200 AMAZING SHOCKING BODY FACTS

1. Skydivers fall through the sky at speeds of 190 kilometers (120miles) per hour! Its the force of gravity that pulls them back down to Earth.
2. As a skydiver falls, super-fast wind is slowed as it enters their airways to help them breathe. Oxygen is also absorbed through their skin.
3. Scientists developed a vertical wind tunnel that blows air upwards at huge speeds so that skydivers can have their fun indoors!
4. If a person is struck by lightning, they sometimes vaporize (evaporate) completely, so that there is nothing left of them at all.
5. Bacteria trapped inside a salt crystal for 250 million years were revived and grown by scientists in the USA.
6. An adult human takes about 23,000 breaths per day.
7. It takes less than 0.1 grams (0.004 ounces) of poison found in parts of the pufferfish to kill an adult human. However, some people eat the fish regularly as they know which bits to remove.
8. Dead bodies can remain perfectly intact after many years. This can happen when fat in the body turns into a type of soap that doesn't rot.
9. Some people are human calculators and can do really complicated sums in their heads instantly even faster than someone with a calculator. No one knows exactly how their brains are different.
10. Malaria is a tropical disease spread by mosquitoes. Since the Stone Age, malaria has been responsible for half of all human deaths from illness.
11. If Scientists could build a brain from computer chips, it would take a million times as much as power to run as a real human brain.
12. Each person's tongue print is unique.
13. In ancient times, Indian doctors used live ants to stitch wounds together. The doctors would hold the edges together and get the ant bite through the skin. The ants head would then be snapped off leaving its jaws as the stitch.
14. Your brain receives about 100 million pieces of information at any one moment from your eyes, nose, ears, skin and receptors inside your body.
15. Eating asparagus produces a chemical that makes urine smell strongly, although not everyone can smell it. Lucky them.
16. A sneeze travels at 161 kilometers (100 miles) per hour.
17. A body left unburied in a tropical climax will be reduced to a skeleton in two weeks by the action of insects.
18. People can be born with ears growing from their necks or chests.
19. There are more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in the whole world.
20. More people are allergic to cow's milk than to any other food or drink.
21. Rubbing yourself with a garlic clove is suppose to keep mosquitoes away... and vampires... and probably other people, too.
22. People are taller in the morning than in the evening. During the day, the weight of your body compresses your spine as you walk around, then when you are asleep it expands again.
23. Electrical activity is detectable in a human brain up to 37 hours after death, possibly caused by chemical reactions.
24. The spice nutmeg is harmless if eaten in moderation, but deadly poisonous if injected. Beware!
25. Your stomach lining replaces itself every three days.
26. If you could lay out all the possible nerve connections in your brain, end to end, they would stretch to about 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles).
27. The strongest muscle in your body is your tongue.
28. If you read a novel that's 100,000 words long (about 300 pages) your eyes will travel just under 1 kilometers (more that half a mile) along the pages.
29. There have been many cases of people spontaneously bursting into flames and dying. Often, their whole body is burned away. No one knows exactly why this spontaneous human combustion happens. What a way to go!
30. Your eyes take about an hour to get accustomed to the dark, but after that they are 100,000 times as sensitive to light as they are in bright sunlight.
31. There is enough acid in the human digestive system to disslove as iron nail completely.
32. Your skin is shed and regrown about every 27 days. Most people get through around 1,000 skins in a lifetime.
33. Your body destroys or losses two and a half million red blood cells every second. Luckily, it creates more at the same rate.
34. Bears hair grows faster than any other hair on the human body. If left to grow for his whole life, a man's beard could be 9 meters (30 feet) long.
35. There is enough iron in your body to make a nail... which you could then dissolve in all the acid.
36. Women blink twice as often as men.
37. The Placenta, which nourishes an unborn baby, is the only organ that develops after a person is fully grown. It is lost when the baby is born and another grows if the woman becomes pregnant again.
38. One in 512,000 births results in triplets.
39. Only a few hundred people in the world are known to have the rare blood type H-H. A person with H-H blood can't receive blood transfusions of any blood type and may need to store their own blood in advance of an operation.
