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Our bodies are truly amazing things. Using these vessels every day, we
sometimes forget just how amazing they are. However, 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
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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
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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
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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!
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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
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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!
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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
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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
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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.
