Interesting & Amazing Facts
Body & Health
Acupuncture
Acupuncture was first used as a medical treatment in 2700 BC by Chinese emperor Shen-Nung.
Acne
Sixty-five percent of North American adolescents get acne.
Arteries & Veins
Laid end-to-end, the arteries, capillaries and veins would stretch for about 60,000 miles in the average child and would be about 100,000 miles in an adult - enough to wrap around the world nearly four times.
Arteries
The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
Aspirin
Aspirin has never been approved by the United Sates FDA.
Babies
* A new born baby breathes five times faster than an adult man.
* All babies are color blind when they are born.
* Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
* Babies' eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.
* Babies who wear disposable diapers are five times more likely to develop diaper rash than those that wear cotton diapers.
* May babies are on average 200 grams heavier than babies born in other months.
* Most Caucasian babies are born with dark blue eyes, although it normally changes color after child birth.
* The body of the average baby is 75% water.
* The navel divided the body of a newborn baby into two equal parts.
Bacteria
* 10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria.
* Bacteria, the tiniest free-living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid contains as many as 50 million of them.
* The bacteria found on human skin is roughly the numerical equivalent of all the humans on Earth.
Blinking
* Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
* Humans blink over 10 million times a year.
Blood
Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles)--that's four times the distance across the US from coast to coast.
Blood Cells
The human body makes and destroys millions of red blood cells every second.
A single drop of blood contains millions of red blood cells which are constantly traveling through your body delivering oxygen and removing waste.
Blood Clots
People who ride on roller coasters have a higher chance of having a blood clot in the brain.
Blushing
No one seems to know why people blush.
Body Odor
Each person has an odor that is as unique as a fingerprint. Much of the thrill in kissing comes from smelling the unique odors of another's face.
Bones
* Although the outsides of a bone are hard, they are generally light and soft inside. They are about 75% water.
* Humans are born with 300 bones in their body, however when a person reaches adulthood they only have 206 bones. This occurs because many of them join together to make a single bone.
* One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet.
* The "funny bone" is not a bone. It's the spot where the ulna nerve touches the humerus.
* The smallest bone in the body is the 'stirrup', deep in the ear. It is hardly larger than a grain of rice.
* The bones in your body are not white - they range in color from beige to light brown. The bones you see in museums are white because they have been boiled and cleaned.
Brain
* As we get older the brain loses almost one gram per year because its nerve cells die and cannot be replaced.
* Except for your brain cells, 50,000,000 of the cells in your body will have died and been replaced with others, all while you have been reading this sentence.
* The body can function without a brain.
* The human brain has about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) neurons.
Breathing
We lose half a liter of water a day through breathing. This is the water vapor we see when we breathe onto glass.
Births
About140 million babies are born each year to the 1.5 billion women of child-bearing age (15 - 44).
Calories
You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
Cats
Changing a cat's litter box can be dangerous to pregnant women, as cat feces sometimes carry a parasite that can cause harm to the developing baby.
Cells
* Every hour one billion cells in the body must be replaced.
* Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
* The average life span of a single red blood cell is 120 days.
Children
* Children grow faster in the springtime than any other season during the year.
* Brain injuries -- accidental (mainly from falls) and inflicted (i.e., from abuse) -- hospitalize or kill an estimated 150,000 children annually in the U.S. Traumatic brain injury is the most common cause of death in childhood, and child abuse is believed to be responsible for at least half of infant brain injuries.
Consumption
Even if you eat food standing on your head, it will end up in your stomach.
Death
* When a person dies, hearing is the last sense to go. First off would be your sight.
* In 1900 the average age at death in the US was 47.
* Human hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death.
* If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning before you will die of oxygen deprivation.
* After human death, post-mortem rigidity starts in the head and travels to the feet, and leaves the same way it came -- head to toe.
* There are 5 times as many deaths due to the negligence of doctors as there are deaths due to firearms.
* 19 people have died in the last 3 years believing that Christmas decorations were chocolate.
* 3 people die each year testing if a 9v battery works on their tongue.
* 85% of the men who die while having sex, die with someone other than their spouse.
* A person remains conscious for eight seconds after being decapitated.
DNA
* If the information contained in the DNA could be written down, it would fill a 1000 volume encyclopedia.
* If all your DNA is stretched out, it would reach to the moon 6,000 times.
Dreams
Only about 5% of people dream in color.
The average person has over 1,400 dreams a year.
Drugs
The first drug to be sold in the form of a tablet is Aspirin.
Enamel
Enamel is the hardest substance in the human body.
Eyes
* The only part of the human body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It takes in oxygen directly from the air.
* When you're looking at someone you love, your pupils dilate. When you look at someone you hate, they do the same thing.
* The muscle that lets your eye blink is the fastest muscle in your body. It allows you to blink 5 times a second. On average, you blink 15 000 times a day.
* We actually do not see with our eyes - we see with our brains. The eyes basically are the cameras of the brain. One-quarter of the brain is used to control the eyes.
Eyelashes
Each of the more than 200 lashes on each eye is shed every three to five months.
False Teeth
On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity.
Feet
The length from your wrist to your elbow is the same as the length of your foot.
Fetus
* A fetus that is four months old, will becomes startled and turn away if a light is flashed on the mother's stomach.
* A fetus can hiccup.
* A fetus develops fingerprints at eighteen weeks.
Finger Nails
* The slowest growing finger nail is on the thumb nail and the fastest growing is the finger nail on the middle finger.
* Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.
Fingers
The sensitivity of a woman's middle finger is reduced during menstruation.
Flatulent
An average adult produces about half a liter of flatulent gas per day, resulting in an average of about fourteen occurrences of flatulence a day.
Freckles
In early time freckles were called "moth-patches" and were considered an affliction.