40. When you hold a seashell to your ear to hear the sea, what you actually hear is your own blood in the blood vessels of your ear.
41. People who have lost a limb in an accident or operation often feel pain or itching in it, even though its no longer there.
42. If you could join up all the eyelashes you will lose during your lifetime they would stretch to about 30 meters (100 feet).
43. Hair grows most quickly during the day in the summertime. It grows more slowly at night and in the winter.
44. For years, doctors thought the appendix in the gut didn't do anything. But in 2007, scientists discovered that it helps to grow new helpful bacteria if vital bacteria in the gut are killed by illness.
45. If all the blood vessels from a human body were laid end to end they would stretch 97,000 kilometers (60,000 miles).
46. A single human hair can support the weight of an apple.
47. You lose around two billion skin cells everyday, which adds up to around 2 kilograms (4.5 pounds) in a year.
48. Everyone spent about half an hour of their life as a single cell, at the start of their mother's pregnancy.
49. A chemical found in asparagus attracts fish. During the First World War, American soldiers were issued with asparagus so that if they were stranded near water they could eat the asparagus, urinate in the water and catch some fish to eat.
50. If you rubbed garlic on the bottom of your foot, it would be absorbed through your skin and eventually your breath would smell of garlic.
51. Laughing seems to reduce a person's allergic responses. So if you have hay fever, try laughing about it.
52. Around 10% of the population is left-handed, but boys are one and a half times more likely to be left-handed than girls.
53. The bad smell of faeces comes from chemicals produced by bacteria that break down the food in your gut.
54. Your brain gets lighter as you get older. In your twenties, it starts to lose up to a gram (0.035 ounces) a year as cells die and are not replaced.
55. Girls have more taste buds than boys.
56. Even though some dreams seems to last ages while you are experiencing them, they generally only take about 2-3 seconds. Most people have at least seven dreams a night.
57. Most people spend about the same amount of time blinking as they spend eating a total of about five years over a whole lifetime.
58. The world records for holding your breath is 7.5 minutes. Most people can only manage around 1 minute.
59. The heat output from the average adult body is enough to boil 30 litres (around 3 pints) of freezing water.
60. If all of your body's molecules of DNA (the chemical which makes up your genes) were stretched out, they would reach to the Moon and back 3,000 times.
61. The hair of really intelligent people contains larger quantities of the minerals copper and zinc than the hair of the less clever people.
62. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes wide open.
63. If you have your head cut off, you may remain conscious and able to see for several seconds before you die.
64. When you sneeze, all of your bodily functions stop momentarily.
65. An average person falls asleep in seven minutes.
66. Being cold in the night tends to give you bad dreams. The colder the room, the more likely you are to have bad dream. Wrap up warm tonight.
67. About 125 grams (5 ounces) of the food you eat each day comes out as faeces. Most of the rest is water, and the remainder is nutrients absorbed by your body.
68. In the 1930s, it was not uncommon for women to swallow live tapeworms in an attempt to lose weight. The tapeworms would live in their stomachs, eating some of the food the women eat.
69. Your fingernails grow four times faster than your toenails.
70. It only takes about 10 days to die from a total lack of sleep.
71. People who live at very high altitudes have blood in their bodies that can deliver oxygen around the body much more efficiently that the blood of sea-level dwellers.
72. Dripping concentrated chili oil into open wound during surgery numbs the nerves for weeks and prevents patients feeling pain after an operation.
73. Chewing bread or gum while you peel onions will prevent the onions making you cry.
74. A body farm is a research center where dead bodies are left to decay in various situations. Scientists study their decomposition and the information is used to help police with murder investigations.
75. Mitochondria parts of the cells in our bodies. Scientists think that they were originally bacteria, which have become absorbed into our bodies and are now an essential part of us. They take in nutrients and make energy for our cells.
76. Chinese scientists are testing robot-controlled mice. They follow instructions from a computer transmitted through electrodes in their brains. Scientists are hoping to use their techniques to cure disabilities by bypassing damaged nerves.
