Your unusual dish of everything.
Posts tagged anatomy
100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body – Part VII
Oct 21st
Aging and Death
From the very young to the very old, aging is a necessary and unavoidable part of life. Learn about the process with these interesting, if somewhat strange facts.
old couple
- The ashes of a cremated person average about 9 pounds. A big part of what gives the human body weight is the water trapped in our cells. Once cremated, that water and a majority of our tissues are destroyed, leaving little behind.
- Nails and hair do not continue to grow after we die. They do appear longer when we die, however, as the skin dehydrates and pulls back from the nail beds and scalp.
- By the age of 60, most people will have lost about half their taste buds. Perhaps you shouldn’t trust your grandma’s cooking as much as you do. Older individuals tend to lose their ability to taste, and many find that they need much more intense flavoring in order to be able to fully appreciate a dish.
- Your eyes are always the same size from birth but your nose and ears never stop growing. When babies look up at you with those big eyes, they’re the same size that they’ll be carrying around in their bodies for the rest of their lives. Their ears and nose, however, will grow throughout their lives and research has shown that growth peaks in seven year cycles. More >
New ultra-flexible, waterproof LEDs can be implanted under your skin
Oct 19th
LEDs are, on small scales, the cheapest, most reliable, and most technologically powerful light sources out there. But their true potential is finally being unleashed. A new generation of LEDs can go anywhere – even into your body.
Led
LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, are often used for text and video displays, and their infrared counterparts are everywhere in remote control technology. You can’t take a trip without running into an LED – traffic signals are all LEDs, as are most of the lights on a car dashboard. And anyone who has been to a rock concert has probably run into a few people going crazy with LED-powered glowsticks.
Still, as researcher John Rogers of the University of Illinois points out, LEDs are brittle, meaning they can’t be bent into different shapes. Well, no more, thanks to his new invention. He and his team have put tiny LEDs, each one smaller than the tip of a pen, on flexible electronic sheets. These sheets can be stretched and twisted up to 720 degrees without any loss in LED function, and they can hold up under soapy water or even underneath the skin, which they demonstrated by implant one sheet under the skin of mice.
As scientist’s tend to do, Rogers looks at this from the perspective of how it might benefit humanity. He sees great potential applications in using implanted LEDs for diagnostic purposes, and putting his LEDs on surgical gloves could allow doctors an even better view at what they’re operating on.
100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body – Part V
Oct 8th
Sex and Reproduction
As taboo as it may be in some places, sex is an important part of human life as a facet of relationships and the means to reproduce. Here are a few things you might not have known.
Hotmale
- On any given day, sexual intercourse takes place 120 million times on earth. Humans are a quickly proliferating species, and with about 4% of the world’s population having sex on any given day, it’s no wonder that birth rates continue to increase in many places all over the world.
- The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm. While you can’t see skin cells or muscle cells, the ovum is typically large enough to be seen with the naked eye with a diameter of about a millimeter. The sperm cell, on the other hand, is tiny, consisting of little more than nucleus.
- The three things pregnant women dream most of during their first trimester are frogs, worms and potted plants. Pregnancy hormones can cause mood swings, cravings and many other unexpected changes. Oddly enough, hormones can often affect the types of dreams women have and their vividness. The most common are these three types, but many women also dream of water, giving birth or even have violent or sexually charged dreams.
- Your teeth start growing 6 months before you are born. While few babies are born with teeth in place, the teeth that will eventually push through the gums of young children are formed long before the child even leaves the womb. At 9 to 12 weeks the fetus starts to form the teeth buds that will turn into baby teeth. More >
100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body – Part III
Sep 24th
Bodily Functions
We may not always like to talk about them, but everyone has to deal with bodily functions on a daily basis. These are a few facts about the involuntary and sometimes unpleasant actions of our bodies.
sneeze
- Sneezes regularly exceed 100 mph. There’s a good reason why you can’t keep your eyes open when you sneeze–that sneeze is rocketing out of your body at close to 100 mph. This is, of course, a good reason to cover your mouth when you sneeze.
- Coughs clock in at about 60 mph. Viruses and colds get spread around the office and the classroom quickly during cold and flu season. With 60 mph coughs spraying germs far and wide, it’s no wonder.
- Women blink twice as many times as men do. That’s a lot of blinking every day. The average person, man or woman, blinks about 13 times a minute.
