I love Bryson, but his latest book really struggled to provide anything that I found interesting.
These are pretty much it:
Regarding farts – “in 1978 when surgeons stuck an electrically heated wire up the rectum of a sixty-nine-year-old man to cauterize a polyp and caused an explosion that very literally tore the poor man apart“.
Nearly all mammals have 800 million heartbeats in a lifetime – little mammals like mice have faster hearts and don’t live as long. That used to be the same for us humans, until recently. Now we get 3x that (75 years).
Regarding our ability to withstand heat, a physician called Charles Blagden decided to experiment on himself in 1774, and stayed in a walk in oven for 10 minutes at 92.2C. His friend Joesph Banks (who became president of the Royal Society) lasted 3 minutes at 98.9C, shortly after circling the world with Captain James Cook. What bold men they were!
Prisoners of War used to be experimented on, prior to the Nuremberg Code (see pages 196-197):
- amputations
- limb transplants
- naked in freezing weather for 14 hours
- injecting eyes with dye
- nerve gases
- given infectious diseases
- blown up with shrapnel bombs
- burnt alive with flame throwers
- dissected while conscious
The latter ones were from Japan’s Unit 731, and the perpetrators were never punished – despite killing an estimated 250,000 people – because they provided America with the test results.
Finally, 0.1% of our bodies is cadmium, and it is toxic if we breathe it. We get it via eating plants and from cigarette smoke, and for some reason cannot get rid of it – it stays in our kidneys and can cause cancer. It does us no good.