brain is sometimes more active when you’re asleep

Amazing Human Body Facts

The human body is defined as the entire structure of a human being and comprises a head, neck, trunk (which includes the thorax and abdomen), arms and hands, legs and feet. The five vital organs essential for human survival are the brain, heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs.

Metabolism is something that consists of both, ‘Catabolism,’ and, ‘Anabolism;’ which are the buildup and breakdown of substances. In the field of Biology, Metabolism refers to all of the body’s chemical processes, the digestion of food, and the elimination of waste. Every part of the human body is composed of various types of cells, the fundamental unit of life. The study of the human body involves both a) anatomy and b) physiology.

  • Human anatomy is defined as the primary scientific study of the morphology of the human body.
  • Human physiology is defined as the science of the mechanical, physical, bio-electrical, and biochemical functions of humans in good health, their organs, and the cells of which they are composed.

The Main Parts of the Human Body Are:

  1. Your mouth produces about one liter of saliva each day!
  2. Your brain is sometimes more active when you’re asleep than when you’re awake
  3. Laid end to end, an adult’s blood vessels could circle Earth’s equator four times!
  4. The word “muscle” comes from Latin term meaning “little mouse“, which is what Ancient Romans thought flexed bicep muscles resembled.
  5. Bodies give off a tiny amount of light that’s too weak for the eye to see.
  6. The average person has 67 different species of bacteria in their belly button.
  7. You lose about 4kg of skin cells every year!
  8. Babies don’t shed tears until they’re at least one month old.
  9. Information zooms along nerves at about 400kmph!
  10. The human heart beats more than three billion times in an average lifespan.
  11. Your left lung is about 10 percent smaller than your right one.
  12. Human teeth are just as strong as shark teeth.
  13. Scientists estimate that the nose can recognize a trillion different scents!
  14. Humans are the only species known to blush.
  15. Your blood makes up about eight percent of your body weight.

