About 70% of an adult’s body is water.
100 Mind-Blowing Body Facts
Every step you take uses 200 different muscles in the body.
Some sharks like great whites can raise their body temperature to gain speed and strength.
Human teeth are the only part of the body that can’t heal themselves. Teeth are not made of live tissue and are coated in enamel, which can’t spontaneously regenerate.
Cat urine glows under a black light. Black lights can be used to detect any body fluids, but cat urine glows particularly bright under ultraviolet light primarily because it contains the element phosphorus.
The smallest bone in the human body is the stapes bone in the ear. Damage to this bone may cause partial or complete hearing loss.
Compared to all other human parts, human teeth do not have the power to heal themselves Since teeth are coated in enamel and not made of live tissue, they cannot heal on their own like other parts of the body.
The circulatory system is more than 60,000 miles long. Veins, arteries and capillaries. One weird fact about the human body is that a child’s circulatory system stretches out to 60,000 miles long. By the time they’re adults, it stretches out to 100,000 miles of blood vessels.
The cornea is one of two parts of the human body without blood vessels. Coming in as another weird fact about the human body is the cornea and the cartilage do not have blood vessels.
In your body, there are more bacterial cells than human cells. The average person is made up of around 56 per cent bacteria.
During the hot summer, our nails grow faster. This weird fact about the human body is because of the increased blood flow to our fingertips.
Dead cells in the human body are eaten by other cells in our body. White blood cells, and phagocytes, consume the dead cells. It’s their job.
The body has 2.5 million sweat pores.
Octopuses have three hearts. One pumps blood around the body, while the other two pump it to the gills. Oh, and that blood is blue, thanks to high copper levels!
Fleas can jump 350 times its body length.
On average, the human body is made up of 60% water.
The body’s largest organ is the skin.
It takes your body about 12 hours to fully digest food.
About half of the bones in your body are in your hands and feet.
You could survive for a couple of minutes in a leaky spacesuit. Although films such as Total Recall show instant explosions and rapidly puffed-up spacesuits, the effects of being exposed to space are slightly less dramatic. Although it would be unpleasant, you could survive for a couple of minutes. After around 10 seconds, you would lose consciousness. The lower pressure of the vacuum would cause your blood to boil, along with other body fluids (the moisture on your tongue, for example) – but this boiling alone would not be fatal due to the pressure maintained by our blood vessels themselves. Gas bubbles would form in your bodily fluids, causing your body to swell up and bloat. The low humidity of space would cause you to cool down rapidly, and your eyes may freeze over. Within one to two minutes, the lack of oxygen would be deadly. The stress of the situation may make these symptoms worse – you would become oxygen-deprived more quickly. A rapid decompression would cause damage to your lungs, eardrums and sinuses, along with bruising and bleeding from soft tissues.
Jupiter’s magnetic field is bigger than the Moon. The region of space in which a mass’s magnetic field dominates is known as its magnetosphere. These regions surround planets, pulsars and even our Galaxy. The planets in our Solar System have magnetospheres that interact with and are shaped by the charged particles in the wind streaming from our Sun. The largest magnetosphere in our Solar System surrounds Jupiter. Jupiter rotates very fast and has a very strong magnetic field, and its magnetosphere is filled with plasma from its volcanically active moon, Io. These features, coupled with the fact that the solar wind is slower and less dense at Jupiter than at Earth, lead to a very sizeable Jovian magnetosphere. It is easily big enough to contain a body the size of our Sun and, if visible, would be larger than the Moon in our night sky; quite an achievement considering that it is over 1,500 times farther away.
Sloths cannot shiver to stay warm, and so have difficulty maintaining their body temperature on rainy days.
The human body contains almost 100 trillion cells.
Manatees use their flippers to walk along the bottom of the body of water, feeling for food. When they find it, they scoop it up toward their mouths with their flipper.
A shark doesn’t contain any bones in its body.
Our average body temperature declines as we age.
The human body is made up of about 37 trillion cells.
