Human Physiology Trivia – 26 Fun Facts

As a follow up to my previous trivia topics, I now present some unusual trivia related to the human body.

True, most of this information is completely useless… but then again so was much of the stuff you learned in high school. :-)

1. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
2. The average human body contains enough: iron to make a 3 inch nail, sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorous to make 2,200 match heads, and water to fill a ten-gallon tank.
3. You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.
4. More people are allergic to cow’s milk than any other food.
5. Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day!
6. In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful.
7. You’re born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206.
8. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
9. Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.
10. Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
11. Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, everytime you breathe!
12. One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet!
13. Like fingerprints, everyone’s tongue print is different!
14. The first known transfusion of blood was performed as early as 1667, when Jean-Baptiste, transfused two pints of blood from a sheep to a young man.
15. Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails!
16. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin!
17. The present population of 6 billion plus people of the world is predicted to become 15 billion by 2080.
18. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
19. The average person laughs 10 times a day!
20. The only time the human population declined was in the years following 1347, the start of the epidemic of the plague ‘Black Death’ in Europe.
21. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years!
22. The human brain is 78% water.
23. A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
24. An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
25. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
26. Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.

Some sources for these facts:

• http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Human_Physiology/The_Nervous_System
• http://www.corsinet.com/trivia/h-triv.html