21 Facts About The Human Body

By Ralph Kratzer

Hello reader, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you have an amazing body!

That’s not a clumsy compliment, I really mean your body is a marvel of nature. It’s something we take for granted everyday, but the human body is a remarkably complex machine. It’s capable of things that are absolutely astonishing. Here are 21 facts about the human body.

1. The muscles we use to focus our eyes move close to 100,000 times every day. It would take a 50-mile walk to give your legs the same workout!

2. There are enough bacteria in your belly to form an ecosystem the size of an entire rainforest.

3. An average person produces more than 23,000 litres of saliva in a lifetime; that’s enough to fill up a swimming pool!

4. The human nose can accurately remember close to 50,000 different smells.

5. A red blood cell can travel through your entire body in just 20 seconds. That is really fast!

6. The entire blood of a human circulates every day 1440 times through the body.

7. The human eye is so sensitive to light that, if the Earth was flat, we could see a candle from almost 30 miles away!

8. We’re all actually super strong, our brain just limits the output our muscles provide to protect them from harming themselves. During an adrenaline rush, however, these limits are removed. This is what makes people capable of unbelievable physical feats, when they are in danger of life.

9. The average adult is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

10. The human eye is an extremely sophisticated optical device. It can can distinguish about 10 million different colours, and is capable of processing more information than any telescope could.

11. We’re the best long distance runners on the planet, which was once very useful to chaseprey until it died of exhaustion.

12. Our bodies are bioluminescent, that means, they glow slightly in the dark. Unfortunately, the light emitted is far too weak to be detected by human eyes.

13. As a baby, you had 60 more bones than you have as an adult.

14. Love is a drug. When you’re in love, the brain releases the same neurotransmitters and hormones that would be released if you took amphetamines.

15. We’re all bananas! Really though, around 50% of our DNA is shared with bananas.

16. Our brains produce enough electrical current to power a light bulb. Is this why having a great idea in cartoons is shown as a light bulb?

17. Roughly 10% of your life will be spent with your eyes closed from blinking.

18. The strongest muscle in the human body is the masseter, a muscle that works the jaw.

19. If it were a computer, the human brain could perform 38 thousand-trillion operations per second! The world’s most powerful supercomputer, BlueGene, can only do about .002% of that.

20. Every second, your body produces 25 million new cells. At that rate, it takes just 20 seconds to produce more cells than the entire population of the European Union.