- A full bladder is roughly the size of a soft ball. No wonder you have to run to bathroom when you feel the call of the wild. The average bladder holds about 400-800 cc of fluid but most people will feel the urge to go long before that at 250 to 300 cc. More >
100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body – Part II
Sep 22nd
Hair and Nails
While they’re not a living part of your body, most people spend a good amount of time caring for their hair and nails. The next time you’re heading in for a haircut or manicure, think of these facts.
bad hair day
- Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body. If you’ve ever had a covering of stubble on your face as you’re clocking out at 5 o’clock you’re probably pretty familiar with this. In fact, if the average man never shaved his beard it would grow to over 30 feet during his lifetime, longer than a killer whale.
- Every day the average person loses 60-100 strands of hair. Unless you’re already bald, chances are good that you’re shedding pretty heavily on a daily basis. Your hair loss will vary in accordance with the season, pregnancy, illness, diet and age.
- Women’s hair is about half the diameter of men’s hair. While it might sound strange, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that men’s hair should be coarser than that of women. Hair diameter also varies on average between races, making hair plugs on some men look especially obvious.
- One human hair can support 3.5 ounces. That’s about the weight of two full size candy bars, and with hundreds of thousands of hairs on the human head, makes the tale of Rapunzel much more plausible.
- The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger. And the nail on the middle finger of your dominant hand will grow the fastest of all. Why is not entirely known, but nail growth is related to the length of the finger, with the longest fingers growing nails the fastest and shortest the slowest.
- There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee. More >
100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body – Part I
Sep 21st
The human body is an incredibly complex and intricate system, one that still baffles doctors and researchers on a regular basis despite thousands of years of medical knowledge. As a result, it shouldn’t be any surprise that even body parts and functions we deal with every day have bizarre or unexpected facts and explanations behind them. From sneezes to fingernail growth, here are 100 weird, wacky, and interesting facts about the human body.
brain
The Brain
The human brain is the most complex and least understood part of the human anatomy. There may be a lot we don’t know, but here are a few interesting facts that we’ve got covered.
- Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour. Ever wonder how you can react so fast to things around you or why that stubbed toe hurts right away? It’s due to the super-speedy movement of nerve impulses from your brain to the rest of your body and vice versa, bringing reactions at the speed of a high powered luxury sports car.
- The brain operates on the same amount of power as 10-watt light bulb. The cartoon image of a light bulb over your head when a great thought occurs isn’t too far off the mark. Your brain generates as much energy as a small light bulb even when you’re sleeping.
- The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Scientists have yet to settle on a definitive amount, but the storage capacity of the brain in electronic terms is thought to be between 3 or even 1,000 terabytes. The National Archives of Britain, containing over 900 years of history, only takes up 70 terabytes, making your brain’s memory power pretty darn impressive.
- Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream. More >
Weirdest Diseases – Part III – Werewolf Syndrome
Jul 1st
The Wolf Boy, Living Werewolf or Dog-Faced Boy have been fixtures of the sideshow world for centuries.
Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy is likely the most famous of the lot however cases of hypertrichosis have been reported and documented long before Jo-Jo.
Hypertrichosis is really a blanket medical term that refers to excessive body hair. It can actually be generalized, symmetrically affecting most of the torso and limbs, or localized, affecting only a small area or location. The term is, however, usually reserved to refer to very above-average amount of normal body hair that is unwanted.
Nearly all the skin of the human body – with the exception of the palms and soles of the feet – are covered with hairs or hair follicles. More >
10 Weird Science Facts
Jun 30th
Science is strangely complicated and complexly weird.
* The blood vessels, are responsible for enabling the transport of blood throughout the body. If blood vessels were made to lay end to end, all of them together would encircle the Earth twice, by stretching up to a distance of about 100,000 kilometers.
* The human brain, which is the core of the central nervous system and a miraculous creation of nature, can process as many as 70, 000 thoughts in a day!
* Seahorses reproduce in a weird way. It is the male seahorses that get pregnant and give birth to the offsprings. A male seahorse can give birth to as less as one to as many as two thousand fry at one time. One pregnancy lasts for about two to four weeks. When the fry are ready to be born, the male seahorse undergoes muscular contractions to expel the offspring from its pouch. More >
