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a human hair is about 1 million carbon atoms wide.A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter. There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. A human hair is approximately 80,000- 100,000 nanometers wide. A single gold atom is about a third of a nanometer in diameter.An atom is a million times smaller than the thickest human hair. The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.1 to 0.5 nanometers (1 × 1010 m to 5 × 1010 m).

How much wider is a human hair than an atom?

A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter. There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. A human hair is approximately 80,000- 100,000 nanometers wide. A single gold atom is about a third of a nanometer in diameter.

How small is an atom compared to a human hair?

An atom is a million times smaller than the thickest human hair. The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.1 to 0.5 nanometers (1 × 1010 m to 5 × 1010 m).

How many atoms wide is a human?

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

How many times smaller are atoms than hair?

Empty space is found between the atomic nucleus and electrons. Atoms are extremely small. Atoms are more than 10,000 times smaller than the width of a hair.

How many atoms wide is DNA?

DNA molecules are about 2.5 nanometers wide.

How many atoms thick is a piece of paper?

So, one sheet of paper is about 1 million atoms thick.

How many cells wide is hair?

A typical human cell might be one-tenth of the diameter of your hair (10 microns).

How many atoms wide is a cell?

Scientists estimate the average cell contains 100 trillion atoms.

How many atoms could you fit on the head of a pin?

how many atom can fit on the head of a pin? About five million million hydrogen atoms could fit.

What does 1 billion atoms look like?

In other words, one billion atoms could line up across the diameter of the battery. The thickness of a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers or 105 nm. A sheet of paper is about six orders of magnitude thicker than an atom. In this example, a stack of 1,000,000 atoms would be the same thickness as sheet of paper.

How many atoms are in a pencil?

Pencil leads are made of carbon atoms. Carbon has an atomic mass of 12. Atomic mass is the mass of an atom.
Exponent Value Analogy
100 1 One pea
101 10 10 peas – spoonful
102 100 10 spoonfuls of peas – plateful
103 1000 10 platefuls of peas – bag

How many atoms are in a blade of grass?

Now we use the percentage of the weight of the grass that is water or lignin, and the numbers above to work out how many moles we have in total. which equals about 3,613,284,456,000,000,000,000 atoms in a blade of grass.

What atoms is hair made of?

The overall chemical composition of hair is 45 % carbon, 28 % oxygen, 15 % nitrogen, 7 % hydrogen and 5 % sulphur. The hair shaft is essentially composed of keratin.

How thick is an atom?

Atoms are too small to be seen clearly, even with very powerful microscopes: the diameter of an atom is typically around 0.1 nm or 1 × 10 10 m. the thickness of a piece of paper is typically around 0.05 mm or 5 × 10 5 m.

How big is a atom?

Atoms are tiny and very light. They are made up of sub-atomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons), which are even smaller and lighter than an atom. **Size: **Atoms have an average radius of about 0.1 nm. About 5 million hydrogen atoms could fit into a pin head.

How many atoms are in a grain of sand?

For a typical grain of sand (size 1mm) made of Si02 , the estimate is 1019 atoms… If a grain is a fraction of mg, 1 g of grain has truly more atoms than stars in the universe.

How many atoms are in the universe?

There are between 1078 to 1082atoms in the observable universe. That’s between ten quadrillion vigintillion and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms.

Who formed the first atomic theory?

Dalton’s atomic theory was the first complete attempt to describe all matter in terms of atoms and their properties. Dalton based his theory on the law of conservation of mass and the law of constant composition. The first part of his theory states that all matter is made of atoms, which are indivisible.


This Animation Shows You How Small Atoms Really Are
This Animation Shows You How Small Atoms Really Are


how many atoms wide is a human hair

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Size of the Nanoscale | National Nanotechnology Initiative

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Diameter of an Atom – The Physics Factbook

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20 amazing facts about the human body | Human biology | The Guardian

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    Many of the most exciting discoveries in science are being played out in the human body, writes Brian Clegg

  • Table of Contents:

1 APPENDIX TO LIFE

2 SUPERSIZED MOLECULES

3 ATOM COUNT

4 FUR LOSS

5 GOOSEBUMP EVOLUTION

6 SPACE TRAUMA

7 ATOMIC COLLAPSE

8 ELECTROMAGNETIC REPULSION

9 STARDUST TO STARDUST

10 THE QUANTUM BODY

11 RED BLOODED

12 GOING VIRAL

13 OTHER LIFE

14 EYELASH INVADERS

15 PHOTON DETECTORS

16 SENSORY TALLY

17 REAL AGE

18 EPIGENETIC INFLUENCE

19 CONSCIOUS ACTION

20 OPTICAL DELUSION

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how many atoms wide is a human hair

