“This is the first time I’ve seen such simple life science!”
A bestseller in the science field with 500,000 copies sold
The author of the "Fun to Read All Night" series has released a new book after 10 years!

Books recommended by the National Science Teachers Association
Reflection of elementary and secondary school curriculum

Takeo Samaki, the bestselling author of 『Fun Chemistry Stories That Will Keep You Reading All Night』 and 『Fun Physics Stories That Will Keep You Reading All Night』, is back with a new science series.
The "If Science Were This Easy from the Start" series, now available for the first time in 10 years, focuses on introducing the fundamental principles of chemistry, physics, and life sciences in an easy and fun way.
While other popular science books that deal with everyday scientific stories often offer fragmented knowledge, this series distinguishes itself by establishing a framework for scientific thinking by organically connecting the content and carefully selecting the core principles that readers must know.


Volume 3, “If Life Science Were This Easy From the Beginning,” covers the definition of living things, the differences between plants and animals, the structure of cells, the principles of heredity, and the history of how the first living things evolved into humans.
Are corals animals or plants? Are there creatures with blue blood? Do plants survive solely on water? How do animals without spines survive? How many cells are there in the human body? Through the rich illustrations presented by the adorable Meow and the friendly doctor, you'll learn the fundamental principles in a fun and engaging way, naturally finding answers to these questions.
Let's embark on a journey into the world of life science, which becomes even more fun once you understand the principles.

People in ancient times thought coral was a plant.
Because it does not move to other places, but lives fixedly in one place and looks like a flower in bloom.
It was around 1800 that scholars began to recognize coral as an animal.
What many people thought was a flower turned out to be a part of the body with a structure similar to a sea snail.
Corals mainly eat small zooplankton or phytoplankton in the water, but some corals settle phytoplankton on their bodies and obtain nutrients from it.
--- From "Is it an animal or a plant?"

Human blood is red because of the hemoglobin in the blood.
But there are animals with blue blood.
This includes arthropods such as shrimp and crabs, and mollusks such as clams, squid, and octopuses.
The reason these animals have blue blood is because they have hemocyanin, a respiratory pigment containing copper atoms, in their blood.
Hemocyanin itself is colorless and transparent, but when combined with oxygen, copper ions react and turn blue.
Like hemoglobin, it plays a role in transporting oxygen, but rather than being contained within blood cells, it is dissolved in hemolymph, which functions as both blood and lymph.
--- From "Red Blood and Blue Blood"

In the 17th century, the Belgian physician Jan Baptista van Helmont surmised that if plants absorbed all the nutrients they needed to survive from the soil, the soil would lose weight as the plants grew.
So, we conducted an experiment where we only watered willow trees for five years and observed their growth.
The willow tree, which weighed 2.27 kg at the beginning of the experiment, grew to 76.74 kg after five years.
I gained more than 70kg in weight over 5 years.
Plants are made up of 80-90% water.
The remaining 10-20% is non-water substances.
So, if we do a rough calculation, we can see that the willow trees Helmont grew had an increase of 7 to 14 kg of substances other than water.
So, did the weight of the soil decrease by that much? No.
The soil only decreased by 0.056 kg.
Helmont concluded that 'since the willow tree was only given water, the weight of the tree increased because of the water absorbed by the roots.'
Today we know that this conclusion was wrong.
It was not until 1804, 150 years after Helmont's experiment, that it was discovered that plants grow by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air.
And it wasn't until 1862 that it was discovered that carbon dioxide absorbed by plants turns into starch.
--- From "Do plants live only on water?"

The body of a living thing is truly magnificent.
Cells that are only a few tens of micrometers in size repeatedly divide to increase in number, and each cell sends signals to each other to properly perform its own role.
For example, if we eat too much food, the remaining nutrients turn into fat and are stored in fat cells.
Obese people have more fat cells than thin people, and the fat cells are filled with fat, so they are also larger.
Osteoblasts, the cells that build bones, produce a strong fibrous substance called collagen inside the cells and export it outside the cells.
Then, collagen meets calcium phosphate carried in the blood to form strong bones.
Everything that happens in a living body, such as storing fat, building bones, sweating, and breaking down alcohol, is handled by cells.

--- From "Cells in Our Body"