Many of the most exciting discoveries in all fields of science are being played out in the human body
1 APPENDIX TO LIFE
The appendix gets a bad press. It is usually treated as a body part that
lost its function millions of years ago. All it seems to do is occasionally get
infected and cause appendicitis. Yet recently it has been discovered that the appendix
is very useful to the bacteria that help your digestive system function. They
use it to get respite from the strain of the frenzied activity of the gut,
somewhere to breed and help keep the gut's bacterial inhabitants topped up. So
treat your appendix with respect.
2 SUPERSIZED MOLECULES
Practically everything we experience is made up of molecules. These vary in
size from simple pairs of atoms, like an oxygen molecule, to complex organic
structures. But the biggest molecule in nature resides in your body. It is
chromosome 1. A normal human cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes in its
nucleus, each a single, very long, molecule of DNA. Chromosome 1 is the
biggest, containing around 10bn atoms, to pack in the amount of information
that is encoded in the molecule.
3 ATOM COUNT
It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are
until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of
around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.
4 FUR LOSS
It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on
our bodies as a chimpanzee, it's just that our hairs are useless, so fine they
are almost invisible. We aren't sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It
has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more
easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because
our ancestors were partly aquatic.
But perhaps the most attractive idea is that early humans needed to
co-operate more when they moved out of the trees into the savanna. When animals
are bred for co-operation, as we once did with wolves to produce dogs, they
become more like their infants. In a fascinating 40-year experiment starting in
the 1950s, Russian foxes were bred for docility. Over the period, adult foxes
become more and more like large cubs, spending more time playing, and
developing drooping ears, floppy tails and patterned coats. Humans similarly
have some characteristics of infantile apes – large heads, small mouths and,
significantly here, finer body hair.
5 GOOSEBUMP EVOLUTION
Goosepimples are a remnant of our evolutionary predecessors. They occur when
tiny muscles around the base of each hair tense, pulling the hair more erect.
With a decent covering of fur, this would fluff up the coat, getting more air
into it, making it a better insulator. But with a human's thin body hair, it
just makes our skin look strange.
Similarly we get the bristling feeling of our hair standing on end when we
are scared or experience an emotive memory. Many mammals fluff up their fur
when threatened, to look bigger and so more dangerous. Humans used to have a
similar defensive fluffing up of their body hairs, but once again, the effect
is now ruined. We still feel the sensation of hairs standing on end, but gain
no visual bulk.
6 SPACE TRAUMA
If sci-fi movies were to be believed, terrible things would happen if your
body were pushed from a spaceship without a suit. But it's mostly fiction.
There would be some discomfort as the air inside the body expanded, but nothing
like the exploding body parts Hollywood loves. Although liquids do boil in a
vacuum, your blood is kept under pressure by your circulatory system and would
be just fine. And although space is very cold, you would not lose heat
particularly quickly. As Thermos flasks demonstrate, a vacuum is a great
insulator.
In practice, the thing that will kill you in space is simply the lack of
air. In 1965 a test subject's suit sprang a leak in a Nasa vacuum chamber. The
victim, who survived, remained conscious for around 14 seconds. The exact
survival limit isn't known, but would probably be one to two minutes.
7 ATOMIC COLLAPSE
The atoms that make up your body are mostly empty space, so despite there
being so many of them, without that space you would compress into a tiny
volume. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of the matter in an atom is so
much smaller than the whole structure that it is comparable to the size of a
fly in a cathedral. If you lost all your empty atomic space, your body would
fit into a cube less than 1/500th of a centimetre on each side. Neutron stars
are made up of matter that has undergone exactly this kind of compression. In a
single cubic centimetre of neutron star material there are around 100m tons of
matter. An entire neutron star, heavier than our sun, occupies a sphere that is
roughly the size across of the Isle of Wight.
8 ELECTROMAGNETIC REPULSION
The atoms that make up matter never touch each other. The closer they get,
the more repulsion there is between the electrical charges on their component
parts. It's like trying to bring two intensely powerful magnets together, north
pole to north pole. This even applies when objects appear to be in contact.
