Quotes About Human

Our seams don't burst, we don't spontaneously sprout leaks," says Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, who is the doyenne of all things cutaneous.

Human memories are short and inaccurate.

The remote valley of Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in Kenya is now one of the world's most productive sites for early human remains

litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, a species we are happy to regard as barely human. The argument put forward is that although our brains were smaller, they were somehow more efficient. I believe I speak the truth when I observe that nowhere else in human evolution is such an argument made.

In 1935, not far from where we stood now, some fishermen captured a fourteen-foot beige shark and took it to a public aquarium at Coogee, where it was put on display. The shark swam around for a day or two in its new home, then abruptly, and to the certain surprise of the viewing public, regurgitated a human arm.

Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about aging in his wife's Ladies' Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human aging. Harman's idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year.

Seven skulls vividly convey the long road of human evolution. From left they are: Adapis (50 million years ago), Proconsul (23–15 million years), Australopithecus africanus (3 million years), Homo habilis (2 million years), Homo erectus (1 million years), early Homo sapiens (92,000 years) and Cro-Magnon (20,000 years ago).

The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.

The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.

if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But

Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance

Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world's most terrifying human had he but been human. I don't know quite what he was, other than it was five feet six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby T-shirt. Reliable rumor had it that he had not been born, but burst fully formed from his mother's belly and then skittered off to the sewers.

As Jablonski has written, "The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain." That, she says, is how sweat helped to make you brainy.

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.

Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.

Settling down also brought a huge increase in "human commensals"—mice, rats, and other creatures that live with and off us—and these all too often acted as disease vectors.

Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected.

The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them – 86 per cent, according to one estimate – have never been tested for their effects on humans.

We're using modern technology to revert to primitive kinds of human relations.

According to the listing on the UNESCO website, "The gastronomic meal emphasizes togetherness, the pleasure of taste, and the balance between human beings and the products of nature.

The earth is warming, it's warming because of human activity, and the impact is bad and will get much worse. We have every reason to believe that at some point the impact will be catastrophic. Will that point come in 30 years? Fifty years? We don't know precisely. But given how hard the problem will be to solve, even if the worst case is 50 years away, we need to act now.

2. What's Your Plan for Cement? If you're talking about a comprehensive plan for tackling climate change, you need to consider everything that humans do to cause greenhouse gas emissions.

I don't think Jesus is any more laissez-faire today than he was when he walked this earth in human flesh.

Whatever the capacity for human suffering, the church has a greater capacity for healing and wholeness.