In our ongoing quest for wonderful facts about all manner of things, we have put together this list (with thanks to the Reader’s Digest Book of Facts), a great list of amazing human facts. These are the fifteen most wonderful things about our bodies that, hopefully, are news to most of our readers! So, onwards:
1. The stomach’s digestive acids are strong enough to dissolve zinc. Fortunately for us, the cells in the stomach lining renew so quickly that the acids don’t have time to dissolve it.
2. The lungs contain over 300,000 million capillaries (tiny blood vessels). If they were laid end to end, they would stretch 2400km (1500 miles).
3. A mans testicles manufacture 10 million new sperm cells each day – enough that he could repopulate the entire planet in only 6 months!
4. Human bone is as strong as granite in supporting weight. A block of bone the size of a matchbox can support 9 tonnes – that is four times as much as concrete can support.
5. Each finger and toenail takes six months to grow from base to tip.
6. The largest organ in the body is the skin. In an adult man it covers about 1.9m2 (20sq ft). The skin constantly flakes away – in a lifetime each person sheds around 18kg (40 lb) of skin.
7. When you sleep, you grow by about 8mm (0.3in). The next day you shrink back to your former height. The reason is that your cartilage discs are squeezed like sponges by the force of gravity when you stand or sit.
8. The average person in the West eats 50 tonnes of food and drinks 50,000 liters (11,000 gallons) of liquid during his life.
9. Each kidney contains 1 million individual filters. They filter an average of around 1.3 liters (2.2 pints) of blood per minute, and expel up to 1.4 liters (2.5 pints) a day of urine.
10. The focusing muscles of the eyes move around 100,000 times a day. To give your leg muscles the same workout, you would need to walk 80km (50 miles) every day.
11. In 30 minutes, the average body gives off enough heat (combined) to bring a half gallon of water to boil.
12. A single human blood cell takes only 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
13. A foreskin, the size of a postage stamp, from circumcised babies take only 21 days to grow skin that can cover three (3) basketball courts. Amazing isn’t it. Thanks to science. The laboratory-grown skin is used in treating burn patients.
14. The eyes receive approximately 90 percent of all our information, making us basically visual creatures.
15. The female ovaries contain nearly half-a-million egg cells, yet only 400 or so will ever get the opportunity to create a new life.
Sources: Reader’s Digest Book of Facts
interesting facts. every body must read and know.
its very good thing.we get to know lots about aou body !!!
Fascinating list. There are some spelling errors however. The fact about the blood traveling in 60 seconds is amazing. also i would love to boil water by myself!! awesome
great list.
#13 is just weird.
15 has some problems. Check Livescience, or most other good sources about scientific knowledge. The appendix has 2 vital roles that it plays in your body. First off, it provides aplace where the stuff that you eat can pool, allowing the exposure of your immune system to he material i your bowels, wher it can have longer to develop antibodies than it would in a faster moving area (like the main section of your intestines). Secondly, it provides a place for your body to store the bacteria that your digestive system uses to process food. If you are appendixless, and get a severe digestive illness, your body can lose the ability to restore these bacteria. If that happens, often times you have to receive a feces transplant from a close relative (whose bacteria should be similar to your own). No joke.
go eat dump
#14. Unless I've been told the wrong thing by textbooks and professors, the eyeball does grow. They give that as one reason for increasing myopia/decreasing hyperopia in growing kids. (The distance from cornea and crystalline lens to retina increases in relation to the focal length).
i don’t remember number 14 saying the eye ball doesn’t grow.
yeah, 13 is a little weird, i have a friend who is a burn vic. I'm sure knowing that his burn victim counterparts are being healed with foreskin will be very comforting to him…or maybe i just wont tell him…
what i think is more interesting about our kidneys is that they primarily produce 180 l of urine every day! only because of some other mechanisms, it is reduced to approx. 2 litres a day… isn´t that fascinating?
Wierd yet interesting list. Although, there are some spelling errors and I had to read #13 twice.
I didn't know #14 and I'm glad to have that knowledge – my Dad used to tell me I couldn't wear contacts until I was at least 18 because my eyes were still growing..lol
Good list!
I've seen how they grow skin, it is a little misleading. They grow it in sheets, then it is perforated with little slits. So that when you apply it, it stretches and and increases 10 fold in size. Similar to the netting on a bag of onions. Once applied the skin quickly fills in the voids.
I have also read that the appendix actually performs as part of the lymphatic system, but there is no consensus, or at least last I heard. That could have changed, and I'm too lazy to look it up.
This list is a complete lie. Jfrater is a witch. Burn him. BURN HIM.
I don't know why my comment didn't show up, so I'll try again.
The eyes do grow with the rest of the body. This is the main reason myopic children get worse and hyperopic children get better as they get older. The length of the eyeball grows in relation to the focal length of the cornea and crystalline lens.
MzFly: Your dad just didn't want to tell you that you were too irresponsible to wear contacts. The only reason kids don't usually get contacts is because they require more care.
CRE – A feces transplant? Please tell me this is a typo.
I'm sure I heard something recently that made out that the appendix is not entirely useless. I don't recall the details, but it was along the lines of helping the immune system.
Wow the picture of the eyeball really REALLY creeped me out, I'm am scared of them! I almost couldn't finish reading you list once I was it………………almost!
The human body can survive on Moutain Dew for years but only if the said body lives in their parents basement during that time.
Great list. Also, babies are born without kneecaps.
I like I like!
Know most of these and I'm delighted to see them compiled in a list.#14 always seemed a bit incredible. I have to convince myself everytime.
"In 30 minutes, the average body gives off enough heat to bring a half gallon of water to boil."
