Lesser known facts about the human body

• A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
• A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
• Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
• A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
• Every person has a unique tongue print.
• According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
• After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.
• An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
• A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
• An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
• It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
• Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.
• 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.
• By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds. By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)
• Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
• Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
• Every person has a unique tongue print. Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
• Fingernails grow faster than toenails.
• Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.

Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.

What happens is babies are born with incomplete bones - many consist of several chunks of bone connected by cartilage. Later on, the cartilage is replaced by real bone, resulting in two or more bone pieces 'fusing' into one adult bone.

Tags: Facts, Miscellaneous

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Comments / Replies

• 

  Jo Johnson Says:
  2 October, 2006 at 5:13 am

  "Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies."
  Not true! We are born with fewer bones in fact. More develop as we age.

• 

  Guillaume Riesen Says:
  13 March, 2007 at 7:41 am

  Actually Jo, that is true. What happens is babies are born with incomplete bones - many consist of several chunks of bone connected by cartilage. Later on, the cartilage is replaced by real bone, resulting in two or more bone pieces 'fusing' into one adult bone.

• 

  atul kumar Says:
  20 September, 2007 at 5:44 pm

  I read somewhere that babies have 208 bones . as soon as babies grow the two bone join to make a bone.

• 

  not dumb Says:
  24 December, 2008 at 12:36 pm

  Well you read wrong you start with 300-350, and you end up with 206-208 depending on how they are counted. so Jo do some research, Atul you too, its not that hard to find reliable sources of info.

• 

  peter paw Says:
  12 January, 2009 at 9:27 pm

  The beard growing to 30 feet is bogus. Hasidic Jews never touch their beards and their beards are definitely not thirty feet long. Absurd.

• 

  Alecia Says:
  16 February, 2009 at 7:50 pm

  Jo your a dumbass, ever heard of Wiki??? 300 bones dude, go back to school.

• 

  blufindr Says:
  17 March, 2009 at 2:45 am

  Peter, hair actually generally falls out after it reaches roughly 1m (3ft, for you Americans) in length.

• 

  hipmonkey Says:
  31 March, 2009 at 9:40 am

  Cool stats. It's really pathetic to hear arguments contradicting the facts from people uninformed. Why would someone how doesn't know want to contradict these facts? Human nature of the amazing sheeple. They think they know, therefore they know. People that know everything can't be taught anything, therefpre they know nothing.

• 

  Zero Says:
  3 August, 2009 at 11:33 am

  @ blufindr and peter paw:
  
  Another reason altogether that most beards don't reach absurd lengths is that after a while, hair frays, and the resources used in growing the hair is pushed to the end of the hair, which cannot actually be repaired by the body, and effectively stops the growth of the hair.
  
  This condition is called "split ends". Cut off the ends and the hair continues to grow, even to extraordinary length. Check Guinness if you don't believe.
  
  For more:
  qualityjunkyard.com/2008/12/21/longest...ale-hairs/
  qualityjunkyard.com/2008/11/29/guinnes...ter-beard/

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