By Tom Keyser, Albany Times Union, N.Y.
Oct. 15–STAFF WRITER
When someone says you’ve got the best seat in the house, this must be what they mean. Through a tiny camera on the back of the tongue, you can watch a human chew salad and swallow it.
And the narrator says: “There is nothing more familiar, or more mysterious, breathtaking in its actions, marvelous in its mechanics, exquisite in its range of senses and staggering in its ability to understand.”
He is talking about the human body, the star of “Incredible Human Machine,” a two-hour program beginning at 9 p.m. Sunday on the National Geographic Channel. It features things never before seen on TV, such as the flapping vocal cords of Steven Tyler, lead singer of the rock band Aerosmith. (They slam together an average of 170 times per second, more than 500,000 times during one concert.)
The program shows a doctor injecting stem cells into the heart of a 49-year-old male patient during an experimental bypass surgery. The man’s size, 6-foot-4 and 275 pounds, made him a difficult match for a heart transplant. Three months after the operation, his heart was pumping 25 percent more blood than before, and he was playing basketball.
It also shows the first retinal implant. A doctor implanted 16 electrodes in the back of a 62-year-old blind woman’s eye. The electrodes act as a retina, converting light into impulses that the brain turns into sight. Initially, the woman could see only light and blurred movement. Then her brain started compensating, and she began seeing more detail.
A fresh look: “The show’s a fresh retelling of the old classic,” says Chad Cohen, writer and producer of “Incredible Human Machine.””We still have the same 206 bones and 600-odd muscles and 20,000-odd genes. But the way science looks at the body and is taking care of it is changing.
“The new medicine is about getting the body to use its own repair and maintenance system to fix us. You can take stem cells from one area of the body, put them in another, and they will potentially grow and heal an area that’s not working.”
An update of the 1975 National Geographic program of the same name, it follows the human body through one ordinary or, as the show makes clear, extraordinary day, morning to night, of 10,000 blinks, 20,000 breaths and 100,000 beats of the heart. It illustrates the scientific data with stories of people, from Olympic athletes, for whom the body works wondrously, to critically ill patients, for whom the body has failed.
You’ll follow a breath down the throat, past the larynx and into the trachea and lungs. You’ll see doctors track changing brain waves as an 84-year-old Tibetan monk meditates. You’ll watch a bite of food travel from the mouth to the esophagus to the stomach to the small intestine.
“Getting our audience to sit down and pay attention to how the body works is always a challenge,” Cohen says. “But with the help of Steven Tyler to get us through how vocal cords work, or the Blue Angels to show us how the circulatory system works in extremes, or top Olympic athletes to take us through how muscles and bones work, we’ve made it accessible to an audience that, for the most part, wouldn’t be so interested in learning about this hard science.”
Star dust: The show’s narrator describes the human body as “bits of star dust, that’s really all we are: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen a handful of elements worth no more than $20 at any chemical-supply shop. But get these chemicals together, marinate in a hospitable place for, oh, about 3.8 billion years, and that mundane mix of molecules becomes precious.”
Refer: For more facts on the human body and a link to a preview from “The Incredible Human Machine,” go to http://timesunion.com. Did you know?
Skin
–It’s the largest human organ with a surface area of about 18 square feet; it carries as much as one third of the blood in our bodies.
–We shed at least 600,000 particles of skin every hour; those particles make up as much as 80 percent of the dust in our homes.
–There are about 45 miles of nerves in our skin.
–Our skin has about 5 million hair follicles; only 100,000 are on our head.
–A vigorous workout can raise the body’s temperature a few degrees, which could be deadly if we didn’t sweat; the more than 2 million holes across our skin can release up to a half gallon of water in an hour.
Sight and hearing
–We blink 10 times per minute; if we’re awake for 16 hours, then we blink 10,000 times.
–Our eyes can differentiate as many as 10 million shades of color.
–One third of our brain is involved in processing vision.
–The smallest bones in our body, not much bigger than a grain of rice, are located deep in our ear.
–The entire area of the middle ear is no bigger than an M&M.
–The ear never stops working, even when we’re asleep; it continues to hear sounds, but the brain shuts them out.
Smell
–Our nose, like our ears, continues to grow our entire life.
–Deep inside our noses, there’s a small patch of 10 million olfactory cells, each carrying 1,000 different receptors; when the right smell meets the right receptor, the brain receives an electrical signal, enabling us to smell.
–Our sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than our sense of taste; but the two are related; that’s why food often tastes different when we have a cold.
–A sneeze can exceed 100 miles per hour.
Respiratory system
–During a 24-hour period, we breathe 20,000 times; with each breathe we inhale and exhale one pint of air.
Circulatory system
–Our heart, which weighs 10 ounces, beats 100,000 a day; that’s 2.5 billion times in 70 years.
–We have 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries, more than twice the circumference of the Earth; blood circulates through this system in less than a minute.
–We have nearly a gallon of blood in our bloodstream at any given time; we can afford to lose a pint.
Digestive system
–We eat three pounds of food a day and more than 1,000 pounds a year.
–It takes 30 hours to digest a meal; a high-fat meal takes longer.
–We can produce more than a pint of saliva a day; it’s full of enzymes that help our teeth start to break down food.
–Our tongue contains 10,000 taste buds, each holding 50 taste-receptor cells that tell the brain what we’re eating.
–Our stretchy, J-shaped stomach is normally about the size of a fist; it can expand more than 20 times after a big meal.
Muscular system
–We have more than 600 muscles; they make up 40 percent of our body mass.
–Speaking can involve as many as 100 muscles; passionate kissing all 34 of our facial muscles.
–Muscles require nerve stimulation; if the nerves directing a muscle are damaged, then the muscle will lose tone and eventually waste away.
Skeletal system
–The word skeleton comes from the Greek “skeletos,” meaning “dried;” but our bones are living and constantly replenishing themselves.
–Newborn babies’ skeletons are made up of 300 parts, most of which are cartilage; as a baby grows, most of the cartilage turns to bone, and many smaller bones fuse, until an adult ends up with 206 bones.
–About 15 percent of our body mass is bone.
–Our feet are made up of 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 200 muscles, tendons and ligaments.
–We think of our skull as one bone, but it’s made up of more than 20 bones.
–Human bones can be as much as five times stronger than steel.
Reproductive system
–About 260 humans are born every minute; that’s 374,000 every hour and more than 130 million every year.
–An egg cell is the largest cell in the human body; a sperm cell is the smallest.
–Every second of every day a man produces more than 1,000 sperm; that’s 60,000 per minute or 14 million over the course of an evening.
–It takes as long as 24 hours for an egg to become fertilized.
–The fetus will grow 5,000 times in size during the nine months of pregnancy.
–By four weeks, an embryo has a tiny heart.
Nervous system
–Our brain weighs three pounds and is made up of mostly fat and water.
–Our most irreplaceable organ, the brain is so soft and delicate that the slightest pressure can damage it.
–A newborn’s brain contains 100 billion neurons, virtually all he or she will ever need.
–Neurons receive and transmit signals at 200 miles per hour.
–The brain exhausts 20 percent of our oxygen.
–The bundle of nerves that makes up the spinal cord is about the width of a thumb.
Source: “Incredible Human Machine”
For more facts on the human body and a link to a preview from “The Incredible Human Machine” go to http://timesunion.com
Tom Keyser can be reached at 454-5448 or by e-mail at [email protected].
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