When you sit on a chair, you don't touch it. You float a tiny distance above,
suspended by the repulsion between atoms. This electromagnetic force is vastly
stronger than the force of gravity – around a billion billion billion billion
times stronger. You can demonstrate the relative strength by holding a fridge
magnet near a fridge and letting go. The electromagnetic force from the tiny
magnet overwhelms the gravitational attraction of the whole Earth.
9 STARDUST TO STARDUST
Every atom in your body is billions of years old. Hydrogen, the most common
element in the universe and a major feature of your body, was produced in the
big bang 13.7bn years ago. Heavier atoms such as carbon and oxygen were forged
in stars between 7bn and 12bn years ago, and blasted across space when the
stars exploded. Some of these explosions were so powerful that they also produced
the elements heavier than iron, which stars can't construct. This means that
the components of your body are truly ancient: you are stardust.
10 THE QUANTUM BODY
One of the mysteries of science is how something as apparently solid and
straightforward as your body can be made of strangely behaving quantum
particles such as atoms and their constituents. If you ask most people to draw
a picture of one of the atoms in their bodies, they will produce something like
a miniature solar system, with a nucleus as the sun and electrons whizzing
round like planets. This was, indeed, an early model of the atom, but it was
realised that such atoms would collapse in an instant. This is because
electrons have an electrical charge and accelerating a charged particle, which
is necessary to keep it in orbit, would make it give off energy in the form of
light, leaving the electron spiralling into the nucleus.
In reality, electrons are confined to specific orbits, as if they ran on
rails. They can't exist anywhere between these orbits but have to make a
"quantum leap" from one to another. What's more, as quantum
particles, electrons exist as a collection of probabilities rather than at
specific locations, so a better picture is to show the electrons as a set of
fuzzy shells around the nucleus.
11 RED BLOODED
When you see blood oozing from a cut in your finger, you might assume that
it is red because of the iron in it, rather as rust has a reddish hue. But the
presence of the iron is a coincidence. The red colour arises because the iron
is bound in a ring of atoms in haemoglobin called porphyrin and it's the shape
of this structure that produces the colour. Just how red your haemoglobin is
depends on whether there is oxygen bound to it. When there is oxygen present,
it changes the shape of the porphyrin, giving the red blood cells a more vivid
shade.
12 GOING VIRAL
Surprisingly, not all the useful DNA in your chromosomes comes from your
evolutionary ancestors – some of it was borrowed from elsewhere. Your DNA
includes the genes from at least eight retroviruses. These are a kind of virus
that makes use of the cell's mechanisms for coding DNA to take over a cell. At
some point in human history, these genes became incorporated into human DNA.
These viral genes in DNA now perform important functions in human reproduction,
yet they are entirely alien to our genetic ancestry.
13 OTHER LIFE
On sheer count of cells, there is more bacterial life inside you than human.
There are around 10tn of your own cells, but 10 times more bacteria. Many of
the bacteria that call you home are friendly in the sense that they don't do
any harm. Some are beneficial.
In the 1920s, an American engineer investigated whether animals could live
without bacteria, hoping that a bacteria-free world would be a healthier one.
James "Art" Reyniers made it his life's work to produce environments
where animals could be raised bacteria-free. The result was clear. It was
possible. But many of Reyniers's animals died and those that survived had to be
fed on special food. This is because bacteria in the gut help with digestion.
You could exist with no bacteria, but without the help of the enzymes in your
gut that bacteria produce, you would need to eat food that is more loaded with
nutrients than a typical diet.
14 EYELASH INVADERS
Depending on how old you are, it's pretty likely that you have eyelash
mites. These tiny creatures live on old skin cells and the natural oil (sebum)
produced by human hair follicles. They are usually harmless, though they can
cause an allergic reaction in a minority of people. Eyelash mites typically
grow to a third of a millimetre and are near-transparent, so you are unlikely
to see them with the naked eye. Put an eyelash hair or eyebrow hair under the
microscope, though, and you may find them, as they spend most of their time
right at the base of the hair where it meets the skin. Around half the
population have them, a proportion that rises as we get older.
