The human body is one of the most complicated and fascinating living forms on Earth. Here are some interesting features that make it special, which you can share with your kids.
1. Adult lungs have a surface area of around 70 square metres.
2. Your left and right lungs aren’t exactly the same. The lung on the left side of your body is divided into two lobes while the lung on your right side is divided into three. The left lung is also slightly smaller, allowing room for your heart.
3. Human lungs contain almost 1,500 miles of airways and over 300 million alveoli.
4. An average person breathes in around 11,000 litres of air every day.
5. Your nose and ears continue growing throughout your entire life.
6. Your sense of smell is around 10,000 times more sensitive than your sense of taste.
7. Around 80 per cent of what we think is taste is actually smell. Flavour, is a combination of taste and smell perception.
8. The brain uses over a quarter of the oxygen used by the human body.
9. The brain of an adult human weighs around 3 pounds (1.5 kg). Although it makes up just 2 per cent of the body’s weight, it uses around 20 per cent of its energy.
10. If you smoothed out all of the wrinkles in your brain, it would lay flat the size of a pillowcase.
11. Your heart beats around 100,000 times a day, 365,00,000 times a year and over a billion times if you live beyond 30.
12. Grouping human blood types can be a difficult process and there are currently around 30 recognised blood types (or blood groups). You might be familiar with the more simplified “ABO” system which categorises blood types under O, A, B and AB.
13. When listening to music, your heartbeat will sync with the rhythm.
14. An healthy adult human heart beats about 75 times on average in a minute.
15. In one year, a human heart would pump enough blood to fill an Olympic size pool.
16. If all the blood vessels in the human body were laid end to end, they would encircle the Earth four times.
17. Skin is the human body’s largest organ
18. The outer layer of your skin is the epidermis, it is found thickest on the palms of your hands and soles of your feet (around 1.5 mm thick).
19. A large amount of the dust in your home is actually dead skin. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour.
20. Humans have a stage of sleep that features rapid eye movement (REM). REM sleep makes up around 25 per cent of total sleep time and is often when you have your most vivid dreams.
21. An eyelash lives for about 150 days before it falls out.
22. The smallest bone found in the human body is located in the middle ear. The staples (or stirrup) bone is only 2.8 millimetres long.
23. The femur (thigh bone) is the longest bone in the human body.
24. As well as having unique fingerprints, humans also have unique tongue prints.
25. Goose bumps evolved to make our ancestors’ hair stand up, making them appear more threatening to predators.
26. Humans are the only animals with chins.
27. Blushing is caused by a rush of adrenaline.
28. The cornea is the only part of the body with no blood supply – it gets its oxygen directly from the air.
29. The human body contains enough fat to make seven bars of soap.
30. Between birth and death, the human body goes from having 300 bones, to just 206.
31. The small intestine is roughly 23 feet long.
32. An average sized man eats about 33 tons of food in his/her life time which is about the weight of six elephants.
33. Nephrons, the kidney’s filtering units, clean the blood in the human body in about 45 minutes and send about six cups of urine (2000 ml) to the bladder every day.
34. One quarter of your bones are in your feet.
35. You can’t breathe and swallow at the same time.
36. The average person produces enough saliva in their lifetime to fill two swimming pools.
37. There are about ten thousand taste buds on the human tongue and in general girls have more taste buds than boys!
38. While awake, your brain produces enough electricity to power a lightbulb.
39. The left side of your brain controls the right side of your body and right side of your brain controls the left side of your body.
40. In camera terms, the human eye is about 576 megapixels.
41. Our brain is programmed to erect the inverted image formed on our retina by the convex eye lens. A newborn baby sees the world upside down till its brain starts erecting it.
42. You carry, on average, about four pounds of bacteria around in your body.
43. 50 percent of your hand strength comes from your little finger.
44. Sometimes the pain from scratching makes your body release the pain-fighting chemical serotonin. It can make the itch feel even itchier.
45. As people get older, their skin gets thinner, drier, and less elastic, hence wrinkles start appearing.
46. An adult skin weighs around 3 to 4 kgs.
47. If you spread out your skin, it would measure around 20 square feet in size, about the same size as a child’s bed sheet.
48. Diaphragm, which is a thin membrane under the lungs, sometimes twitches, causing a sudden intake of air, which is interrupted by throat closing. This is what we call hiccups.
49. In case of injury under the skin the blood vessels break and spread into the tissues near the injury. The dark colour of the blood shows through the skin as bruise.
