Curious Human Body Facts

The human body is a very complicated system consisting of millions of cells organised uniquely and functioning dynamically together. The complexities can be better understood when it is highlighted. Anatomists find it useful to divide the human body into eight systems: the skeleton, the muscles, the circulatory and respiratory systems, the digestive system, the urinary system, the glandular system, the nervous system, and the skin.

Interesting Facts

• The thickness of the skin varies from 1/2 to 6 mm, depending on the area of our body.
• The four taste zones on our tongue are bitter(back), sour(back sides), salty(front side,) and sweet(font).
• One uses 14 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
• The strongest muscle of the body is the masseter muscle, which is located in jaw.
• The small intestine is 5 feet long and 3 times wider than the small intestine.
• Most people shed 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime.
• When we sneeze, air rushes through our nose at the rate of 100 mph.
• An eye lash lives about 150 days before it falls out.
• Our brain sends messages at the rate of 240 mph.
• About 400 gallons of blood flow though our kidneys in one day.
• Each of our eyes has 120 M rods, which help us see in black and while.
• Each eye has 6 M cons, which help us see in color.
• We blink our eyes about 20,000 times a day.
• Our heart beats about 100,000 times a day. 
• Placed end-to-end all our body's blood vessels would measure about 62,000 miles.
• The average human brain has about 100 billion nerve cells.
• The thyroid cartilage is more commonly known as the Adam's apple.
• It's impossible to sneeze with our eyes open.
• It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
• When we sneeze, all our bodily functional stop even our heart.
• Babies are born without kneecap. They don't appear till they are 2-6 years of age.
• Children grow faster in the spring season.
• Women blink twice as much as men.
• If one goes blind in one eye, that person only loses about 1/5 of vision but all of the sense of depth.
• Our eyes are always the same size form birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• The length of the finger dictates how fast the fingernail grows. The nail on the middle finger grows faster and on an average our toenails grow twice as slow as our fingernails.
• Hair is made of the same substance as fingernails.
• The nose can remember 50,000 scents.
• Similar to finger prints, everybody's tongue has a unique tongue print.
• A finger nails takes about 6 months to grow form base to tip.
• The energy used by the brain is enough to light a 25 watt bulb.
• The heart produces enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet.
• We get a new stomach lining every 3-4 days. If we didn't, the strong acids our stomach uses to digest food would also digest our stomach. 

Space Junk

Man-made rubbish floating in space often litter from space exploration, including spanners, nuts, bolts, gloves and shards of space craft are what is called Space Junk. The majority of the space debris consist of small particles but some objects are larger, including spent rocket stages, defunct satellites and collision fragments.

About 10 million pieces of human made debris are estimated to be circulating in space at any one time. Out of which 22,000 human-made objects are larger than 10 centimeters across. Experts believe that global positioning systems, international phone connection, television signals and weather forecasts could be affected by increasing levels of space junk. The windows of space shuttles are often chipped by space junk when returning to earth. A crash between a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite and an Iridium's satellite in February 2009  left around 1,500 pieces of junk whizzing around the earth at 7.5 km a second. 

The international Space Station is fitted with special impact shield known as the Whipple Bumper, which is designed to protect the structure from damage caused by collisions with minor debris. As the cloud of orbiting junk shrouding the Earth grows ever denser, the most sophisticated garbage collectors of all time are taking shape. "Robotics capture" or Orbital snatch-and-grab technology orbit to burn up on re-entry can be a reliable option in orbit. 

Fruit Juices Are Healthy :Right or Wrong?????

Fruit juice should not be counted as one of our five-a-day because it contains too much sugar-but dried fruit should, two new studies suggest. Most health guidelines encourage people to consume drinks such as orange and apple juice in order to have a healthy balanced diet yet ignore dried fruits. But the findings of two teams of UK researchers turn that advice on its head concluding that fruit juices should be avoided and instead dried fruit consumption should be encouraged.

The first study found that even freshly squeezed fruit juices can contain as much as five teaspoons of sugar per glass because the squeezing process concentrates their sweetness. This is around two-thirds of the amount found in a can of soda and can contribute to obesity and also disturb blood sugar levels and the body's natural metabolism. According to researchers people are encouraged to eat whole fruits and vegetables  which have far more nutrients per calorie. In the second study, partly conducted by the University of Leeds, researchers found that dried fruits contain just as many antioxidants, polyphenols and nutrients as normal fruit. 

