Like its sibling, Amazing Weather Facts and Trivia, this book was great fun to research and write, and I’m really proud of the result. I really like the design, by Hugh Schermuly.

From the publisher: “Each book in the Amazing Facts and Trivia series is beautifully illustrated and contains hundreds of colourful pieces of artwork, photographs, and diagrams. These quirky books are designed to be opened to any page so that readers can discover intriguing stories, facts, tips, and trivia.

The human body is truly incredible. Amazing Body Facts and Trivia features over 400 fascinating facts, busted myths, and amazing statistics about your body, drawn from anatomy, physiology, medicine, history, and mythology—which are sure to astound, amuse, inform, and entertain. Every body is an incredibly complex machine. This book is a celebration of that machine, one that aims to set the record straight with clear explanations and reliable facts.

One of my favourite parts about writing this book was the opportunity to write dozens of puns. For example, the title of a section about the various ways inflammatory response affects the body is ‘Inflammation Overload’.

Here’s an extract from the introduction:

“Delve into this richly illustrated book to find a treasure trove of information about … you.

Every human being who has ever lived spent about half an hour as a single cell—a fertilized egg. After about nine months of continuous cell divisions, that single fertilized egg cell became a baby, ready to face the world; by then, it was made of around 2 trillion cells in more than 200 different varieties. The instructions that tell a fertilized egg how to divide are carried in DNA— nearly 10 feet (3 m) of it, coiled very tightly. The entire length of DNA is then copied to every new cell. The process of cell division continues into adulthood-the average adult consists of around 100 trillion cells-and cells are constantly dying and being replaced, at the rate of about a million every second.

Every human body is an incredibly complex machine.

This book is a celebration of that machine; it is filled with facts and explanations from anatomy, physiology, medicine, history, and mythology. There are countless web pages that contain lists of supposed facts about the human body, but in most cases they are badly explained if they are explained at all—and most have not been checked for accuracy. This book aims to set the record straight, with clear explanations and reliable facts; and it challenges many urban myths about the body-some of which are sustained by those web pages filled with ‘facts’.”