There would be some discomfort as the air inside the body expanded, but nothing like the exploding body parts Hollywood loves. If sci-fi movies were to be believed, terrible things would happen if your body were pushed from a spaceship without a suit. Humans similarly have some characteristics of infantile apes – large heads, small mouths and, significantly here, finer body hair. Over the period, adult foxes become more and more like large cubs, spending more time playing, and developing drooping ears, floppy tails and patterned coats. In a fascinating 40-year experiment starting in the 1950s, Russian foxes were bred for docility. When animals are bred for co-operation, as we once did with wolves to produce dogs, they become more like their infants. It has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because our ancestors were partly aquatic.īut perhaps the most attractive idea is that early humans needed to co-operate more when they moved out of the trees into the savanna. We aren't sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it's just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible. It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. Chromosome 1 is the biggest, containing around 10bn atoms, to pack in the amount of information that is encoded in the molecule. A normal human cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes in its nucleus, each a single, very long, molecule of DNA. But the biggest molecule in nature resides in your body. These vary in size from simple pairs of atoms, like an oxygen molecule, to complex organic structures. Practically everything we experience is made up of molecules. They use it to get respite from the strain of the frenzied activity of the gut, somewhere to breed and help keep the gut's bacterial inhabitants topped up. Yet recently it has been discovered that the appendix is very useful to the bacteria that help your digestive system function.
All it seems to do is occasionally get infected and cause appendicitis. It is usually treated as a body part that lost its function millions of years ago.