Here are some Amazing Human Body Facts, 

  • The largest bone in the human body is the femur. It can support 30 times the weight of a person’s body. Ounce for ounce, that’s stronger than steel.
  • Messages from the human brain travel along nerves at up to 200 miles an hour (322 km/h).
  • In an adult human, 25% of their bones are in the feet.
  • The gluteus maximus is the body’s largest muscle.
  • A human’s ears and nose never stop growing.
  • There are more bacteria in a human mouth than there are people in the world.
  • A human’s little finger contributes over 50% of the hand’s strength.
  • If a human being’s DNA were uncoiled, it would stretch 10 billion miles, from Earth to Pluto and back.
  • Within three days of dying, the enzymes that digested a person’s food will begin to digest that person’s body.
  • For an adult human, taking just one step uses up to 200 muscles.
  • A human skeleton renews itself completely every 10 years.
  • The same skin cells that make up a human vagina are the same type of cells that are in a human mouth.
  • By the time a person reaches 70 years old, he or she will have consumed over 12,000 gallons of water
  • Bone is five times stronger than a steel bar of the same width, but it is brittle and can fracture on impact.
  • The body can detect taste in .0015 seconds, which is faster than the blink of an eye.
  • Every hour, humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin, or about 1.5 pounds every year. By the time a person is 70 years old, they will have lost about 105 pounds of skin.
  • The largest cell in the human body is an egg (or ovum) and is barely visible to the naked eye.
  • Taste buds are not visible to the naked eye; the little bumps that can be seen on the tongue are actually papillae, on top of which rest the taste buds
  • There are ten times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells.
  • The brain contains 86 billion nerve cells joined by 100 trillion connections. This is more than the number of stars in the Milky Way.
  • Like fingerprints, each human tongue has its own unique print.
  • Two percent of the human population has a bifid uvula, which means it has a forked appearance.
  • Rhinotillexomania is the excessive habit of picking one’s nose.
  • The lining in a person’s stomach is replaced every 4 to 5 days to prevent it from digesting itself.
  • An adult humans small intestine is about 18 to 23 feet long, which is about four times as long as an adult is tall.
  • Semen normally contains 1-8 billion sperm per fluid ounces (140-300 million sperm per millimeter).
  • A person’s feet have about 500,000 sweat glands and can produce about a pint of sweat a day.
  • A human sneeze can travel about 100 mph or more.[1]
  • The average human produces 25,000 quarts of saliva in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.
  • Fingernails grow faster on the hand a person writes with. They also grow faster than toenails, and faster on long fingers.
  • The strongest muscle in the human body is the masseter or jaw muscle.
  • The liver the largest internal organ and is the only organ that can regenerate itself. However, repeated damage to the liver can eventually injure and scar this amazing organ.
  • The human brain uses just as much power as a 10-watt light bulb.
  • The word “organ” comes from an old Greek word, Organon, which means “tool” or “instrument.”
  • There are so many nerve cells in a human brain that it would take almost 3,000 years to count them.
  • An adult’s skin weighs between 8 and 11 pounds (3.6 to 5 kg). It’s surface area is about 18-22 square feet (1.7 to 2 sq. m), which is the size of the floor in a one-person tent.
  • The longest bone in an adult human is the thighbone, measuring about 18 inches (46 cm). The shortest bone is in the ear and is just 0.1 inches (.25 cm) long, which is shorter than a grain of rice.
  • An adult who weighs 150 pounds has a skeleton that weighs about 21 pounds.
  • An average person walks about 100,000 miles (160,934 km) in his or her lifetimes, which is like walking around the world four times at the equator.
  • An adult human body is made up of about 7 octillion atoms.
  • The fastest muscles in the human body are the ones that make the eyes blink. They can contract in less than one-hundredth of a second. In just one day, a person may blink their eyes over 11,500 times.
  • The word “muscle” is from the Latin word musculus, or “little mouse.” The Romans thought a flexing muscle looked like a mouse moving under the skin.
  • Omphalophobia is the fear of the navel.
  • Humans spend about five years of their lives eating.
  • An adult’s stomach can hold over two quarts (1.9 l) of food. That’s enough to fill four large or eight small drinking glasses.
  • The average human produces about three to eight ounces of feces a day.[23]
  • The average person has about 5 pounds of bacteria in his or her digestive system.
  • “Eructation” is the medical word for burping.
  • “Coprastasophobia” is the fear of constipation.
  • In an adult human, blood circulates about 12,000 miles (19,000 km) a day. This is like traveling from east to west across the widest part of the Pacific Ocean.
  • A human heart beats over 3 billion times during an average human lifespan.
  • The word “lung” is from a German word meaning “light”; together two adult human lungs weigh only 2.5 pounds (11.1kg).
  • If you spread out an adult human’s brain, it would be about the size of a pillowcase.
  • Adult humans spend about 33% of their lives asleep. A python spends about 75% of their life, and a dog spends about 44%.
  • In a lifetime, a human body will process about 100,000 pounds of food.
  • A human eye can distinguish between approximately 10 million different colors.
  • The space between the eyebrows is called the “glabella,” which is derived from the Latin word glabellus, meaning smooth.
  • “Rubatosis” is the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
  • A person takes about 23,040 breaths a day or about 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime.
  • Like Wolverine, the liver is the only organ that can completely regenerate. As little as 25% of the original liver mass can regenerate back to its full size.
