Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise and the weather should be little regarded. If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. – thomas jefferson.
The first pacemaker was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Today’s are no bigger than one American quarter and can last up to ten years.
And running – serious, dogged, long-distance running – is the one thing we do superlatively well.
1845, she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled.
Yet in clean Hong Kong asthma rates are 15 percent, while in heavily polluted Guangzhou they are just 3 percent, exactly the opposite of what one would expect.
A woman endows all her children with her mitochondria, but only her daughters have the mechanism to pass it onward to future generations.
About 15 percent of girls now begin puberty by age seven.
But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words – the length of a short novel – to discuss them all.
Then these corpuscles are collected by scavenger cells and sent to the spleen for disposal. You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.
Water is everywhere. A potato is 80 percent water, a cow 74 percent, a bacterium 75 percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but water. Even humans are 65 percent water, making us more liquid than solid by a margin of almost two to one.
It’s a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly – so far anyway – eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring. And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken.
Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes – Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or.
Women are much better than men in tactile sensitivity with their fingers, but possibly only because they have smaller hands and, therefore, a denser network of receptors.
In a popular book of 1899, What a Young Woman Ought to Know, Mary Wood-Allen, an American doctor and social reformer, told women that they could engage in conjugal relations within marriage so long as it was done “without a particle of sexual desire.
Hemoglobin has one strange and dangerous quirk: it vastly prefers carbon monoxide to oxygen. If carbon monoxide is present, hemoglobin will pack it in, like passengers on a rush-hour train, and leave the oxygen on the platform. That’s why it kills people.
Despite its lavish spending, the United States has one of the highest rates of both infant and maternal death among industrialized nations,” according to The New York Times.
That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us – that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt.
That means that a 150-gram serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.
What most small investors didn’t realize was that things were often stacked against them. Many of the most respected business leaders in the country took part in syndicates in which share prices were shamelessly manipulated for the sake of a large, quick gain at the expense of innocent investors. One such, reported by the financial writer John Brooks in his classic Once in Golconda, involved such.
On the last Sunday of March 1851, the Church of England conducted a national survey to see how many people actually attended church that day. The results were a shock. More than half the people of England and Wales had not gone to church at all, and only 20 percent had gone to an Anglican service.