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. Unless you're comfortable in metric, imperial and the UK's various quaint units of measure you'll find yourself pausing to do the conversions yourself.T he cartilage in your joints is smoother than glass, and has a friction coefficient five times less than ice. Sometimes Bryson will refer to length in feet, or meters, or weight in kilos, pounds or stones, he might provide conversions, or he might not. Finally, for a book that's partly trying to explain a technical subject it contains an infuriating mismatch of differing systems of units of measure. Sometimes there's a great mix of those, but more often than not the science suffers because too much time is taken on some personal observation or anecdote that that isn't all that interesting, or some other mixture of the three. This book's a mixture of scientific fact, anecdotes and personal observations. He's still not quite capturing what made 'A Short History.' great. I've read many of Bryson's earlier books, this is the third one of his that I've read with a scientific theme read after 'A Short History.' and 'At Home'. Bryson manages to sound monotone, unexcited and borderline out of breath throughout. It's great when certain authors narrate their own works, as you can really feel their enthusiasm for the subject, but boy is this not one of those cases. Average, really needs a professional narrator,

The body by bill bryson