If you work as a healthcare professional, you deal with the human body all day long.
You understand what gets it sick and what gets it well. But chances are, there are plenty of things you don’t know about the amazing human body.
Here are 10 cool facts that may blow your mind:
- The average human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels inside of it. That’s enough to circumnavigate the Earth two and a half times!
- Are you someone who blushes when they become embarrassed? Know that every time you do, the lining of your stomach blushes as well.
- While you may only be able to read 100 words per minute, your brain can read up to 1,000 words per minute.
- You know that there are thousands of bacteria in your gut, but did you know there are also thousands in your belly button? Enough to form an ecosystem the size of an entire rain forest.
- When human beings fall in love, their brain releases the same cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones that are released by amphetamines. This is what makes our hearts beat faster, and causes a loss of appetite and sleep, and intense feelings of excitement.
- The human eye technically has the ability to see ultraviolet light. It’s just that our eye lens filters out this natural ability. Some people have undergone surgery to remove this lens so they can detect ultraviolet light.
- An adult is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms. To put that into some kind of perspective, there are only about 300,000,000,000 (300 billion) stars in our galaxy. Let that sink in.
- Did you ever wonder why someone can suddenly lift a car that has dropped onto a loved one and is crushing them? Where does that strength come from? It turns out our muscles are far more powerful than they seem to be. Human strength is intentionally limited to protect our muscles and tendons from harming themselves. But, this limitation is removed during an adrenaline rush, and makes people seem like they have super human strength.
- The amount of heat given off by the human body in just 30 minutes is enough to bring one gallon of water to a boil. If you always wanted to considered hot, now you can be.
- A single human sperm contains the 37.5mb of male DNA required to create a human child. That means an average ejaculation sees the transfer of 1,500 terabytes of information.
The human body… ain’t it neat?
