![]() ![]() He has waded through a PhD’s worth of articles, interviewed a score of physicians and biologists, read a library of books, and had a great deal of fun along the way. If you laid all the DNA in your body end to end it would stretch 10bn miles, beyond the orbit of Pluto: “Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system,” Bill Bryson writes “You are in the most literal sense cosmic.”īryson’s The Body is a directory of such wonders, a tour of the minuscule it aims to do for the human body what his A Short History of Nearly Everything did for science. Through her nipples a breast-feeding mother’s body gauges the microbes in her baby’s saliva, to adjust the antibody content of her milk. Over a lifetime your heart performs the equivalent work to lifting a tonne weight 150 miles into the air. Our ears can discern a volume range of a 1,000,000,000,000 factors of amplitude. A study of 60 people’s belly buttons found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of them “unknown to science”. ![]() We are made of seven billion billion billion atoms, the constituent elements of which would cost £96,546.79 on the open market (excluding VAT). Taste receptors trigger insulin release, so that before we’ve even swallowed our bodies are preparing for a meal (there are even taste receptors in the testicles). The more exercise we do the more our bones produce a hormone that boosts mood, fertility and memory – staving off frailty, depression and dementia. T he cartilage in your joints is smoother than glass, and has a friction coefficient five times less than ice. ![]()
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