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1990-11-22
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Chapter 8
THE HUMAN BODY
The Limits
The youngest parents on record are a Chinese couple who gave
birth to a normal boy when the father was nine the mother was
eight years old.
A baby was born to parents in Turkey that weighed 24 pounds,
4 ounces at birth.
A woman in Russia had 69 children. (16 were quadruplets, 21
were triplets and 32 were twins.)
Shortest person: Pauline Musters, one foot, 9.65 inches tall.
Tallest person: Robert Wadlow, 8 feet, 11 inches tall.
Lightest person: lucia Zarate 13 pounds at age 20.
Heaviest person: Jon Minnoch, 1400 pounds.
The person who is currently the oldest in the world is 115
years old. She spent 75 years of her life in a mental
institution.
Hawaii is the state where life expectancy is the longest. The
average lifespan there is 73.6 years.
In the US 30.8% of women live to be at least 85 years old,
but less than 15% of men do.
Average life expectancy around the world in 1950 was 47.4
years.
Two centuries ago almost fifty percent of women died before
making it to age thirty-five.
In pre-historic times, people lived to an average age of
eighteen.
As you age, your ability to taste sweet flavors fades out.
Facts and Figures About Your Body
Your hair grows 83 feet per day. Explanation: This is the
total growth of all your 120,000 hairs, which each grow
one-hundredth of an inch per day. If you figure that you need a
haircut after you hair grows out one-half inch, you will need a
haircut every 7 weeks.
Your heart circulates about a million gallons of blood per
year.
If you stretched out all the blood vessels and capillaries in
your body, they could wrap around the equator three times. The
smallest of your capillaries are one-fiftieth the diameter of one
of your hairs. If you weigh twenty-five pounds more than average,
your heart has to work to circulate blood an extra 5,000 miles.
Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells
per second.
If you start counting the ten trillion cells in your body at
the rate of ten per second, it will take you thirty-one thousand
years to finish.
Your mouth produces about 16 ounces of saliva per day. Can
you imagine drinking it all at once?
You can sweat up to 3 gallons per day.
How good are human eyes? On a clear night you can see the
flame of a match up to fifty miles away.
You can't sneeze with your eyes open.
Your body is 63% hydrogen and 25.5% oxygen. Also necessary
are flourine, silicon, tin and vanadium.
Your skin weighs 6 pounds and covers about 17 square feet.
If you straightened out a French horn, the tubing would be 22
feet long. Human intestines, straightened out are 21 feet long.
It is possible for a tapeworm over thirty feet long to grow
inside your belly.
It has been proven that if you exercise, you will add about
two years to your life. However, you will use the two years
exercising.
Colds
Scientists are not yet fully in agreement about how colds are
transmitted. There is one theory commonly accepted: It seems that
the cold virus cannot live for more than a few microseconds at
less than body temperature (98.6 f). It is transferred by people
muffling a sneeze or cough with their hands and then shaking hands
or touching another person. The recipient now has some germs in
the skin of their hand, but is not yet truly infected. What it
takes to catch a cold is to then put the hand in nose, mouth, or
rub the corner of an eye.
You are most infectious with cold viruses for the first three
days that you have cold symptoms, but you can pass along a few
viruses from 3 days before symptoms to 3 weeks after cure.
It may not seem fair, but teenagers catch colds twice as
often as people over the age of fifty.
The average American adult has at least two colds per year.
Children can get as many as 12 colds per year.
Adults in childless households get less than 1/2 as many
colds as do mothers and fathers.
Married people have about a 40 percent chance of catching a
cold from their spouse. There is somewhat less chance of catching
a cold from a fellow worker.
Taste and Smell
A scientific study has proven that blindfolded people can
figure out what sex another person is just by the other person's
smell.
25% of the 20,000 people who responded to a survey by Omni
Magazine said they can detect a difference between how each
nostril perceives smells.
We have four different kinds of taste buds. Each can taste
only one kind of flavor. Smell, texture and imagination make up
the rest of the variety of flavors we experience. If you could
feed a slice of raw potato to a blindfolded volunteer who also had
a plugged nose, and said the potato was an apple, the volunteer
would not say otherwise.
Some people have as many as 500 taste buds per square
centimeter, others as few as 5/cm2. Do pancakes with maple syrup
taste the same to you as they do to me?
Babies
A newborn baby is a colony of 26 billion cells.
Until babies are six months old, they can breathe and swallow
at the same time. Adults cannot.
Science has determined that fetuses can hear sounds while
still in the womb. Sometimes they remember. One two-year-old girl
was found sitting on the floor reciting, "breathe in, breathe out,
breathe in..." The only time she could have heard this was when
she was in the womb as her mother was practicing the LaMaze
exercises which help a mother during childbirth.
A research project found that children were more likely to be
born male if their father was under less stress than their mother
at the time of their conception, and be female if their mother was
under less stress.
Miscellaneous
There is a disease called hypertrophy of the tongue that can
make the tongue so large that it no longer fits into a person's
mouth.
Occasionally people are born with horns. The majority of
these horns protrude from people's foreheads, but some folks have
had horns on their thighs, backs, noses, sexual organs and feet.
Members of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church have ten times
less lung cancer, 40% less heart disease and one-fourth the dental
cavities than average Americans.
Men in Vermont are twice as likely to have high blood
pressure as the national average.
The native residents of the Andes Mountains, where the air is
thin and oxygen is hard to get, have more than two extra quarts of
blood in their bodies.
People with blue eyes are better able to see in the dark.
People who are chronically ill never yawn. When nurses see
their sickest patients yawn, they know that it is time to stop
worrying. A psychologist noticed that when the a person speaking
yawns during a meeting, others in the room will yawn too. Those
who do yawn, are most likely to agree with the arguments of the
speaker.
You can last about eleven days without water.