77. Some substances colour your urine if you eat lots of rhubarb, your urine will be orange, and blackberries can make it go red.
78. In 1804, trainee doctor Stubbins Firth tried to prove that yellow fever is not an infectious disease by drinking his patients' vomit! Although he did not get yellow fever, he was wrong. It is very contagious, but must enter directly through the bloodstream.
79. People in Pakistan have been visiting the dentist for 9,000 years. Archaeologists have found drilled and capped teeth in ancient skeletons discovered there.
80. Most people's ears grow a quarter of a centimeter (0.1 inches) per year for their whole life.
81. Genetic evidence shows that most people in Britain are descended from the Spanish. Its thought that Spanish fishermen colonized Britain 6,000 years ago and took over from the native Britons.
82. The amount of electrical energy generated by your brain is enough to power a light bulb.
83. Most American fashion models are thinner than 98 percent of American women.
84. Medical researchers studied 46 professional sword-swallowers and discovered that sore throats are common amongst them, especially when they are training... how surprising.
85. Researchers think girls like pink and red colors because thousands of years ago their job was to hunt for ripe berries. Over the years girls eyes became conditioned to seek out those berry colour.
86. Babies have many more taste buds than adults.
87. A chemical from bullfrogs may help doctors to wipe out the deadly MRSA virus, which infects some hospital patients. Frog chemicals have been used to treat wounds for centuries.
88. Neanderthal (early) man had larger brains than people have now.
89. There are around 100 million microbes living in your mouth at any time. They feed on scraps of food and dead cells from your mouth.
90. One of our closest relatives is the colugoor flying lemur. Its like a squirrel with bat-like flaps of skin between its arms, legs and tail and it glides from tree to tree. After apes, its the animal genetically closest to humans.
91. One in 20 people has an extra rib.
92. Doctors in the old days used leeches to remove people blood. Today, doctors still use leeches in some surgical procedures, as they produce chemicals that kill pain and keep blood flowing without clotting.
93. Gnathostoma spinigerumis a parasitic worm that lives under the skin. It moves around at a rate of about 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) per hour, so if you have one you can watch it moving under your skin.
94. The name for gurgling in your stomach isborborygmus. Its caused by all the gases and half-digested food jumbling around and being pushed through the gut.
95. Gas you take in with food takes between 30 and 45 minutes to be released as a fart. It can come out quicker as a burp.
96. Dandruff is made of clumps of dead skin cells mixed with dirt and oil from your scalp. You lose millions of skin cells each day, so there's plenty available to make dandruff.
97. There are 2,000 glands in your ear that produce earwax. The sticky wax collects dirt, dead bugs and old skin cells before it falls out of your ears. It also kills germs.
98. The water in urine comes from your blood. It goes from your food and drink through the gut wall into the blood, and it takes from the blood to make urine.
99. Mucous (slime) in your nose collects all the dirt you breathe in, including particles of smoke, pollen, exhaust fumes and even dust from outer space. The slime and dirt clump together to make bogeys.
100. A pimple appears when a hair follicle becomes clogged by dried-up oil that oozes out of the skin.
101. Half of the bulk of faeces is bacteria.
102. Bile is the liquid that breaks down starches in your body. It determines the colour of urine, faeces and vomit.
103. Sweat only smells bad because bacteria break it down when it stays on your skin. So, if your armpits or feet smell, its rotting sweat helped along by colonies of bacteria.
104. The broad tape worm can live in your gut for decades and grow to 10 metres (39 feet) in length. You may not even know you have one...
105. There are tiny hairs all over your body, except for the palms of your hands and soles of your feet.
106. In the condition myiasis, maggots hatch out and live under the skin they can even be seen wriggling around. In 1993, doctors in Boston, USA, developed a treatment for myiasis that involved covering the skin with bacon. Maggots like the bacon, so come up towards it. Doctors then pull them out with tweezers. Gross!
