Thursday, November 29, 2012

Bee in a Cathedral

Batman...check.

Spiderman...check.

Fruit Fly Man?

We share over 60% of our DNA with a fruit fly.  
We share over 90% of our DNA with a mouse.
We share 98.4% of our DNA with a chimpanzee.

Does that 1.6% that is really ours turn us into the carnivorous beings that we are?

These and other fascinating tidbits are the stuff of A Bee in a Cathedral, a great new book in the CHMS Library.  Author Joel Levy has a great way of explaining difficult concepts and relating them to things and ideas with which we are already familiar.  Here are a few more:

A chunk of neutron star no bigger than a sugar cube contains the same amount of mass as every living human put together.

Every year there is three times as much trash dumped into the world's oceans as fish taken out of them.

To see what it's like to be your own heart, try emptying a bathtub in 15 minutes -- with a teacup.  Then do it again and again, without stopping, for the rest of your life.
                                  --from A Bee in a Cathedral, by Joel Levy (Firefly, 2011)


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