Amazing facts about the human body

Here is a collection of unusual health trivia ranging from anatomical facts to medical anecdotes gathered from various sources. The human body is like a machine that is full of wonder. Did you know that…

• The human brain cell can hold five times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica? 

• The average number of nerve cells (neurons) in the brain is 100 billion.

• The brain is soft and gelatinous — its consistency is something between jelly and cooked pasta.

• Though it makes up only two percent of our total body weight, the brain demands 20 percent of the body’s oxygen and calories.

• The time until unconsciousness after loss of blood supply to the brain is about eight to 10 seconds (so don’t let anybody squeeze your neck).

• Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour.

• The hearing range for a young adult human is 20 to 20,000 Hz. For an elderly person, hearing is less at 50 to 8,000 Hz. In contrast, a cat can hear better at 100 to 60,000 Hz, and a dolphin has the widest hearing range at 200 to 150,000 Hz.

• The Auditory Pain Threshold is 130 decibels (db). The threshold for hearing damage is 90 db for an extended period of time. Noise from a rocket launching pad is equivalent to 180 db, a jet plane to 140 db, an automobile horn to 120 db, a nagging wife up to 75 db, while a soft whisper is 30 db. Interestingly, the sound of a snore (up to 69 db) can be almost as loud as a drill.

• There are 9,000 taste buds on the tongue. We lose a lot of these taste buds as we get older.

• If you go blind in one eye, you’ll only lose about one-fifth of your vision, but all your depth perception.

Trivia about the lungs and heart:

• A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.

• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.

• According to a German study, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week, probably because Mondays are stressful days.

• An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

• Every day the average heart beats 100,000 times and pumps about 2,000 ?gallons of blood.

• By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beaten some two-and-a-half billion times (computing on an average of 70 beats per minute). Therefore, an average person has 3 billion heartbeats to spare. That is why some doctors believe that drugs called beta-blockers, which slow down the heart rate, may help prolong life. Generally, unhealthy people have faster heart rates, while athletic individuals have slower heart rates.

• Even properly performed, CPR delivers less than 30 percent of the heart’s normal flow of oxygenated blood to the brain.

• Fewer than five percent of cardiac arrest sufferers survive to hospital discharge. If a victim of cardiac arrest is given good CPR, gets shocked by a defibrillator within four minutes, and drugs are given within 60 minutes, the chance of survival can go up to 60 percent.

• Trivia about the skin and body:

• A pair of human feet contains 250,000 sweat glands. Each foot can sweat the equivalent of half a glass of water per day.

• There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet. That’s why feet are so smelly.

• Your teeth start growing six months before you are born. 

• What’s the hardest substance in your body? It’s the enamel in your teeth.

• You use 200 muscles to take one step. 

• Your big toes have two bones each, while the rest have three bones. 

• Every 12 years, we humans have an entirely new skeleton due to the body’s continual replacement of its bone cells.

• Your heels bear 60 percent of your body’s weight.

• There are more than a hundred different types of arthritis. You have a one-in-five chance of experiencing some form of rheumatic disease, such as arthritis, during your lifetime.

• 75 percent of adults do not know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses.

• On the average, the chance of contracting an infection during a hospital stay is one in ?15.

• Most deaths in a hospital are between the times of 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. This is said to be the ?time when the human body is at its weakest.

• Tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including at least 50 that cause, initiate or promote cancer in humans, such as tar, ammonia, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and benzopyrene.

• Tobacco kills more people each year than all of the people killed by all of the illegal drugs in the last century.

• There are 18 doctors in the US called Dr. Doctor, and one called Dr. Surgeon. ?There is also one dermatologist named Dr. Rash, a psychiatrist called Dr. Couch ?and an anesthesiologist named Dr. Gass.

• What are the 10 human body parts that are only three letters long? Answers: eye, ear, leg, arm, jaw, gum, toe, lip, hip and rib.

• Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (45 letters; a ?lung disease caused by breathing in certain particles) is the longest word in any ?English-language dictionary.

• Your thumb is the same length as your nose. Try it and find out if it’s true.