107. Most people pass about a litre (2 pints) of gas a day as burps and farts.
108. Bacteria can survive 10,000 times the dose of radiation that would kill a person.
109. Tooth farming is an experimental technique in which scientists take dental stem cells (cells from immature teeth) and use them to grow complete teeth. So far, only parts of a tooth have been grown, but farmed teeth might replace dentures in 15 years time.
110. Forensic scientists examine maggots and beetles eating dead bodies to try to work out the time that the person died. They work out at which stages of decomposition the different bugs like to eat the body.
111. Your stomach uses hydrochloric acid to digest your food, but if you spill it on to your skin, it burns you. The stomach produces mucous to protect itself from the acid. When someone dies and the mucous stops, the acid starts to dissolve the stomach.
112. When you vomit, the muscles that usually push the food down through your gut go into reverse and push it up and out of your mouth.
113. Dead bodies swell up as they rot, because decomposition produces lots of gas. Some dead bodies burp or fart as they release gas, which can be quite alarming.
114. There are several medical conditions that lead people to act like or believe they are wild animals such as wolves. These may explain some of the stories about werewolves.
115. Roy Sullivan of the USA survived being struck by lightning seven times and eventually committed suicide.
116. You produce about a litre (about 2 pints) of saliva everyday. It helps to break down your food before you swallow it, and keep your teeth clean.
117. Putrescine, one of the smelly chemicals produced by rotting dead bodied, is also partly responsible for bad breath.
118. Some people pay to have their bodies frozen after death in case scientists work out a way to bring them back in the future!
119. When people die in extreme circumstances their muscles can go into spasm and freeze in their final position. Forensic scientists can use this to show that someone was still alive when pushed into a river, for example, or died holding a weapon.
120. Fleas that live on rats spread bubonic plague, which killed around a third of the population of Europe in the 14th century. They only started to bite humans because all the rats died.
121. The human body uses 60 calories an hour just to sleep the same as it takes to watch TV. So if you were a complete couch potato, you would need to eat only 1440 calories a day.
122. The placenta (the organ which grows to nourish a baby inside its mother) uses the same biological tricks as a parasitic worm to hide from the mothers immune system. Without it, the mothers body would reject the baby as an intruder.
123. A blackhead is black because the oily gunk in it changes to a black colour on exposure to the air.
124. If a wound gets infected, find some maggots to put on it! They will eat all the rotten flesh and protect you from gangrene.
125. The nastiest form of the disease malaria can cause the blood vessels in the brain to clog up with dead blood cells, causing deadly spasms.
126. In the First World War, soldiers used the super-absorbent sphagnum moss to bandage their wounds. It can soak up to four times as much blood as cotton bandages, but was a disgusting colour, like dried pus!
127. The human body contains an amazing 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.
128. Scientists have recreated the deadly flu virus that killed one percent of the entire world population between 1918 and 1919. Smart, huh?
129. You will probably produce enough saliva during your life to fill two swimming pools.
130. A virus can only survive in a living host cell so its not in a virus interest to kill you. Even so, viruses caused all pandemic illnesses except bubonic plague, so don't get too relaxed about them.
131. Early anatomists were not allowed to study dead bodies, so they pay grave robbers to steal them. Often, the bodies of executed criminals were stolen and sold.
132. A flea carrying bubonic plague gets blocked up with plague bacteria then vomits them up into the bite it makes in its animal host.
133. If you don't have enough water, eventually your lips shrivel and go black, your tongue swells so that it wont fit in your mouth, and you can go nearly deaf and blind. Your skin turns grey or purple, your breath stinks and your spit turns gluey and smelly, and if you cut yourself you don't bleed. So make sure you drink up!
134. Occasionally a baby is born with its legs fused together, but still with two feet. This mutation might have led to true stories of mermaids.
135. Casper's Law of decomposition states that a body left in the open air decomposes twice as fast as if it were immersed in water and eight times faster than if it were buried underground.
136. Xenographic-transplants involve taking an organ from an animal and using it in a human being a chimpanzee heart was transplanted into a man in Mississippi, USA in 1964, but the patient died two hours later.
