The Body: A Guide for Occupants Paperback – January 26, 2021

Its Bill Bryson and his talking about the body so of course everything in this book is interesting. Laid out in a witty style, the author distills complex functions in a very enjoyable manner.Did you know?-You blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.- Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast.- it constitutes 10 percent of all our genetic material. No one has any idea why. The mysterious part was for a while called junk DNA but now is more graciously called dark DNA, meaning that we don’t know what it does or why it is there.- Of the million or so microbes that have been identified, just 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans—very few, all things considered.- Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch.It makes up just 2 percent of our body weight but uses 20 percent of our energy. In newborn infants, it’s no less than 65 percent. That’s partly why babies sleep all the time—their growing brains exhaust them—and have a lot of body fat, to use as an energy reserve when needed.- Smell is said to account for at least 70 percent of flavor, and maybe even as much as 90 percent.- In the United States, plasma sales make up 1.6 percent of all goods exported, more than America earns from the sale of airplanes.- it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do.- You can remove two-thirds of a liver and it will grow back to- Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much.- Despite the vast differences in heart rates, nearly all animals have about 800 million heartbeats in them if they live an average life. The exception is humans. We pass 800 million heartbeats after twenty-five years, and just keep on going for another fifty years and 1.6 billion heartbeats or so. It is tempting to attribute this exceptional vigor to some innate superiority on our part, but in fact it is only over the last ten or twelve generations that we have deviated from the standard mammalian pattern thanks to improvements in our life expectancy. For most of our history, 800 million beats per lifetime was about the human average, too.- Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits, needless to say) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.- Just look at how swiftly they swarm in and devour you when you die. That’s because your lifeless body falls to a delicious come-and-get-it temperature, like a pie left to cool on a windowsill.- In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is fifteen milligrams, for instance, but in the U.K. it is three to four milligrams—a very considerable difference.- Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar.- According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, the amount of vegetables eaten by the average American between 2000 and 2010 dropped by thirty pounds. That seems an alarming decline until you realize that the most popular vegetable in America by a very wide margin is the French fry. (It accounts for a quarter of our entire vegetable intake.) These days, eating thirty pounds less “vegetables” may well be a sign of an improved diet.- A more scientific, and more recent, U.S. National Health and Social Life Survey found that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men said they had been unfaithful at some time.- Over time, the mitochondrial pool for humans has shrunk so much that, almost unbelievably but rather wonderfully, we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor—a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You might have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all.- A twenty-week-old fetus will weigh no more than three or four ounces but will already have 6 million eggs inside her.- More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans. We don’t even know much about the good or neutral chemicals around us.- Still, the story is mostly positive, and not just for childhood cancers but for cancers at all ages. In the developed world, death rates from lung, colon, prostate, Hodgkin’s disease, testicular cancer, and breast cancer have all fallen sharply—by between 25 and 90 percent—in twenty-five years or so. In the United States alone, 2.4 million fewer people have died of cancer in the last thirty years than would have if the rates had stayed unchanged.- By one reckoning, life expectancy on Earth improved by as much in the twentieth century as in the whole of the preceding eight thousand years.- By 1950, half of the medicines available for prescription had been invented or discovered in just the previous ten years.- A case in point is the drug atenolol, a beta-blocker designed to lower blood pressure, which has been widely prescribed since 1976. A study in 2004, involving a total of twenty-four thousand patients, found that atenolol did indeed reduce blood pressure but did not reduce heart attacks or fatalities compared with giving no treatment at all. People on atenolol expired at the same rate as everyone else, but, as one observer put it, “they just had better blood-pressure numbers when they died.”- By one calculation, if we found a cure for all cancers tomorrow, it would add just 3.2 years to overall life expectancy.- For every year of added life that has been achieved since 1990, only 10 months is healthy.Additionally there are interesting anecdotes and issues discussed such as:-On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how many times the rooster copulated daily. “Dozens of times” was the reply. “Please tell that to the President,” Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the President passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked: “Same hen every time?” “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time.” The President nodded slowly, then said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.” —LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, JANUARY 25, 1990 I-The PSA test is “hardly more effective than a coin toss,” Professor Richard J. Ablin of the University of Arizona has written, and he should know. He was the man who discovered the prostate-specific antigen in 1970. Noting that American men spend at least $3 billion a year on prostate tests, he added, “I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven disaster.”And finally:Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world,” according to Nature Neuroscience.*1 If that is not the most extraordinary thing in the universe, then we certainly have some wonders yet to find.You will need each exabyte to absorb this fascinating read.

FASCINATING read - humor and history included and eye-opening information for every HUMAN. HIGHLY RECOMMEND

This is my second book from Mr. Bryson that I have read. Both were very entertaining. I really enjoyed the side stories that he added to the content that made it all the more interesting. I have saved numerous highlights in this book. Lots of nice interesting facts and tidbits. The one thing that I did not like that is common with many "science" related books is the absence of the word "theory." Regardless of whether you are a believer in intelligent design or in evolution, or an even a combination of the two, all are just theories, or faith as it pertains to intelligent design. It irks me when authors fail to highlight that what they are discussing is theory versus fact. Evolution is a theory, not fact. From there, the reader is free to make their own decision as to what they believe but it is irresponsible to write an entire book with so many references to Evolution without mentioning that it is a theory. While I understand that there is evidence of evolution, there are also a lot of holes in the theory. More recent evidence suggests that Darwin got a lot wrong in his theory. There are a couple of areas in the book where the author even takes some light jabs at intelligent design. There are numerous reasons why people could believe in this Theory well. For example, why is it that a newborn infant has the innate desire and ability to suckle? How would nature or evolution insert such a desire? Did you ever stop to think that if sex did not feel good the entire human race would probably die off? Why did Sex have to feel good? How did nature or evolution know to make it feel good? It would seem to me that both were designed that way for a purpose. There are lots of examples like that but I don't want to bog down this review. I still think that this was a very good book and I enjoyed reading it.