By now, you know that we’ve been studying the world of small things…really, really small things. We’ve been studying molecules. A couple of weeks ago in class we came across a surprising statistic that students in E period found particularly amazing:
A typical cell in your body might be made of 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) molecules, and more than half of these might be water molecules. The girls in the picture above decided to take this statistic a bit further. With a little bit of help from their science teacher, they discovered that a typical human body might contain anywhere between 50-100 trillion cells, which basically means that a typical human body might contain a minimum of…
250 sextillion (250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) water molecules!
But our curious classroom scientists didn’t stop there. They then did some research into the population of students at TASIS in order to calculate how many water molecules might be contained with the bodies of students at TASIS at this very moment! Their findings are almost difficult to imagine.
The girls estimate that the 618 TASIS students likely contain 154.5 octillion water molecules (154,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). That means that the 165 elementary school students probably contain over 41 octillion (41,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) water molecules; the 119 middle school students probably contain just under 30 octillion (29,750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) water molecules; and the high school students probably contain 83.5 octillion (83,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) water molecules.
If your brain hurts…it should. Sometimes the most surprising aspects of the world around us lie the in teeniest tiniest details.