Why Metabolic Rate Scales with Body Mass: From an Elephant's Dose to the Size of Cities

A 1960s dosing accident with an elephant raises a deceptively simple question: how should a safe dose scale with body size? This leads into an exploration of scaling laws in biology and cities, from metabolic rate and heartbeats per lifetime to how infrastructure and crime grow with urban population.

■ The Elephant Experiment and Nonlinear Scaling
- The failed LSD experiment on Tusko the elephant and why linear dose assumptions went wrong
- The surprising pattern that most mammals receive roughly a billion heartbeats in a lifetime
■ Biological Scaling Laws
- The surface law, Kleiber's law, and quarter-power scaling for lifespan, heart rate, and circulation
- WBE theory: fractal transport networks and its predictions for anatomical and physiological traits
- The ongoing research debate over whether the exponent is three quarters, two thirds, or varies across species
■ Scaling in Cities
- How crime, wages, GDP, and patents grow faster than population while infrastructure grows more slowly
- Walk speed and the pace of life in larger cities
■ Sponsor Segment
- Brilliant, an interactive learning platform for math, science, and coding

This suits viewers interested in biology, physics, and data-driven explanations of everyday phenomena. It offers a concrete framework for thinking about proportionality and efficiency in nature and urban life, and points to the book and learning platform mentioned for further study.