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. As Bill Bryson writes, "we pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted." The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information.T he cartilage in your joints is smoother than glass, and has a friction coefficient five times less than ice. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Bryson-esque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you, in particular. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody.īill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body-how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY Maclean's īill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body.
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