Marius Comper · Health
Hearts and neurons, hospitals and medicines, hearing and sight. Each work starts from one question about the body and follows it through the data to the end.
Start here
One sleepless night, hour by hour in the brain: what fails first, what holds and which myths fall. If you open a single health work, open this one.
After one night without sleep, the brain doesn't switch off — but attention becomes unstable. Follow hour by hour what we know and what we don't: adenosine, reaction time, the alcohol comparison and the glymphatic debate.
Masterpieces
Six works chosen for visual power, depth and finish: maps, atlases and stories showing everything this page can do.
A canvas of a thousand dots, one for every 242 deaths, that rearranges itself when you switch from counting people to counting years lost. Four views, a ranking of causes in two orders, and the distance from Europe broken down.
In Arbore, a commune of 8,173 people in Suceava, the last doctor left in 2019 and was never replaced. Look up your locality and see what medical services it has, today and twenty years ago.
In Petrila, a Hunedoara town with its own hospital, adjusted mortality is 54% above expectations — the highest in the country. Find your locality and see how close you really are to a functioning hospital.
In 1953 George Palade described the grains on the cell's membranes, the ribosomes, and with Lucien Caro and James Jamieson he measured how many minutes new proteins take from the ribosome to the granules. The name ribosome was proposed at a 1958 meeting, and the year he left for America depends on the source. The story, in nine chapters, with games.
Paulescu published the animal evidence in 1921; Toronto achieved effective clinical treatment in January 1922. The day-by-day record, documented.
About 21 times: 6.2 billion kilometres of DNA in 3 trillion nucleated cells. Guess first, then redo the sum with your own numbers and learn why the 600-trips myth no longer stands.
Selected
Reflexes, hearing, sight and rhythm: six tests you can take right now, with real data.
Five drops test how fast the brain converts visual motion into mechanical grip. Each catch leaves a stamped mark on the ruler's body.
A fist held at arm's length covers ten degrees of sky — the rule astronomers have used for centuries. The same ruler, turned on your own eye, finds a real gap with no photoreceptors: 6.28 degrees on average, over twelve times wider than the full moon.
Hearing at very high frequencies weakens first, long before speech becomes difficult to follow.
At 180°, cross-finger pairs alternate; as tempo rises, the pattern can fall abruptly into 0° symmetry. A test on your own hands reveals your personal threshold.
Left-handedness looked like it tripled over the twentieth century. A survey of over a million Americans and British film footage from 1900–1906 independently place the historical low around 1900; school pressure may explain part of the later recovery, but the data do not establish a single cause.
Out of 180 degrees of human vision, only a tiny two-degree window sees the world in full sharpness and color. The brain reconstructs the rest through four saccades per second.
Themes
Each shelf shows the theme's four finest works, hand-picked. Open any shelf to see the full list in the library.
Oxygen, blood, neurons and reflexes: how you work, in numbers.
In 1953 George Palade described the grains on the cell's membranes, the ribosomes, and with Lucien Caro and James Jamieson he measured how many minutes new proteins take from the ribosome to the granules. The name ribosome was proposed at a 1958 meeting, and the year he left for America depends on the source. The story, in nine chapters, with games.
About 21 times: 6.2 billion kilometres of DNA in 3 trillion nucleated cells. Guess first, then redo the sum with your own numbers and learn why the 600-trips myth no longer stands.
Haemoglobin's binding capacity is about 66 times the dissolved fraction at 100 mmHg. Without haemoglobin, about 82 L/min would be only the theoretical minimum scale of flow required.
Cold on the body triggers tachycardia, but on the face it fires the heart's vagal brake (−25% bpm, −80% limb flow). A biophysical explainer with a hemodynamic simulator and an on-body test.
Medicines, hospitals and checked official figures.
Ten forms of magnesium, one named study behind each claim: who paid for it, how many people it studied, what it actually measured. For bisglycinate, malate, and taurate, this research found no independent human trial in healthy adults of comparable size to the ones behind citrate.
