Wotcha,
We're going on a big, leaky Fact Hunt today.
Because this week, it's ten facts about bodily fliuds.
1.
And first take a deep breath and swallow, because mucus.
You produce about four cups of the stuff every day.
Plus eight cups of saliva, lovely.
Most of which flows down your throat and into either your stomach or your lungs without
you noticing.
As gross as mucus is, it's pretty useful, trapping bacteria, dust, pollen and other
things you don't want to be breathing in into a solution we call snot.
It also heals infections and acts as a lubricant for your airways.
Lovely.
2.
And from the gross stuff inside your body to the gross stuff outside of it - sweat.
And sweat doesn't actually smell, because it's pretty much just saltwater.
So where does that beautiful beautiful BO come from?
Well there are two types of sweat glands and you produce two kinds of sweat.
Eccrine glands cool you down by pouring water onto your skin and generally Eccrine sweat
doesn't smell unless you leave it lying around for ages - it's the kind of almost nice odour
you get after a day at the beach.
That's not wierd, right?
Maybe it is when I sniff it off strangers in the ice cream queue...
Then there's the other kind.
Aprocine glands produce sweat with lots more fat and proteins in it, and are found in areas
with lots of hair, like your pits and your...
You know...
They activate when you're stressed, and provide a liquid that happens to be an excellent source
of food for the kind of bacteria that like warm, moist places like your armpits.
Or your, you know.
And its that bacteria on your skin which reeks.
Remember that next time you're standing under someones sweaty pit on the train into work.
The more you stare at them and try to move away, the more anxious they get and the more
whiff you get.
So try telling them they smell nice.
It might just work.
Probably not though.
3.
On to wee now and your pee is actually pretty useful stuff.
It's been used to clean and dye clothes, it's excellent against certain kinds of sting as
urea is antiseptic and mildly acidic, and it was even used as a facewash in elizabethan
times, with one surgeon, William Bullein, advising people to scrub themselves with vinegar,
milk, and the urine of a boy.
That's important.
It definitely has to be boy wee.
Otherwise that's just wierd.
Speaking of which, eggs boiled in the urine of young boys is a popular summer snack in
parts of China.
And in world war one, soldiers used to pee on their hankies and hold it over their mouths
to neutralise chlorine gas attacks.
Wee, is there anything it can't do?
4.
And if you've got a newfound love for wee, you'd be amazed what you can do with fat.
In November 2008, Craig Alan Bittner, a Beverly Hills surgeon with a very successful liposuction
practice, suddenly closed up shop and zipped off to South America.
Why?
Well if you've seen fight club, you'll know human fat's actually pretty useful and you
can make all kinds of things out of it.
In Bittners case, he'd been turning it into diesel fuel or "lipodiesel", and putting it
in his car.
Which actually makes a trip to the drive-thru pretty efficient.
It might seem like a brilliant idea to fuel your car off human blubber, but he was violating
state laws on medical waste.
Plus the smell...
Imagine the smell.
5.
Some men have trouble committing and it seems their sperm is no different.
In a test in mice in 2010 the stem cells of mice were made to be flourescent so scientists
could track what happened to them.
And amazingly, they found that huge numbers of the cells than transformed themselves into
swimmers then changed their mind, and became something else entirely, or simply turned
back into stem cells.
And of those that do decide to settle down, at least 249 million, 999,999 are wasted in
every er, you know.
6.
And from the amazing to the downright wrong.
Male bed bugs inseminate females by stabbing them in the abdomen with their sabre like
penises and inject their sperm directly into the bloodstream.
And who says romance is dead.
7.
That's quite enough of that, so how about some pus.
Ah go on.
Just a little bit of pus.
If you've ever wondered what your white blood cells look like without all that pesky red
blood getting in the way, pop a pimple.
Pus is just white blood cells, sometimes with a little wee bit of bacteria in it for colour.
8.
And now how about a bodily fluid we might be falling over ourselves to get into ourselves
in the next few years.
That sounds dirty.
And confusing.
It's been found that a protein in the bloodstream of the American opossum can neutralise almost
any poison, including snakebites, and even biological agents like Ricin.
The protein, known as Lethal Toxin-Neutralizing Factor or LTNF, seeks out foreign, poisenous
agents and neutralises them.
It can even attack harmful agents it's never experienced before.
In tests on mice who were injected with the protein, they survived being injected with
scores of different snake venon, as well as bee stings, ricin and botulism.
And what we've learnt from that is don't be a lab mouse.
9.
And now to something really pleasant.
Have you ever scored your poo?
Well science has.
It's called the Bristol Stool Chart and it marks your dung from 1-7, one being seperate
hard lumps a bit like nuts - and that's a quote - to entirely liquid, a 7.
It was developed by a man called Dr Ken Heaton at the University of Bristol and has been
in common use by doctors and analysts since 1997.
10.
And finally to the travelling toilets of the sea.
The blue whale excretes about 2% of it's body weight every single day.
Which equates to a whopping three tonnes of whale dung.
And in case you're wondering, and you are, it's mostly liquid, a firm type 7.