40 Amazing Facts About The Human Body

The human body is an incredibly complex and intricate system and it still baffles researchers regularly despite thousands of years of medical knowledge. As a result, it shouldn't be a surprise that even body parts we deal with everyday have unexpected facts and explanations behind them.
Here are 100 wacky facts about the human body:
1. The brain is more active at night than during the day. Scientists don't know yet why this is.

2. The higher your IQ, the more you dream.

3. Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body.

4. The nail on the middle finger grows faster than the other fingernails.

5. Fingernails grow nearly four times faster than toe nails.

6. The lifespan of a human hair is 3 to 7 years on average.

7. The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve zinc. It doesn't destroy the stomach because because the stomach walls constantly renews itself.

8. Women's hearts beat faster than men's.

9. Women blink twice as many times as men do.

10. Women are born better smellers than men and remain better smellers over life.

11. Men burn fat faster than women by a rate of about 50 calories a day.

12. Men get hiccups more often than women.

13. A man has approximately 6.8 litres of blood in the body while women have approximately 5 litres.

14. The largest cell in the body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm.

15. During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.

16. Babies are always born with blue eyes. The melanin in their eyes needs time to be fully deposited or to be darkened by ultraviolet light to reveal the baby's true eye color.

17. Men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep. This is because the combination of blood circulation and testerone production can cause erections during sleep and are a necessary part of REM sleep.

18. After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp.

19. If your saliva cannot dissolve or mix with food, you will not be able to taste that food (try tasting something after drying off your tongue)

20. Noise causes the pupils of your eyes to dilate. Even very small noises can do this.

21. Everyone has a unique smell, unique finger print and unique tongue print.

22. By age 60, most people will have lost half their taste buds.

23. Your eyes remain the same size after birth but your nose and ears never stop growing.

24. A simple, moderately severe sunburn burns the blood vessels extensively.

25. We are about 1cm taller in the mornings than in the evenings.

26. The strongest muscle in the body is the human tongue.

27. The hardest bone in the human body is the jaw bone.

28. The hands and feet contains almost half of the total bones in the human body.

29. About 32 million bacteria call every inch of your skin home, but they are mostly harmless and some of them are even helpful.

30. Humans shed and regrow outer skin every 27 days.

31. Three hundred million cells die in the human body every minute and everyday and adult produces 300 billion new cells.

32. The colder the room you sleep, the higher the chances are that you would get a nightmare.

33. Humans are the only species that produce emotional tears.

34. All babies are color blind at birth, they see only black and white.

35. The only part of your body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It gets its oxygen directly from air.

36. A normal human being can survive 20 days without eating but can survive only 2 days without drinking.

37. It is impossible to kill yourself by choking yourself with your hands.

38. Everybody has one strong eye and one weak eye.

39. Your skeleton keeps renewing itself every ten years which means that every ten years you get a new skeleton.

40. The human feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.

Louis Pasteur Did Not Invent Pasteurization

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” —George Bernard Shaw

In A Nutshell

Most people erroneously believe that Louis Pasteur was the inventor of pasteurization, but he merely improved upon the method which had been in place for decades. At the end of the 18th century, Nicolas Appert actually began pasteurizing foods and was the first person to do so. He was even rewarded by Napoleon for his efforts.

The Whole Bushel

Louis Pasteur is credited with being an amazing scientist and he is sometimes called “the father of microbiology” thanks to his germ theories of fermentation and disease. He is also the namesake of pasteurization, the process used to inhibit microbial growth in food. However, Pasteur is not the true inventor at all—he just took an existing method and improved upon it in 1864, scientifically documenting times and temperatures to come up with a better balance between taste and safety.

The true inventor of the process is Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner, who began experimenting with various ways of preserving food, finally discovering pasteurization’s benefits in 1795. Basically, Appert would put the item in a glass jar, hermetically seal it, and submerge it in boiling water for a length of time which Appert himself determined on his own. It was rather effective, enabling the food to last for a much longer amount of time before spoiling, but the taste was greatly diminished because Appert boiled it at too high of a temperature for too long.

In 1800, Napoleon offered 12,000 francs (equivalent to over $200,000 today) as a prize to anyone who could come up with a better way for him to feed his army. Appert submitted his method and won, but Napoleon refused to let him publish his methods for 10 years, as he felt it held too much strategic importance for his army.

