7. There Are More Bacterial Cells In Your Body Than Human
Or, "there are loads of bacteria cells and they're all inside of you and me and we're going to die! Somebody please soak me in acid so I can be clean again." That's the subtext to this fact. Actually, the bacteria crawling all over your insides are mostly harmless - quite a lot are even 'friendly' bacteria. And yet, despite the efforts of Yakult, Actimel, et al, icky germs still have a sticky rep (probably with good reason, given the whole Ebola thing). The truth is, this whole 'ten times' thing is misleading, because bacteria are miniscule. Bacteria can range from a diameter of about 0.2-10 microns, whereas human cells are more like 15-30 microns. With a little 4/3 pi r^3 magic, we can work out some approximate volumes: about 60µm3 for the bacteria, versus about 6,000µm3 for the human cells. That's about 100 times smaller, or like comparing a basketball to a golf ball. Ten golf balls to every basketball isn't really noteworthy.