How CAR-T cell engineering went from a last-resort leukemia treatment to early evidence that some cancers and autoimmune diseases might be reset rather than managed for life.
The same patient-days. A denominator of 290 or 365 days. Different percentages.
Romania: 199.7. EU average: 86.8. The same measure and year, a gap of 112.9 points.
What to actually do: menopause, blood, boxes and treatment maps.
A final menstrual period gets its name only 12 months later. Symptoms and care can begin much earlier.
You do not choose your blood type, but it determines who you can donate to and receive from. Pick a type to see its compatibility and frequency in Romania and twenty other countries.
What the box says, what sits underneath, and what each name costs.
Treatment, evidence, costs and access in the US, UK, EU and Romania, in a bilingual documentary.
Reflexes, sight, hearing and rhythm, measured with real data.
Five drops test how fast the brain converts visual motion into mechanical grip. Each catch leaves a stamped mark on the ruler's body.
A fist held at arm's length covers ten degrees of sky — the rule astronomers have used for centuries. The same ruler, turned on your own eye, finds a real gap with no photoreceptors: 6.28 degrees on average, over twelve times wider than the full moon.
Hearing at very high frequencies weakens first, long before speech becomes difficult to follow.
Out of 180 degrees of human vision, only a tiny two-degree window sees the world in full sharpness and color. The brain reconstructs the rest through four saccades per second.
Health on a map: hospitals, medical deserts and treatments.
In Arbore, a commune of 8,173 people in Suceava, the last doctor left in 2019 and was never replaced. Look up your locality and see what medical services it has, today and twenty years ago.
In Petrila, a Hunedoara town with its own hospital, adjusted mortality is 54% above expectations — the highest in the country. Find your locality and see how close you really are to a functioning hospital.
One molecule, three receptors. What studies show about the body, and what remains unproven.
Human biology naturally schedules birth between 03:00 and 06:00 AM. Modern medicine concentrated deliveries at 09:00 AM, and Sunday births drop by 35%. Explore the 24-hour birth clock.
Approaches
The numbers show how many health works each approach holds.
All
The complete list in publication order, 25 at a time.
In 1953 George Palade described the grains on the cell's membranes, the ribosomes, and with Lucien Caro and James Jamieson he measured how many minutes new proteins take from the ribosome to the granules. The name ribosome was proposed at a 1958 meeting, and the year he left for America depends on the source. The story, in nine chapters, with games.
About 21 times: 6.2 billion kilometres of DNA in 3 trillion nucleated cells. Guess first, then redo the sum with your own numbers and learn why the 600-trips myth no longer stands.
Two works made Copșa Mică Europe's most polluted town: soot, lead in air, soil and children's blood. The figures, from the studies, plus the plume map and the lab bench.
The heart preserved in Toronto was weighed at 175 kg and is about a metre across, far less than the car it is said to match. Stand beside it, put your hand in its aorta and hear it beat, from 2 a minute in a dive to 37 at the surface.
Paulescu published the animal evidence in 1921; Toronto achieved effective clinical treatment in January 1922. The day-by-day record, documented.
Sleep-deprivation research as an interactive 24-hour timeline: the wake-hours slider, BAC comparison cards, a PVT reaction-time distribution, a caffeine calculator — the science of “17–19 hours ≈ the drink-driving line” and its limits.
5 spa resorts compared: water type, entry price, treatment base and measured access from Oradea, Cluj, Brașov, Bucharest. Official tariffs.
After one night without sleep, the brain doesn't switch off — but attention becomes unstable. Follow hour by hour what we know and what we don't: adenosine, reaction time, the alcohol comparison and the glymphatic debate.
Enter 138/84 and see what the cuff is measuring: the peak and trough of one arterial pressure wave, pulse pressure, why ESC 2024 and AHA/ACC 2025 disagree, and how to measure at home.
In darkness, rod ion channels remain open; a 20 pA illustrative model shows why light can reduce energy consumption by more than 75% in mammalian rods.
