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Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turns cancerous and your immune system captures and kills them.
Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.34
To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like one-fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in
other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.
You may have had the experience of looking at a clear blue sky on a sunny day and seeing little white sparks popping in and out of existence, like the briefest of shooting stars. What you are seeing, amazingly enough, is your own white blood cells, moving through a capillary in front of the retina.17
When loss of balance is prolonged or severe, the brain doesn’t know quite what to make of it and interprets it as poisoning.34 That is why loss of balance so generally results in nausea.
What we appreciate when we eat is flavour, which is taste plus smell.fn3 Smell is said to account for at least 70 per cent of flavour and maybe even as much as 90 per cent.28
Vaccination is really a way of inducing the body to produce useful antibodies against a particular scourge without having to be unwell in the first place.
When they encounter an invader, they fire off attack chemicals called cytokines, which is what makes you feel feverish and ill when your body is battling infection. It’s not the infection that makes you feel dreadful, but your body defending itself. The pus that seeps from a wound is simply dead white cells that have given their lives in defence of you.
Incidentally, the reason your nose runs in chilly weather is the same reason your bathroom windows run with water in chilly weather. In the case of your nose, warm air from your lungs meets cold air coming into the nostrils and condenses, resulting in a drip.
The highest rate in the world is in the UK, where 30 per cent of children have shown asthma symptoms in the past year.
Asthma (the word comes from a Greek term meaning ‘to gasp’)
Nearly one-third of people below the poverty line still smoke,
Vitamins are simply organic chemicals – that is, from things that are or were once alive, like plants and animals – while minerals are inorganic, and come from soil or water.
Shakespeare ate were, for the most part, probably no sweeter than the modern carrot.27
According to the Times, 86 per cent of US high schools start their day before eight thirty in the morning, and 10 per cent start before seven thirty. Later start times have been shown to produce better attendance, better test results, fewer car accidents, and even less depression and self-harm.16
Perhaps nothing says more about our delicacy towards matters genital than that the word pudendum – meaning the external genitals, particularly those of a woman – comes from the Latin for ‘to be ashamed’.
we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
Various studies have shown that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for Type 1 diabetes, asthma, coeliac disease and even obesity, and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.
There is some evidence that a nursing mother absorbs a little of her suckling baby’s saliva through her breast ducts and that this is analysed by her immune system, which adjusts the amount and types of antibodies she supplies to the baby,
By one estimate, about 60 per cent of all infectious diseases are zoonotic (that is, from animals).
it was realized that some derivative of mustard gas might be useful in treating some cancers.23 Thus was born chemotherapy.
males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years