Amazing Dolphin Superpowers

Everyone loves dolphins. They’re intelligent, inquisitive, playful creatures who have captivated people since the dawn of time. But dolphins didn’t get to be everyone’s favorite aquatic mammal just by lounging around all day. Having to adapt to life in the harsh ocean environment requires some serious skills. As a result dolphins, have developed some incredible abilities that continue to amaze researchers.

10Sleeplessness

Everything needs sleep. The human world record holder, Randy Gardner, stayed awake for 11 days straight. By the fourth day, he was hallucinating. Not sleeping will eventually kill you and every other mortal creature with higher brain functions—except dolphins, which have apparently found a way around sleep. Baby dolphins actually forgo sleep for the first month of life—and so, therefore, do their parents.

The trick is that these amazing sea critters can shut half of their brain off at a time. Scientists tested dolphin reactions without rest for five days straight and their reaction time never slowed. Blood tests for signs of stress or sleep deprivation turned up negative. Dolphins may be able to do this indefinitely.

Another study showed that dolphins can use their sonar for 15 days straightwith almost perfect accuracy. It makes sense that dolphins evolved a way to keep an eye out for predators while they’re dozing in the open ocean. But the truly fascinating part about all of this is that tests showed visual information was being passed from the snoozing side to the active side. Even though they shut down half of their noggin at a time, the other half can take over all the functions. It’s almost as if they have two brains.

9Vision

Everyone knows about dolphins and sonar. With those trademark clicks and squeaks they use sound to perceive the world around them. You would think that would mean their other faculties would be diminished. But in fact, they have better eyesight than we do. To start, dolphins have an eye on each side of their head, which gives them a panoramic visual range of 300 degrees. They can see behind themselves, and each eye can move independently of the other, meaning they can look two different directions at the same time. They also have a reflective layer of cells just behind the retina called thetapetem lucidem. This helps them to see exceptionally well in low light. And as if all of that wasn’t enough, dolphins can see just as well out of the water as in it.

8Skin

Why aren’t dolphins covered in barnacles? Whales are coated in the things, but the dolphin family seem to be immune. Look at Flipper or Shamu (killer whales are just big dolphins by the way): They’re clean and glassy smooth. So what’s their secret? Super skin.

Dolphin’s unique skin gives them all kinds of advantages. To start, while their epidermis is no tougher than ours, it is about 10 to 20 times thicker than any land animal. It also grows about nine times faster than ours. An entire layer of skin is replaced every two hours. This rapid skin regeneration helps to keep dolphins smooth, silky, and hydrodynamic. Dolphins also have microscopic ripples in their skin, which help them travel faster through the water and prevent parasites from grabbing hold. But the real secret of why dolphins are so clean is that they secrete a special gel, which resists the mucus that barnacles and their ilk cling on with. So dolphins are covered in some sort of natural glue solvent. Even if something does find a way to latch on, this dolphin grease also contains enzymes that attack parasites.

7Respiration

It turns out that dolphins are pretty good swimmers. The bottlenose can hold its breath for 12 minutes and dive nearly 550 meters (1800 ft). Part of the reason dolphins can do this is because they’ve got incredible lungs. Though they aren’t much bigger than our own, they’re much more efficient. With each breath, a dolphin exchanges 80 percent or more of its lung air. We puny humans can only get out about 17 percent. Their blood and muscles can store and transport more of that oxygen, too. This is because they havemore red blood cells, which in turn have greater concentrations of hemoglobin than we do.

But this still doesn’t fully explain how dolphins can hold their breath for so long and dive so deep. To accomplish this feat, they can also restrict where their blood circulates. During long dives, blood is shunted away from the extremities and sent to the heart and brain. All nonessential tissues are cut off and forced to rely on their own internal supplies.

6Healing

Dolphin healing is pretty much impossible. Seriously, scientific opinion can besummed up as “its healing is almost alien compared to what we are capable of.” They’ve been known to survive wounds the size of basketballs, and they will regrow that huge chunk of flesh in a couple of weeks, actually returning to the original contours instead of leaving a gaping scar. They don’t just heal,they regenerate. Their recuperative abilities have been likened to fetuses in the womb. But besides Wolverine-esque recovery skills, dolphins don’t bleed out either. Typically, when someone takes a shovelful of flesh out of your side you’ll hemorrhage to death. However, it’s believed dolphins use the same mechanics that enable them to dive to great depths to help themconstrict blood vessels to stem the flow.