50. A running nose is the way our body flushes out germs from our nose while we catch cold and flu.
51. On average, human body contains enough iron to make a nail 2.5 cm (1 inch) long.
52.It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it's just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible. We aren't sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because our ancestors were partly aquatic.
But perhaps the most attractive idea is that early humans needed to co-operate more when they moved out of the trees into the savanna. When animals are bred for co-operation, as we once did with wolves to produce dogs, they become more like their infants. In a fascinating 40-year experiment starting in the 1950s, Russian foxes were bred for docility. Over the period, adult foxes become more and more like large cubs, spending more time playing, and developing drooping ears, floppy tails and patterned coats. Humans similarly have some characteristics of infantile apes – large heads, small mouths and, significantly here, finer body hair.
53.Eachperson sheds 22 kilograms of skin in his or her lifetime.
54.Your body has enough iron in it to make a nail 3 inches long.
55.One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
56.During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
57.One person in 20 has an extra rib, and they are most often men.
58.There are approximately 96,000 km / 59650 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
59.A person will die from lack of sleep sooner than they will from starvation, which usually takes a few weeks.
60.You are taller in the morning; throughout the day, the cartilage between your bones is compressed, making you about 1 cm shorter by day’s end.
61.More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
62. We make around a litre of saliva every day. During our lifetime, we'll produce enough to fill two swimming pools.
63. The surface area of the human lung is the same size as a tennis court.
64. The best-selling pharmaceutical drug in the world is a brand of statin - a cholesterol-lowering drug.
65.The strongest muscles in the human body are the masseters, located either side of your mouth, which are used for chewing.
66.You can't see it, but your skin is constantly flaking. on average, people shed around 18kg of skin in their lifetime.
67. Your left lung is smaller than your right one, to make space for your heart.
68. Babies are born with 300 bones in their bodies but adults only have 206. This is because some bones fuse as you grow.
69. Your brain generates about 25 watts of power while you are awake.
70. It takes the body around 12 hours to completely digest food.
71. Fingernails grow nearly four times faster than toenails. The ones on the hand you write with grow fastest.
72. other than being burned, human hair is basically indestructible. It can't be destroyed by water (no wonder it clogs up drains!) and is resistant to many acids and corrosive chemicals.
73.Eyes stay the same size from birth - but your nose and ears grow throughout your lifetime.
74. More people die of a heart attack on oonday than any other day of the week.
75.The human scalp has around 100,000 hairs and you lose around 80 of them a day
76. The indentation between your nose and upper lip is called the philtrum.
77. Women suffer four times as many headaches as men, which is thought to be due to fluctuations in hormones.
78. The average cost of developing a new prescription drug and making it available to the public is $1.13 billion.
79. Your heart beats around 100,000 times a day.
80. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg, while the smallest is the male sperm
81. By the time they reach 60, most people have lost 50% of their taste buds.
82. The largest artery in the body, the aorta, is about the same width as a garden hose. Meanwhile, capillaries are so small, 10 of them put together are the thickness of a human hair.
83.Right-handed people live an average of nine years longer than left-handed ones.
84.A sneeze can exit your nose at 166km/h.
86. Your brain is made up of 75 to 80% water. This is why being dehydrated affects its ability to work properly.
87. As well as having unique fingerprints, we also have unique tongue prints.
88, The tooth is the only body part that can't heal itself
89.Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
90.The average person breaks wind 14 times a day.
91. The smallest bones in your body are in your ears.
92.Your thigh bone is stronger than concrete
93. When you laugh heartily, the linings of your blood vessels relax, increasing blood flow for up to 45 minutes.
94. Although your brain processes pain messages when other parts of your body hurt, it can't feel pain itself.
95. A woman's egg survives around 18 hours after being released from the ovary but sperm lasts for five to seven days after ejaculation, so depending on when you ovulate, it's possible to conceive several days after having intercourse.
96. About one person in every 20 has an extra pair of ribs.
97. The biggest muscle in your body is your gluteus maximus, in your buttock. The smallest is in your ear and is thinner than a cotton thread.
98. Your stomach gets a new lining every three days. If it didn't, the acids in your gut that digest food would also digest your stomach.
99. We're taller in the morning than in the evening. During the day, cartilage between our bones gets compressed by activities such as sitting and standing so by the end of the day, we're about 1cm shorter.
100. The cornea is the only living tissue in the body that doesn't have any blood vessels.
101.The space between your eyebrows is called the glabella.
102. Bones are about 75% water.
103.Blood accounts for about 8% of your body weight.
104. People who suffer from gum disease are twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke.
105. We start losing around 7000 brain cells a day once we turn 35. They can never be replaced.
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