COBOL as a Programming Language

I worked with COBOL near the end of my last contract and found aspects of it fascinating compared to today's languages. Everything is about structures that map directly to the bits on disk, with fine grain control on precision and data types. But then the language reads as a series of macros where you don't have to remember the low level details: do this to this, put this here, if this do that. It's also a terribly difficult language to parse because it was designed for ease of use by humans...

 Different Cells are Replaced at Different Rates

Different types of cells have different lifespans, e.g.:  we shed our skin cells about every 35 days red blood cells live about 120 days, platelets 6 days and white cells less than a day most of the adult skeleton is replaced about every 10 years the average age of a fat cell seems to be about 10 years a 25-year-old heart replaces about 1% of all its cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells ) over the course of a year, while a 75-year-old heart replaces about half a percent our neocorti...