Sam Kean

“So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn’t touch. This…

— Sam Kean

So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just…

— Sam Kean

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and…

— Sam Kean

“Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the…

— Sam Kean

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special…

— Sam Kean

“The irony is too rich not to point out. When arranging the different human races in tiers, from just below the angels…

— Sam Kean

“Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in…

— Sam Kean

“For his part, Mendeleev scanned Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s data on gallium and told the experimentalist, with no justification, that he must have…

— Sam Kean

“Sir Isaac Newton famously said that he had achieved everything by standing on the shoulders of giants—the scientific men whose findings he…

— Sam Kean

“If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells…

— Sam Kean

“Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of…

— Sam Kean

“Somehow, though, life turned that danger around, and this former poison became essential. It may sound trite, but this reversal always reminds…

— Sam Kean

“Since before even the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, human beings used the stars and seasons to track time and record their most…

— Sam Kean

“Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows…

— Sam Kean

“Furthermore, because silicon packs on more protons than carbon, it's bulkier, like carbon with fifty extra pounds. Sometimes that's not a big…

— Sam Kean

“the navy brought an ark’s worth of animals to Bikini and distributed them among the target ships, to test the biological effects…

— Sam Kean

If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.

— Sam Kean

“When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron’s…

— Sam Kean

“Fruit fly scientists, God bless ‘em, are the big exceptions. Morgan’s team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like ‘speck,’…

— Sam Kean

“Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted…

— Sam Kean

“Great literature remains great when it says new things to new generations, and the loops of a knot quite nicely parallel the…

— Sam Kean

“Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the…

— Sam Kean

“This hinted at something that no one had ever suspected -- that the brain tracks moving things more easily that still things.…

— Sam Kean

“Polar bears began evolving their impressive vitamin A–fighting capabilities around 150,000 years ago, when small groups of Alaskan brown bears split off…

— Sam Kean

“You're not supposed to interject feelings into science, but part of the reason it's so fascinating that we're 8 percent (or more)…

— Sam Kean