The Body

A Guide for Occupants

Bill Bryson 2019 Bvt Lib 612 BRY

Notes and bibliography and index, yay!

CH01 How to Build a Human

• 001-004 silliness about the cost of the elements in your body ... actually the cost of purifying those elements. That can be turned upside down; there are 10 tonnes of CO2 carbon above my 0.7 acres, and another 30 tonnes (est) of carbon in my trees and bushes and grass. A few more tonnes in the wood of my house, and the books on my shelf, call that 10 tonnes, for a total of 50 tonnes for a "home price" of perhaps $500K; $10/kg carbon. For the rest of the elements, dig down, there is plenty of everything, arguably $4.7 trillion dollars worth of elements and compounds.

The reference human is Benedict Cumberbatch, 78 kg, ( 18.5% carbon by weight hence 15 kg, so the limiting element of human existence (carbon) cost of a my-backyard-sourced Cumberbatch is $150. Using a less expensive carbon source (like coal, closing at $340/ton (907 kg) is $0.40 per kilogram, or about $6 per Cumberbatch. Humans add 40 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere per year, perhaps 11 billion tonnes of carbon, or about one million "carbon-Cumberbatchs" per second.

Personally, I believe one Cumberbatch is ample, and would prefer the atmospheric excess turns into 3000 big trees per second. As I write this, way too many Oregon trees are burning into CO2 instead.

• 007 DNA All Humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA (3 billion base pairs) typical differences 3 million base pairs, 100 unique mutations
• 009 37 trillion cells

CH02 skin and hair

• 011 Two square meters, 4 to 7 kg
• 012 live inner layer dermis, outer layer epidermis, outermost layer stratum corneum, dead cells replaced every month
  • one million flakes (squamae) per hour
  • 2M to 5M follicles, 4 to 10M sweat glands
• 013 Meissner's corpuscles sense light touch, Ruffini corpuscles sense HOT, Merkel cells pressure, Pacinian corpuscles sense 10nm vibration
• 014 Race/skin color is a millimeter layer of epidermis, pigmentation is more than 120 genes
• 015 all have same number of melanocytes, more melanin produced for some
• 016 lighter skin increases vitamin D synthesis
• 019 hairlessness 1.2 to 1.7 MYA
• 022 dermatoglyphics study of fingerprints, papillary ridges
• 023 155 lb man 42 quarts water, 1.5 quarts/day resting, 1.5q/h exertion, 7q mental impairment, 10q shock and death

CH03 microbes

• 031 commensals, benign bacteria, kissing samples histocompatibility genes
• 035 flu virus can survive 2.5 weeks on paper money
• 038 Robert Koch 1884 cholera bacillus, lab assistant Julius Petri, Fanny Hesse suggests agar growing medium.

• 042 Peoria lab assistant Mary Hunt, cantaloupe mold, penicillin -> 100 billion units per month

CH04 brain

CH05 head

CH06 mouth and throat

CH07 heart and blood

CH08 body chemistry

CH09 skeleton

CH10 bipedalism

CH11 equilibrium

CH12 Immune system

CH13 Lungs

CH14 Food

CH15 Guts

CH16 Sleep

CH17 Sex

CH18 Pregnancy

CH19 Pain

CH20 Diseases

CH21 Cancer

CH22 Medicine

CH23 Death

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