Top 98 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.