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Cancer has been around as long as humankind, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did the number of cancer cases explode.
Critical care patients are twice as likely to receive the wrong medication. Of these errors, 20% are life-threatening, and 42% require additional life-sustaining treatments.
Human kidneys will clean about 1 million gallons of blood in an average lifetime.
There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in every adult human.
When Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury thermometer, he called "zero degrees" the lowest temperature he was able to attain with a mixture of ice and salt. For the upper point of his scale, he used 96°, which he measured as normal human body temperature (we know it to be 98.6° today because of more accurate thermometers).