Jesp_Way: переводы

→You would probably be lucky to get a take-home Benedict Cumberbatch for much under $300,000—not a massive fortune, all things considered, but clearly not the meager few dollars that my junior high school teacher suggested.

→Altogether, according to the RSC, the full cost of building a new human being, using the obliging Benedict Cumberbatch as a template, would be a very precise $151,578.46. Labor and sales tax would, of course, boost costs further.

→So, clearly it is a good idea to get some selenium inside you (it is found particularly in nuts, whole wheat bread, and fish), but at the same time if you take in too much you can irremediably poison your liver. As with so much in life, getting the balances right is a delicate business.

→We now know that selenium makes two vital enzymes, deficiency in which has been linked to hypertension, arthritis, anemia, some cancers, and even, possibly, reduced sperm counts.

→Pluck almost any cell from your body, and it will have a million or more selenium atoms in it, yet until recently nobody had any idea what they were there for.

→If you are from North America, you probably ingest about eighty micrograms of cadmium a day, and no part of it does you any good at all.

→We have it in us not because our body craves it but because it gets into plants from the soil and then into us when we eat the plants.

→Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

→Of the fifty-nine elements found within us, twenty-four are traditionally known as essential elements, because we really cannot do without them.

→All the tin you require can be yours for six cents, while zirconium and niobium will cost you just three cents apiece. The 0.000000007 percent of you that is samarium isn’t apparently worth charging for at all. It’s logged in the RSC accounts as costing $0.00.*1

→Thorium costs over $3,000 per gram but constitutes just 0.0000001 percent of you, so you can buy a body’s worth for thirty-three cents.

→Most of the rest is even more expensive per unit of volume, but fortunately only needed in microscopic amounts.

→Calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, though needed in much smaller amounts, would between them set you back a further $73,800.

→You need about thirty pounds of carbon, and that will cost you $69,550, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. (They were using only the most purified forms of everything. The RSC would not make a human with cheap stuff.)

→Your nitrogen (2.6 percent of you) is a better value still at just forty cents for a body’s worth. But after that it gets pretty expensive.

→Oxygen and hydrogen are also two of the cheaper elements within you. All your oxygen will set you back just $14 and your hydrogen a little over $26 (assuming you are about the size of Benedict Cumberbatch).

→The reason we are not light and bouncy like a balloon is that the oxygen is mostly bound up with hydrogen (which accounts for another 10 percent of you) to make water—and water, as you will know if you have ever tried to move a wading pool or just walked around in really wet clothes, is surprisingly heavy. It is a little ironic that two of the lightest things in nature, oxygen and hydrogen, when combined form one of the heaviest, but that’s nature for you.

→The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.

→Who would have thought that we would be incomplete without some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin, and copper?

→Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected.