Hannah Riley
In the market for some cool and gross body facts? You’re in the right place. Well, maybe a doctor’s office or something might be more reliable, but we’re really happy you trust us for your science knowledge.
Here’s a bonus fact you won’t get from some boring ‘doctor’: If you stretched out your intestines they would reach all the way back to the cabin you were murdered in.
1. You can live “normally” with half your brain. In some severe drug resistant epileptic syndrome in young kids, the only option to stop the seizures is to remove a complete brain hemisphere.
2. If you faint at the sight of your own blood you may have an oversensitive vasovagal response. The theory is that this developed as a survival mechanism, kind of like an opposum playing dead.
3. You can poop out of your mouth if your intestines get backed up enough. It’s like vomit, doesn’t look like actual poop per se, but it’s still disgusting.
4. Jaw muscles are the strongest in the human body
5. Some women can feel the exact moment an egg is released from the ovary during ovulation. Feels like a little pop just on one side. Pretty neat
6. It only takes about 15 pounds of force to rip off a human ear
7. 39% of people have an extra bone in their knee. 100 years ago only 11% of people had this bone.
8. Human eggs are small but big enough to be visible to the human eye
9. You will sooner die from lack of sleep than lack of food.You can live, depending on your current body fat and health level, for months without food. Estimates are you that you will die for lack of sleep within 2 weeks
10. The human body typically only uses 30% of its muscle’s strength. The only times where your body will activate full power is when it’s life or death. The cost of full muscle power is torn muscles, broken bone, stress, and in some cases, lacerations.
11. Humans are one of a few species of mammal that oddly don’t produce their own vitamin C due to lack of a certain enzyme. Other mammalian species who exhibit this mutation are those contained in the main primate suborder Haplorhinni (monkeys, apes, tarsiers), as well as bats, capybaras, and guinea pigs.All other mammals produce vitamin C in the liver.
12. It’s possible to pull a jaw muscle while yawning. I found this out the hard way at work one day.
13. Synovial joint fluid is the most frictionless stuff on the planet (unless they’ve synthetic’ed something up that recently.)
14. Every minute you shed over 30,000 dead skin cells off your body
15. Humans have stripes, we just normally can’t see them. They’re called Blaschko’s lines and form along the paths of embryonic cell migration. The stripes are sort of U-shaped down our front, V-shaped on our back, wavy on the head and face and we have basic, simple stripes on our extremities.
16. Humans are bioluminescent and glow in the dark, but the light that we emit is 1,000 times weaker than our human eyes are able to pick up.
17. Your eyes have a separate immune system from the rest of your body and in a lot of occasions if your body’s immune system finds your eyes, they will assume they are a foreign body and blind you.
18. Your brain continues to try to revive the body long after the heart has stopped. In some cases 30 hours later there has been found brain activity trying to make repairs to bring the body back. This is used to indicate time of death in murder victims.
19. You can grow a new human being faster than most missing toenails can grow back
20. When you cry and your nose becomes runny, it’s actually your tears.
21. The surface area of the lungs is about the same size as a tennis court
22. The reason it’s so easy to break your collar bone is because its designed to break.The way it was explained to me is that its like a circuit breaker. It breaks there to stop the shock of impact getting to your spine
23. “The heart smells like mushrooms. (Source: I’m a cardiac anesthesiologist)”
24. People who live in “extreme” conditions for generations adapt in extreme ways. For example people that live in high elevations often have larger lungs and different blood makeup. Or my favorite is the Bajau people that live on the water and spend a lot of their time diving, their spleens have become 50% larger in order to store more blood.
25. When doing surgery where the doctors have to take out some organs, when placing them back, they don’t have to be put back In the exact position there meant to be, your body kind of just, moves the organs into the correct position after the surgery
26. You hate the sound of your recorded voice because it’s missing the low frequency you’re used to hearing.When you talk, you hear your voice as it goes to the air and back to you ear. It also goes through your skull to your ear, and this bone conduction mechanism transmits the low frequencies better than air does.Your recorded voice only has the air transmitted sound. That causes the dissonance between what you think your voice sounds like, and what it really does. It’s also why your voice will (almost) always be higher pitch than you think.
27. Humans have, on average, just as many hairs on their body as chimpanzees, human hair is just a lot shorter and finer.
28. Your brain regulates how strong your muscles are. If your leg muscles were to contract at full strength, they would snap your femur.Its why people in emergencies on adrenaline can lift cars off children. Your body is capable of great strength, but it could also severely damage you, so your brain keeps you a weak, soft bag of jelly.
29. Our brains make up, on average, around 2% of our body weight but consume 20% of our caloric intake
30. The eyeball is the fastest healing part of your body.