Some perspective would be nice on that one, since clearly the average human body *cannot* boil any amount of water. If it's really something like, "If the amount of heat the body gives off in 30 minutes was all expelled in 5 minutes instead, it could boil water," then maybe.
Absent further explanation, I'm calling mild shenanigans on this one.
Wow you're *****.
Great list. Should come in handy in school.
Truly amazing facts, I also find it great that you used standard and metric.
A less depressing list than the lest
Great list.
About # 15)People chew and eat beatle leaves in many countries, I've done it many times myself.So does that mean my appendix is actually used in the digestion process? I thought it had no functions at all in humans.
I still have my appendix – guess that's why I love eating leaves (lettuce, specifically)
"From the moment we are born, only one body part never changes in size – the eyeball."
This simply isn't true. Why do people believe this one?
A physics professor claimed we give off the same amount of heat as a 100 watt bulb. Invite more company in the winter but charge them for added air conditioner costs in the summer.
caboose: metric IS standard, no? ^__________^ (ok, not for the Americans..)
CRE: Yeah, I checked Livescience, and it says nothing similar to what you said. It says it's probably vestigial. It also says that "does not directly assist digestion".
#14 is technically almost true, because the eyeball DOES grow, but only a few millimeters since you are born, and compared to the rest of the body it's pretty much nothing.
Oh and the eyeball only grows until you're 5 or so, while the rest of your body still has a long way to go…
thtx vri intresting thou…
This was told to a relative of mine who plays the banjo.
A banjo player is kind of like an appendix: They can both be a big pain sometimes; you don't miss them when they're gone; & no one's figured out what good they are…
Very Informative list by the way
Number 13 is not true…..
The foreskins are placed in a test tube and artificially grown until they reach the size of an average human, at this point they are removed, dressed up nice clothes and sent into the world as a politician.
Awesome list as usual guys.
Did you know that the average pubic hair can remain in the corner of my bathroom for up to 8 months? Fascinating.
this message is for CRE, just wondering if u are the same person that posts on mma.tv forums, jw
wow, very interesting list, a whole basketball court?!?!? damn!
I would like to contest fact 15. First of all, your description of why it is now vestigial is quite Lamarckian, we stopped eating leaves so it got smaller? No, I don't believe any modern scientists would support the theory that less leaves lead to smaller appendixes.
Also, the appendix in humans is comperable to the cecum in grazers, which is a large organ about the size of a pillowcase in horses that aids in the digestion of fiber and cellulose.
From wikipedia: "Exclusive carnivores, whose diets contain little or no plant material, have a reduced cecum; often partially or wholly replaced by the vermiform appendix."
Thus the origins of our appendix, we do have a cecum, but it is very small and would have been our appendix in a common ancestor, however genetic changes over many thousands, millions even, of years has lead to a reduced cecum and the debatably useless appendix.
With the question on the feces transplant….no its not a joke. Very gross and rare..but yes..you would need feces from a relative to replace bacteria and such in your intestines.
Yeah i read about the last one. We used our appendix to digest tough material like Tree bark …. pretty useless now or maybe not with the way things are going with the oil and food shortage maybe this would be in use lol
It's just occurred to me that humans DO eat raw leaves. Usually dripping with Italian dressing.
I would totally repopulate the entire planet in just six months.
Cool list. Lots of interesting info in the comments as well. Oddly, that eye has almost my exact eye color, though mine aren't quite as bloodshot
JFrater–I won the movie drawing over a month ago and followed up with a email 5 days ago…Radio silence. What's the deal?
very entertaining and interesting list.
i always wanted to know why there are multiple colors for eyes?
its kinda odd that teeth don't grow back…
they grow when you're a baby, then they grow when you lose the baby teeth. but if you lose one after that, tough luck.
for some people the brain stays the same size too
teeth should grow back
how amazing are the bodies that God has created!!
even the stuff that we all know, and is "old news", is very cool. i have just recently learned the reason behind fevers. brilliant!
If bone is that much stronger than concrete, why don't we build our buildings out of it? I'm going to have the most metal house on the block…
Bone is that strong? Tell that to the tree that broke my wrist.
Copperdragon; That is because you are born with the buds for your permanent teeth already in your head. Some people have an extra set, but they erupt at the same time, they don't remain dormant until you lose a tooth. Have you seen people with extra sets of dentition? It is disturbing. (I had 2 extra bottom teeth pulled when I was a kid, they grew in right behind the first 2)
double check your "facts"
There are rare cases of people getting a third set of teeth, or of being born with teeth. Rarer still and, as far as I know, occurring only in children under two or three, is the regrowth of a digit lost to a sharp cut.
I'd love to reference the aforementioned, but I did read them both, in more than one book, but it was some time ago. I probably still have the books, I have thousands, but where to start?
My library is organized alphabetically by author, and sub-alphabetically by title when I have several works by the same author…I often wish I had organized following the dewey decimal system.
Barack Obama: I haven't received an email from you – it might have been lost in my spam folder – can you resend it to frater at gmail please? I will act on it ASAP.
is it any surprise bone is so strong
after all it must protect and support our delicate bodies
funny but true story, one of my friends actually thought that when a man gets an ***** a bone in the penis is why it is so hard.
i laughed and said then where does it go when you're not "happy"
he's not the brightest star in the milky way
i knew some of those
I can personally vouch for #5 I knocked off a toenail once when I ran into something. Took about 6 months to grow back to normal.
#3 That's a helluva lot of sperm!
sunny, did you cry
i took a piece of toenail but it only hurt for a minute
off
No 3 – I thought there'd be more jokes about this one! I'm confused – the human gestation period is 9 months, so how can one repopulate the planet in 6 months?
No 5 – On Tuesday a dermatologist pulled my big toenail off, so I'll get back to you approx 12 Dec.