In other words, according to the McMaster study, too little salt is at least as risky as too much.
The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids – seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.
On even the most modest properties, a good, well-cut lawn became the ideal. For one thing, it was a way of announcing to the world that the householder was prosperous enough that he didn’t need to use the space to grow vegetables for his dinner table.
Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn’t study divinity at all, and so had no training in how to preach, provide inspiration or solace, or otherwise offer meaningful Christian support.
Children do much better with extreme cold than with extreme heat. Because their sweat glands aren’t fully developed, they don’t sweat freely as adults do.
Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.
It is a myth, and physiological impossibility, incidentally, that hair and nails continue to grow after death. Nothing grows after death.
At very high altitudes, any exertion becomes difficult and exhausting. Around 40 percent of people experience altitude sickness above thirteen thousand feet, and it is impossible to predict who the victims will be because it is not related to fitness.
People tend to blame the last thing they ate, but it’s probably the thing before the last thing they ate.
Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.
The largest source of foodborne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as commonly supposed, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.
It also gives life a richness and unpredictability that endows even the simplest undertakings with an air of challenge and uncertainty.
Now the best thinking is that the appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria. About one person in every sixteen in the developed world will suffer appendicitis at some point, enough to make it the most common cause of emergency surgery. Without surgery, many appendicitis victims would die.
Most of the best technology that exists on Earth is right here inside us. And everybody takes it almost completely for granted.
If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.
On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how many times the rooster copulated daily. “Dozens of times” was the reply. “Please tell that to the President,” Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the President passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked: “Same hen every time?” “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time.” The President nodded slowly, then said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.” – london review of books, january 25, 1990.
Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a better title.
As Jablonski has written, “The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain.” That, she says, is how sweat helped to make you brainy.
Edison was good at making things the world didn’t yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them.
Twenty years after Waksman’s death, the American Society for Microbiology made a somewhat belated attempt at amends by inviting Schatz to address the society on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of streptomycin’s discovery. In recognition of his achievements, and presumably without giving the matter a lot of thought, it bestowed on him its highest award: the Selman A. Waksman medal. Life sometimes really is very unfair.