Tastes Like Lincoln...

I was just reading the History Channel Magazine and saw this. I thought it was pretty gross/cool:

My husband recently told me that in the near future we will breathe air that was once breathed by Abraham Lincoln.

The truth is even stranger than what your husband said, according to David Bodanis, a historian who taught for many years at the University of Oxford, and author of several well-regarded books, including The Secret House: The Extraordinary Science of an Ordinary Day (1986).
In the last chapter of The Secret House Bodanis examines oxygen atoms. A goodly number of these particles bounce around in a typical room--300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 give or take, constituting about 20 percent of the air that surrounds us. (The most prevalent element in air is nitrogen.)
Oxygen atoms are in constant motion, moving in and out of our lungs, our rooms, and our houses, and traveling up to 1,000 miles in as little as two weeks. In his book, Bodanis offers an amazing observation, so odd and counterintuitive that the mind virtually reels. He writes, "A small sample of the oxygen molecules from any breath that anybody took within the past few thousand years is near certain to be in the next breath you take." Name a historical figure--Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, Cleopatra, Hitler, your great-grandmother. Tiny samples of them all, says Bodanis, "are in the air you have just drawn in."

I thought that was pretty neat. There goes Alexander the Great. It kind of freaked me out at first, thinking about sharing oxygen and such. But DUH! There's Big Granny. Oh, and that was just Chester Nimitz. And here comes George Bush...

I'm going to bed.