Top 100 Human Body Facts That Will Surprise You

Top 100 Quick Body Facts That Will Surprise You

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 100 Quick Body Facts That Will Surprise You.

For this list, we’ll be looking at facts about the human anatomy that you may have not known about and could shock you.

Which fact surprised YOU the most? Let us know in the comments!

#1: Our brains don’t have pain receptors and so are incapable of feeling pain.

#2: Adults are made up of approximately 7 octillion atoms.

#3: Your thumb has its own pulse, due to an artery called the princeps pollicis.

#4: The condition of having two different eye colors is known as Heterochromia iridis or iridum.

#5: Ear wax protects your ears and actually keeps them clean.

#6: When you eat, it’s your small intestine that digests and absorbs nutrients.

#7: The largest organ in your body is your skin.

#8: A human bone is stronger than steel of the same weight.

#9: Due to chemical reactions, humans glow in the dark, but the light is too weak for our eyes to see it.

#10: Fingernails grow faster than toenails.

#11: The air released when you sneeze can travel at up to 100 miles per hour.

#12: 60% of the human body is water.

#13: Your tongue has a tongue print, much as your fingers have fingerprints.

#14: There’s one muscle in the human body that never tires; the heart. Aww.

#15: Your stomach rumbles when your digestive system contracts, typically to process food, liquids, digestive juices, and air, but also when you’re hungry.

#16: That noise your stomach makes has a name: borborygmi.

https://www.today.com/health/growling-belly-why-your-stomach-rumbles-how-stop-it-t104948

#17: Your funny bone isn’t a bone; it’s an area of your ulnar nerve. When you hit your ‘funny bone’, you’ve squished this nerve against a protuberance of your humerus bone.

#18: Your nose and ears never stop growing.

#19: A 2017 study suggested that sleep-deprivation could lead the brain to eat itself - with glial cells called astrocytes gnawing away at synapses.

#20: The femur, or thigh bone, is the longest bone in the human body.

#21: Human and chimpanzee DNA is 96% identical.

#22: Fingers don’t have any muscles.

#23: Our lungs aren’t the same size; the left is smaller than the right to accommodate the heart.

#24: Some tumors can grow teeth and hair. They’re called teratomas.

#25: Children have far more taste buds than adults.

#26: Teeth are not considered bones.

#27: There are 60,000 to 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. Laid out, they’d circle around the world over two to three times!

#28: A pregnant woman’s brain loses gray matter in areas that process social signals. This may actually fine-tune those neural networks, improving the ability to understand and respond to infants.

#29: Bacteria in your gut can change your mood.

#30: The gut is the only organ in the human body with its own nervous system. Having a gut feeling is a thing after all!

#31: The cornea doesn’t have its own blood supply. Instead, it gets oxygen from the air.

#32: Your brain generates enough electricity to power a lightbulb.

#33: The human eye weighs just under an ounce.

#34: For you to taste your food, it must first be dissolved by saliva.

#35: The resolution of a human eye is 576 megapixels.

#36: Water makes up about a quarter of our bone mass.

#37: 96.2% of your body is made up of four elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.

#38: Our bodies have between two to five million sweat glands.

#39: Humans sometimes form stripes on their skin, known as Blaschko lines. They develop as a result of cell development in people with certain conditions.

#40: The fastest moving muscles in the body are the orbicularis oculi, which close your eyes.

#41: Astronauts can grow up to two inches taller in space, as without gravity, the fluid between vertebrae expands.

#42: Your skin actually has three different layers: the epidermis, the dermis and the hypodermis.

#43: A human skull has 22 bones.

#44: Your muscles connect to your bones via tendons, whereas ligaments connect bone to bone.

#45: Wisdom teeth are considered vestigial, meaning that they no longer serve any functional purpose.

#46: The smallest skeletal muscle in your body is the stapedius muscle. It’s just one millimeter long.

#47: You’re unable to tickle your own body. Go on, try it!

