DK - WOW! The Visual Encyclopedia of Everything

285

An adult man normally needs to eat about 10,000 kilojoules (2,500 calories) a day.

Arctic explorers need about three times that much to keep them going in the cold.

You cannot

sneeze

with your eyes open.

The first successful heart transplant

took place in 1967. There are now

eight heart transplants in the USA

alone every day.

The largest artery, the aorta,

is about 2 cm (0.78 in) in

diameter. That’s as wide as a

hose pipe.

During puberty, boys can grow 9 cm

(3.5 in) in a year.

Children grow faster

in spring.

In a whole lifetime,

a human passes

45,000 litres

(10,000 gallons)

of urine. That’s

enough to fill a

swimming pool.

In your lifetime, you will drink

about 70,000 litres (16,000 gallons)

of water.

A fingernail would grow 28 m (90 ft) long if

never cut. The middle nail grows fastest, the

thumb slowest.

There are the same number of hairs on the body

of a human being as on a chimpanzee.

The longest beard ever measured was more than

(16 ft) long

and belonged

to Norwegian

Hans Langseth.

The largest organ is the skin, which has a

surface area of about 2 sq m (20 sq ft)

and weighs about 10 kg (22 lb).

Babies don’t have

bony kneecaps.

Their soft

kneecaps begin

to become bony

between the ages

of three and six.

73 per cent of babies’ bodies are

water. This drops to 60 per cent in adult

men and 55 per cent in adult women.

Standing upright burns up 600 kilojoules

(140 calories) of energy in an hour.

In an average

lifetime, you

will walk the

equivalent

of five times

around the

Equator.

Babies start dreaming before they are born.

The average human blinks 23 times a minute.

That’s 12 million times a year.

A body releases 2 litres (3.5 pints) of gas per day

as burps or farts.

The most common time of birth is between

3 am and 4 am.

There are 250,000 sweat glands in a pair of feet.

They can produce a quarter of a litre (half a pint)

of sweat in one day.

When you sleep, you

lose up to 42 g (1.4 oz)

in weight every hour.

The oldest person ever documented was French

woman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997

aged 122 years and 164 days.

A cough releases

air at speeds up to

100 km/h (60 mph).

Common colds can be caused by one of more

than 200 types of virus.

More people died during the flu pandemic at the

end of World War I than were killed during the war.

19

th

-century British surgeon

Robert Liston could cut off

a leg in 28 seconds.

A single sneeze might contain up to

100,000 viruses.

Life expectancy at birth in Japan is 84.2 years –

the highest in the world.

SEE AND EXPLORE THE HUMAN BODY ON PAGES 60–87

5 m

One in

2,000 babies

is born with a

tooth.

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