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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fb42865 | Buchner proposed that fermentation was carried out by biological catalysts that he named enzymes (from the Greek en zyme, meaning in yeast). He concluded that living cells are chemical factories, in which enzymes manufacture the various products. | Nick Lane | ||
| 7f39925 | Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different. | Nick Lane | ||
| 7b66e28 | Pigments such as haemoglobin are coloured because they absorb light of particular colours (bands of light, as in a rainbow) and reflect back light of other colours. The pattern of light absorbed by a compound is known as its absorption spectrum. When binding oxygen, haemoglobin absorbs light in the blue-green and yellow parts of the spectrum, but reflects back red light, and this is the reason why we perceive arterial blood as a vivid red c.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 5e781e8 | Our bodies are historical accidents of evolution and ultimately can only be understood from an evolutionary perspective: how things got to be the way they are. From this point of view, a good guys-bad guys philosophy is a woefully inadequate way of thinking about molecules as complex as NFKB. Even so, this is the norm. NFKB is usually portrayed as Janus-faced, capable of abrupt swings from the good to the bad and the ugly. Sometimes it dest.. | Nick Lane | ||
| a8af30d | Core consciousness operates in the present, rebuilding itself moment by moment, mapping out how the self is altered by external objects, draping perceptions with feelings. Extended consciousness uses the same mechanisms, but now binds memories and language into each moment of core consciousness, qualifying emotional meaning with autobiographical past, labelling feelings and objects with words, and so on. Thus extended consciousness builds o.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 44cb4eb | When a molecule of vitamin C encounters a free radical, it becomes oxidised and thereby renders the free radical innocuous. The oxidised vitamin C then gets restored to its non-oxidised state by an enzyme called vitamin C reductase. It is like a boxer who goes into the ring, takes a hit to his jaw, goes to his corner to recover, and then does it all over again. | Nick Lane | ||
| 015d7a1 | We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents - alkaline hydrothermal vents - match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the p.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 58d29b8 | But whatever our beliefs, this richness of understanding should be a cause for marvel and celebration. | Nick Lane | ||
| a386591 | Every day in the human body, some 10 billion cells die and are replaced by new cells. The cells that die do not meet a violent unpremeditated end, but are removed silently and unnoticed by apoptosis, all evidence of their demise eaten by neighbouring cells. This means that apoptosis balances cell division | Nick Lane | ||
| cb6833d | Sometimes you can see car crashes from a long way off, if the road is straight and both vehicles are heading towards each other in the same lane. | Nick Hornby | ||
| cbec4c8 | With these new techniques, a new breed of evolutionist is emerging, able to capture the workings of evolution in real time. The picture so painted is breathtaking in its wealth of detail and its compass, ranging from the subatomic to the planetary scale. And that is why I said that, for the first time in history, we know. Much of our growing body of knowledge is provisional, to be sure, but it is vibrant and meaningful. It is a joy to be al.. | Nick Lane | ||
| 668530e | Lane closed her eyes and pressed her lips together at the sound of the nickname, a thousand memories whirling through her mind. He hadn't meant it to hurt her, but even the smallest nick could reopen old wounds. | Courtney Walsh | ||
| 1af5565 | The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5ee274f | TAWANTINSUYU In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thir.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 919e78d | The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos, mestizos, and mulattos dressed sumptuously, moving happily about their daily business, tall and robustly healthy each and every one. Looking at the smooth, smiling faces now, one would never know that on the streets of the cities where they were painted these people were scorned for their very diversity. One would also n.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| aa8d44d | Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood--to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other t.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0d8e89d | Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means "maize field," but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume). In nature, wild b.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 497f630 | Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 22aaeed | Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion-that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millenia until 1492-may seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out. In this case they took decades to rectify. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 788fba8 | The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f193209 | Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b7571eb | visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 577c317 | Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8e35108 | T]he Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that...[t]o resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d23bfbd | Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a8015a1 | think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets--Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e0ff53d | testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance). | Charles C. Mann | ||
| ba9742f | By fall the settlers' situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 7a33037 | A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth's population find screamingly dull. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 64e367a | Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants' Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8d3bcc7 | What Vogt saw in Peru would crystallize his picture of the world and the human place in it--a vision of limitation. It would bring him to the Prophet's essential belief: humans have no special dispensation to escape biological constraints. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 158fcfc | Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 042ca4f | Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 82e4473 | One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunning diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a regiin where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjuga.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8a5da02 | He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love," Wood explained. Character" | Charles C. Mann | ||
| fa9cecc | When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person. Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to eve.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| cf3e977 | Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a3a4ee8 | A pretty sight; it would have surprised me, if my capacity for surprise wasn't flattened. | Jacqueline Carey | ||
| aba36e6 | To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live. | Barbara Brown Taylor | ||
| c22ad3f | A small kindness, a confluence of compassion, had saved his life. Was that strength, or a weakness? | strength | Jacqueline Carey | |
| 97c10a7 | Pain speaks louder than words ever could. Like most things it serves as both messenger and a symbol. | god life-lessons pain simple-truths symbolism | Brandi L. Bates | |
| fe7cd8f | partner ACC Colin Carswell based at police HQ Sir David Strathern chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police Jean Burchill Rebus's current partner, museum curator | Ian Rankin | ||
| 7df8714 | muted 'thanks' as the person moved away. 'It | Ian Rankin | ||
| ee966e4 | Groynes divided the mostly sandy beach into neat compartments. | Ian Rankin |