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    The Human Body
    The Human Body
    The Human Body
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    The Human Body

    By Ken Jennings and Mike Lowery

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    About this ebook

    Unveil the impressive mysteries of your own body with this interactive trivia book from Jeopardy! champ and New York Times bestselling author Ken Jennings.

    With this book about the amazing human body, you’ll become an expert and wow your friends and teachers with awesome anatomical facts: Did you know that your hair is as strong as copper wire? Or that if you could spread them out, your lungs would have the surface area of a tennis court? With great illustrations, cool trivia, and fun quizzes to test your knowledge, this guide will have you on your way to whiz-kid status in no time!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLittle Simon
    Release dateFeb 3, 2015
    ISBN9781481401753
    The Human Body
    Author

    Ken Jennings

    Ken Jennings is the New York Times bestselling author of Brainiac, Maphead, Because I Said So!, and Planet Funny. In 2020, he won the “Greatest of All Time” title on the quiz show Jeopardy! and in 2022, he succeeded Alex Trebek as a host of the show. He is living in Seattle during his mortal sojourn, but his posthumous whereabouts are still to be determined.

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      It's a Ken Jennings Junior Genius Guide. 'Nuff said, bro.

    Book preview

    The Human Body - Ken Jennings

    Settle down and find your seats, class. I’m Professor Jennings. But you probably already know that, because I’m such a world-famous authority on absolutely everything. Today we will be studying the most complicated and extraordinary object in the known universe: the human body. I bet most of you know only a tiny fraction of the cool stuff that goes on inside you. Did you all remember to bring your bodies to class today, like I asked? If anyone forgot their body, please raise your hand.

    All right! In that case we’ll begin in our usual fashion by reciting the Junior Genius Pledge to this picture of Albert Einstein. Please place your right index finger to your right temple and repeat after me.

    Wit hall my fellow Junior Geniuses, I solemnly pledge to quest after questions, to angle for answers, to seek out, and to soak up. I will hunger and thirst for knowledge my whole life through, and I dedicate my discoveries to all humankind, with trivia not for just us but for all.

    If you’re afraid you’re not quite as smart as Albert Einstein, don’t worry. You don’t have to revolutionize physics to be a Junior Genius. You just need to pay attention to all the amazing things there are to know about the world around you. "Semper quaerens is the Junior Genius motto. That’s Latin for always curious." Even Einstein had to start somewhere!

    Are you ready for an in-depth look at your body from the inside? (Not literally—don’t worry. That would be dangerous and gross.) Let’s begin!

    BEING HUMAN

    Junior Geniuses, your body is a wonderland. Nothing personal! I just mean that if you are human, you are an amazing piece of biological machinery. If you are not human, please let me know immediately. We would like to dissect and study you for the upcoming Junior Genius Guides: Alien Beings.

    The chemicals in your body are nothing special—common stuff you could buy with a little allowance money. In fact, you could recreate most of your body just by turning on a faucet. More than half of you is actually water!

    So, if you are an eighty-pound human looking to rebuild your body with a chemistry set, buying the elements shown in the chart would set you back about $160. More than half the money would go to buying potassium, a kind-of-rare mineral found in foods such as oranges and bananas. Your body needs potassium to keep your blood pressure healthy and your muscles working.

    EXTRA CREDIT

    Your body doesn’t need gold to survive, but you do have some in your tissues, from tiny traces of it in the food you eat and water you drink. But you’re not going to strike it rich by selling your boogers and earwax to a late-night gold infomercial! The total amount of gold in your body is about the size of a grain of sand.

    But when you combine the elements in your body, your value skyrockets. Let’s say you sold every part of you on the open market—your organs, your bone marrow, your DNA, your antibodies. I would advise against this, however. Not only is it illegal, but you sort of need some of that stuff. But if you had a clearance sale and everything had to go, your body could bring in about $45 million!

    That’s because your body is made of very ordinary elements combined in extraordinary ways.

    LADDER PERFECT

    Like all other life on earth, human beings are carbon-based. This means that the big, complicated molecules that power us, like proteins and carbohydrates, are all based on the element carbon. Yup, the same stuff that charcoal and diamonds and graphite are made out of. Your body has enough carbon in it to provide the graphite for more than six thousand pencils!

    One of the most important of these carbon-based molecules is deoxyribonucleic acid. Most people call it DNA to save time, and because it’s much easier to spell. DNA is a long, skinny molecule shaped like a twisted ladder (or a double helix, as a biologist would say).

    Why is DNA so complicated? Because it contains all the information necessary to make you . . . you. It’s how a skin cell knows how to divide itself into new skin cells, and how a liver cell knows how to make new liver cells. There’s a reason why dogs don’t give birth to kittens and cats don’t give birth to puppies, and that reason is DNA. The DNA ladder is divided into long sections called genes, which contain instructions on how to pass along heredity information. Do you have brown eyes? Eye color is a gene. Curly hair? The ability to roll your tongue? Morton’s Toe? (That’s when your second toe is longer than your big toe.) Those traits are all in your genes.

    EXTRA CREDIT

    There’s even a human gene named for Sonic the Hedgehog! The SHH gene makes sure that your body grows your fingers and brain tissues in the right places.

    The rungs of the ladder in each molecule of DNA are chemicals called bases. There are four different bases: adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. You know what? Let’s keep it simple and call them A, G, T, and C. The pattern of As, Gs, Ts, and Cs on your DNA molecules is like a secret code that contains all the instructions your cells needed to grow into a person. Your whole genome—the entire code—is three billion base pairs long. That’s enough space to encode an entire shelf of encyclopedias!

    MR. GREEN GENES

    DNA isn’t just a human thing, Junior Geniuses. Pretty much all life on earth is based on DNA. Don’t get me wrong, I love humans. We are the only organisms on earth with speech, opposable thumbs, video games, and pizza. But not everything in our genome is so special. Did you know that . . .

    99% of your DNA is the same as a chimpanzee’s?

    97% of your DNA is the same as an orangutan’s?

    80% of your DNA is the same as a mouse’s?

    50% of your DNA is the same as a banana’s?

    You may not be yellow, potassium-rich, and delicious on cereal, but you and bananas are distant branches on the same family tree–the tree of life on earth.

    PIECES OF ME

    Your DNA is found

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