About this item
For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who we are.Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth's deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you've got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human? All matter - everything around us and within us - has an ultimate birthday: the day the universe was born.
About the Author
Dan spent over 25 years writing, producing, and directing award-winning documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery, Science, History, PBS, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His film topics included how Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Hawking made their greatest discoveries; the archeology of Custer's Last Stand; a new theory on dinosaur evolution; and the scientific search for alien life. Dan began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, teaching high school physics and biology. He lives in Cambridge with his wife, two children, and their dog.