137. The human stomach can hold up to 4 litres (7pints) of partly-digested food. A cows stomach can hold ten times as much enough to fill a whole bath!
138. People who suffer from migraines (terrible headaches with sickness) have thicker brains than people who don't. Scientists don't know which came first in sufferers, the thickening or the migraines.
139. Stone Age people used to practice trepanning an early medical procedure that involved drilling a hole in the skull. They had no anaesthetics, so it must have hurt but the patients didn't all die lots of skulls have been found with partly healed holes.
140. Many cures used in ancient times really do work. One was to put honey on wounds and then dress them with willow bark. Honey is an antiseptic, which stops the wound going bad and willow contains the same painkiller thats in aspirin. Genius isn't it?!
141. A new way of treating cancer involves blowing bubbles inside the body. When the bubbles burst, they release heat, which kills the cancer cells.
142. The latest artificial limbs can be controlled just by thought. Amazing!
143. Bacterial farms are used to produce certain drugs. Scientists have adapted bacteria to manufacture the hormone insulin needed by people with diabetes. Previously, insulin was taken from cows and pigs.
144. The human brain contains one hundred billion nerve cells.
145. A new method of transferring information, using the human body to carry signal,means we could soon be able to pass on material such as photos and songs just by shaking hands.
146. Your nose and ears never stop growing.
147. Synaesthesia is a condition that jumbles up how people sense things. They might see sounds as colours, or hear smells as sounds.
148. Heavier women produce brainier children. Scientists believe that fat stored on a womans hips contains acids that are essential to the development of the unborn baby's brain.
149. You are more likely to get ill from kissing another person than a dog. Even though a dog's mouth has as many germs as a humans', not as many of them are harmful to us.
150. A rare response to a virus that normally causes warts can also lead people to develop brown growths, which make them look as though they are covered with tree bark.
151. In one day, your blood travels 19,312 kilometers (12,000 miles).
152. Before they are born, developing human babies have a tail, and some developing snake babies have legs. Perhaps we have more in common with snakes than we think.
153. It's possible that hiccups come from our distant ancestors who crawled out of swamps and had both lungs and gills. Hiccups may be a remnant of a way of closing off their lungs when in the water.
154. Your skin weighs about 3 kilograms (6.5 pounds) the same as a bag of potatoes.
155. Most human mutations happen on the Y chromosome, which only men have.
156. People in some countries would bind their babies heads using wooden boards, to make them grow into strange shapes... don't try it with your baby brother or sister!
157. A man born in England long ago had four eyes, arranged one pair above the other. He could close any one eye independently of the others.
158. Necrotizing fasciitisor the flesh-eating bug causes your flesh to rot, die and fall off. It can be fatal, and even people who recover often lose whole chunks of their bodies. Yuk!
159. Zombies are not just a fictional invention. Witch doctors called Bokors in Haiti, can use a special combination of plant-based drugs to make a person appear to be dead, then revive them and keep them under their control.
160. Being born with webbed hands of feet is quite common. It happens because fingers and toes develop from a flipper-like hand or foot that divides on the unborn baby. If it doesn't divide properly, the skin stays webbed.
161. Some people have an abnormality called hairy tongue which gives them you guessed it a hairy tongue! In fact, its not hair, but extra long papillae (the little bumps on your tongue). They also turn black.
162. A Swiss journalist called Etienne Dumont is growing horns on his head. He has silicon implants under the skin and as the skin grows over them he replaces them with slightly larger ones.
163. Every year you will eat about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of food. That's about the same weight as a small car.
164. Even when you are elderly you will still have the tooth enamel that was formed in your mother's womb.
165. The skin of your eyelid is only 0.5 millimeters (0.02 inches) thick, the same width as a single hair.
166. The skeleton of a body buried in pH neutral soil or sand can survive for thousands of years.
167. Every day you produce enough saliva in your mouth to fill five cups.
168. Humans can tell the difference between 10 million different colours.
169. A traditional treatment for the pain of arthritis is bee venom... but then you are faced with the pain of bee stings!
