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How to make a human body:

Blend together the right amount of each of 59 elements, at a cost of US$151,578.46 according to the Royal Society of Chemistry.  

~Or~

If you don't have that kind of money lying about, you can also do it the old-fashioned way that involves heterosexual sex. I'm not here to judge your methods; make a human whichever way you please.  What I am here to do is tell you that Bill Bryson has done it again!  He has written yet another brilliant and vastly interesting book, this time about the human body. Whether you want to know about bones or skin or digestion, muscles or brains or bacteria, you'll find it in this book.  I don't even know where to begin in telling you about the contents.  Whilst some things I already knew and thus this was a refresher, there were even more that I didn't know and thus made my brain very happy.  There are just so many interesting facts wrapped up in this book.  A random few from my highlights:

��"You have a meter of [DNA] packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto."

•We shed over a million flakes of skin every hour, leaving behind about a pound of dust every year.  (Easy way to rid yourself of a pound, but for some reason I've never seen it in a diet book.)

•If you could ice skate on cartilage, you would go 16 times as fast as on ice, due to the smoothness of cartilage.

��"In the second or so since you started this sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells." (and used a dozen muscles just to read these words)

��"The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth."

��"Every gram of feces you produce contains 40 billion bacteria and 100 million archaea."  (Now that's something you can impress your co-workers with at your Christmas party!)

•The "the death rate for infectious diseases has been climbing and is back to the level of about forty years ago."  This is due to bacteria evolving resistance to our antibiotics, partly because of the copious amounts of antibiotics that are fed to livestock (a good reason to cut out meat and dairy!) and the over-prescription of antibiotics, especially for illnesses that are not helped by them (please stop asking your doctor for antibiotics for colds!).

The award for my favourite tidbit of information in this book goes to:

•All of your skin colour is in "a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick". 

Did you get that??  ALL of the pigment in your skin is in a sliver so thin that you can see through it!  "That’s all that race is—a sliver of epidermis."  For this we have enslaved millions of people, killed, hated, treated unfairly, imprisoned.  For a translucent sliver of skin.   Stupid reason if you ask me, especially when you consider that if you go back far enough, every single person on earth has ancestors who came from Africa.  We ALL had black ancestors.  We ALL came from Africa.  The original skin colour of homo sapiens was dark, so stop already.  Stop hating on people over a sliver of skin.  If you have "white" skin, it's due to a gene mutation, a freak gene that happened to get passed on because our ancestors needed Vitamin D after they left Africa.  Not because you are somehow superior to people who have more melanin than you.  Got that?

Those are just a few of the many things I highlighted in this book (it's best to have a Kindle copy if you don't like marking up paper pages).  If you enjoy learning new things, if you like to know what makes you you, or if you have an extra $151,578.46 on hand and want to know the ingredients required to create a human body, this is the book for you!