• There are nine muscles in your ear.
• The navel divides the body of a newborn baby into two equal parts.
• If the average male never shaved, his beard would be 13ft long when he died.
• Experts say the human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
• The human eye blinks an average of 4,200,000 times a year.
• Foetuses can hiccup.
• Your brain uses 40 per cent of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream.
• Your left hand does an average of 56 per cent of your typing.
• Men without hair on their chests are more likely to get cirrhosis of the liver than men with hair.
• Blood is about 78 per cent water.
• The longest recorded sneezing fit lasted 978 days.
• Sunburn seems to heal in just a few days, but the blood vessels under the skin do not return to their normal condition for up to 15 months.
• We lose half a litre of water a day through breathing.
• The screaming of an upset baby can damage your hearing. Kids can scream at levels up to 90 dB, and permanent damage can be caused at 85 dB.
• Your stomach has 35 million digestive glands.
• At the moment of conception, you spent about half an hour as a single cell.
• There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.
• Side by side, 2,000 cells from the human body could cover about one square inch.
• Your body contains about 4oz of salt.
• Injured fingernails grow faster than uninjured ones.
• Jeffrey and Sheryl McGowen in Houston turned to in vitro fertilisation. Two eggs were implanted in Sheryl’s womb, and both of them split. Sheryl gave birth to two sets of identical twins at once.
• If you calculated the DNA length for each living person, it would stretch across the diameter of the solar system.
• Twelve per cent of the British population are left handed.
• The average heart beats 2.5 billion times in a lifetime.
• It is a medical fact that, after drinking, the last place in the body to be cleared of alcohol is the brain. We often stumble and drop things because our bodies and brains are out of synch.
• Even mild dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as much as 3 per cent.
• When you are looking at someone you love, your pupils dilate; they do the same when you are looking at someone you hate.
• It takes twice as long to lose new muscle if you stop working out as it did to gain it.
• The three things pregnant women dream most of during their first trimester are frogs, worms and potted plants.
• Your skin weighs about 3.2kg.
• 55 per cent of people yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else yawn. Reading about yawning makes most people yawn.
• A blink lasts approximately 0.3 seconds.
• Seventy-five per cent of Americans are chronically dehydrated.
• In 37 per cent of Americans, the thirst mechanism is so weak that it is often mistaken for hunger.
• A mere two per cent drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.
• The lifespan of a taste bud is ten days.
• We forget 80 per cent of what we learn every day.
• Men get hiccups more often than women do.
• In 1991, the average bra size in the United States was 34B. Today it’s 36C.
• The average North Korean seven-year-old is almost three inches shorter than the average South Korean seven-year-old.
• The Amish diet is high in meat, dairy, refined sugars and calories. Yet obesity is virtually unknown among them. The difference is, since they have no TVs, cars or powered machines, they spend their time in manual labour.
• The most common phobia in the world is odynophobia which is the fear of pain.
• In a University of Arizona study, rails and armrests in public buses were found to be contaminated by the highest concentration of bodily fluids.
• A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years.
• An average human loses about 200 head hairs per day.
• Mexican women spend 15.3 per cent of their life in ill health.
• In 2004, one in six girls in the United States entered puberty at age eight. A hundred years ago, only one in a hundred entered puberty that early.
• Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil.
• You use over 70 muscles to say one word.
• Bone is stronger, inch for inch, than the steel in skyscrapers.
• About one-third of the human race has 20-20 vision.
• In a hot climate, you can sweat as much as three gallons of water a day.
• Everyone is colour-blind at birth.
• Fingernails are made from the same substance as a bird’s beak.
• A runner consumes about seven quarts of oxygen while running a 100-yard dash.
• Your teeth start growing six months before you are born.
• Your big toes have two bones each while the rest have three.
• A pair of human feet contains 250,000 sweat glands.
• Living brain cells are bright pink.
• Your ears secrete more earwax when you are afraid than when you aren’t.
• Your body uses 300 muscles to balance itself when you are standing still.
• If saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.
• Your body contains the same amount of iron as an iron nail.
• You will have to walk 80km for your legs to equal the amount of exercise your eyes get daily.
• It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.
• Humans are born with 300 bones but, by the time they reach adulthood, they only have 206.
• The right lung in humans is slightly larger than the left.
• The average woman is 5in shorter than the average man.
• The heart beats about 100,000 times each day.
• Fidgeting can burn about 350 calories a day.
• A shank is the part of the sole between the heel and the ball of the foot.
• The talus is the second largest bone in the foot.
• The attachment of human muscles to skin is what causes dimples.
• A 13-year-old child found a tooth growing out of his foot in 1977.
• A woman’s heart beats faster than a man’s does.
• Another name for your little or pinky finger is Wanus.
• Dogs and humans are the only animals with prostates.
• It only takes 7lb of pressure to rip off your ears.
• Wearing headphones for just one hour will multiply the number of bacteria in your ear 700 times.
• If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.
• The total surface area of a pair of human lungs is equal to that of a tennis court.
• It takes food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your stomach.
• A dog’s sense of smell is twenty times better than that of a human.
• The average human dream lasts two to three seconds.
• Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.
• The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
• A human foetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
• A four-month-old foetus will startle and turn away if a bright light is flashed on its mother’s belly. Babies in the womb will also react to sudden loud noises, even if their mother’s ears are muffled.