Genes
Females have 500 more genes than males, and because of this are protected from things like color blindness and hemophilia.
Growth
From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.
Hair
* During his or her lifetime, the average human will grow 590 miles of hair.
* Hair and fingernails are made from the same substance, keratin.
Hearing
When you put a seashell to your ear, the sound you hear is not the waves, but actually the echo of the blood pulsing in your own ear.
Heart
* The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime--that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.
* The human heart can create enough pressure that it could squirt blood at a distance of thirty feet.
* Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year.
Heart Attacks
Most heart attacks occur between the hours of 8 and 9 am.
Herpes
The herpes virus, which causes cold sores and other nasty but generally nuisance-like manifestations, is present in some form in almost 85% of the world's population. It "hibernates" in nerve cells, making it impossible to get rid of using any method found so far, and is activated primarily during times of stress.
Hiccups
The longest recorded bout of hiccups lasted for 65 years.
Hormones
Your body releases growth hormones when you sleep.
Hygiene
Only one out of every three people wash their hands when leaving a public bathroom.
Influenza
Influenza caused over twenty-one million deaths in 1918.
Kiss
During a kiss as many as 278 bacteria colonies are exchanged.
Knuckles
The sound you hear when you macho people crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.
Laughter
* It has been medically been proven that laughter is an effective pain killer.
* The average person laughs 13 times per day.
Left-Handed
A left handed person finds it easier to open a jar than a right handed person. This is because a left handed person can supply a stronger anticlockwise turning force than a right handed person. However a right handed person will find it easier to tighten the jar up afterwards.
Lice
Head lice actually prefer to live on clean heads, not dirty ones.
Life Span
* Being unmarried can shorten a man's life by ten years.
* Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
* About 3,000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.
Liver
If a person has two thirds of their liver removed through trauma or surgery, it will grow back to the original size in four weeks time.
Lungs
The surface area of the lungs is roughly the same size as a tennis court.
Memory
The short-term memory capacity for most people is between five and nine items or digits. This is one reason that phone numbers were kept to seven digits for so long.
Miscellaneous
* Every day, the average person swallows about a quart of snot.
* People who have never been married are seven and a half times more likely than married people to be admitted to a psychiatric facility.
Morphine
"Soldiers disease" is a term for morphine addiction. The Civil War produced over 400,000 morphine addicts.
Muscles
* If you combined all the muscles in an average human in to one muscle, the force it would be capable of producing is about 2,000 tones.
* The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
* The tongue is the only muscle that is attached at just one end.
* A person has 696 muscles while a caterpillar has over 4000.
Nose Job
In 1981, Ruth Clarke (age 23) of London England, underwent surgery to correct a lifelong breathing problem. She was presented with a tiddlywink, which doctors had removed from her nose. She vaguely recalled losing the disk as a tot.
Nostrils
Each nostril of a human being register smell in a different way. Smells that are made from the right nostril are more pleasant than the left. However, smells can be detected more accurately when made by the left nostril.
Physicians
* 75-90% of primary physician visits are due to stress.
* In Canada, men are three times more likely than women to have seen a doctor in the last year.
* Ironically, when doctors in Los Angeles, California went on strike in 1976, the daily number of deaths in the city dropped 18%.
* The stethoscope was not invented to hear the heartbeat better, but to give doctors some distance from a patient's body odors.
* In medieval Japan, dentists extracted teeth with their hands.
Pregnancy
* During pregnancy, the average woman's uterus expands up to five hundred times its normal size.
* Worldwide, there are currently about 220 million pregnancies each year. 63% result in live births, 15% or so end in miscarriages or stillbirths, while 22% are aborted deliberately.
Ribs
Your ribs move about 5 million times a year (every time you breath).
Saliva
In a lifetime, an average human produces 10,000 gallons of saliva.
Scurvy
English sailors were referred to as "limeys" because sailors added lime juice to their diet to combat scurvy.
Skin
* Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin!
* Skin is the largest organ of the human body.
* The average adult has approximately six pounds of skin.
* We discard about 10 billion skin flakes every day. Over a year this mounts up to nearly two kilograms.
* Human skin sheds continually, and the outer layer of skin is entirely replaced every 28 days.
Smallpox
Smallpox, until its eradication from the general population of the world in the 1970s, was probably the most deadly disease our species has ever faced. An estimated 500 million people were killed by smallpox in the 20th Century.
Sneeze
* You cannot sneeze with your eyes open.
* The longest sneezing fit was 978 consecutive days.
* A sneeze travels out of your mouth at over 100 miles per hour.
Spiders
The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.
Stomach
* The lining of the a person's stomach is replaced every 36 hours.
* The stomach as 35 million digestive glands.
Surgery
* The first open-heart surgery was performed in 1893.
* The oldest for of surgery is "trepanning" - drilling holes into the skull.
Suicide
* The most frequent season for most suicides to occur is in the spring. The winter months have the lowest number of suicides.
* Men commit suicide three times more frequently than women do. But women attempt suicide two to three times more often than men.
Sweat
A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there.
Taste
* We taste only four things: sweet, sour, salt and bitters. It's the smells that make things really taste.
* An onion, apple and potato all have the same taste. The differences in flavour are caused by their smell.
Taste Buds
* The average lifespan of a human taste bud is ten days.
* Not all our taste buds are on our tongue; about 10% are on the palette and the cheeks.
Teeth
* Your teeth are 6 months older than you are, they start growing 6 months before you are born.
* Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks.
Thumb
Your thumb is the same length as your nose.
Toes
The big toe is the foot reflexology pressure point for the head.
Tongue
Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.
Weight
The average human head weighs about eight pounds.
Womb
The amniotic fluid that surrounds a baby in the womb is completely replaced every three hours.