I recently read Bill Bryson's, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'.  He's got a great perspective on humanity and our scientific understanding of the universe we inhabit.  Even things you all ready know, he presents in a fresh way or embellishes with interesting anecdotes or trivia to illustrate his points, and that makes the book a very enjoyable read.  There aren't many science books that I can think of that made me laugh out loud, let alone more times than I can recall.  About halfway through the book, I started keeping notes of some of my favorite facts, quotations, and anecdotes.  Here are some of those that I found particularly interesting or amusing.

1.  80% of US casualties in WWI were due to the Spanish or swine flu epidemic of 1918.

2.  The biomass of microbes in the world exceeds that of all other flora and fauna, and would coat the surface of the planet to a depth of 5-6 feet if it were piled up.

3.  Many viruses have 10 or fewer genes.  The simplest bacteria have several thousand.

4.  In 1918, out of 300 volunteers for flu research selected from the inmates at Deer Isle Military Prison, 62 volunteers:
          a.  Were injected with infected lung tissue from the recently dead.
          b.  sprayed with infectious aerosols in their eyes, noses, and throats.
          c.  Had their throats swabbed with discharges from the sick and dying.
          d.  Had to sit open-mouthed while a gravely ill flu victim was encouraged to cough in their faces.

          The only fatality in the study was the ward doctor who oversaw the experiments.

5.  Less than one in 10,000 species has made it into the fossil record.

6.  Trilobites, (Ordovician Era), were a successful species for 300 million years.  Dinosaurs, (Permian Era), were extant for about 150 million years.  Homo sapiens has been a biologically successful species for around 50,000 years.    

7.  If your pillow is 6 years old, it is estimated that 1/10 of its' weight is made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites, and mite dung.   

8.  If you go out to the woods, (any woods), and scoop up a handful of soil.  You will be holding up to 10 billion bacteria, most of them unknown to science.  You'll also be holding up to 1 million yeasts, 200,000 molds, perhaps 10,000 protozoans, and assorted rotifers, roundworms, and other small creatures collectively known as cryptozoa.


9.  Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology lists 4000 types of bacteria.  Norwegian scientists, Jostein Goksoyr and Vigdis Torsvik collected one gram of random soil from a beech forest near their lab, and carefully analyzed its' bacterial content.  They identified between 4K and 5K species.  They repeated the experiment with a gram of soil taken from a coastal area a few miles away, and found it contained between 4K and 5K different species of bacteria.   Some estimates of the total number of bacterial species on Earth are as high as 400 million.

10.  99% of flowering plants have not been tested for their medicinal properties.  Currently, nearly 1/4 of all prescribed medicines are derived from just 40 plants.

11.  All the fungi found in a typical acre of meadow would weigh about 2500 pounds.

12.  The takahe, a large flightless bird of New Zealand, was presumed dead for 200 years before being rediscovered in a remote, and rugged area of the South Island.

13.  In 1995 a team of British and French scientists lost in a snowstorm in a remote valley of Tibet, came across a breed of horse, (the riwoche), that had previously been known only from prehistoric cave paintings.  The valleys' inhabitants were surprised to learn the horse was considered a rarity in the wider world. 

14.  After 47 cell doublings, you have 10,000 trillion cells and are ready to be born.  (Margulis and Sagan, 1986).

15.  To build the most basic yeast cell, you would have to miniaturize the number of functioning components in a Boeing 777 to a 5 micron sphere, plus get it to reproduce itself.    

16.  We have 200,000 different proteins at work in our bodies.  We understand what approximately 2% of those proteins do.

17.  A human ovum is 85,000 times the size of a human sperm.  Who envies whom?

18.  The total energy in a human body is a bunch of 0.1 V traveling distances measured in nanometers.  Scaled up, this translates to a jolt of 20M volts per meter or about the same as the charge carried by the main body of a lightning strike. 

19.  Darwin published his paper on the origin of species, after a 15 year wait following the return of H.M.S. Beagle, when he received an uncannily similar theory in manuscript form from Alfred Russell Wallace.  Both Darwin's and Wallace's claims to priority were later disputed by a Scottish Gardener, Patrick Matthew, who had remarkably, and independently come up with the principles of natural selection earlier than both, but had the bad luck to have his views published in a book titled 'Naval Timber and Arboriculture', which had been overlooked not just by Darwin, but by the whole of the scientific world.

20.  Gregor Mendel, 'the father of genetics', eagerly sent a copy of his paper based on 8 years of experiments to the great Swiss botanist Karl-Wilhelm von Nageli, whose support was more or less vital for his theory's prospects.  It later became evident to Mendel that Nageli had not read the paper closely, and perhaps not at all.  Frustrated, Mendel retired from investigating heritability and spent the rest of his life growing outstanding vegetables, studying bees and mice, and sunspots among much else.  Eventually he was made Abbot of his monastery.

21.  Mendels' work was simultaneously rediscovered by 3 separate scientists in 1900.  It was only because one of them seemed to claim Mendels' insights as his own, that one of the rivals made it noisily clear that the credit lay with the forgotten monk. 

22.  Darwins book, 'The Formulation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms', was more popular than 'On the Origin of the Species'.

23.  In the mid 1800s the theory of 'Ice Age Glaciation' had stalled in its' inability to account for periodic "Ice Ages".  During the 1860s journals and other 'learned publications' began to receive submissions on hydrostatics, electricity, and other scientific subjects from one James Croll of Anderson's University in Glasgow.  One of Crolls' papers was published on how variations in Earths orbit could have precipitated ice ages, and was recognized as scientific work of the highest standard.  There was some surprise when it turned out that Croll was not an academic at the university, but a janitor.  He had been availing himself of the university library in the evenings.  Eventually Croll was widely honored, and given a job at the Geological Survey of Scotland. 

24.  When someone boasts to you that he or she is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower pilgrims, you should answer at once:  "Me too!".  In the most literal and fundamental sense, we are all family.


Bryson's book is a fascinating read, and these 'fun facts are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of information within it.   Do you have any interesting trivia, (scientific or otherwise), that you would care to share?