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How Many Atoms Wide Is A Human Hair – How To Discuss

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    How many atoms is a cell membrane thick?
    The diameter of the hydrogen atom is. The thickness of a cellular membrane is.We can also as…

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How thick is a hair in atoms? – TheKnowledgeBurrow.com

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How Many Atoms Wide Is A Hair? – Hair Byte

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How many atoms are in the width of a human hair? – Answers

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width of human hair | Electron Smuggler

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Size of the Nanoscale

Just how small is “nano?” In the International System of Units, the prefix “nano” means one-billionth, or 10-9; therefore one nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. It’s difficult to imagine just how small that is, so here are some examples:

A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick

A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter

There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch

A human hair is approximately 80,000- 100,000 nanometers wide

A single gold atom is about a third of a nanometer in diameter

On a comparative scale, if the diameter of a marble was one nanometer, then diameter of the Earth would be about one meter

One nanometer is about as long as your fingernail grows in one second

The illustration below has three visual examples of the size and the scale of nanotechnology, showing just how small things at the nanoscale actually are.

Diameter of an Atom

Bibliographic Entry Result

(w/surrounding text) Standardized

Result Henry F. Holtzclaw & William R. Robinson. General Chemistry. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1988: 98. “The diameter of an atom is of the order of 10−8 cm.” 0.1 nm March, Robert H. Atom. USA: World Book Encyclopedia, 1995: 870. “The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.1 to 0.5 nanometer.” 0.1–0.5 nm Metcalf, Williams, & Castka. Modern Chemistry. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980: 43. “The diameter of a nucleus is about 10−12 cm. This is about one ten-thousandth of the diameter of an atom itself, since atoms range from 1 × 10−8 to 5 × 10−8 cm in diameter.” 0.1–0.5 nm Speakman, J. C. Molecules. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966: 19. “Atoms vary in size according to the element, but their diameters are of the order of 1 × 10−8 cm.” 0.1 nm

An atom is one of the basic units of matter. Everything around us is made up of atoms. An atom is a million times smaller than the thickest human hair. The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.1 to 0.5 nanometers (1 × 10−10 m to 5 × 10−10 m).

All the atoms of an element are not alike, however. For example, a second kind of hydrogen exits which is present in every sample of the gas no matter where it is obtained. It weighs twice as much as the more common hydrogen and is called deuterium or heavy hydrogen. The diameter of an atom for this type of hydrogen differs from the more common type.

Atoms vary greatly in weight, but they are all about the same size. For example, an atom of plutonium (one of the heaviest elements) weighs more than 200 times as much as a hydrogen atom (the lightest element), but the diameter of a plutonium atom is only about 3 times that of a hydrogen atom.

Michael P. — 1996

Bibliographic Entry Result

(w/surrounding text) Standardized

Result Brown, LeMay, Bursten. Chemistry-The Central Science. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997: 44. “Atoms are extremely small; most have diameters between 1 × 10−10 m and 5 × 10−10 m.” 0.1–0.5 nm The World book Encyclopedia. vol. 1 Chicago: World Book, 1996: 870. “The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.1 to 0.5 nanometer.” 0.1–0.5 nm The World of Science: Chemistry in Everyday Life. vol. 14. Oxford: Equinox, 1989: 31. “Atom… name given to a relatively stable package of matter, typically about 0.1 nm across.” 0.1 nm Bixby, William. Great Experimenters.New York: David McKay, 1964: 150. “According to Rutherford, the radius of the entire atom was 0.00000001 cm.” 0.1 nm Baylis, William E. Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics. New York: Prentice Hall, 1996: 71. “the Bohr radius a o = 5.2917725 × 10−11 m is the unit of length.” 0.106 nm

An atom is one of the basic units of matter. Atoms form the building blocks of the simplest substances, the chemical elements. Nearly everything on earth is made up of atoms. Each element consists of one basic kind of atom. An atom is incredibly small — more than a million times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. Tiny as atoms are, they consist of even more minute particles. The three basic types are protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons have a positive electrical charge, and electrons have a negative charge. Neutrons are electrically neutral. The protons and neutrons are crowded into the nucleus, a tiny region at the center of the atom. The nucleus makes up nearly all the mass of an atom. The rest of the atom outside the nucleus is mostly empty space. The electrons whirl through this space. All atoms of the same element have the same number of protons. The atomic number tells how many protons an atom has.

