Quotes About Chemical signals

Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

pheromones, those fascinating chemicals that can initiate mating behavior in certain species

For one thing, part of the process is not even neural; that is, it does not involve regular nervous firing along chains of neurons. The process is humoral: chemical signals traveling in the blood capillaries bathe certain regions of the nervous system that are devoid of blood-brain barrier and can thus inform those brain regions directly about aspects of the ongoing homeostatic state.17

The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says in effect, 'No, I don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive.' At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.

If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There's no central blueprint for the construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins.

A neuron is a nerve cell that transmits information using electrical or chemical signals. A synapse is a structure or pathway that carries a signal from a neuron to another neuron or cell.