eli5 – How can the human body be composed of 70% water when it feels and behaves like any other solid?

Question

eli5 – How can the human body be composed of 70% water when it feels and behaves like any other solid?

In: 18

Answer 1

Does it though? How many other solids are squishy and have maliable joints?

Your bones are mostly hollow matrices of mineralized bone tissue. But even bones contain mostly water-mediated tissues.

While water might constitute 70 percent of your mass, the water is divided between and contained within billions of cells, each within its own phospholipid membrane that surrounds cellular plasma (again, mostly water) organelles made from proteins, and a nucleus that contains your DNA.

That our bodies appear solid is simply a heuristic presumption our brains makes because such is the most practically useful way to conceptualize the human body.