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Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected.
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. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.
Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you. No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you.
Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth. 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. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.
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.
day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of that. A couple of dozen times a week, well over a thousand times a year, you get the most dreaded disease of our age, and each time your body saves you.
Skin color is a classic example of what is known as convergent evolution—that is, similar outcomes that have evolved in two or more locations.
Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.
The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. —emily dickinson
THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY thing in the universe is inside your head. You could travel through every inch of outer space and very possibly nowhere find anything as marvelous and complex and high functioning as the three pounds of spongy mass between your ears.
Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.
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 a 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.
This was not merely an idea, but a flash of inspiration. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal. —cesare lombroso
Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise and the weather should be little regarded. If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. —thomas jefferson
Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. —emily dickinson
It’s remarkable that bad things don’t happen more often. According to one estimate reported by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, the number of viruses in birds and mammals that have the potential to leap the species barrier and infect us may be as high as 800,000.
In 2000, a landmark paper in the journal Cell listed six attributes in particular that all cancer cells have, namely: They divide without limit. They grow without direction or influence from outside agents like hormones. They engage in angiogenesis, which is to say they trick the body into giving them a blood supply. They disregard any signals to stop growing. They fail to succumb to apoptosis, or programmed cell death. They metastasize, or spread to other parts of the body. What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without
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Exercise regularly. Eat sensibly. Die anyway. —anonymous
IN 2011, AN interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke, and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined. We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.