Ten forms of magnesium, one named study behind each claim: who paid for it, how many people it studied, what it actually measured. For bisglycinate, malate, and taurate, this research found no independent human trial in healthy adults of comparable size to the ones behind citrate.
How CAR-T cell engineering went from a last-resort leukemia treatment to early evidence that some cancers and autoimmune diseases might be reset rather than managed for life.
Spin in a chair and stop dead: you feel a rotation that isn't there. Keep turning instead, and the sensation disappears entirely — an interactive physical model of the inner ear shows why, and how a pilot ends up in a graveyard spiral believing they're flying straight.
Skin maintains a 20–50 mV potential; a wound collapses local resistance and creates a 100–200 V/m field that mechanically steers keratinocytes to the cut long before chemical gradients can diffuse.
A fist held at arm's length covers ten degrees of sky — the rule astronomers have used for centuries. The same ruler, turned on your own eye, finds a real gap with no photoreceptors: 6.28 degrees on average, over twelve times wider than the full moon.
In the controlled study, the peak was measured at 07:30, the trough at 00:00, and 80% of the mean 19.3 mm variation occurred within the first 3 hours after getting up.
Eating fast roughly doubles the risk of brain freeze (27.4% vs 12.5%, RR 2.2). A Doppler study shows the pain arrives with a surge in cerebral artery blood flow, misrouted to the forehead through trigeminal convergence.
Puberty barely moved across twenty-five years of Norwegian generations. Menopause moved thirteen times more — and almost nobody talks about that.
In Petrila, a Hunedoara town with its own hospital, adjusted mortality is 54% above expectations — the highest in the country. Find your locality and see how close you really are to a functioning hospital.
Left-handedness looked like it tripled over the twentieth century. A survey of over a million Americans and British film footage from 1900–1906 independently place the historical low around 1900; school pressure may explain part of the later recovery, but the data do not establish a single cause.
In Arbore, a commune of 8,173 people in Suceava, the last doctor left in 2019 and was never replaced. Look up your locality and see what medical services it has, today and twenty years ago.
An artery in the forearm is supposed to regress before birth. In a cadaveric study, it persisted in 43% of limbs, and in 15% it could become, via the carpal tunnel, the sole blood supply of a finger.
A canvas of a thousand dots, one for every 242 deaths, that rearranges itself when you switch from counting people to counting years lost. Four views, a ranking of causes in two orders, and the distance from Europe broken down.
The part after ovulation varies by just 4.9 days across the study's five groups; the part before it varies by 16.4 days.
In the 1930s, when tuberculosis had no chemical cure, Romania erected a network of machine-like buildings across the Carpathian Mountains and deep underground. From −240 metres underground to +1,010 metres on the ridge, five monumental structures rendered obsolete by a single molecule.
One molecule, three receptors. What studies show about the body, and what remains unproven.
The same diagnosis can encompass very different experiences. Compare manifestations and shared criteria, check the combinations and explore the limits of a feedback model.
The same patient-days. A denominator of 290 or 365 days. Different percentages.
The tally through 1 September: 6,250 confirmed cases and 3,039 deaths; WHO’s 1 September guidance recommends Ervebo only within research protocols for Bundibugyo.
Five drops test how fast the brain converts visual motion into mechanical grip. Each catch leaves a stamped mark on the ruler's body.
Haemoglobin's binding capacity is about 66 times the dissolved fraction at 100 mmHg. Without haemoglobin, about 82 L/min would be only the theoretical minimum scale of flow required.
When you stand motionless, the column of blood raises ankle pressure to 90 millimetres of mercury. Six to seven steps bring it down towards approximately 25 millimetres, while sustained walking maintains a 20–25 millimetre plateau.
Cold on the body triggers tachycardia, but on the face it fires the heart's vagal brake (−25% bpm, −80% limb flow). A biophysical explainer with a hemodynamic simulator and an on-body test.
The oxygen explanation was tested directly in 1987 and falsified. Contagious yawning follows a narrow temperature window, measured independently in Tucson and Vienna.
