The human body is a truly revolutionary machine of evolution and While we don’t have wings, armor, venom, or claws, there are some truly cool things about our bodies.
1. You Can Live Without Many of Your Internal Organs
Many of us think that if we were to lose one of our internal organs, we would die immediately, and while this is true for the heart, it is not so true for other internal organs. In fact, you can remove your spleen, one kidney, one lung, as well as 75 percent of your liver, 80 percent of your intestines and most of the organs located in your pelvis and groin area. That’s right, all of those organs can disappear and you will still be functioning. You may not function so well, and you may not live for as long as you hoped, but yes, you can live without those organs.
2. The Death of Hundreds of Millions
Each minute, our body is dying, this is a fact. Each time 60 seconds has passed by; our body has lost 300,000,000 cells. Yep, that’s right, that many cells, which amount to the population of the United States, die in our bodies every single minute. While this may seem like a lot of dying cells, and you would think our bodies would decay within hours, there are more cells being born than dying in our bodies. Each day, 10 to 50 trillion (50,000,000,000,000) cells are replaced in our body.
3. Your Hair Is the Superman of the Body
When we say your hair is the Superman of the body, what we mean is that your hair is pretty much indestructible. Hair decays at an extremely slow rate and that means hair often stays around longer than most other parts of your body. In fact, mummies that date back thousands of years still have hair on their heads. Changes in climate, humidity and temperature can’t hurt your hair, and neither can many different varieties of acids and chemicals. The only real weakness your hair has is to fire, which is probably because your hair is made up of so much carbon.
4. Beware the Power of Stomach Acids
Your stomach is a very powerful part of your body. The stomach acids that sit inside of our stomach are so strong that they can dissolve zinc. You would think that such a strong acid would eat through our body in seconds, but our stomach lining actually renews itself so fast that there is not enough time for the acid to eat through the lining. If it was not for this renewing capacity, we would have a large hole in our body within minutes.
5. Your Lungs, Bones and Nails!
Here are essentially three facts in one. First, your lungs are full of tiny blood vessels called capillaries. In both your lungs, there are 300,000 million capillaries and if you were to take all of these capillaries and lay them out end-to-end, they would stretch for 1,500 miles. Second, we can break our bones but our bones are actually quite strong. One block of bone the size of a matchbox can support the weight of nine tones, which is actually four times as much weight as concrete can hold. Third, your fingernails are constantly growing and if you lose a fingernail, it will take roughly half a year for the nail to grow back from the base to the tip.
6. We Grow Every Night
Yes, that’s right, every single night your body grows by a little bit. It is estimated that the human body grows about one-third of an inch while you sleep because your cartilage discs are squeezed by the force of gravity when you are standing or sitting. So, when you wake up and start walking, your height shrinks back down to your normal height.
7. Nature’s Filter
Your kidneys help to get rid of toxins from our bodies and without our kidneys, both of them, we would die. The reason for this is the amazing filter capacity of kidneys. Each kidney contains one million filters. This means your body has two million individual filters in it, which filter out 1.3 liters of blood per minute and expel 1.4 liters of urine per day! Without this vitally important filtering, our bodies would quickly fill with toxins and we would soon find ourselves very sick and very close to death. This is why people whose kidneys have failed need to be hooked up to kidney dialysis machines.
8. Our Bodies Are Hot, Hot, Hot!
The human body is one big energy producing machine. When you look at a picture of the human body with infrared technology, all you see is radiating heat. That heat is generated within our bodies and it helps to keep us alive. In fact, the human body generates so much heat that in only 30 minutes, the average body gives off enough heat (throughout the entire body) to bring half a gallon of water to boil. That may not seem like much given you can boil water in only a few minutes on the stove, but remember that your body is boiling this water by doing nothing but what it does every day; keep you alive!
9. We Are Visual Beings
We are visual beings because of the amount of information we process through our eyes, rather than through other senses. While bats may process most of their information through their ears, we process 90 percent of all our information through our eyes. The other 10 percent of the information is processed by our other four senses of touch, taste, smell and sound.
10. Breaking the Speed Limit
Our bodies do not move as fast as other animals, the cheetah for example, but we can exceed 100 miles per hour with something; our sneezes. When we sneeze, we expel air from our nose and mouth at the whopping speed of 100 miles per hour. That is pretty fast considering that it is coming out of our face and many may wonder why we do not blow our nose clean off with that kind of force.
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