22 Facts About The Human Body You'll Never Be Able To Forget
Your body is a wonderland. A horrifying, beautiful wonderland.
1. Your heart can keep beating outside of your body.
TransMedics has developed a system to keep donor hearts pumping blood while it's transported, and it is amazing.
2. Speaking of your heart, it pumps with enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet across a room.
3. There are mites living in your eyelashes.
They're called Demodex, and they embed their heads into your hair follicles.
4. The average adult has ten times more bacteria than human cells living in their body.
(In other words, 90% of the cells in our body don't even belong to us.)
5. If you laid all of your blood vessels (veins, arteries, and capillaries) end to end, the line could circle the globe more than twice.
6. And just to really drive the point home: there could be more bacteria living in your mouth than there are human beings on this earth.
7. In rare cases, people who have sustained injuries to their right anterior cerebral hemisphere will develop "Gourmand syndrome": an eating disorder in which the person becomes obsessed with eating and thinking about fine foods.
8. Speaking of rare disorders, people with Exploding Head Syndrome will hear a loud bang in their heads, like a bomb exploding, right as they're falling asleep.
9. And heartbreak is more than a metaphor: Broken Heart Syndrome mimics a heart attack and is spurred by stressful or tragic situations.
10. When you blush, the lining of your stomach does, too.
11. There is a type of tumor that can grow teeth and hair.
They're called teratomas.
12. You are shorter when you go to bed than you are when you wake up.
13. And, starting at around age 30, you lose about half an inch in height every ten years.
14. You also lose about half of your taste buds by age 60.
Enjoy while you can!
15. Kissing (but, like, full-on, drool-y making out) fights cavities.
Anything that increases saliva!
16. Humans are bioluminescent — AKA, we glow — but the light is too weak to be seen by the human eye.
Special cameras found that the brightest light was emitted from our cheeks, forehead, and neck.
17. In the 1940s, about 75% of Americans claimed they rarely, if ever, dreamed in color.
Experts say it has to do with growing up with black and white TV. These days, that number is down to 12%.
18. Humans — like all mammals — have a "diving reflex" which instinctively shuts down certain parts of the body to conserve energy when submerged in cold water.
Other mammals use it for hunting or diving, but we use it to survive in near-drowning scenarios.
19. Tears that are shed for different reasons — like, from sadness, or happiness, or an onion — actually have different compositions.
20. Pregnant women's brains shrink during pregnancy and take six months post-delivery to get back to its previous size.
21. Babies are born with over 90 more bones than they'll have as adults.
The extras will fuse with others as they age.
22. And the human embryo's first development is the anus.
The second is the mouth, which means we're deuterostomes. Or, we're all a bunch of buttholes from the start.