  • The word “blood” is from the PIE root “bhlo-“, which means “that which bursts out.” This root is also related to “bloma,” (flower), which also “blossoms” outward.
  • The heaviest ever trichobezoar (human hairball) surgically removed from a human weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). It was found in the stomach of an 18-year-old woman in 2007 in Chicago, Illinois.
  • Dead skin comprises about a billion tons of dust in the earth’s atmosphere.
  • You get a new top layer of skin (epidermis) every 30 days.
  • Your skin is its thickest on your feet (1.4mm) and thinnest on your eyelids (0.2mm).
  • An adult small intestine is about 22-23 feet long, which is longer than a minivan.
  • “Onychophagia” is the medical name for nail biting.
  • Before ChapStick was invented in the 1880s, people used various products to treat chapped lips, including earwax.
  • Some people can hear their eyeballs moving around in their head.
  • The average scalp contains about 100,000 hairs. Hair grows about 6 inches per year.
  • The medical name for ear wax is “cerumen.”
  • Mucophagy (literally “mucus feeding”) is the act of eating one’s own “boogers.”
  • The uvula is the fleshy extension that hangs down from the back of the soft palate. It is from the Latin word, uva, meaning “grape.”
  • Fingers don’t have muscles that facilitate movement. The tendons in our fingers are moved by the muscles of the forearm.
  • Fingernails grow about 3 millimeters per month, which is about twice as fast as toenails.
  • The medical term for “bum crack” is the intergluteal cleft.
  • The average person passes gas about 15 times a day. Most people try to do it privately, but kids (of all ages) like to share them with friends and family.
  • Matthias Schlitte (b. 1987) was born with a rare bone disorder that made his right arm bigger than his left. Rather than seeing this as a weakness, he became a professional arm wrestler.
  • The average person breathes about 20,000 times a day.
  • Blood in arteries is bright red, and blood in veins is dark red. A human’s blood is not blue.
  • The human body contains over 35 trillion cells. Earth has about 7 billion people, which means that there are 5,000 times more cells in one body than there are people on the planet.
  • “Bromidrophobia” is the fear of body odors.
  • “Emetophobia” is the fear of vomiting.
  • A person suffering from anosmia is unable to detect smells.
  • The average person has about 250 hairs per eyebrow. Eyebrow hairs have a lifespan of about 4 months.
  • The shape of the eyebrows can predict a person’s personality. Straight eyebrows indicate that someone is more fact-oriented and direct. Slightly curved eyebrows suggest that someone is more people-oriented.
  • Borborygmi is the noise that your stomach makes when you are hungry.
Quick and Fascinating Facts About the Human Body
  1. The only part of the body that has no blood supply is the cornea of the eye. It receives oxygen directly from the air.
  2. The human brain has a memory capacity which is the equivalent of more than four terabytes on a hard drive.
  3. A newborn child can breathe and swallow at the same time for up to seven months.
  4. Your skull is made up of 29 different bones.
  5. Nerve impulses sent from the brain move at a speed of 274 km/h.
  6. A single human brain generates more electrical impulses in a day than all the telephones of the world combined.
  7. The average human body contains enough sulfur to kill all the fleas on the average dog, enough carbon to make 900 pencils, enough potassium to fire a toy cannon, enough fat to make seven bars of soap and enough water to fill a 50-liter barrel.
  8. The human heart pumps 182 million liters of blood during the average lifetime.
  9. 50,000 cells in your body died and were replaced by new ones while you were reading this sentence.
  10. The human embryo acquires fingerprints within three months of conception.
  11. Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s.
  12. A man named Charles Osborne hiccupped for a total of 68 years.
  13. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.
  14. About two-thirds of people tilt their head to the right when kissing.
  15. The average person forgets 90% of their dreams.
  16. The total length of all the blood vessels in the human body is about 100,000 km.
  17. On average, a person’s respiration rate is one third higher in spring than in autumn.
  18. By the end of a person’s life, they can recall, on average, around 150 trillion pieces of information.
  19. We lose 80% of our body heat from the head.
  20. When you blush, your stomach also turns red.
  21. A feeling of thirst occurs when water loss is equal to 1% of your body weight. The loss of more than 5% can cause fainting, and more than 10% cause death from dehydration.
  22. At least 700 enzymes are active in the human body.
  23. Human beings are the only living things which sleep on their backs.
  24. The average four-year-old child asks 450 questions a day.
  25. Not only human beings but also koalas have unique fingerprints.
  26. Only 1% of the bacteria can result in the human body becoming ill.
  27. Everyone alive on Earth could comfortably be placed into a cube with sides 1000 meters long.
  28. The scientific name for the belly button is the umbilicus.
  29. Teeth are the only part of the human body which cannot heal themselves.
  30. On average, a person needs seven minutes to fall asleep.
  31. Right-handed people chew most of their food on the right side of their mouth, whereas left-handed people do so on the left.
  32. Only 7% of people are left-handed.
  33. The fragrance of apples and bananas can help a person to lose weight.
  34. If allowed to grow for their whole lifetime, the length of someone’s hair would be about 725 kilometers.
  35. Out of all the people who can move their ears, only one-third of them are able to move just one ear.
  36. During their lifetime, a person will on average accidentally swallow eight small spiders.
  37. The total weight of the bacteria in the human body is 2 kg.
  38. 99% of the calcium contained in the human body is in one’s teeth.
  39. Human lips are hundreds of times more sensitive than the tips of a person’s fingers.