The size of an atom is difficult to describe because atoms have no definite outer boundary. To overcome this problem, the size of an atom is estimated by describing its radius. In metals, this is done by measuring the distance between two nuclei in the solid state and dividing this distance by 2. For nonmetallic elements, that exist in pure form as molecules, measurements can be made of the distance between nuclei for two atoms covalently bonded together. The diameter of an atom ranges from 1 × 10−10 m to 5 × 10−10 m. There is no one definite diameter of an atom because since the number of electrons in the outer principal energy level increases as you go from left to right in each period, the corresponding increase in the nuclear charge due to the additional protons pulls the electrons more tightly around the nucleus. This attraction results in the radius to be generally reduced. For a group of elements in the periodic table, the atoms of each successive member have another outer principal energy level in the electron configuration that electrons can move to. The increased distance from the nucleus results in the atomic radius to increase in a group.

Judy Dong — 1998

20 amazing facts about the human body

1 APPENDIX TO LIFE

body appendix Photograph: Corbis

The appendix gets a bad press. It is usually treated as a body part that lost its function millions of years ago. All it seems to do is occasionally get infected and cause appendicitis. Yet recently it has been discovered that the appendix is very useful to the bacteria that help your digestive system function. They use it to get respite from the strain of the frenzied activity of the gut, somewhere to breed and help keep the gut’s bacterial inhabitants topped up. So treat your appendix with respect.

2 SUPERSIZED MOLECULES

Practically everything we experience is made up of molecules. These vary in size from simple pairs of atoms, like an oxygen molecule, to complex organic structures. But the biggest molecule in nature resides in your body. It is chromosome 1. A normal human cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes in its nucleus, each a single, very long, molecule of DNA. Chromosome 1 is the biggest, containing around 10bn atoms, to pack in the amount of information that is encoded in the molecule.

3 ATOM COUNT

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

4 FUR LOSS

body chimp Photograph: Alamy

It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it’s just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible. We aren’t sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because our ancestors were partly aquatic.

But perhaps the most attractive idea is that early humans needed to co-operate more when they moved out of the trees into the savanna. When animals are bred for co-operation, as we once did with wolves to produce dogs, they become more like their infants. In a fascinating 40-year experiment starting in the 1950s, Russian foxes were bred for docility. Over the period, adult foxes become more and more like large cubs, spending more time playing, and developing drooping ears, floppy tails and patterned coats. Humans similarly have some characteristics of infantile apes – large heads, small mouths and, significantly here, finer body hair.

5 GOOSEBUMP EVOLUTION

body goosebumps Photograph: Alamy

Goosepimples are a remnant of our evolutionary predecessors. They occur when tiny muscles around the base of each hair tense, pulling the hair more erect. With a decent covering of fur, this would fluff up the coat, getting more air into it, making it a better insulator. But with a human’s thin body hair, it just makes our skin look strange.

Similarly we get the bristling feeling of our hair standing on end when we are scared or experience an emotive memory. Many mammals fluff up their fur when threatened, to look bigger and so more dangerous. Humans used to have a similar defensive fluffing up of their body hairs, but once again, the effect is now ruined. We still feel the sensation of hairs standing on end, but gain no visual bulk.

6 SPACE TRAUMA

body astronaut Photograph: Alamy

If sci-fi movies were to be believed, terrible things would happen if your body were pushed from a spaceship without a suit. But it’s mostly fiction. There would be some discomfort as the air inside the body expanded, but nothing like the exploding body parts Hollywood loves. Although liquids do boil in a vacuum, your blood is kept under pressure by your circulatory system and would be just fine. And although space is very cold, you would not lose heat particularly quickly. As Thermos flasks demonstrate, a vacuum is a great insulator.

In practice, the thing that will kill you in space is simply the lack of air. In 1965 a test subject’s suit sprang a leak in a Nasa vacuum chamber. The victim, who survived, remained conscious for around 14 seconds. The exact survival limit isn’t known, but would probably be one to two minutes.

