the.com/lung
two wet balloons running an air-traffic control tower for your entire bloodstream
means either of the two spongy organs in your chest that take in air so your blood can grab oxygen and dump carbon dioxide.
from From Old English 'lungen,' tracing back to Proto-Germanic and ultimately a root meaning 'light' — as in not-heavy, possibly a cousin of words like 'lever.' The reason: lungs are full of air, so they're the bit of the carcass that floats. Butchers in many languages called them the 'lights' for exactly this reason ('lights' still meant lungs in English for centuries), and the same instinct shows up in the Russian 'lyogkoe' (lung), built straight on the word for 'light.'
- surface area
- unfolded, covers a tennis court
- asymmetry
- left lung is smaller, sharing space with heart
- daily breaths
- about 20,000 inhales without asking permission
- no muscle
- can't breathe alone, the diaphragm does heavy lifting
- floats
- only organ that floats in water, full of air
marlboro — cigarette brand that caused ~100,000 smoking-related deaths annually in the us by the 1990s
black lung disease — coal miners in appalachia and worldwide, documented since 1800s with ~76,000 deaths in us since 1968