A steep 300,000:1 hydronium ion gradient is sustained across the thickness of two sheets of paper via continuous chemical titration, while cellular restitution can begin within minutes and rapidly restore superficial continuity in some models; complete recovery ranges from tens of minutes to hours depending on the injury and model.
A political border, measured in centimeters of height.
Under >60 N tensile force, synovial pressure falls to −2.5 bar and the cavity appears in <310 ms. MRI supports cavity formation, while the 2018 model leaves a role for partial collapse open; the ~20-minute clock is illustrative.
The quantitative biophysics of the active cochlear amplifier: how 12,000 outer hair cells leverage a 150 mV transmembrane gradient to oscillate nanomechanically at over 20,000 Hz, generating otoacoustic emissions and the Tartini phantom tone (2f1 - f2).
A sudden inspiratory diaphragm contraction is followed, in the classic description, by glottic closure. The approximately 35-millisecond interval turns a breathing movement into a “hic”.
Swallowing starts a short respiratory pause linked to neural inhibition and coordinated laryngeal closure. The measured pause lasted 0.75 ± 0.14 seconds on average.
On the cornea, the tear film measures about 3.3 micrometres in its muco-aqueous region, while the surface lipid layer is only 52.7 nanometres thick. After a blink, surface flow redistributes it faster than evaporation can thin it during the first seconds.
In quiet standing, the ankle keeps correcting an unstable pendulum. In a no-correction model, a 0.5° sway grows to 5° in 0.72 seconds at the default height of 1.75 m.
Submerged in 140 millilitres of fluid, the brain sheds 97% of its effective weight through buoyant force, while deep sleep unleashes a hydraulic tide that purges cellular waste.
Touch you produce yourself is less surprising. One experiment shifted attenuation after repeated 100-millisecond delays, while a replication and an fMRI study show that temporal selectivity depends on the protocol.
In walking, the body passes over the stance foot like an inverted pendulum and recovers about 65% of external mechanical energy. Measure your walk and see where its Froude number lands.
The pupil can widen from 2 to 8 millimetres: fourfold in diameter, sixteenfold in opening area. The geometry is simple; the retina adapts separately.
At the same mass, distance from the elbow can change torque tenfold. Play with mass, distance, and angle, then see what static force would balance the object at the biceps.
While the cortical visual system needs 150 milliseconds to process motion, the inner ear vestibulo-ocular reflex rotates the eyes in the opposite direction in just 7 milliseconds through the fastest neural arc in the human body.
The quantitative biophysics of the stapedius reflex: anticipatory activity observed during vocalisation and frequency-dependent filtering in the middle ear. The simulator uses 20 decibels as an explicit model example.
A static touch on the skin resolves two separate pins only when spaced at least 1.6 millimetres apart. Yet the moment a fingertip slides laterally, epidermal friction ridges convert microscopic surface relief into a 250 Hz shear wave, allowing the detection of surface grooves just 13 nanometres high.
The eye's true lens is the cornea's curvature in air. That is why a dive mask restores sharp vision with completely flat glass.
When you take your pulse, you feel an elastic shockwave travelling 35 times faster along the arterial wall than the blood itself.
An in-vivo study measured 11.3 J of propulsive recoil at 3.5 m/s; the historical 35 J figure is 3.1 times larger, but it does not describe the same measurement.
When you move a finger, the brain is already preparing the tactile consequence. A 200-millisecond delay made touch produced by your own movement receive ratings comparable to externally produced touch.
Finger wrinkles are not simply waterlogged skin: fingertip vasoconstriction changes the surface relief, while the grip experiment offers a measurable but task-specific effect.
An evidence-led visual reading of a rare 900-second EEG recording around cardiac arrest. One case, four windows, and a careful boundary around what the signal can show.
Why humans are Earth's greatest endurance coolers in the heat: the biophysics of water phase transition, 1,343-watt cooling power, and the dripping sweat paradox.
Why spicy food burns without thermal injury: the biophysics of TRPV1, probabilistic activation-curve shifting, and the cold-water illusion.
