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NOVEMBER 2009
 		It’s only human

Quick facts about the amazing machine that we call the human body.

  • The largest organ in the body is the skin — it totals between 12 and 20 sq feet in area. It contains approximately 640,000 sense receptors, scattered unevenly over the body’s surface. You have about 300 million skin cells, and every minute you shed up to 40,000 of them.
  • The largest gland inside your body is the liver, weighing 3-4 pounds.
  • The most sensitive finger on the human hand is the index finger.
  • Humans produce about 10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime.
  • The circulatory system of arteries, veins, and capillaries is about 60,000 miles long.
  • There are about 9,000 taste buds on the surface of the tongue, in the throat and on the roof of the mouth.
  • Your nose is not as sensitive as a dog’s, but it can remember 50,000 different scents.
  • A pair of feet has 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.
  • The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm.
  • Your brain is about the same size as your two fists put together.
  • The lungs are the only organs in the human body that can float in water.
  • Did you know that you get a new stomach lining every 3-4 days? If you didn’t, the strong acids your stomach uses to digest food would also digest your stomach.
  • It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 muscles to frown!
  • It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
  • If you blink one eye you move over 200 muscles.
  • The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
  • The largest muscle in your body is the gluteus maximus. Partnered with two other muscles (glutes) known as the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus, the gluteus maximus helps form your buttocks and give it its rounded appearance.
  • Hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body, second only to bone marrow.
  • Human hair is almost indestructible. Only fire can destroy it.
  • Your whole body is covered in about 5 million hairs. You have about 100,000 hairs on your head. The hair on your head grows about 2 mm a week.
  • An eyelash lasts 150 days.
  • Half of your 206 bones are in your hands and feet. There are 27 bones in each hand and 26 in each foot. The human face has 14 bones.
  • A typical human rib cage consists of 24 ribs.
  • The longest bone in your body? Your thigh bone or femur — it’s about 1/4 of your height. The smallest is the stirrup bone in the ear which can measure 1/10 of an inch.
  • The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
  • Did you know that humans and giraffes have the same number of bones in their necks? The neck vertebrae of giraffes are just much, much longer!

    • What’s in a name?

  • The back of your knee is called the ‘oblique popliteal ligament’.
  • The indentation in the middle of the area between the nose and the upper lip is called the ‘philtrum’.
  • Your ‘orbicularis oris’ is sometimes known as the ‘kissing muscle’. It is a circular muscle that closes your mouth and puckers your lips when it contracts.

    Beat of life!

    The human heart works ceaselessly, beating 100,000 times a day, 40 million times a year — in total clocking up 3 billion heartbeats over an average lifetime. It produces enough pressure to squirt blood upto 30 feet.

    No wonder babies have such a hard time holding up their heads!

    The human head is one-quarter of our total length at birth but only one-eighth of our total length by the time we reach adulthood.

    Dominant dimples

    Have a chin dimple? That’s a relatively rare trait. Though it’s the result of a dominant gene, few people in the general population carry it.
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