The Database of Useful Biological Numbers

The full database (27 MB) can be downloaded from: https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/resources.aspx

It is a surprisingly simple single excel sheet or a single table with 14,248 rows. I was expecting an SQLite database with multiple relationally linked tables. Anyway the simplicity and the fact that it is a single spreadsheet makes it easy to browse through, and for most rows, a reference is provided.

Note to the maintainers: The last 3-4 entries are spam.

This is a more useful resource than one would think. When I switched from studying math to biology, I was surprised that most graduate biology textbooks never provided these basic numbers --- average diffusion time of a protein across a cell, for instance --- which really helps in making back-of-the-envelope calculations.

If this is interesting to y’all, I highly recommend checking out their book Cell Biology By The Numbers. It’s lots of numbers like in this database, but with the hows and whys.

http://book.bionumbers.org/

I'm a little sorry I clicked on "Net population change in North American birds"

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=117281&...

Reminds me of Prime Curios, which is trivia about prime numbers. https://primes.utm.edu/curios/ They could make an interesting mash-up. Like a Vornoi scale made of prime numbers with the occurrence of biological numbers between them. It's well into the territory of a weird gematria at that point, but in terms of looping people into studying them with trivia, it would be fun.

Searching for kangaroo ended me up on this pdf table [0] of the percent of lactose in non-domestic mammal milk. Sadly, the table is null on that exact measure, although they do have data on the amount of fat and protein in kangaroo milk.

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/files/The%20gross%20compo...

Fascinating.

> Length of neuron from base of spine to big toe-longest cell in human body

> Range ≤1 meter

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=104901&...

Why do they need to refrigerate COVID mRNA vaccines?

Because the mean lifetime of mRNA is 5 minutes (at body temperature).

Arrhenius acceleration (or deceleration) with cold temperatures is the only viable trick. But even then, it's going to disappear quickly once it hits a target cell and the liposome is absorbed. Probably not a great half-life even then.

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=108592&...

Cool.