15 Fascinating Facts About the Human Body
How many bones do you have? Do you know the exact number of muscles in your body? If not, here are 15 fascinating facts about the human body that will surprise and delight you. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll be an expert on all things human!
Humans are 97% water
One interesting fact about human beings is that we’re 97% water. It would be easy to assume that there’s a slight margin of error with these figures but it seems as though humans actually maintain just over 2% more water than other mammals in proportion to our body weight. This may not seem significant but consider, for a moment, an Olympic swimming pool which contains 2,500,000 gallons of water and you’ll see just how much effort we put into keeping ourselves hydrated! Humans are around 70% made up of carbon: Another interesting fact about human beings is that we’re 70% carbon.
Our bodies get bigger in summer
In order to regulate body temperature, our bodies have an internal clock that has evolved over time. This system is fine-tuned to control processes like shivering and sweating—both methods of cooling ourselves down. However, it’s surprisingly susceptible to outside temperatures, particularly humidity. When it’s hot out, our bodies will increase their core temperature by several degrees to try and keep up with the rising heat levels around us. To accomplish that goal, it needs more energy (i.e., calories). More calories means we need more food—and more water! In other words: when summer rolls around and you start craving ice cream or pop, your body is trying to compensate for all those extra calories from higher temperatures.
We lose 1.5 million cells every day
When you first read that number, it may seem like a trivial amount of cells. After all, you have over 100 trillion in your body. But consider for a moment that cells reproduce at about half that rate: roughly 500 million die every day. And with each cell dying and being replaced, there’s always a chance for something to go wrong in the replication process and cause an error. Those errors add up over time and—well, yes, 50 fascinating facts about human body . . . strange but true facts about human beings
To taste food, we need only 20 cells
Scientists have found that taste only requires 20 of our taste buds. We use these taste buds to detect five different tastes: salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami. Umami is a Japanese word for savory taste, such as from soy sauce. Our tongue has between 2,000 and 8,000 taste buds. Taste-receptor cells called gustatory receptor cells are organized into four broad categories (sweet, saltiness or savoriness, bitterness and sourness). Each cell may react to more than one type of chemical. To find out which chemicals each cell reacts to researchers put tiny amounts of food on each cell. They then tested each cell with known chemicals until they could determine which chemicals activated that specific taste bud—to find out what foods we like best!
If you couldn’t blink, it would take 10 days to read this sentence
The human body is so complex that if you were unable to blink for one day and night, it would take 10 days of non-stop reading at a rate of 250 words per minute (the approximate reading speed of most people in industrialized countries) just to read through your genes. The human body contains around 100,000 miles of blood vessels, enough to circle Earth more than twice. Humans have a total of 46 chromosomes (23 pairs). Of these 23 pairs, 22 are autosomes and one pair is sex chromosomes: X and Y. A cat’s purr is actually a form of communication that helps heal bones and muscles by creating low-frequency vibrations.
Our noses can remember 50,000 different scents
It's thought that humans are capable of distinguishing somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 different odors. While we may not be able to distinguish all of them, we have an amazing ability to recall smells. The human nose is estimated to have around five million olfactory receptors. It’s believed that everyone has their own signature scent which others can identify as belonging uniquely to us. Our sense of smell is connected directly with our memory and emotions; being able to identify scents allows us not only to remember times in our lives but also remember who or what was present at these moments.
By age 20, humans will have lost half their taste buds
Humans lose approximately 50 to 70 percent of their taste buds by age 20. This is because after early childhood, a person will stop growing new ones. But as we get older, our tastebuds also begin to die off—and so does our sense of taste. Since there are only about 10,000 taste buds in an adult’s mouth, it means that humans have a limited number of opportunities to learn and experience flavors. In addition to that fact, people over 60 or so often complain about food tasting bland or losing their appetite—this is likely because they aren’t able to fully enjoy their food!
Over 200,000 miles of blood vessels exist inside the human body
The human circulatory system is responsible for transporting nutrients and oxygen to every cell in your body. It also carries waste products away from your cells and returns a constant supply of blood cells to you. Over 200,000 miles of blood vessels—which are made up of arteries, capillaries, and veins—make up your circulatory system. You have several major arteries that carry blood away from your heart to all parts of your body. Each one splits into smaller ones as it gets farther away from your heart. Small blood vessels called capillaries are extremely tiny; they only allow red blood cells to pass through them. When nutrients enter these capillaries, they immediately enter into our bodies' tissues and become available for use by our cells.
A male sperm cell can swim up to nine inches during its lifetime
If a man’s sperm is going to make a baby, it better be good. Male sperm typically live three to five days in the female reproductive tract. When they finally die, they are replaced by millions of new sperm. The average male releases approximately 280 million sperm during sex. That sounds like a lot, but not if you consider that one ejaculation contains more than 1 billion sperm cells. As if that weren’t impressive enough, research shows that 20 percent of all men are super-fertile, meaning their swimmers can last for up to nine inches during their lifetime! This means that for these men and their partners, pregnancy can happen after just one sexual encounter.
Each cell in our body dies and replaces itself within seven years
That's right. The body you have now isn't necessarily exactly like it was seven years ago; every cell in your body has been replaced. Remember though, some cells live much longer than others—our red blood cells for example, have a life span of about 120 days, and our white blood cells can live up to five years.
There are more bacteria inside us than there are human cells
The human body is host to trillions of bacteria—and most of them are good for us. They live in our guts, mouths, and skin. But it’s hard to say exactly how many there are. One estimate, from 2012, puts it at 30 trillion—about 10 times as many cells as there are in a human body. And one study found that humans carry 3 million types of bacteria—100 times more than we’d previously thought. That means there could be 2 million different species inside you right now!
Our brains make up 2% of our weight but use 20% of our energy
Our brains only weigh about 3 pounds but take up a whopping 2% of our body weight. Our brains require 20% of our resting metabolic rate—the amount of energy we need to keep breathing and heart beating at rest. In comparison, our muscles only require about 20% of resting metabolic rate. All that thinking burns a lot of calories! click here for more...
15 Fascinating Facts About the Human Body
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