Ava Garner’s Reviews > The Body: A Guide for Occupants > Status Update

The outermost surface of the epidermis, called the stratum corneum, is made up of entirely dead cells. It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, over 1 million pieces an hour. Dust in your house is fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly, we turn to dust.

You would need 20 billion strands of DNA laid side-by-side to make the width of the finest human hair.

Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court. The airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you 2 1/2 times around earth. You have a meter of DNA in every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch 10 billion miles, to beyond Pluto.