Author: Sid Perkins / Source: Science News
Skeleton Keys
Brian Switek
Riverhead Books, $26
At this very moment, voracious cells are eating away at your bones. Not to worry, though — that’s just a normal part of bone maintenance in healthy adults.
The formation of new bone cells balances out the removal of old bone cells. Although bone-making cells rev up when a bone breaks or disease sets in, eventually bone-eating cells kick in to make sure a bone doesn’t grow out of control. Bones as active tissues, not fixed structures, is just one of the fascinating topics that writer Brian Switek explores in Skeleton Keys.The microscopic structure of our bones isn’t the only thing that changes throughout our lives; the number of bones changes too. Humans are born with about 270 bones that over the course of our youth and adolescence grow and fuse into 206 bones, give or take a few. And while some of those bones can provide clear evidence of whether a person was male or female, there are, contrary to what we see in many crime dramas, no anatomical characteristics that conclusively indicate…
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