The Human Body

Amazing things we should know about our bodies. Here’s some points I heard from BBC TV programme:

• A baby’s skull is made up of 22 different bones.
• The milk produced in a mother’s breast can be activated merely by the sound of the baby crying.
• The top speed of a crawling baby is about 2 kilometer an hour.
• The average baby crawls about 200 meters a day.
• When they first learn to speak, babies use a completely different part of the brain than the adults.
• The average toddler learns 10 new words a day

An Everyday Miracle

• Every day over 100 million acts of sexual intercourse take place in the world and these results in around 910,000 conceptions.
• There are about 500 million sperm in a single ejaculation.
• 5 out of 6 embryos do not survive beyond eight weeks in the womb.
• During pregnancy the uterus increase up to 20 times its normal size, and the blood supply increases by more than a third

LIFE STORY

• Spend 2 and half years eating.
• Produce 40,000 liters of urine and spend more than 6 months on the loo.
• Kiss for 2 weeks.
• Grow 28 meters of finger nails.
• Grow 950 kilometers of hair on the head, and 2 meters up the nose.
• Be able to name 2,000 people and call 150 of them friends.
• Shed 19 kilograms of dead skin.
• Have sex 2,580 times – with five different people.
• Fall in love twice.
• Have two children and four grandchildren.
• Love for 79 years.
• Talk continuously for 12 years

The End of life

• Each 50 minutes, theres around a billion cells in your body will die.
• We now live twice as long as we did 100 years ago.
• Heart disease is the cause of death for one quarter of the western world.
• The human heart pumps 7,500 liters of blood a day.
• The small arteries that supply blood to the heart are less than a millimeter wide.
• Without a supply of blood, the brain fails within 5 minutes.

AS TIME GOES BY

• On average, a young person’s skin is 0.5mm thick. older skin is 25% thicker.
• The hairs in your ears that register high frequencies die off first, so that by the age of 10 we have heard a greater range of sounds than we will hear in the rest of our lives.
• By the age of 70, we have lost a third of our muscle strength.
• The body is constantly repairing itself – the lining of the gut is totally renewed every 3 days, blood is replaced 3 times a year, and the parts of the skeleton are regenerated every 4 years.

Brain Power

• The brain uses up on fifth of all the food that we consume.
• As a brain cell fires, the electric impulse travels at 400km an hour.
• The brain is made of 100 billion cells, or neurons. Together they can generate enough electricity to illuminate a light bulb.
• The average person can remember a million different items.

Raging Teen

• Each ovary contains 100,00 eggs.
• The testes produce 1,000 sperm every second.
• Girls’ hips end up 4 cm wider than the boys’ – crucially this is just big enough for a baby’s head to squeeze through.
• Public hairs grow for just 6 months, so when they die and drop out, they’re still short. hair on the head grows for 7 years.