Human body
284
Your body sheds tens of
thousands of skin flakes
every minute. Over a lifetime, a
body loses 20 kg (44 lb)
of skin flakes.
Your brain weighs about 2 per cent
of your total body weight, but uses
20 per cent of your blood supply.The brain of an adult is three times
heavier than that of a newborn baby.
From the age of 20, the brain loses 1 g
(0.03 oz) a year as brain cells die and
are not replaced.
The liver handles more than 500 different jobs, including
the disposal of dead blood cells, making proteins, and
storing sugars.There are 100 trillion cells in your
body. A billion of them die every 20 seconds.The largest human cell
is the female ovum.
The smallest is the male sperm.Your eyes stop growing when you reach puberty
and stay the same size for the rest of your life.Nose hairs act like a net to trap
and remove nasty particles
from the air.
The bones in the hands and feet account
for more than half the bones in the
human body.The smallest muscle in the human body is the
stapedius. It is inside the ear and is less than
2 mm (0.8 in) long.There are more thanFood spends up to six hours in your stomach being digested.
600
Everyone has a unique tongue print.
There are more
muscles in a
caterpillar than
there are in a
human body.
You spend half an hour
every day blinking.
The left lung is smaller than the right lung
to make room for the heart.It takes about 40 hours for food to pass through
the large intestine.Women’s hearts are smaller than men’s, but they beat on average
75 times per minute compared to 70 times for men.About a third
of adults snore.
Stretched out straight, the small intestine is about 6 m (19 ft) long.At rest, you breathe about
once every four seconds.
This rises to once every
second during exercise.We make 1 litre (2 pints)
of saliva in our mouths
every day.Tiny bacteria make up
3 per cent of your
body weight.Blood travels 19,000 km (12,000 miles)
every day. That’s half way around
the world.After the age of 60 ,
you will lose about
half your taste buds.The stomach
continually produces new
layers of mucus to protect
the lining and stop the
stomach from digesting itself.There are around 1,000 trillion
bacteria in your body – 10 times
more than the number of
body cells.The loudest snore ever
recorded was more than
80 decibels, as loud as a
pneumatic drill.The average human head
has 100,000 hairs growing
on it, but redheads have
only 90,000.muscles in the human body. Muscles are
40 per cent of the body’s total weight.The average
person eats 30
tonnes of food in
a lifetime – that’s
the weight of 80
horses.
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