“ 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
“ There are a few elements - especially platinum and palladium - that have the amazing ability to absorb up to 900 times their own volume in hydrogen gas. To get a sense of the scale there, that's rough… Sam Kean
“ 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 t… Sam Kean
“ 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 dis… Sam Kean
“ Different sets of facial muscles—and therefore produce different-looking smiles. This divergence explains the difference between genuine smiles and fakey, say-cheese smiles in photographs. People have… Sam Kean
“ All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most import… 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 through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some luc… Sam Kean
“ Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It’s… 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 twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hu… Sam Kean
“ All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that… 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 them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since elec… Sam Kean
“ Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs’ vital organs the wrong color. Sam Kean
“ In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut bo… Sam Kean
“ Also unlike a planet, an electron—if excited by heat or light—can leap from its low-energy shell to an empty, high-energy shell. The electron cannot stay in the high-energy state for long, so it soon… Sam Kean
“ This hinted at something that no one had ever suspected -- that the brain tracks moving things more easily that still things. We have a built-in bias toward detecting action. Why? Because it's probabl… 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 measured something wrong, because the density and weight o… Sam Kean
“ The color of the emitted light depends on the relative heights of the starting and ending energy levels. A crash between closely spaced levels (such as two and one) releases a pulse of low-energy redd… Sam Kean
“ In fact, his travelogues spend amazingly little time discussing his blindness. Only one passage stands out for its frank discussion of his handicap and how it changed his worldview. In it, Holman was… Sam Kean
“ Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer was rounded incorrectly; who tucked in his periodic table T-shirt, correct… Sam Kean