Some interesting facts

COTTON

For as long as 7,000 years, cotton has been grown, picked, woven, and fashioned into materials as diverse as jeans, underwear, shirts, and even animal feed! Almost 757.1 million liters (200 million gallons ) of cottonseed oil are used in food products such as margarine and salad dressing. Even products such as toothpaste, ice cream, and, of course, the paper money used to by them, contain by-products of the cotton seed.

This productivity comes with a price. Conventionally grown cotton use a total of $2.6 billion worth of hazardous pesticides, some of them the most toxic in the market. These include carbamate pesticides, as well as broad spectrum organophoshates, which were originally developed as toxic nerve agents during Wold War II 

BANANA

There are over 500 varieties of banana today. This means that if you ate a different kind of banana each day, you would take almost a year and a half to eat every last one! In fact, about 99.5% of banana-eaters in the world are eating varieties of banana that have been selected by farmers and haven't changed in centuries. But wait : Not All Bananas Are Edible!

In any case, bananas are loved and eaten the world over. East Africans, and Ugandans in particular, eat around 450 kg(9921.1 lbs) per person per year. In East Africa, the word for bananas is "matooke," which also means"food".

Bananas may be valuable, but there are many problems involved in their cultivation. For instance, almost all cultivated bananas are seedless and sterile. This means that they can't be grown from seeds. Banana plants also take up to 18 months to fruit, which makes them even harder to breed.

If those problems aren't big enough, consider the fact that bananas can get sick, too. An illness of bananas called Black Sigatoka can cut a harvest by as much as 50%. Farmers control the disease by spraying banana crops with fungicide up to 40 times in one growing season. 

Age and Size of the Universe

Age of the Universe 

The current estimate of the age of the universe is about 13 billion years. The 60 old-years following Hubble's original findings have seen numerous revisions of the constant. HST's main purpose was the measurement of the Hubble constant. The Hubble's constant as measured by the space telescope was on the high side implying a rather young Universe also depending on what theoretical mode is accepted. Scientists say the Universe could be just 8 billion years old if the Hubble constant is precisely 80.

Size of the Universe 

No one knows whether the Universe is finite or infinite in size. Albert Einstein described the Universe as "finite but unbound" meaning that the frontiers cannot be observed even though they are definitely there.

 

Some Space Facts

1. There are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe. The largest galaxies have nearly 400 billion stars. There are an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy. If we tried to count all the stars in just our galaxy at a rate of one star per second, it would take us about 3000 years.

2. The Sun is the largest object in our solar system. It contains roughly 98% of our solar system's total mass. The surface of the Sun is 6000 deg C. The interior of the Sun is 15,000,000 deg C. 1.3 million Earths could fit in the Sun.

3. The Moon is drifting away form the Earth at the rate of 3.8 cm in a year. Because of this, the Earth is also slowing down. 100 years from now, the day will be 2 milliseconds linger.

4. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. It is so big that all other planets could fit inside and the fastest rotating planet 9 hrs and 55 minutes. Jupiter has 63 moons. Europa, one of the Jupiter's moons, is completely covered in ice.

5. Saturn, the second largest planet and its density is so law that it would float in water.

6. Most asteroids lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Dangerous asteroids, ones that could could cause major regional or global destruction, only hit the Earth every 100,000 years on average. We can Observe more than 20 million meteors every day but only 1 or 2 meteorites hit the Earth's surface each day.

7. By the most accurate definition, there are 1.4 known Black Holes. The closest  Cygnus X-1, is 8,000 light years. Black holes only absorb things that cross their event horizon, so they wouldn't destroy the entire universe. It's also possible for black holes to collide and merge. We can't see a black hole  because like everything else, they also absorb light.

8. The Big Dipper is an asterism, not a constellation . The Big Dipper is actually a small part of Ursa Major. Ursa Major is the constellation. In the same way, Orion's Be;t is an asterism within the Orion constellation.

9. The darkest space, with absolutely nothing around, would be about 2.7 Kelvin(-270 deg C). Space would be absolute zero except for background radiation which makes it ever slightly warmer.

10. Highways, airports,the pyramids, and even large vehicles have been seen by shuttle astronauts  at 217 kilometers from Earth. In fact, the Great Wall is much less visible than other things, especially things that are either reflective or a color that contrasts the surrounding areal

Floating Boat?

Take a look at these Pictures at one glance the boat appears to be floating in the air, but actually the water is so clear that it creates a illusion of flying.