Quotes from Natalie Angier

Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart. 12 MINDFUL MENOPAUSE Can We Live Without Estrogen?

Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart.

it's better to be sullen and strong than sullen and weak.

We lived so long and so self-consciously that we assumed we must live forever, and we buried our dead with enough talismans and spare change for eternity.

Or try the star-spangled bowl of a desert sky at night and consider that, as teeming as the proscenium above may seem to your naked gape, you are seeing only about 2,500 of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way—and that there are maybe 100 billion other star-studded galaxies in our universe besides, beyond your unaided view.

By the classic definition, a hormone is a substance secreted by one tissue that travels through blood or another body fluid to another tissue, whereupon the hormone arouses the encountered tissue to a new state of activity.

My daughter's eggs are silver points of potential energy, the light at the beginning of the tunnel, a near-life experience. Boys don't make sperm—their proud "seed"—until they reach puberty. But my daughter's sex cells, our seed, are already settled upon prenatally, the chromosomes sorted, the potsherds of her parents' histories packed into their little phospholipid baggies.

In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura , or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

For the record, the average penis is about 4 inches long when flaccid, 5.7 inches when erect. That's a bit bigger than the gorilla's 3-inch erection, but then there's the blue whale, the world's largest mammal, who has, yes, a 10-foot pole.)

Scientists get annoyed at the hackneyed notion that their pursuit of knowledge diminishes the mystery or art or "holiness" of life.

humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes and that the pairs of chromosomes are the same in men and in women, with the exception of pair number 23—the sex chromosomes. In that case, women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y. Moreover, a woman's two X chromosomes look pretty much like all her other chromosomes. Chromosomes resemble Xs.

In a female guinea pig, a membrane normally covers the vaginal opening. It takes the release of sex hormones during ovulation to open up the membrane and allow the guinea pig to have sex.

The attrition continues, though at a more sedate pace, throughout a woman's youth and early middle age. At most, 450 of her eggs will be solicited for ovulation, and far fewer than that if she spends a lot of time being pregnant and thus not ovulating.

We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

The clitoris not only applauds when a women flaunts her mastery; it will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does noy need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.

Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.

Touch is... one of the most ancient transactions, a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it brought.

What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence.

You have your opinion, I have mine, and it takes all kinds of nuts and dips to make a party, right?

Giving a girl the impression that girlhood is an extended bounce on Barney's knee is like prepping a young gazelle for life on the Serengeti by dipping it in cream.

We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.

Our minds hurtled outward in all directions. We became absurdly creative, Homo artifactus , intolerant of bare cave walls and naked clay pots.