Jason E. Andersen

Bonus Fun Fact: The average human body is composed of 37.2 trillion cells. That’s 37,200,000,000,000 if you were going to write it out. It’s a big number. To maybe put it in perspective, we’ll use time as a metaphor — a million seconds is 13 days, and a billion seconds is 31 years. That’s quite a leap in itself, but a trillion seconds is 31,688 years! So 37.2 trillion seconds is something like 1.18 million years! Crazy!

Anyway, enough with big numbers and back to cells. If you missed high school biology, a cell is the basic unit of life — they’re microscopic compartments where all the basic functions necessary for life take place. We might talk more about cells some other time as they’re pretty important. They’re very small and your body has a lot of them, and that’s not counting all the bacteria, fungi, and other microbes that are living on and in you as well. We should talk about that sometime too…