The Moon is drifting away from Earth. You read that correctly! The Moon is gradually drifting away from Earth at a rate of approximately 4 cm per year. This phenomenon is caused by the Moon pulling on Earth’s oceans creating tidal forces that produce a bulge of water on the side of Earth facing the Moon. This bulge in turn creates a gravitational pull on the Moon, causing it to accelerate slightly and move further away from Earth. Over time, this process has caused the Moon to move farther away from Earth each year. This gradual drift is not noticeable on a day-to-day basis, but over millions of years, it can have significant effects on Earth’s rotation. Today, most scientists believe the Moon is ‘Earth’s child’ – a large body collided with Earth, destroying our planet’s mantle and sending material into orbit from which the Moon formed. This ‘big splash’ theory would explain why the Moon’s rocks are similar to those on Earth. Bonus fun fact: Australia is wider than the Moon. The Moon sits at 3400 km in diameter, while Australia’s diameter from east to west is almost 4000 km. The Moon, as a sphere, has more surface area, but it’s still pretty impressive.
Newborn babies are incredibly different from what they will grow up to be. At birth, a baby’s head is approximately one-quarter of its body weight. The baby’s brain will also double in size in one year. Babies also have 300 bones while adults have 206.
Sea slugs are almost invincible. If something severs the head of a sea slug from the body, a new body grows.
A chameleon’s tongue is at least as long as its body, but it can grab prey in a fraction of a second.
Cat fleas can jump to a height of up to 60 times their body length.
Get this – axolotls can regrow their body parts. Yep, you read that correctly and this isn’t the stuff of science fiction. If axolotls become injured they, like some other species of salamanders, can regrow missing limbs, including hands, feet and even tails. They can also regrow organs. This unique ability means they’re regularly used for scientific research.
The tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body.
A flea can jump 350 times its body length, the equivalent of a human jumping the length of a football field.
The biggest tapeworm found inside a human body was 35 meters long.
Koalas may be cute, but they’re incredibly dumb. No, they have one of the smallest brains out of all mammals, and that’s in proportion to their body weight too! Their restrictive diet of non-nutritious eucalyptus leaves may be the cause, as this diet couldn’t possibly sustain a larger brain. To give you an idea of how clueless they are, when a koala is presented with a branch with leaves and a pile of leaves on a plate, they will eat the leaves on the branch as they cannot recognise those on the plate as food.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs thought he didn’t have body odour. Steve Jobs, genius as he was, had some interesting beliefs. For example, he was vegetarian and flirted with being a vegan and a fruitarian at various points for much of his life. He believed that his vegan diet prevented any form of body odour – something that his co-workers were quick to disagree with!
The quietest place on Earth is in Minnesota. Pretty much wherever you go in the world, there’s always going to be some sort of background noise, whether that’s the chirp of crickets or the slow, lazy whoosh of a gentle breeze. That’s the case everywhere except Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where something called an anechoic chamber lies. While the background noise in a tranquil bedroom measures somewhere around 30 decibels, Orfield Laboratories anechoic chamber recorded an average of -13 decibels – that’s so quiet that the inner workings of your body are audible.
About a quarter of the bones in your body are in your feet.
Skin is your body’s largest organ.
The beard has the fastest-growing hair on the human body.
99% of the human body is space.
The hardest working muscle in your body is your heart—it pumps more than 2,000 gallons of blood a day and beats more than 2.5 billion times in a 70-year lifespan.
Individual people can experience time differently, too. You’ve probably noticed how time seems to speed up when you’re racing against a deadline or having fun, and how it tends to drag when you’re bored. This is because when you’re focused on something, like a big work project or a party, your brain pays less attention to how time passes. But when you’re bored, or your brain is less stimulated, you become more aware of the passing of time, making it feel slower. One study proposed that dopamine—the neurotransmitter and hormone that helps us feel happy—may be an additional culprit. It showed that increased dopamine production, which happens when you’re enjoying something, may slow down your body’s internal clock, making time feel like it’s flying by.
Einstein’s theory also states that gravity can warp time. If you’ve seen the 2014 movie Interstellar, this concept may seem familiar. The closer you are to a massive body—which, in the case of Interstellar, is a giant black hole—the slower time will pass for you.