If human lungs were lined with pure water, all 480 million alveoli would collapse immediately. A 2.5-gram lipid film reduces surface tension to 2 mN/m at expiration.
A third of every breath never reaches the blood: the biophysical paradox of alveolar ventilation at 6 litres of air per minute and the physical limit of snorkeling.
A pump displacing 7.6 tonnes of fluid daily operates at a mechanical output of just 1.33 watts and a total metabolic power of 7.4 watts.
The central fovea spans only 1.5 degrees of visual angle (thumbnail width at arm length); at 20 degrees eccentricity visual acuity drops by 90%, our panorama being assembled from 200,000 saccades/day.
From the same 20 °C starting point, the skin interface reaches 20.6 °C on aluminium and 29.2 °C on wood; the idealised 8.65 °C gap comes from an effusivity ratio of almost 67 to 1.
In a human centrifuge experiment, resonant mechanics predicted 99% of postural-tremor peak frequency. The phone used for measurement adds inertia and changes the observed spectrum.
At rest, 80% of air passes through one nostril (4:1 ratio) via cyclical turbinate engorgement, preventing ciliary desiccation and separating odors via dual-speed gas chromatography.
Across all 5 litres of human blood, only 4.5 grams of glucose circulate (a single teaspoon of sugar), maintained with millimetric precision via a 200 g/day hepatic turnover.
Although the human jaw operates as a Class III lever with a mechanical disadvantage at the incisors (150–250 N), back at the second molar bite force surges to 700–900 N (70–90 kgf). Concentrated onto just a few square millimetres, contact stress exceeds 150–300 MPa (over 1,500 atmospheres — higher than the Mariana Trench), resisted without fracture by enamel's decussating prism architecture.
The human brainstem detects sound arrival disparities down to 10 microseconds (3.4 mm in air) using axonal delay lines and coincidence detector neurons in the medial superior olive.
At a daily burn of 2,500 kcal, your body synthesizes and breaks down 57.3 kg of ATP via F₀F₁ rotary nanomotors at 9,000 RPM, despite holding only 50 g in stock.
At 180°, cross-finger pairs alternate; as tempo rises, the pattern can fall abruptly into 0° symmetry. A test on your own hands reveals your personal threshold.
Your body stores just 50 grams of ATP, yet synthesizes 70 kilograms daily — spinning over 10¹⁷ rotary nanomachines at 21,000 RPM with near 100% thermodynamic efficiency.
At a resting cardiac output of 5.0 L/min, Q = A × v gives about 185 mm/s in the aorta and 0.19–0.24 mm/s across the capillary bed. Systemic oxygen exchange depends on tissue, metabolism, diffusion distance and flow distribution.
Hecht estimated the visual threshold at 5–14 absorbed photons; 9 is representative. Modern intact-rod experiments estimate about 2,000 cGMP molecules hydrolyzed per R*, while the roughly 1 pA measurement came from toad rods.
At the parietal-cell apical membrane, the H⁺/K⁺-ATPase produces one of the steepest proton gradients known in mammalian tissue: from pH 7.40 in the cytosol to pH 1.40 in the secretory canaliculus, or one million to one. The mucus-bicarbonate barrier is 200 µm thick.
To haul cargo across one metre of axon, delivery accumulates the kinematic equivalent of 125 million 8-nm steps through coordinating kinesin relays. While free diffusion would exceed 150,000 years, in vivo fast axonal transport completes delivery in 2.5–5 days.
Every day, the kidneys generate 180 litres of ultrafiltrate across two million glomeruli, reclaiming 99.2% via solute transport and osmosis to leave just 1.5 litres of urine. A 1% reabsorption drop more than doubles urine output.
On the index fingertip we resolve two points 1.6 millimetres apart, but on the back they must be spread 42 millimetres apart to avoid fusing. The back compresses space by 26 times due to mechanoreceptor density and cortical magnification.
What your body makes in a second, a day and a lifetime. A live inventory of bodily rhythms and tissues that renew slowly.
