Do you ever think of how many bones we have or how we get to know the tastes of several different food or other things related to human anatomy? The human body is a very complicated system consisting of millions of cells organized and functioning dynamically altogether. These complexities can be better understood with the help of Anatomists, who studies the structure of organism and their parts. They find it useful to divide the human body into eight major systems: Skeleton, Muscles, Circulatory and Respiratory system, Digestive system, Urinary system, Glandular system, Nervous system and Skin. In this section, we have gathered some of the important facts regarding human body, which you may find informative and interesting.
Table of Contents
1.
The thickness of the skin varies from ½ mm to 4 mm, depending on the area of the body.
An average adult human skin has a surface area of 1.5-2.0 square meters (16.1-21.5 sq. ft.), most of it between 2–4 mm (0.15 inch) thick.
2.
The four taste zones on your tongue are bitter (back), sour (back sides), salty (front sides), and sweet (front).
3.
One uses 14 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. Some people also claim that smiling takes more muscles than frowning, but this is still not proven.
4.
Masseter (chewing) muscle is the strongest muscle in the human body (located in jaw) , and particularly in herbivores to facilitate chewing function.
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5.
Photo credit: livescience
The small intestine situated between our stomach and large intestine is about 25 feet long.
6.
The large intestine is just about 5 feet long, but 3 times wider than the small intestine.
7.
Most people shed 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime.
Desquamation also called skin shedding is generally of 2 types: non-pathologic and pathologic.
In pathologic desquamation, the stratum corneum (h*rny layer) or outermost layer of epidermis becomes thicker and corneocytes starts shedding in clusters (instead of scraping in single cells), forming visible scales.
8.
When you sneeze, air rushes through your nose at the rate of 100mph.
9.
An eye lash lives about 150 days before it falls out.
10.
Our brain sends messages at the rate of 240 mph.
11.
About 400 gallons of blood flow through our kidneys in one day.
12.
Each of our human eyes has 120 Million rods, which help us to see in black and white, while only 6 Million cons, which help us see colors.
The number and ratio of rods to cones varies among different species, primarily dependent on whether it is diurnal (day) or nocturnal (night).
13.
Have you ever thought that how many times do you blink your eyes per day? The answer is approx. 20,000 times.
14.
Our heart beats about 100,000 times a day.
15.
Placed end-to-end all your body’s blood vessels would measure over about 60,000 miles.
16.
The average human brain has about 100 billion nerve cells.
17.
The thyroid cartilage is more commonly known as the Adam’s apple.
18.
It’s impossible to sneeze with our eyes open. Try it out.
19.
It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
20.
When you sneeze, all your bodily functions stop even your heart.
21.
Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear till they are 2-6 years old.
22.
Human child grow faster in spring season.
23.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ear never stop growing.
24.
The length of the finger dictates how fast the fingernail grows. The nail on the middle finger grows faster and on an average our toenails grow twice as slow as our finger nails.
25.
Hair is made of the same substance as our fingernails.
26.
The nose can remember 50,000 different scents.
27.
Similar to fingerprints, everybody’s tongue has a unique tongue print.
28.
The energy used by the brain is enough to light a 25 watt bulb.
29.
The heart produces enough pressure to squirt blood up to 30 feet.
30.
We get a new stomach lining every 3-4 days. If we didn’t, the strong acids our stomach uses to digest food would also digest our stomach.
31.
There are about 320 pairs of muscles in our body.
32.
A full bladder is roughly the size of a softball.
33.
A pair of feet has 500,000 sweat glands.
Each of your feet has 26 bones, 33 joints, 107 ligaments, 19 muscles and 500,000 sweat glands that make about one cup of sweat every day.
34.
Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
35.
A single human blood cell takes only 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
36.
The human brain can read up to 1,000 words per minute.
37.
The human brain can perform 38 thousand-trillion operations per second. The world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-2, can manage up to 33.86 petaflops (33 quadrillion calculations per seconds).
38.
A single human sperm contains the 37.5MB of male DNA required to create a human of spring. This means an average ejacul*tion transfer 1,500 terabytes of information.
39.
Human body consists of around 0.2 milligrams of gold. One needs the blood of around 40,000 people to collect enough gold to make one 8g coin.
40.
In various studies, scientists say that people with higher I.Q. have more dreams. This may be true, or not, we can’t say, as we don’t have the adequate proof, but one thing we can say that you’re not mentally lacking if you can’t recall your dreams.
41.
Our heart will pump nearly 1.5 million barrels of blood during your whole life, enough to fill 200 train tank cars.
42.
Do not worry, if you find yourself about 1 cm shorter while going to bed at night compared to when you wake up in the morning. That is because the cartilage in your spine slowly compresses throughout the day. Probably, you won’t recognize it, so be cool.
43.
The human spinal cord controls over 10 billion nerve cells, but surprisingly it is less than two feet in length and its diameter is same as that of the index finger.
44.
The muscles that control our eyes, contract about 100,000 times a day (that’s the equivalent of giving your legs a workout by walking 50 miles).
45.
The eyes have the fastest reacting sets of muscle in the entire body. It reacts in 1/100th part of a second.
46.
The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm. The female egg or ovum is actually the only cell in the body that is visible by the naked eye.
47.
The lifespan of a human hair is about 3 to 7 years. On an average, a person loses 60-100 strands of hair. Although, you must lose over 50% of your scalp hairs before it is apparent to anyone.
48.
During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
49.
Less than one third of the human population has optical 20-20 vision. This means that two out of three people don’t have perfect vision.
50.
It’s possible for you to survive without a large fraction of your body’s internal organs. If you lose your stomach, your spleen, 75% of your liver, and 80% of your intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from your pelvic and groin area, you might not be as much as healthy that you are now, but you would live.
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51.
In 1929, a German surgeon Werner Forssmann examined his very own heart. He threaded a catheter into his arm vein. This was the first cardiac catheterization.