Living with the Stars : How the Human Body is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars

Living with the Stars tells the fascinating story of what truly makes the human body.The body that is with us all our lives is always changing.We are quite literally not who we were years, weeks, or even days ago: our cells die and are replaced by new ones at an astonishing pace.The entire body continually rebuilds itself, time and again, using the food and water that flow through us as fuel and as construction material.What persists over time is not fixed but merely a pattern in flux. We rebuild using elements captured from our surroundings, and are thereby connected to animals and plants around us, and to the bacteria within us that help digest them, and to geological processes such as continental drift and volcanism here on Earth.We are also intimately linked to the Sun's nuclear furnace and to the solar wind, to collisions with asteroids and to the cycles of the birth of stars and their deaths in cataclysmic supernovae, and ultimately to the beginning of the universe.Our bodies are