15 PHOTON DETECTORS
Your eyes are very sensitive, able to detect just a few photons of light. If
you take a look on a very clear night at the constellation of Andromeda, a
little fuzzy patch of light is just visible with the naked eye. If you can make
out that tiny blob, you are seeing as far as is humanly possible without
technology. Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. But
"near" is a relative term in intergalactic space – the Andromeda
galaxy is 2.5m light years away. When the photons of light that hit your eye
began their journey, there were no human beings. We were yet to evolve. You are
seeing an almost inconceivable distance and looking back in time through 2.5m
years.
16 SENSORY TALLY
Despite what you've probably been told, you have more than five senses.
Here's a simple example. Put your hand a few centimetres away from a hot iron.
None of your five senses can tell you the iron will burn you. Yet you can feel
that the iron is hot from a distance and won't touch it. This is thanks to an
extra sense – the heat sensors in your skin. Similarly we can detect pain or
tell if we are upside down.
Another quick test. Close your eyes and touch your nose. You aren't using
the big five to find it, but instead proprioception. This is the sense that
detects where the parts of your body are with respect to each other. It's a
meta-sense, combining your brain's knowledge of what your muscles are doing
with a feel for the size and shape of your body. Without using your basic five
senses, you can still guide a hand unerringly to touch your nose.
17 REAL AGE
Just like a chicken, your life started off with an egg. Not a chunky thing
in a shell, but an egg nonetheless. However, there is a significant difference
between a human egg and a chicken egg that has a surprising effect on your age.
Human eggs are tiny. They are, after all, just a single cell and are typically
around 0.2mm across – about the size of a printed full stop. Your egg was
formed in your mother – but the surprising thing is that it was formed when she
was an embryo. The formation of your egg, and the half of your DNA that came
from your mother, could be considered as the very first moment of your
existence. And it happened before your mother was born. Say your mother was 30
when she had you, then on your 18th birthday you were arguably over 48 years
old.
18 EPIGENETIC INFLUENCE
We are used to thinking of genes as being the controlling factor that
determines what each of us is like physically, but genes are only a tiny part
of our DNA. The other 97% was thought to be junk until recently, but we now
realise that epigenetics – the processes that go on outside the genes – also
have a major influence on our development. Some parts act to control
"switches" that turn genes on and off, or program the production of
other key compounds. For a long time it was a puzzle how around 20,000 genes
(far fewer than some breeds of rice) were enough to specify exactly what we
were like. The realisation now is that the other 97% of our DNA is equally important.
19 CONSCIOUS ACTION
If you are like most people, you will locate your conscious mind roughly
behind your eyes, as if there were a little person sitting there, steering the
much larger automaton that is your body. You know there isn't really a tiny
figure in there, pulling the levers, but your consciousness seems to have an
independent existence, telling the rest of your body what to do.
In reality, much of the control comes from your unconscious. Some tasks
become automatic with practice, so that we no longer need to think about the
basic actions. When this happens the process is handled by one of the most
primitive parts of the brain, close to the brain stem. However even a clearly
conscious action such as picking up an object seems to have some unconscious precursors;
with the brain firing up before you make the decision to act. There is
considerable argument over when the conscious mind plays its part, but there is
no doubt that we owe a lot more to our unconscious than we often allow.
20 OPTICAL DELUSION
The picture of the world we "see" is artificial. Our brains don't
produce an image the way a video camera works. Instead, the brain constructs a
model of the world from the information provided by modules that measure light
and shade, edges, curvature and so on. This makes it simple for the brain to
paint out the blind spot, the area of your retina where the optic nerve joins,
which has no sensors. It also compensates for the rapid jerky movements of our
eyes called saccades, giving a false picture of steady vision.
But the downside of this process is that it makes our eyes easy to fool. TV,
films and optical illusions work by misleading the brain about what the eye is
seeing. This is also why the moon appears much larger than it is and seems to
vary in size: the true optical size of the moon is similar to a hole created by
a hole punch held at arm's length.
SOURCE : theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/27/20-human-body-facts-science
