The Wonders of Our Body / Basic Facts

The wonders of our body

• Blood takes 46 seconds to make one full loop around the body.

• Without saliva on the tongue you can't taste anything

• Without moisture in the nose you can't smell.

• A newborn is born with 305 bones, but as we grow many of them fuse and we end up with around 206.

• The two nostrils switch their activity every 3-4 hours.

• While one nostril is smelling, the other rests.

• The brain is only 2% of body weight, but it uses 20% of total oxygen.

• The brain consumes 20% of the food we eat and uses 15% of the total blood.

• Skin is constantly sloughing off and is completely replaced by new skin every 4 weeks.

• So we end up changing the natural, fully waterproof "leather outfit" our parents gave us about once a month.

• Over a lifetime, the skin a person sheds weighs about 48kg, and you switch to new skin roughly 1,000 times.

• We're about 0.8cm taller in the morning than in the evening.

• That's because during the day, while we stand or sit, the soft discs in the spine get flattened by body weight.

• At night they expand again.

• Our feet are largest in the evening.

• Walking all day makes feet swell without our noticing.

• So it's better to buy shoes in the evening.

• If you laid out all the blood vessels of a human in a single line, it would be 112,000km—enough to wrap around the Earth two and a half times.

• The human brain itself can't feel pain.

• Occasional headaches come from the muscles wrapped around the brain.

• A man's body is 60% water, a woman's is 54%, so women generally get drunk faster than men.

• Children grow more while they're sleeping than while they're awake.

• The odds of two fingerprints being identical are 1 in 64,000,000,000.

• So every person's fingerprint in this world is different.

• Saying a single word requires moving 72 of the body's 650 muscles.

• Men outweigh women in almost everything, with one exception—women carry more body fat.

• And that's what makes women beautiful.