Ten Facts about the Human Body

Blood vessels in a human body can be as long as 60,000 miles.
Humans are born with over 300 bones, but this number reduces to 206 in adults because some naturally fuse together as we grow.
Of the 206 bones, 106 are located in the hands and feet.
The liver is the largest solid organ and it contains 10% of the blood in a human body.
The stirrup bone in the middle ear is the smallest bone in the human body and is about .11 inches long.
The average person has 100,000 hairs on his or her head. Hair grows about five inches per year.
The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue in proportion to its size. The hardest bone is the jawbone.
The tooth is the only part of the human body that can not repair itself.
It takes twice as long to lose new muscle if you stop working out than it did to gain it.
We use 200 muscles to take one step and we average 10,000 steps a day.

Ice Cream Trick

Ice cream is good for your tongue, but if you put it in the freezer it gets hard as a rock. Next time, put the carton in a plastic bag. It will be much softer when you take it out so you do not need to bend your spoon.

Apple Facts

Greek and Roman mythology refer to apples as symbols of love and beauty. This time of year we often think of warm apple cider on a cold night.

Apples contain Vitamin C, Beta-Carotene, iron, potassium, and more. Apples have very high mineral contents, pectins, malic acid which are good in normalizing the intestines. Apples are good for treatment of anemia, dysentery, heart disease, headache, eye disorders, and kidney stones. Apple juice is an excellent means of providing essential fluids to the body.

A number of components in apples, have been found to lower blood cholesterol with a reduced risk of ischemic heart disease, stroke, prostrate cancer, type II diabetes, asthma, and a new study findings published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease show there may be some help for those patients.Apples are also good for treatment of the Acid reflux condition also called gerd (gastro esophageal reflux disease).

Green Apples - Good for strong bones and teeth, aids in vision, anti cancer properties.
  
Yellow Apples - Good for heart and eyes, immune system, reduce risk of some cancers.
  
Red Apples - Good for heart, memory function, lower risk of some cancers and to maintain urinary tract health. Maybe there is some truth to the old saying that an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Heart Attack and Cardiac Arrest

The terms “heart attack” and “cardiac arrest” are often used interchangeably. However, they are not equivalent. “Cardiac arrest” simply implies the heart has stopped pumping blood.  A heart attack is a lack of blood flow to a specific area of the heart caused by some blockage, spasm, or rupture.

People who have a heart attack are significantly more likely to survive than those who suffer cardiac arrest. While both are bad, cardiac arrest is worse.

Musical Trivia

Shirley Jones and stepson David Cassidy sang The Partridge Family single, “I Think I Love You” and it became a number 1 record.

Shirley's son, Shaun Cassidy’s record, “Da Doo Ron Ron” was also number 1.

Shirley Jones and Shaun Cassidy remain the only mother and son to each have a #1 record. Also, Shirley Jones, David Cassidy, and Shaun Cassidy remain the only mother/son/step-son trio to all have #1 records.

Happy Friday

Happiness held is the seed, happiness shared is the flower.

Friday is a seed, but to make it flower I will share a Happy Friday!

Monkey Day

December 14 is officially Monkey Day. Decided to let you know this week so you have time to prepare for this officious occasion of all things monkey business.

This is a day devoted to bananas, ape culture, and general monkeying around. Founded by a cartoonist and student at Michigan State University, Casey Sorrow unpeeled Pandora’s Banana when he jotted “Monkey Day” on a friend’s calendar. It was subsequently promoted in Sorrow’s controversial school newspaper cartoon “Fetus-X”, and by other cartoonists, and now its a sort of phenomenon. Hallmark recognizes it and it is celebrated by monkey-centric costume parties, the consumption of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, and by just becoming concerned with what’s going on in the world of monkeys.

Animal Sounds

Here are some interesting animal tidbits. You can tell a turtle’s gender by the noise it makes. Males grunt and females hiss. Pigs exhibit more than 20 vocalizations for various circumstances. Houseflies always hum in the key of F. Male ostriches can roar like lions. Giraffes have no vocal cords and humpback whales create the loudest sound of any living creature.

Wordology; College - University

In the US a college and university are essentially the same thing. They are both institutions which give degrees. In commonwealth nations the terms are more distinct. A college can be a school affiliated with a university – the college prepares the student for the degree and the university with which it is affiliated gives the degree.

Another way to describe the difference in the US is a college offers a collection of degrees in one specific area while a university is a collection of colleges. When you go to a university you are going to be graduating from one of their colleges, such as the business college. A Community College is different from both in that it cannot grant a bachelor's degree.

Some “colleges” in the UK are really secondary schools. One famous example is Eton College, where students typically enter at age 13. In Australia and New Zealand, “college” means high school.

Save Bananas

I usually buy some fairly green and some not so green so they do not all ripen at the same time. Here is another method. Take a piece of cling wrap about the size of your fist and wrap it tightly around the crown.

Each time you remove a banana remove and replace the cling wrap. If done correctly this method should give you another few days before your bananas are too ripe to enjoy. Seems it reduces the ethylene which ripens the fruit faster. It it doesn't work, there is always banana bread.

Give the Cold Shoulder

This is a rude way of telling someone they are not welcome. In medieval England, it was regarded as a polite gesture. After a feast, the host would let his guests know it was time to leave by giving them a cold piece of meat from the shoulder of beef, mutton, or pork. Even though it now seems rude, the meaning lingers that it is time to go.

How Big is the Internet

Some experts say that the Internet is growing by an exabyte of data every day. To put that in perspective, an exabyte equals 250 million DVDs.

After an exabyte comes a zettabyte, which equals 1,000 exabytes. In 2011, no single data center could hold a zettabyte of information.

By 2016, Cisco predicts that data centers will be sending more 1.3 zettabytes across the Internet every year. That's the equivalent of sending all movies ever made across the Internet every 3 minutes.

The National Security Agency is building a $2 billion data center in Utah that will be the world's first to store a store a yottabyte of data. That's 1,000 zettabytes or 1 million exabytes (or 1 million billion gigabytes).

Over half of Americans have watched TV streamed from the Internet.

Dissolving Tooth Myth

Here is another common myth debunked. The most popular Coke myth is that if you were to leave a tooth in a cup of coke overnight by morning the tooth would be completely dissolved. Like most of the other legends involving the popular drink this is totally untrue.

Clean Houses Cause Allergies

Here is another one of those studies that makes me wonder. It contends that children who grow up in hygienic households develop more allergies, eczema, and other disorders that result from a depressed antibody response. Scientists have theorized that children from middle class and affluent families have weaker immune systems because they live in cleaner homes.

Besides increases in medicated and vaccinated children in the past 20 years, the number of children with allergies has also doubled, with the sharpest increase among the middle classes.

Their study examined 8,306 patients, 776 of which had some form of reaction to peanuts, and the findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.

Lead study author, allergist Dr Sandy Yip, said, ‘Overall household income is only associated with peanut sensitization in children aged one to nine years. This may indicate that development of peanut sensitization at a young age is related to affluence, but those developed later in life are not.’ Am not sure of the relationship between dust bunnies and peanuts, but why take chances. Was going to clean my house today, but think it might be healthier if I wait a few weeks.