The human body hosts roughly 68 trillion cells in total — 30 trillion human cells (mostly red blood cells) and 38 trillion bacteria — shown as an interactive census by category, including the 2016 correction of the old "ten bacteria per human cell" estimate.
Turn the virtual head and see how the vestibulo-ocular reflex keeps your gaze in place.
If sound struck inner ear fluid directly, 99.89% of energy would bounce off like a wall. To bridge the impedance mismatch, evolution built a mechanical three-bone lever that amplifies pressure over 22-fold — enabling the eardrum to detect vibrations of just 10 picometres.
A human cell maintains a resting potential of just 70 millivolts. Yet because this voltage drops across a lipid bilayer only 7 nanometres thick, the transverse electric field reaches 10,000,000 V/m — over three times the dielectric breakdown threshold of a lightning strike in air.
The 1.5-second gap between impact and ache: how nerve impulses race and why myelin saves a metre of spinal cord.
By age nine, genes already explain 41% of intelligence differences between children, and family only 33%. By adulthood, the split reaches 80% against 10% (Haworth et al., 2010; Bouchard, 2013).
A systematic synthesis of epidemiological evidence on ambient heat during pregnancy. How local climate, humidity, and gestational timing shape risk thresholds at 30.55°C, 34.11°C, and 39.07°C.
Butter melts at 34°C on the tongue, while industrial margarine melts at 44°C like wax: 150 years of chemistry, gastronomy, and clinical trials.
When you lose ten kilograms of fat, 8.4 kilograms leave through your lungs as invisible carbon dioxide, and 1.6 kilograms become water. An interactive exploration of respiratory mass biochemistry.
Out of 180 degrees of human vision, only a tiny two-degree window sees the world in full sharpness and color. The brain reconstructs the rest through four saccades per second.
Human biology naturally schedules birth between 03:00 and 06:00 AM. Modern medicine concentrated deliveries at 09:00 AM, and Sunday births drop by 35%. Explore the 24-hour birth clock.
Every land mammal is allotted roughly 1.5 billion heartbeats across a lifetime. Modern humans doubled this biological baseline, accumulating nearly 3 billion beats.
You do not choose your blood type, but it determines who you can donate to and receive from. Pick a type to see its compatibility and frequency in Romania and twenty other countries.
Thirty amino acids have 801,543,976,648,704 RNA encodings.
Statistics promise a boy born in Romania today 72.8 years. Follow 100,000 people born in the same year and see how the target moves as the years pass.
A reading of recorded causes of death in Romania from 2018 to 2022. How many identify the disease that began the chain, and how many leave the question open?
What the box says, what sits underneath, and what each name costs.
A critical synthesis of DRD4-7R, novelty, migration, culture and the only direct tourism study found in this research register.
In the hippocampus of 40 donated brains, resident microglia thin out between about ages 50 and 75. Cells with a blood-lineage signature appear. The evidence comes from tissue, not a clinical test.
Hearing at very high frequencies weakens first, long before speech becomes difficult to follow.
How much leaders sleep — and how much of the story survives scrutiny.
Sleep is a bundle of biological jobs. One experiment replaced a few of them locally.
The big numbers come from doses nobody actually performs.
Romania: 199.7. EU average: 86.8. The same measure and year, a gap of 112.9 points.
A final menstrual period gets its name only 12 months later. Symptoms and care can begin much earlier.
Tropical nights (≥ 20°C) are warming faster than daytime highs. An interactive explainer about recovery, Europe, Bucharest on the chart and mortality.
A bilingual guide to recognising sepsis, emergency care, post-sepsis syndrome and recovery.
A route through diagnosis, treatment, daily life and access, with the limits of the evidence in view.
A multidisciplinary dossier about how heat affects sleep, mood, learning, decisions and aggression, with interactive visualisations.
Treatment, evidence, costs and access in the US, UK, EU and Romania, in a bilingual documentary.
An interactive documentary about colour-vision deficiency: prevalence, types, a simulator and educational and professional impact.