#48: You’re shedding about 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells every minute. We leave a trail of skin everywhere we go.

#49: We shed about 1.5 lbs of skin annually. Some of that is the dust you see on your furniture.

#50: Nails are composed of a protein called keratin. That’s also what our hair is made of!

#51: Eyebrows serve a purpose; they keep sweat out of our eye sockets.

#52: The small intestine isn’t really small; it’s around 22 feet long.

#53: Some bacteria in your body are actually good for you and provide beneficial functions, such as assisting with food digestion and absorbing nutrients.

#54: Every human body is totally unique.

#55: Humans and cabbage (yes, cabbage) share between 40% to 50% of the same DNA!

#56: On average, the heart weighs around 10 ounces, about the same as a juicebox.

#57: The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs of DNA.

#58: Speaking of the human genome, it would take someone approximately 50 years to type it out, even if they wrote 60 words a minute for 8 hours a day!

#59: A human body normally contains 12 ribs, but there are some rare instances when it can contain 13.

#60: Humans can detect sounds that range between the frequencies 20 Hz to 20 kHz.

#61: Blinking may offer mini-naps for our brains.

#62: Research has shown that “old person smell” is real; it’s due to chemical changes that occur during the aging process.

#63: The human heart beats around 100,00 times in a single day. In one year, it beats 35 million times.

#64: We take around 20,000 to 22,000 breaths a day.

#65: It’s been estimated that the human brain can store 2.5 petabytes of data. That’s 2.5 million gigabytes.

#66: Romance is a complicated chemical cocktail. Testosterone and estrogen are linked to lust; dopamine and norepinephrine to attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin to attachment.

#67: Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do.

#68: The excess skin on your elbow is your weenus. At least, that’s the slang term.

#69: The term used for weenus by the scientific community is olecranal skin.

#70: Our skin helps regulate our body temperature.

#71: Excessive sun exposure can trigger the overproduction of melanin, leading to dark spots on the skin.

#72: There are eyelash mites living in your eyelashes, eating your dead skin. Lovely!

#73: Your thinnest layer of skin is located on your eyelids.

#74: The thickest skin is found on your palms and the soles of your feet.

#75: Each of our eyes has a tiny blind spot, where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc.

#76: The position of one’s left kidney is slightly higher than the right.

#77: The lungs are the only part of the human body that can float.

#78: Human mouths are home to 700 species of bacteria - some helpful, some not.

#79: Your body has more bacterial cells than human cells.

#80: Our fingers can perceive even minor surface changes, as minute as the width of a hair.

#81: Each of your feet can produce approximately half a pint of perspiration daily.

#82: While walking, a total of 200 muscles are at work.

#83: The average person walks 115,000 miles in their lifetime. That’s over four and a half times the distance around the globe!

#84: Your liver can regenerate after being damaged.

#85: It’s estimated that an adult has between 2,000 and 8,000 taste buds.

#86: Our taste receptors can detect five different tastes: salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (or savoriness).

#87: A quarter of your bones are found in your feet. Another quarter are in your hands!

#88: When we blush, the lining of our stomachs blush too.

#89: You can’t breathe and swallow at the same time.

#90: The longest and widest nerve of the body runs from the base of the spine down to the feet and is called the sciatic nerve.

#91: You’ll find that you’re around a third of an inch taller in the morning when you first get up than when you go to sleep.

#92: In an average lifespan, the human heart beats over 2 billion times.

#93: Studies have shown that human teeth are just as strong as a shark’s.

#94: The largest joint in your body is your knee.

#95: A child has 300 bones, but these fuse together, leaving an adult with 206.

#96: Your bones renew every five to 10 years. You have a completely different skeleton to the one you had 10 years ago!

#97: The human nose can recognize over 1 trillion different scents.

#98: Your sweat doesn't smell bad; what smells is a chemical produced by the bacteria feeding on your sweat!

#99: 60% of the brain is made up of fat.

#100: All humans share 99.9% of the same DNA.