Quotes About Molecules

What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3

By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist.

Proteins can't exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow. And

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule8 – that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters.

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule – that was part of us nine years ago.

The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for "little mass").

The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

As Davies puts it, "If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?

Proteins can't exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume then that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.

Because it expands, ice floats on water—"an utterly bizarre property," according to John Gribbin.

When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.

Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, so the thinking is that if you take a lot of them in the form of supplements, you can counter the effects of aging. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to support that.

When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer's day, it's really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.

Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules.

an atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules. And yet right there"—she tapped the stromatolites—"you have organisms almost at the surface. It's a puzzle.

DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is "among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world

COMPLICATED molecules. About a fifth of our body weight is made up of them. In simplest terms, a protein is a chain of amino acids. About a million different proteins have been identified so far, and nobody knows how many more are to be found. They are all made from just twenty amino acids

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that's 2.5 x 1022) molecules of oxygen—so many that with a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived.

Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that's 2.5 x 1022) molecules of oxygen—so many that with a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.

Why don't all gases act this way? Because molecules with two copies of the same atom—for example, nitrogen or oxygen molecules—let radiation pass straight through them. Only molecules made up of different atoms, the way carbon dioxide and methane are, have the right structure to absorb radiation and start heating up.

You might as well ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of chop-sticks, as to try to interest me, about the lesser carnivora, when I know of what is before me.