  40. A kiss increases a person’s pulse to 100 beats per minute or more.
  41. The total strength of masticatory muscles on one side of your jaw is equal to 195 kilograms.
  42. A person passes on 278 different types of bacteria to another person when they kiss them. Fortunately, 95% of them are not harmful.
  43. Parthenophobia is a fear of virgins.
  44. If you collected all the iron contained in the human body, you would get just a small cog, big enough only for use in your watch.
  45. There are more than 100 different viruses which cause a cold.
  46. If someone kisses another person for a certain amount of time, this is much more effective in terms of hygiene than using chewing gum, as it normalizes the level of acidity in your oral cavities.
  47. You can lose 150 calories per hour if you hit your head against the wall.
  48. Human beings are the only animals which can draw straight lines.
  49. Human skin is completely replaced about 1,000 times during a person’s lifetime.
  50. A person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day is doing the equivalent of drinking half a cup of tar a year.
  51. Women blink about two times less often than men.
  52. The structure of the human body contains only four minerals: apatite, aragonite, calcite, and crystobalite.
  53. A passionate kiss causes the same chemical reactions in the brain that skydiving and firing a gun do.
  54. Men are officially classified as dwarves if their height is below 1.3 m, whereas for women the measure is 1.2 m.
  55. Fingernails grow about four times faster than your toenails.
  56. People with blue eyes are more sensitive to pain than others.
  57. Nerve impulses in the human body move at about 90 m/s.
  58. 100,000 chemical reactions occur in the human brain every second.
  59. Everyone has dimples on their lower back, but on some people, they are more pronounced than on others. They appear where the pelvis joins with the sacrum, so their appearance makes sense.
  60. If one identical twin lacks a certain tooth, the other twin will not have that tooth either.
  61. The surface area of the human lungs is approximately equal to the area of a tennis court.
  62. During a person’s lifetime, they spend about 2 weeks kissing.
  63. The facial hair of a blonde-haired man grows faster than that of a man with dark hair.
  64. Leukocytes in the human body live for two to four days and erythrocytes for three to four months.
  65. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
  66. The human heart is approximately equal in size to that of a person’s fist. An adult’s heart weighs 220-260 grams.
  67. At birth, there are 14 billion cells in the human brain. This number does not increase throughout a person’s lifetime. After 25 years, the number of cells falls by 100,000 every day. About 70 cells die in the minute it takes you to read a page in a book. After 40 years, the decline of the brain accelerates sharply, and after 50 years neurons (that is, nerve cells) shrink and the brain gets smaller.
  68. At birth, a child’s body is made up of around 300 bones. But an adult has just 206.
  69. During a person’s lifetime, the small intestine is about 2.5 meters. After they die, the muscles in the walls of their intestine relax, and it’s length increases to 6 meters.
  70. Your right lung can take in more air than your left.
  71. An adult person performs around 23,000 inhalations and exhalations a day.
  72. The smallest cells in a man’s body are sperm cells.
  73. There are about 40,000 bacteria in the human mouth.
  74. Each of us has around 2,000 taste buds.
  75. The human eye can distinguish 10 million different colors.
  76. The chemical compound in the body which causes feelings of ecstasy (phenylethylamine) is also contained in chocolate.
  77. The human heart pumps blood at such pressure that it would be able to raise blood up to the fourth floor of a building.
  78. A person burns more calories when they are asleep than when they watch TV.
  79. Children grow faster in the spring.
  80. Every year more than 2 million left-handed people die because of mistakes they make when using machines designed for right-handed people.
  81. It turns out that one man in every three hundred is capable of satisfying themselves orally.
  82. A person uses 17 muscles when they smile, and 43 when they frown.
  83. By the age of 60, most people lose half of their taste buds.
  84. The rate at which a person’s hair grows doubles during an airplane flight.
  85. One percent of people can see infra-red light and 1% can see ultraviolet radiation.
  86. If you were locked in a completely sealed room, you would not die due to a lack of air, but from carbon dioxide poisoning.
  87. Statistically, only one person out of two billion reaches the age of 116 years old.
  88. On average, a person says 4,800 words in 24 hours.
  89. The retinas inside the eye cover about 650 square mm and contain 137 million light-sensitive cells: 130 million are for black and white vision and 7 million are for helping you see in color.
  90. Our eyes remain the same size as they were at birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
  91. In the morning, a person is about 8 millimeters taller than in the evening.
  92. The muscles which help your eyes to focus complete around 100,000 movements a day. In order to make your leg muscles do the same amount of movements, you would need to walk 80 kilometers.
  93. A cough amounts to an explosive charge of air which moves at speeds up to 60 miles per hour.
  94. According to German researchers, the risk of having a heart attack is higher on Monday than on any other day of the week.
  95. Bones are about 5 times stronger than steel.
  96. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
  97. Ingrown toenails are hereditary.
  98. A person would die quicker from a total lack of sleep than from hunger. Death would occur after ten days without sleep, whereas from hunger it would take several weeks.
  99. The average life expectancy is 2,475,576,000 seconds. During this time we pronounce, on average, around 123,205,750 words and have sex 4,239 times.
  100. By the end of a person’s life, they can recall, on average, around 150 trillion pieces of information.