7 ATOMIC COLLAPSE

The atoms that make up your body are mostly empty space, so despite there being so many of them, without that space you would compress into a tiny volume. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of the matter in an atom is so much smaller than the whole structure that it is comparable to the size of a fly in a cathedral. If you lost all your empty atomic space, your body would fit into a cube less than 1/500th of a centimetre on each side. Neutron stars are made up of matter that has undergone exactly this kind of compression. In a single cubic centimetre of neutron star material there are around 100m tons of matter. An entire neutron star, heavier than our sun, occupies a sphere that is roughly the size across of the Isle of Wight.

8 ELECTROMAGNETIC REPULSION

The atoms that make up matter never touch each other. The closer they get, the more repulsion there is between the electrical charges on their component parts. It’s like trying to bring two intensely powerful magnets together, north pole to north pole. This even applies when objects appear to be in contact. When you sit on a chair, you don’t touch it. You float a tiny distance above, suspended by the repulsion between atoms. This electromagnetic force is vastly stronger than the force of gravity – around a billion billion billion billion times stronger. You can demonstrate the relative strength by holding a fridge magnet near a fridge and letting go. The electromagnetic force from the tiny magnet overwhelms the gravitational attraction of the whole Earth.

9 STARDUST TO STARDUST

body atoms Photograph: Alamy

Every atom in your body is billions of years old. Hydrogen, the most common element in the universe and a major feature of your body, was produced in the big bang 13.7bn years ago. Heavier atoms such as carbon and oxygen were forged in stars between 7bn and 12bn years ago, and blasted across space when the stars exploded. Some of these explosions were so powerful that they also produced the elements heavier than iron, which stars can’t construct. This means that the components of your body are truly ancient: you are stardust.

10 THE QUANTUM BODY

One of the mysteries of science is how something as apparently solid and straightforward as your body can be made of strangely behaving quantum particles such as atoms and their constituents. If you ask most people to draw a picture of one of the atoms in their bodies, they will produce something like a miniature solar system, with a nucleus as the sun and electrons whizzing round like planets. This was, indeed, an early model of the atom, but it was realised that such atoms would collapse in an instant. This is because electrons have an electrical charge and accelerating a charged particle, which is necessary to keep it in orbit, would make it give off energy in the form of light, leaving the electron spiralling into the nucleus.

In reality, electrons are confined to specific orbits, as if they ran on rails. They can’t exist anywhere between these orbits but have to make a “quantum leap” from one to another. What’s more, as quantum particles, electrons exist as a collection of probabilities rather than at specific locations, so a better picture is to show the electrons as a set of fuzzy shells around the nucleus.

11 RED BLOODED

body blood cells Photograph: Alamy

When you see blood oozing from a cut in your finger, you might assume that it is red because of the iron in it, rather as rust has a reddish hue. But the presence of the iron is a coincidence. The red colour arises because the iron is bound in a ring of atoms in haemoglobin called porphyrin and it’s the shape of this structure that produces the colour. Just how red your haemoglobin is depends on whether there is oxygen bound to it. When there is oxygen present, it changes the shape of the porphyrin, giving the red blood cells a more vivid shade.

12 GOING VIRAL

body dna Photograph: Getty

Surprisingly, not all the useful DNA in your chromosomes comes from your evolutionary ancestors – some of it was borrowed from elsewhere. Your DNA includes the genes from at least eight retroviruses. These are a kind of virus that makes use of the cell’s mechanisms for coding DNA to take over a cell. At some point in human history, these genes became incorporated into human DNA. These viral genes in DNA now perform important functions in human reproduction, yet they are entirely alien to our genetic ancestry.

13 OTHER LIFE

On sheer count of cells, there is more bacterial life inside you than human. There are around 10tn of your own cells, but 10 times more bacteria. Many of the bacteria that call you home are friendly in the sense that they don’t do any harm. Some are beneficial.

In the 1920s, an American engineer investigated whether animals could live without bacteria, hoping that a bacteria-free world would be a healthier one. James “Art” Reyniers made it his life’s work to produce environments where animals could be raised bacteria-free. The result was clear. It was possible. But many of Reyniers’s animals died and those that survived had to be fed on special food. This is because bacteria in the gut help with digestion. You could exist with no bacteria, but without the help of the enzymes in your gut that bacteria produce, you would need to eat food that is more loaded with nutrients than a typical diet.

