Our bodies are perfect machines, performing thousands of processes every minute while we are reading, for example, this article. And we don’t even know about the majority of them.
Here are a few unbelievable facts about our bodies that will definitely surprise you.
- Newborns don’t have kneecaps. They exist at first as soft cartilage tissue that becomes hard only by the age of 3.
- The cornea is the only part of the human body that gets oxygen not from blood but straight from the air.
- It’s impossible to laugh if you try to tickle yourself. Your cerebellum would send signals to ignore the irritation to other parts of your brain.
- The human brain uses 20% of the oxygen and 50% of the glucose that enters the body. It also spends a 20% share of the total amount of energy. By the way, the famous theory that claims we use only 10% of our brain is nothing but a myth: in fact, we use all the parts of our brain, and they are active practically all the time.
- “Snow blindness” is a condition where a person is unable to see because of bright light.
- The majority of people breathe with only one nostril at a time. We change our “leading” nostril every 4 hours.
- Despite a lot of opinions, it is twice as difficult to reduce muscle size than gain it.
- 25% of all our muscles are situated in the neck and face area. Thanks to this, our facial expressions are rich and versatile.
- The hair of red-haired women is used to make hygrometers (devices for measuring air humidity).
- Our brain can provide enough energy to light up a light bulb.
- Despite the widespread opinion that color blindness is a gender-related condition and only men suffer from it, it is also found in 0.4% of women (up to 8% of men have this condition). However, the gene of color blindness is inherited only from mothers.
- In order to make only a single step forward, our body uses more than 200 muscles working consequently. This number may vary depending on personal anatomy peculiarities.
- Human skin regenerates itself every 28 days. During our lives, we “shed” approximately 40 kg of skin.
- A newborn baby has more than 270 bones. During the process of growing, some of these bones merge into each other. There are around 206 bones in an adult’s body.
- The life cycle of a human hair is from 2 to 5 years long. However, some hairs can live up to 7 years.
- During one year, the human heart pumps through enough blood to fill an Olympic swimming pool (over 2.5 million liters), and it makes 38.5 million contractions.
- The liver is one of a few organs in our body that is able to restore its initial size, even after losing 75% of its tissue.
These are just a few examples of the amazing abilities of the human body. For example, if you spent 2 minutes reading this article, you have blinked about 40 times.
