REVIEW 63
The amazing story of us A set of human lungs, if smoothed out, would cover a tennis court and the airways within them would stretch from London to Moscow. There is a metre of DNA packed into every cell in the human body and if all of this was formed into a single fine strand, it would stretch 10 billion miles. These are just a few of the mindboggling nug- gets of information offered by Bill Bryson in his latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants. were properly human” as Bryson puts it. The book is comprehensive and has chap- ters covering every part and system of the body. It also covers sleep, conception, birth, nerves and pain, disease, medical progres- sion and, of course, death, the chapter on which is aptly entitled ‘The End’.
Of the book, Bryson himself said the fol- lowing: “We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary con- traption that is us. What I learned is that we are infinitely more complex and won- drous, and often more mysterious, than I had ever suspected. There really is no story more amazing than the story of us.” Full of extraordinary facts and amazing stories The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a clever, amusing and entertaining endeav- our to explain the miracle of the physical side of being human. – Alison Moore The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson is published by Penguin. ISBN: 978-087522405. RRP STG £25
Bryson approaches the subject of biol- ogy in the same no-nonsense, relatable, observational style as he employs in his other writing, but you cannot escape the fact that a huge amount of research has gone into this book. The human brain, he observes, while having the consistency of a “slightly over- cooked blancmange” churns through more information in 30 seconds, while you sit doing nothing, than the Hubble Space Tel- escope has processed in 30 years! In a chapter entitled ‘Food, Glorious Food’ Bryson takes the reader through the history of our understanding of nutrition
including the pre-human use of cooking to make more foods more accessible to humans as fuel. The research suggests that our ancestors were cooking food as much as 1.8 million years ago, “long before we
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Crossword
Across 1 Type of rowboat, or a concert (3) 3 Was this relation Adam’s second grandchild? (5,6) 8 Pattern associated with the family of Sailor Brown (6) 9 Mac (8) 10 Melodies (5) 11 Perish in water (5) 13 In the Bible, he had a whale of a tale to tell! (5) 15 Insists on having (7) 16 Some urinals are cut off by water (7) 20 Lacy table mat (5) 21 Head-case! (5) 23 Piece of shamrock, perhaps (5) 24 Piece of furniture in which to hang clothes (8) 25 Expert - on a TV panel, for example (6) 26 The ‘R’ of DNR (11) 27 Angling stick (3)
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Down 1 Enjoy greyhound racing, but lose one’s sensibility? (2,2,3,4) 2 Popular garden and house plant (8) 3 Tricolours, perhaps (5) 4 Maid found in strange taverns (7) 5 Possessed (5) 6 One’s offspring has swallowed marijuana? That’s exactly right! (4,2) 7 Mesh (3) 12The grenade hits like that? One must be myopic! (11) 13 Worn out (5) 14 Sweetness from bees (5) 17 Breed of dog named for part of Canada (8) 18 Type of hazelnut (7) 19 Protects, keeps watch over (6) 22 Entices into breaking the rules (5) 23 Ketchup (5) 24Conflict occurs when one opens 24 across! (3)
October crossword solution Across: 1 Double vision 7 Opt 9 Ante 10 Fodder 11 Flax 14 Lacks 15 Kayak 16 Taco 18 Uncut 21 Dosed 22 Renal 23 Suede 24 Espy 25 Toxic 26 Shock 29 Puff 33 Evaded 34 Ewer 36 Emu 37 Red letter day Down:1 Don 2 Used 3 Loft 4 Vodka 5&9 Steak and kidney pie 6 Noel 8 Tax collector 12 Hyssop 13 Skids 14 Louse 17 Annexe
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19 Creek 20 Trite 27 Hovel 28 Cadet 30 Four 31 Adze 32 Dead 35 Ely
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The winner of the October crossword is: Zoe McHale Killarney, Co Kerry
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You can now email your entry to us at nursing@medmedia.ie by taking a photo of the completed crossword with your details included. Closing date: Thursday, November 28, 2019 If preferred you can post your entry to: Crossword Competition, WIN, MedMedia Publications, 17 Adelaide Street, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, A96E096
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