In his entertaining book about how the body works, Bill Bryson devoted a chapter to the airways and the lungs, as well as the heart. The Body, A Guide for Occupants offers fascinating insights into our physical home. What I enjoyed most in the the chapter about the respiratory system, was the author making a case for the efficiency of the airways to deter, get rid of and kill any possible pathogens that dare to enter with an inhaled breath. And I was educated by his explanation, in alarming detail, about what happens during sternutation, better known as sneezing.
There are fun facts aplenty and short, succinct summaries of life‘s greatest phenomena, in the case of breathing, for example:
„Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day‘s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.“
Source: Bill Bryson, The body, A Guide for Occupants, Black Swan, 2020