The human body is an incredibly complex and intricate system and it still baffles researchers regularly despite thousands of years of medical knowledge. As a result, it shouldn’t be a surprise that even body parts we deal with everyday have unexpected facts and explanations behind them.
Here are 50 wacky facts about the human body:
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The brain is more active at night than during the day. Scientists don’t know yet why this is.
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Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body.
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Fingernails grow nearly four times faster than toe nails.
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The lifespan of a human hair is 3 to 7 years on average
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The higher your IQ, the more you dream.
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The nail on the middle finger grows faster than the other fingernails.
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Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s.
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Women blink twice as many times as men do
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The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve zinc. It doesn’t destroy the stomach because because the stomach walls constantly renews itself.
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Men burn fat faster than women by a rate of about 50 calories a day.
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Women are born better smellers than men and remain better smellers over life.
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A man has approximately 6.8 litres of blood in the body while women have approximately 5 litres.
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Babies are always born with blue eyes. The melanin in their eyes needs time to be fully deposited or to be darkened by ultraviolet light to reveal the baby’s true eye color.
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Men get hiccups more often than women.
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The largest cell in the body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm.
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During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
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Men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep. This is because the combination of blood circulation and testerone production can cause erections during sleep and are a necessary part of REM sleep.
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Everyone has a unique smell, unique finger print and unique tongue print.
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After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp.
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Noise causes the pupils of your eyes to dilate. Even very small noises can do this.
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If your saliva cannot dissolve or mix with food, you will not be able to taste that food (try tasting something after drying off your tongue)
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By age 60, most people will have lost half their taste buds.
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A simple, moderately severe sunburn burns the blood vessels extensively.
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Your eyes remain the same size after birth but your nose and ears never stop growing.
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The strongest muscle in the body is the human tongue.
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We are about 1cm taller in the mornings than in the evenings.
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The hardest bone in the human body is the jaw bone.
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About 32 million bacteria call every inch of your skin home, but they are mostly harmless and some of them are even helpful.
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The hands and feet contains almost half of the total bones in the human body.
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Three hundred million cells die in the human body every minute and every day and adult produces 300 billion new cells.
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Humans shed and regrow outer skin every 27 days.
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Humans are the only species that produce emotional tears.
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The colder the room you sleep, the higher the chances are that you would get a nightmare.
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The human feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.
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Everybody has one strong eye and one weak eye.
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All babies are color blind at birth, they see only black and white.
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The only part of your body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It gets its oxygen directly from air.
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Your skeleton keeps renewing itself every ten years which means that every ten years you get a new skeleton.
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Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour.
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Human lips have a reddish color because of the great concentration of tiny capillaries just below the skin.
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A normal human being can survive 20 days without eating but can survive only 2 days without drinking.
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Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood the number is reduced to 206.
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It is impossible to kill yourself by choking yourself with your hands.
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It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
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The most common blood type in the world is Type O. The rarest blood type, A-H or Bombay blood due to the location of its discovery, has been found in less than hundred people since it was discovered.
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When you sneeze all body functions stop, even your heart.
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Your eyes are always the same size from birth but your nose and ears never stop growing.
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Tears and mucus contain an enzyme (lysozyme) that breaks down the cell wall of many bacteria.
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The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
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Women burn fat more slowly than men.
