the body a guide for occupants by bill bryson

In terms of our reproductive capacities, you might be interested to know that the chance of conceiving on a single, randomly timed act of sex is 3%, the lucky sperm welcomed to the egg “like a long-lost if curiously diminutive friend”. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/EPAīryson’s tour of the marvellous arcs into the remarkable achievements of an elite few of our fellow humans: the toddler who was fully resuscitated from hypothermia even though her heart had stopped for hours the flight attendant who survived a fall of 33,000ft, cushioned by fir trees the Spanish diver who held his breath for 24 minutes the Chilean miners who do hard labour 19,000ft up a mountain. Wry, companionable, avuncular and always lucid … Bill Bryson. There’s a formula at work – the prose motors gleefully along, a finely tuned engine running on jokes, factoids and biographical interludes. 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.

The body a guide for occupants by bill bryson