Buzz
The human body is a bizarre and fascinating thing. It's made up of various squishy fluids, starts as a single cell, and carries a skeleton inside. But the weirdness goes far beyond that: Here are 14 unusual facts about the human body that you may not have known.
Babies are born with more bones than adults
You’ve probably heard that the human body has 206 bones, which is mostly accurate: Most adults have around that number. But, it’s not easy to count them all, as some of them are tiny bones like sesamoids in your finger joints.
However, babies? They have more. An average baby is born with approximately 300 bones. This is because many bones that are a single piece in adults are made up of several smaller bones connected by cartilage in babies. For example, the soft spot on a baby's head is simply cartilage between skull bones that haven’t fused yet.
We emit a faint glow in the dark, but it's hardly noticeable.
Ever wondered if bioluminescent creatures like anglerfish are fascinating? Well, you're in luck: humans glow too, through a process called biophoton emission. This occurs when chemical reactions in our cells release tiny amounts of light, detectable by ultra-sensitive cameras. However, this glow is too weak to be seen by the naked eye—it's about a thousand times dimmer than what we can observe.
Update 2021-10-11, 10:42am: Previously, we mentioned “you’re bioluminescent too,” but a keen reader pointed out that researchers behind this discovery clarify that it’s more like, rather than identical to, bioluminescence.
Your appendix is not as pointless as once thought.
The appendix, that small worm-shaped organ attached to our large intestine, used to be considered an enigma, a leftover feature from our evolutionary past. For instance, rabbits have a much larger pouch in the same region, which plays a role in their digestion.
However, recent understanding shows that our appendix is far from useless. It's filled with tissues tied to our immune system. Experts believe it may act as a backup storage for the beneficial bacteria in our gut, helping replenish them after disruptions like a bout of diarrhea.
Goosebumps occur when your skin attempts to puff up the body hair to trap heat and keep you warm.
Have you ever observed a bird puffing up its feathers on a cold day, turning into a fluffy ball? Or seen a squirrel doing the same with its fur? That’s what happens to your body when you experience goosebumps: your body hairs stand up to trap more air underneath, helping to warm you up.
It’s not that effective, of course, since we don't have a lot of body hair. But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that each goosebump appears at a hair follicle. This is due to a tiny muscle called the arrector pili (which means 'the hair-raiser'), which contracts to pull the hair upright.
Did you know you only breathe through one nostril at a time?
When you catch a cold and your nose gets congested, you might notice that only one nostril is blocked at any given time, and that nostril alternates throughout the day. This happens because we only breathe through one nostril at a time, even when we’re healthy. (The nostril that feels blocked is simply the one that happens to be resting.)
This is called the nasal cycle, and you can test it for yourself by placing your hand under your nose. You’ll likely notice that you’re breathing more from one nostril than the other. If both feel equal, you’ve caught the cycle during its transition. Try again after a while. Right now, I’m breathing through my left nostril.
We carry invisible stripes on our skin.
Tiger stripes aren't exclusive to tigers; humans also have a similar striped pattern on their skin, though we can’t typically see them.
These stripes, called Blaschko lines, develop as cells divide and the body grows during fetal development. The cells in these rows, including those in the skin, are uniform, which is why the stripes are invisible most of the time. However, certain rashes may follow these lines, making them visible, and in some cases, they can even be seen under strong ultraviolet light.
Whenever you eat asparagus, everyone’s urine will smell, even if you can’t personally detect it.
Have you ever noticed a strong odor in your urine after eating asparagus? This used to be a controversial subject, with some people insisting it’s true while others had no clue what anyone was talking about. It turns out that some people notice a cabbage-like smell in their urine, while others don’t. So the next step in understanding this odd fact is that some people actually produce the odor while others don’t.
But wait—there’s more to this strange tidbit: People who say they don’t have stinky urine also cannot smell the stench in other people’s urine. (Imagine conducting that study!) The theory today is that everyone produces the smell, but only some can detect it. Scientists are still uncertain, though—it’s possible that only some of us make the odor, and only some of us can smell it.
Did you know that babies blink only once or twice a minute?
The average adult blinks 10 to 15 times each minute. But babies blink much less frequently: Studies show that they blink just once to three times a minute. We’re not sure exactly why—perhaps it’s because babies tend to stare at things for longer periods, trying to absorb all the details.
Your stomach is always in the process of digesting itself.
Your stomach contains so many enzymes and acids that it could easily digest a piece of meat. But why doesn’t it digest itself? Well, it kind of does—just not in a way that harms you. The cells in the lining of your stomach regenerate quickly, replacing the ones that get broken down as part of their daily duties. In fact, you get a completely new stomach lining about every three days.
Your DNA is 99.9% identical to someone you’ve never met.
You might think you’re completely different from everyone else, but genetically, humans are remarkably similar. Even if you consider someone unrelated to you as not sharing any of your DNA, the reality is that roughly 99.9% of human DNA is the same across all people. The differences between you and a random person lie in that tiny 0.1%. And for fun, you share about 98.8% of your DNA with a chimpanzee.
When it's inside you, your poop is actually liquid.
Forget the diarrhea jokes—you know what I’m saying. Even though food enters and exits your body in solid form, it spends most of its time in a liquid state. Your stomach is essentially an acid bath, and your small intestine is like a thin garden hose. So, there’s no solid food traveling down the tube; the food being digested is a liquid called chyme. It’s only at the very end of digestion that most of the water gets absorbed back into your body, leaving solid waste behind.
Each year, your body produces enough saliva to fill one or two bathtubs.
Our bodies produce quite a bit of various substances. How much exactly? Quite a lot.
On a daily basis, you produce 0.7 liters of saliva—about the same amount as a typical water bottle. Over a year, you could easily fill one or two bathtubs with it.
Each day, you also pass gas between 15 and 25 times, with a total volume that can reach up to 1.8 liters—that’s enough to inflate a small party balloon.
Your body generates around 1.5 liters of mucus daily, though it’s not all concentrated in your nose. Mucus lines various parts of the body, including the lungs. And most of the mucus produced in your nose? You end up swallowing it.
The force of gravity actually makes you a bit shorter.
Gravity is constantly pulling you down. For example, when astronaut Scott Kelly returned from space, he found himself two inches taller than his twin. The same thing happens to most of us: We are slightly taller in the morning than we are by the time the day ends.
