- The longest muscle in your body
is named after a tailor. The name
comes from sartor, the Latin word for
tailor. Tailors used to sit cross-legged
on the floor when they pinned hems
or cuffs. That position required heavy
use of the sartorius muscle, which
ropes around your thigh from the
pelvis to the shinbone. - Your lungs have an enormous
surface area. Tiny air sacs called alve-
oli allow oxygen and carbon dioxide to
move between the lungs and the blood-
stream. Average adult lungs have about
480 million alveoli, the surface area of
which could cover half a tennis court. - The average human passes
about 360 pounds of poop per year.
Before you get grossed out, consider
this medical wonder: A fecal trans-
plant to help someone with an infec-
tion called Clostridium difficile—in
which doctors take a healthy person’s
poop and put it into the sufferer’s
gastrointestinal tract—has a 90 percent
cure rate. That’s a higher rate than for
treatment with an antibiotic. - You might be able to wiggle your
ears. Thirty million years ago, the
three auricular muscles of the outer
ear helped our evolutionary ancestors
pivot their ears the way cats do. This
movement doesn’t serve much pur-
pose to modern humans—other than
as a party trick. Scientists aren’t sure
why, but only about 10 to 20 percent
of us are able to engage those muscles
to wiggle our ears.- You can live without your stom-
ach ... With some weight-loss surger-
ies and for some stomach cancers,
patients might have part or all of their
stomach removed. Once it is gone,
surgeons will connect the esophagus
directly to the small intestine so food
can be digested there. - ... and without your colon. The
large intestine might be removed to
treat colorectal cancer, Crohn’s dis-
ease, or ulcerative colitis. A surgeon
would either connect a pouch made of
small intestine to your anus so you can
pass stools or divert waste from the
small intestine to an opening created
in the abdomen, which would empty
into a colostomy bag outside the body. - Your skin glows in the dark. A
decade ago, Japanese scientists used
ultrasensitive cameras to discover that
humans actually give off light, sort of
like fireflies. Chemical reactions within
our cells transmit a glow, mostly from
the forehead, cheeks, and neck. The
glow is faintest late at night and bright-
est in late afternoon, possibly because
of changes in metabolism.
By Ashley Lewis, with additional
reporting by Marissa Laliberte,
Jessica Migala, Meghan Jones,
Alyssa Jung, Claire Nowak, Teresa
Dumain, and Lauren Gelman66 june 2019 | rd.com
Reader’s Digest Cover Story