
#5. 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

Kean Quotes #75993
#6. Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #96859
#7. Negative experiences can wire neurons together, too.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #102096
#8. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #102448
#9. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #113936
#10. Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #123345
#11. In a touch Buckland would have appreciated, this multipronged dispersal from Africa is sometimes called the Weak Garden of Eden theory. But this tale is actually better than the biblical version; we didn't lose Eden but learned to make other Edens across the world.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #123576
#12. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #128450
#13. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #133454
#14. Biologists summarize these hypothalamic duties as the "four F's" of animal behavior - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, well, sexual congress.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #154255
#15. Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #179742
#16. 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

Kean Quotes #203550
#17. I always knew that I would give back. My mother and my father both believe you have to work hard and give back. That's why I was a volunteer firefighter, that's why I worked in a homeless shelter. I always knew I'd give back, elective office or not.

Thomas Kean Jr.

Kean Quotes #220529
#18. 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

Kean Quotes #221383
#19. Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs' vital organs the wrong color.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #242284
#20. DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #280071
#21. Microchimeric sharing means that, even if the mother loses a child, she'll have a small memento of him or her secreted away inside her. Similarly, a bit of our mothers live on in all of us no matter how long ago Mom died.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #283355
#22. Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.'

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #286301
#23. 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

Kean Quotes #300506
#24. If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #301710
#25. Since before even the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, human beings used the stars and seasons to track time and record their most important moments. Cesium severed that link with the heavens, effaced it just as surely as urban streetlamps blot out constellations.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #303842
#26. 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

Kean Quotes #314266
#27. 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

Kean Quotes #316986
#28. Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #341895
#29. The amygdala plays a crucial role in processing fear, and minus her two amygdalae, S.M. became unflappable. Studies of her are actually a hoot to read, since they basically consist of scientists concocting ever-more-elaborate ways of trying to scare her.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #346006
#30. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #350882
#31. In a cool solitude of trees Where leaves and birds a music spin, Mind that was weary is at ease, New rhythms in the soul begin.

William Kean Seymour

Kean Quotes #352376
#32. 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

Kean Quotes #365485
#33. 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

Kean Quotes #375865
#34. (In the 1920s, two Chicago chemists had to puree several thousand pounds of bull testicles from a stockyard to get a few ounces of the first pure testosterone.)

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #397539
#35. Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #400503
#36. Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #401319
#37. Acid strength is measured by the pH scale, with lower numbers being stronger, and in 2005 a chemist from New Zealand invented a boron-based acid called a carborane, with a pH of -18

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #440338
#38. More congenial to me than dictators
Are rickshaw-runners.
If they break my neck
It will be by accident,
Not as a matter of state policy.

William Kean Seymour

Kean Quotes #451487
#39. After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #472412
#40. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #504100
#41. B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it's nothing less than evolution for elements.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #509303
#42. When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron's twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star's natural life.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #513505
#43. Scientists didn't discover the noble gas helium - the second most common element in the universe - on Earth until 1895. And they thought it existed in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #551177
#44. Maman," she shouted. "Wait for us.

Catherine Kean

Kean Quotes #554614
#45. 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

Kean Quotes #571768
#46. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #593602
#47. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #625754
#48. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #628473
#49. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #653694
#50. If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #657912
#51. Most people who have encountered mercury have done so after breaking a mercury thermometer. And many of us who saw the liquid balls of mercury scatter across a floor or countertop considered the element the most beautiful on the periodic table.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #671551
#52. Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #674754
#53. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #746076
#54. When my father ran for the state Assembly, the headline said, 'Kean's Son to Run for Assembly.' When my grandfather first ran for Congress, it was 'Kean's son to run for Congress.'

Thomas Kean Jr.

Kean Quotes #765647
#55. If anything runs deeper than a mathematician's love of variables, it's a scientist's love of constants.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #784371
#56. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #799715
#57. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #804785
#58. Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #806116
#59. 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

Kean Quotes #814671
#60. Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #817390
#61. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #825192
#62. 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

Kean Quotes #826658
#63. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #829026
#64. 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

Kean Quotes #831775
#65. Among physicists and chemists, cold fusion - nuclear fusion at close to room temperature - enjoys a reputation about on par with creationism.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #840879
#66. So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder - the famed double helix.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #847627
#67. 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

Kean Quotes #873924
#68. 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

Kean Quotes #876861
#69. 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

Kean Quotes #888366
#70. 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

Kean Quotes #889859
#71. All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #897801
#72. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #900563
#73. My opponents will do anything they can to distract from their own flawed candidate. Bob Menendez is under federal criminal investigation. As far as I know, he is the only candidate for Senate under federal criminal investigation.

Thomas Kean Jr.

Kean Quotes #906547
#74. 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

Kean Quotes #950008
#75. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #950033
#76. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #959531
#77. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #965037
#78. Aluminium's sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #972855
#79. I want to emphasis again, Governor (Thomas) Kean and Congressman (Lee) Hamilton pointed out that congressional oversight also was a major contributor to our failures prior to 9/11 and that has to be fixed as well.

John McCain

Kean Quotes #973373
#80. 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

Kean Quotes #973709
#81. 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

Kean Quotes #977866
#82. 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

Kean Quotes #1004517
#83. 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

Kean Quotes #1015324
#84. Do not be too sure, young fellows,
That you are better than your ancestors.

William Kean Seymour

Kean Quotes #1029282
#85. Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table - thallium, lead, and polonium - the nucleus of poisoner's corridor.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1035175
#86. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1035527
#87. I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1038185
#88. 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

Kean Quotes #1085288
#89. Thirteen aluminum atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine, the two entities indistinguishable in chemical reactions.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1089034
#90. The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1089434
#91. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1093430
#92. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1108170
#93. Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1152616
#94. A fully plastic brain learns everything and remembers nothing.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1154188
#95. For a long time, I kept an eye out for element eighty at school and in books, as you might watch for a childhood friend's name

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1155811
#96. 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.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1157426
#97. The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1163963
#98. People adored Element 13's color and luster, which reminded them of the sparkle of gold and silver - a brand-new precious metal. In fact, aluminum became more precious than gold and silver in the 19th century because it was harder to obtain.

Sam Kean

Kean Quotes #1175952
#99. I eat you, life; you make me living eat.

William Kean Seymour

Kean Quotes #1185927
#100. Kindness is in a prison till it finds
Release in words or deeds.

William Kean Seymour

Kean Quotes #1186862

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