14 EYELASH INVADERS

body mite

Depending on how old you are, it’s pretty likely that you have eyelash mites. These tiny creatures live on old skin cells and the natural oil (sebum) produced by human hair follicles. They are usually harmless, though they can cause an allergic reaction in a minority of people. Eyelash mites typically grow to a third of a millimetre and are near-transparent, so you are unlikely to see them with the naked eye. Put an eyelash hair or eyebrow hair under the microscope, though, and you may find them, as they spend most of their time right at the base of the hair where it meets the skin. Around half the population have them, a proportion that rises as we get older.

15 PHOTON DETECTORS

body eye Photograph: Getty

Your eyes are very sensitive, able to detect just a few photons of light. If you take a look on a very clear night at the constellation of Andromeda, a little fuzzy patch of light is just visible with the naked eye. If you can make out that tiny blob, you are seeing as far as is humanly possible without technology. Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. But “near” is a relative term in intergalactic space – the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5m light years away. When the photons of light that hit your eye began their journey, there were no human beings. We were yet to evolve. You are seeing an almost inconceivable distance and looking back in time through 2.5m years.

16 SENSORY TALLY

Despite what you’ve probably been told, you have more than five senses. Here’s a simple example. Put your hand a few centimetres away from a hot iron. None of your five senses can tell you the iron will burn you. Yet you can feel that the iron is hot from a distance and won’t touch it. This is thanks to an extra sense – the heat sensors in your skin. Similarly we can detect pain or tell if we are upside down.

Another quick test. Close your eyes and touch your nose. You aren’t using the big five to find it, but instead proprioception. This is the sense that detects where the parts of your body are with respect to each other. It’s a meta-sense, combining your brain’s knowledge of what your muscles are doing with a feel for the size and shape of your body. Without using your basic five senses, you can still guide a hand unerringly to touch your nose.

17 REAL AGE

body ovum Photograph: Getty

Just like a chicken, your life started off with an egg. Not a chunky thing in a shell, but an egg nonetheless. However, there is a significant difference between a human egg and a chicken egg that has a surprising effect on your age. Human eggs are tiny. They are, after all, just a single cell and are typically around 0.2mm across – about the size of a printed full stop. Your egg was formed in your mother – but the surprising thing is that it was formed when she was an embryo. The formation of your egg, and the half of your DNA that came from your mother, could be considered as the very first moment of your existence. And it happened before your mother was born. Say your mother was 30 when she had you, then on your 18th birthday you were arguably over 48 years old.

18 EPIGENETIC INFLUENCE

We are used to thinking of genes as being the controlling factor that determines what each of us is like physically, but genes are only a tiny part of our DNA. The other 97% was thought to be junk until recently, but we now realise that epigenetics – the processes that go on outside the genes – also have a major influence on our development. Some parts act to control “switches” that turn genes on and off, or program the production of other key compounds. For a long time it was a puzzle how around 20,000 genes (far fewer than some breeds of rice) were enough to specify exactly what we were like. The realisation now is that the other 97% of our DNA is equally important.

19 CONSCIOUS ACTION

body mri Photograph: Alamy

If you are like most people, you will locate your conscious mind roughly behind your eyes, as if there were a little person sitting there, steering the much larger automaton that is your body. You know there isn’t really a tiny figure in there, pulling the levers, but your consciousness seems to have an independent existence, telling the rest of your body what to do.

In reality, much of the control comes from your unconscious. Some tasks become automatic with practice, so that we no longer need to think about the basic actions. When this happens the process is handled by one of the most primitive parts of the brain, close to the brain stem. However even a clearly conscious action such as picking up an object seems to have some unconscious precursors, with the brain firing up before you make the decision to act. There is considerable argument over when the conscious mind plays its part, but there is no doubt that we owe a lot more to our unconscious than we often allow.

20 OPTICAL DELUSION

The picture of the world we “see” is artificial. Our brains don’t produce an image the way a video camera works. Instead, the brain constructs a model of the world from the information provided by modules that measure light and shade, edges, curvature and so on. This makes it simple for the brain to paint out the blind spot, the area of your retina where the optic nerve joins, which has no sensors. It also compensates for the rapid jerky movements of our eyes called saccades, giving a false picture of steady vision.

But the downside of this process is that it makes our eyes easy to fool. TV, films and optical illusions work by misleading the brain about what the eye is seeing. This is also why the moon appears much larger than it is and seems to vary in size: the true optical size of the moon is similar to a hole created by a hole punch held at arm’s length.

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