5

Pain

Dolphins don’t care about little inconveniences like mind-numbing agony. After receiving crippling injuries that would incapacitate just about any other creature on Earth, dolphins have been observed playing, swimming, and feeding normally. They give no outward signs of the gaping wound full of exposed nerve endings that should be screaming bloody murder. And it’s not that they don’t feel pricks and pokes. Dolphins are just as sensitive as we are. But when inflicted with a serious wound they shrug it off. It’s believed they must be able to produce natural morphine-strength painkillers . . . that are nonaddictive.

Try losing a bucket’s worth of flesh then going back to work in the morning with only your body’s natural painkillers to tide you over and see how that works out for you. Since predators go after the weak, not showing pain or distress makes evolutionary sense. If you just got a hole the size of a melon blown in you, you really don’t want to advertise that fact to any sharks that might be lurking nearby.

4Thrust

In 1936, famed British zoologist Sir James Gray was amazed by how fast dolphins could swim. He’d studied their anatomy extensively and the best he could guess at was that dolphin skin had to have some sort of magical anti-drag properties. This was known as “Gray’s paradox,” and it wasn’t officially solved until 2008.

Gray wasn’t completely wrong—dolphins do have anti-drag properties, but he grossly underestimated the power that a dolphin’s muscles produce. Olympic swimmers can produce about 60 or 70 pounds of thrust in the water. A dolphin moving at average speed hits 200. Swimming at full tilt, these aquatic speed demons can produce 300 to 400 pounds of thrust. That’s over five times what the most physically fit person on earth can do. And dolphins are extremely energy efficient, too. A human can only convert about four percent of their energy into forward momentum in the water. Dolphins, on the other hand, can turn 80 percent of their energy into thrust, making them some of the most efficient swimmers in the ocean.

3Infection

Dolphins are able to swim with open wounds in the bacteria-riddled ocean and not die of infection. And the incredibly filthy teeth of sharks don’t bother them much either. Without hospitalization, humans would die of sepsis within a few days of a shark bite . But dolphins seem to do just fine. In fact, they won’t get any infection at all, which has been described as no less than “miraculous.” And yet dolphins have an immune system similar to ours, so how have they acquired this super resilience?

Well, no one really knows. The best guess that science has is that dolphins have managed to siphon off antibiotics made by plankton and algae. Chemicals produced by these microscopic creatures have been found in dolphin blubber. As the blubber decomposes at the site of the wound, it gives off these natural antibacterial substances. How they can store these lifesaving chemicals just under their skin instead of metabolizing or excreting them is still a mystery.

2Magnetic Sense

Why do dolphins and whales strand themselves on beaches? It’s a mystery that has confounded researchers for years. Theories include some strange disease, pollution, or military sonar testing. But autopsies have not produced a smoking gun. And when you take into account that strandings have been recorded for hundreds of years, it probably rules out humans as the cause. Now, some researchers are beginning to suspect that it’s all the sun’s fault.

Dolphins and whales have magnetite crystals in their brain to help them sense the magnetic field of the earth. With this built-in GPS, they can navigate the featureless oceans with ease. One group of researchers plotted stranding spots along the US East Coast and found that they coincided with places where local magnetic rock reduces the Earth’s magnetic field. So a deep-sea dolphin or whale that depends on its magnetic sense might not see the shore till it’s too late. Other evidence suggests that when the sun throws too much radiation our way, it also screws up the magnetic senses of aquatic mammals. Researchers at the University of Kiel have shown that most beachings correlate with the portions of the sun’s solar cycle that produce a higher flux of radiation. This might explain why rescued dolphins and whales will often turn around and beach themselves again.

1Electroreception

Dolphin sonar is pretty incredible. The ability to detect objects from a distance through some sort of aquatic beatboxing is just amazing. And combined with the other senses we’ve already covered, dolphins have some of the keenest senses of any animal on the planet. Yet Mother Nature isn’t done with these sea critters. They can boast one other super sense:electroreception. Dolphins can actually sense the electrical impulses given off by all living things.

Guiana dolphins live around the coast of South America and resemble the common bottlenose. Researchers discovered a depression on their rostrum (snout) that can detect electrical impulses given off by the muscles of fish. Scientists liken the sensitivity of its electroreception to that of a platypus. They probably use this ability to search for fish hiding in the mud. Sonar is great for detecting objects at a distance, but not so much when you get up close. Scientists suspect that all dolphins and even some whales may have this ability.