Eight Interesting Body Facts

More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose.

Capillaries are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.

Your body has about 6 quarts (5.6 Liters) of blood. It circulates through the body three times every minute.

The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime.

The human body can function without a brain (although not long).

Humans are the only primates that do not have pigment in the palms of their hands

A mans testicles manufacture 10 million new sperm cells each day, enough to repopulate the entire planet in 6 months.

Ten More Fascinating Body Facts

From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.
Most people lose fifty per cent of their taste buds by the time they reach age sixty.
Your body contains enough iron to make a spike strong enough to hold your weight.
The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9,000 'lead' pencils.
One square inch of human skin contains 625 sweat glands.
The surface area of a human lung is equal to that of a tennis court.
Give a tennis ball a hard squeeze and you use about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood around your body.
When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.
The human body has less muscles in it than a caterpillar.
Your eyes blink enough times in a lifetime to see blackness for over a year.

Ten Amazing Body Facts

An average red blood cell lives for 120 days.

There are about 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your body at any moment.

A red blood cell can circumnavigate your body in under 20 seconds.

Nerve Impulses travel at over 400 km/hr (25 mi/hr).

A sneeze generates a wind of 166 km/hr (100 mi/hr), and a cough moves out at 100 km/hr (60 mi/hr).

Our heart beats about 100,00 times every day.

Our blood travels about 60,000 miles each day.

When we touch something, we send a message to our brain at 124 mph

The life span of a taste bud is ten days.

There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth.

De-oxygenated Blood Turns Blue Myth

The common misconception that blood which lacks oxygen turns blue probably comes from the fact that veins appear blue and blood in the veins is typically heading back to the lungs, hence depleted of oxygen.

People who perpetuate this myth often claim that the reason we never see blood in its blue form is that the instant we get cut, the blood is exposed to oxygen and instantly turns red. However, when you get blood drawn from your veins that isn't exposed to air, it is dark red.

When blood is deprived of oxygen it actually just turns dark red. When it’s oxygenated, it turns a brighter red. The red color primarily comes from the hemoglobin, which contains four heme groups. These heme group’s interactions with various molecules end up giving it the dark red or light red color we see. The hemoglobin itself is a protein that binds with oxygen to be distributed throughout the body in blood.

Veins are very close to the surface of skin. This location under the skin is largely why veins appear blue despite the fact that the blood is dark red. This is from the way light diffuses in the skin. Veins appear blue from the way subcutaneous fat absorbs low-frequency light. This permits only high frequency blue and violet wavelengths to penetrate through the skin to the vein, with the other wavelengths getting filtered off from the pigmentation of your skin.

If a person has darker or lighter skin the veins tend to appear green or brown. People with extremely light skin, such as an albino, will typically have veins that show up as dark purple or dark red, more closely resembling the actual color of the blood running through the veins.