The brains of other animals, such as dogs and hamsters, are made up of the same components, and the size or ours is nothing special either – relatively speaking, they’re the same size as those of mice.

In fact, it takes up 20 percent of all our energy – for a newborn baby, that number is 65 percent – yet it is highly efficient, needing only as many calories per day as you’d get from a blueberry muffin. The myth that we only use 10 percent of our brain’s full capacity at any given moment isn’t true: we use the whole thing. It’s 75–80 percent water, strangely soft, and permanently sealed away from the outside world that it lets you comprehend. It’s a unique structure, no matter how you look at it. The body as a whole is amazing, but the brain is particularly amazing. We’re not alone: each of us contains trillions of microbes, which we need to survive. All the developments that humans have undergone since that time have basically been wonderful accidents.

It’s also remarkable to think that we arrived here through evolution, having started off as nothing more than a few cells in the ocean. On all the time, it usually goes for decades without needing repairs, and all it needs to run is water and food. Some people think of the body as a machine, but it’s so much more mysterious and impressive than that. It’s amazing to think that your DNA is the product of generation after generation of transmission: the information encoded in your genes links you directly to your ancestors of some three billion years ago. Made up of chromosomes and genes, DNA contains the information needed to make you. Inside the nucleus of each cell is a meter of DNA. But how exactly do cells coordinate themselves to create a functioning human being? Science still can’t tell us the full story – which is wondrous in itself. The cell is the essential life-giving unit that we’re all made up of. In fact, we can’t even say with certainty where life begins. The miracle of life isn’t something you can create simply by sticking stuff together. All we’d have would be a pile of inert elements. An episode of the science program Nova, broadcast by US network PBS in 2012, pegged the cost of building a human at a mere $168.Įven the cost of the materials for building a human body, then, is uncertain – but more to the point, even with all those materials, the actual act of building a human being would still be beyond us.

Those elements would cost you £96,546.79 - labor and taxes not included.īut that’s only one estimate. According to their calculations, you’d need 59 different elements, although only six in any serious quantity – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous. Well, in 2013 the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry took on the bizarre task of estimating the specific cost of building actor Benedict Cumberbatch. How would you go about it? What building blocks would you need? How much would it cost? Imagine that you had to build a human being from scratch.

The body bryson