170. When the girls are one and a half years old they are almost half their adult height. The same happens for boys when they are two.
171. When you look at your tongue first thing in the morning, it is covered in white stuff. These are cells that died during the night.
172. Forensic dentists examine teeth and tooth marks. Their work includes identifying dead bodies, and examining bite marks to match them to assailants.
173. In the 1700s a Russian woman had 69 children: 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets and 4 sets of quadruplets. That's a lot of birthdays to remember!
174. You have 10,000 taste buds on your tongue. By the time you are 60, half of these will have died.
175. Carrots really do help you see in the dark, they contain vitamin A which helps the retina to develop.
176. Some people suffer from a sleep-related eating disorder that makes them get up in the night (while still asleep) and go to the kitchen to stuff their face.
177. People who have been struck by lightning often develop musical ability they did not previously have.
178. Ebola fever is a horrible disease that makes people bleed from all their body openings, and turns their internal organs to liquid. Victims often die.
179. Human memory recalls events seven times faster than they really happen.
180. Many victims of the flu pandemic in 1918 went deep purple just before dying. Their lungs were so badly damaged by the disease that no oxygen could get into their blood.
181. You have more bacteria than human cells in your body.
182. Strychnine poisoning causes extreme muscle spasms. They can be so severe that the body can jerk backwards until the heels touch the back of the head and the face is drawn into a terrifying, wide, fixed grin.
183. Messages are sent to your brain at around 360 kilometers (224 miles) per hour.
184. In 2002, German anatomist Gunther Von Hagens carried out a public autopsy, cutting up a corpse in London, England. It was the first public autopsy for 170 years and was illegal. The police attended, but did not stop the autopsy or arrest Von Hagens, and the autopsy was even broadcast on television.
185. Having hookworms inside your body can protect you from asthma. Some people have deliberately infested themselves with hookworms to get rid of their asthma.
186. It is possible to die in just four minutes from choking or a blocked windpipe.
187. 18th-century Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani often made himself sick to get samples of stomach acid for his experiments.
188. The most dangerous animal to humans is the housefly. It carries more disease than any other creature.
189. The human intestine is 9 metres (nearly 30 feet) long. Just as well as its all coiled up.
190. In 1822, a man called Alexis St Martin was shot in the stomach. A doctor called William Beaumont cared for him, but the wound didn't heal completely and the man was left with a hole leading right into his stomach. Beaumont used it to study the workings of the stomach. St Martins meals used to leak out of the hole unless he kept it covered.
191. A Big Mac provides 2,365 kilojoules (565 calories) of energy. You'd need to cycle for 3 and a quarter hours to burn it off.
192. Some of the Forepeople of New Guinea suffered from a strange illness that caused shaking, paralysis and death and defied medicine for years. It was eventually discovered that the disease, Kuru, was caused by eating the undercooked brains of dead relatives, part of the Fore people's burial ritual.
193. Bodies buried in a peat bog may be naturally preserved for hundreds or thousands of years. Bog bodies have dark leathery skin, but are still recognizable.
194. Your heart beats about 35 million times a year.
195. Hookworms enter through the feet are carried in the blood to the lungs, and travel upinto the throat to be swallowed. The gut is their final destination, they bite unto it and live there.
196. An 11-year old boy needs around 10,000 kilojoules (2,388 calories) of energy from food each day. A canary needs only 46 kilojoules (11 calories) and an elephant needs 385,000 kilojoules (91,955 calories). The boy could get his 10,000 energy by eating 71 canaries or a small portion of elephant.
197. Bubonic plague has not gone away completely. An epidermic in Vietnam between 1965 and 1970 affected up yo 175,000 people.
198. Anatomist Gunther Von Hagens offered to buy the body of Russian basketball player Alexander Sizonenko, who is 2.39 metres (7 feet 10 inches) tall, even though he was not dead at the time! Sizonenko refused.
199. People with the condition Cotard syndrome believe that they are already dead, and are walking corpses.
200. No two persons have exactly the same DNA.