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10 Weird Facts About the Human Body

The average person sheds about 600,000 particles of skin every hour.

The human brain is made up of around 75% water.

The surface area of the human lung is roughly the same size as a tennis court.

The smallest bone in the human body is the stapes bone in the ear, which is smaller than a grain of rice.

A human sneeze can travel up to 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour.

The strongest muscle in the human body is the masseter muscle, which is used for chewing.

Human hair can stretch up to 30% of its length when wet.

The human nose and ears continue to grow throughout a person’s entire life.

The human body has enough fat to make 7 bars of soap.

The human body contains enough iron to make a 3-inch (7.5 cm) nail.

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps blood to squirt blood up to 30 feet (9 meters) away.

The human body has enough salt to fill an average-sized salt shaker.

The human body can produce about a quart (1 liter) of saliva per day.

The liver is the only organ that can regenerate itself completely.

The human body produces about 25,000 quarts (25,000 liters) of blood in a lifetime.

The human body has enough carbon to make 900 pencils.

Human eyes are capable of distinguishing over 10 million different colors.

The average human farts around 14 times a day.

The human body has enough phosphorous to make 2,200 match heads.

The human brain uses around 20% of the body’s energy despite only making up 2% of the body’s weight.

The human body can survive without food for about a month, but only without water for about a week.

The human body can sweat up to 3 gallons (11.3 liters) per day in hot conditions.

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New Chemicals

In 1965, the CAS Chemical Registry System listed 211,934 synthetic chemicals. In 2006, that number rose to 88,758,285 and it’s still growing. Many of the chemicals are in products you use everyday from cosmetics to plastic toys.

Many soak through our skin or are breathed in and can be detected inside our bodies. For instance, researchers sprayed the common household oil, WD-40, on volunteers’ fingertips, and detected it in their blood five minutes later.

The average American male has a sperm count 75% lower than 40 years ago. Could this be partially due to these chemicals?

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The Extent of Human Capacity

We remember one trillion things in our lifetime.

Computer scientists say our brains have a storage capacity approximately the same as an 11-terabyte hard drive, which with current solid-state technology can be stored in an area about the size of a fingertip.

Our eyes are each equivalent to a 137-megapixel camera, roughly ten times higher resolution than a typical modern digital camera.

These comparisons are a bit rough, because humans are made from wetware, not hardware. For instance, the retina has much greater sensitivity near the center than at the edges, while a camera has uniform sensitivity. The memory of a hard drive is digital. Each ‘cell’ in a hard drive can hold a one or a zero. Each cell in the human brain is more of an analog mechanism, firing or not based on many input factors.