Book Reviewed: What's Gotten into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner by Dan Levitt

Itsy bitsy of cosmos and biological evolution This book is all talk but no substance. It is a hotchpotch of news items and history told in a non-stimulating way. The readers learn extraordinarily little from this author. A summary of the book is as follows: Understanding the origin and evolution of life in the Universe is a multi-disciplinary problem: from the astrophysics describing the processes giving rise to stars and planets to the chemistry and biology of organic matter and evolution of living organisms. Solar system is 4.5 billion years old, and the Earth was formed within a residual disk of gas surrounding the young Sun. Starts are living physical entities, they are born, physically exist with some order, and eventually die. But for most of their lives, stars fuse elemental hydrogen into helium in their cores (nuclear fusion reaction). Two atoms of hydrogen are combined in a series of steps to create helium 4. These reactions account for 85% of the Sun’s energy. The remaining 15% comes from reactions that produce the elements beryllium and lithium. When a star’s core runs out of hydrogen, the star begins to die out. The dying star expands into a red giant, which begins to manufacture carbon atoms by fusing helium atoms. More massive stars begin a further series of nuclear burning or reaction stages. The elements formed in these stages range from oxygen through to iron. During a supernova, explosion of massive stars, the star releases huge amounts of energy as well as neutrons, which allows elements heavier than iron to be produced. In the supernova explosion, all of these elements are expelled out into space. Other heavier elements are created when pairs of neutron stars collide cataclysmically and explode. Light elements like hydrogen and helium formed during the big bang when spacetime emerged and laws of physics began to operate. All the elements we have in our body are the ashes of long dead stars. Simple organic molecules could have been synthesized in the atmosphere of early Earth and rained down into the oceans. RNA and DNA molecules, the genetic material for all life, just long chains of simple nucleotides were formed on earth. Some of them may have been rained down to earth from comets and asteroids. Life may have formed on earth 3.8 billion years ago, and there were six major extinctions, the first being about 2.4 billion years ago. The emergence of life from non-life (biomolecules) was a thermodynamic wonder. A living cell (ordered structure, more information, and fully self-regulated) was produced from a state of disordered structures (less information and non-regulated).