The Building Block of Life: How Metabolism Works from Mouse to Whale
In 1932, the zoologist Max Kleiber noticed a strange pattern: take a mouse, a dog, and an elephant, and their metabolic rates do not scale in proportion to mass but more slowly, as mass to the power of three quarters. An elephant is a million times heavier than a mouse, yet it burns energy not a million times faster but only thirty thousand times faster. Why this is so remained a mystery for nearly a century.