Quotes About Biology

Skin flakes are properly called squamae (meaning "scales").

When you put your hand on a hot plate, your Ruffini corpuscles cry out. Merkel cells respond to constant pressure, Pacinian corpuscles to vibration. Meissner's

What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.

Adults in the West produce about 200 grams of feces a day—a little under half a pound, about 180 pounds a year, 14,000 pounds in a lifetime.

Was das Leben sonst auch sein mag, auf der Ebene der Chemie ist es erstaunlich profan: Kohlenstoff, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff und Stickstoff, ein wenig Calcium, ein Schuss Schwefel, eine kleine Prise von ein paar anderen ganz gewöhnlichen Elementen - nichts, was man nicht in jeder normalen Apotheke finden würde -, das ist alles, was man braucht. Das einzig Besondere an den Atomen, die Sie bilden, besteht darin, dass sie Sie bilden. Und das ist natürlich das Wunder des Lebens.

It is in all that complex synaptic entanglement that our intelligence lies, not in the number of neurons , as was once thought.

DNA molecule, as you will almost certainly remember from countless television programs if not school biology, is made up of two strands, connected by rungs to form the celebrated twisted ladder known as a double helix. Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome.

What genes specifically do is provide instructions for building proteins. Most of the useful things in the body are proteins. Some speed up chemical changes and are known as enzymes. Others convey chemical messages and are known as hormones.

THE MOST POWERFUL impression you get in a dissecting room is that the human body is not a wondrous piece of precision engineering. It's meat.

professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere (about whom much more in due course) gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. "That," he said, "is where all your skin color is. That's all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.

Children do much better with extreme cold than with extreme heat. Because their sweat glands aren't fully developed, they don't sweat freely as adults do.

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

Por ejemplo, cuando hacemos ejercicio de forma vigorosa, la hipófisis segrega endorfinas en el torrente sanguíneo. Las endorfinas son las mismas sustancias químicas que se liberan cuando comemos o mantenemos relaciones sexuales. Están estrechamente emparentadas con los opiáceos; de ahí que a menudo se hable de la llamada «euforia del corredor

Most of the best technology that exists on Earth is right here inside us. And everybody takes it almost completely for granted.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

Authorities seem to be universally agreed that the average quantity of semen released at orgasm is three to three and a half milliliters, about a teaspoonful, with an average spurt distance of eighteen to twenty centimeters, or seven to eight inches, though according to Desmond Morris, a launch of three feet has been scientifically recorded. It does not specify the circumstances.

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.

but it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do.

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.

The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.

Hemoglobin has one strange and dangerous quirk: it vastly prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen. If carbon monoxide is present, hemoglobin will pack it in, like passengers on a rush-hour train, and leave the oxygen on the platform. That's why it kills people.

some birds and marine mammals are able to switch off one half of their brain at a time, so that one half remains alert while the other is snoozing.

That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us - that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt.

DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.