Your body is made up of many atoms...around 7 octillion to be exact. These make up the
37 trillion cells in your body, which are actually much younger than you think. The
cells that line your stomach regenerate every 5 days - which makes sense as stomach acid
can dissolve metal; Your skin's outer layer, known as the epidermis, is shed every two
to four weeks, meaning after one year you’ll shed roughly 0.7 kg (1.5lbs) of dead skin;
and only some cells have been with you your entire life - those of the inner lens of the
eye, the muscle cells of the heart, and the neurons of the cerebral cortex in your brain,
which is is largely responsible for your memory.
And while the brain may seem small, all those wrinkles are for a good reason. Spread it
all out, and the brain would be about the size of a pillowcase! Which is great for the
trillion nerves powering your memory. In fact, studies have shown that after viewing 2,500
images for only 3 seconds, participants could recall if they had seen one of the images
with 92% accuracy.
Don’t believe your eyes? Maybe it’s because you spend 10% of the day blinking - but they
can actually distinguish between 2.3 to 7.5 million colours. Your nose is able to discriminate
between 1 trillion different smells, meanwhile your fingers can feel a ridge as small as
13 nanometers in size - that’s 7500X smaller than the diameter of a human hair. And while
you may not think much of your pinky finger, without it, you’d lose 50% of your hands
strength. Sure, the index and middle finger are essential to help pinch and grab with
the thumb, but it’s your ring and pinky that give your hand power.
Now clasp one hand into the other - that’s roughly the size of your heart! It beats 100,000
times per day, pumping 5.5 litres with each pulse, which is close to 3 million litres
of blood a year. If you live to 75, it would fill 90 Olympic size swimming pools.
When it’s all said and done, human decomposition begins around 4 minutes after death. This
process is known as self-digestion, in which your enzymes and bacteria eat you away. In
fact, three to five pounds of your body is made up of bacteria. In a an unclean mouth
alone, 100 million to 1 billion bacteria can grow on each tooth – with 32 teeth each,
some of us have more bacteria in our mouth than there are people in the world.
If that leaves you weak in the knees, don’t worry - your bones are incredibly strong!
When testing compression strength for a rate of 1 sec, an 83kg person with US shoe size
11 could have 16,000 people stand on their bone at once - that is of course, if there
was room!
From the bones of our ancestors, we can extra DNA to learn about them. But if we were to
take all of your DNA from your entire body and uncoil it, it would stretch about 10 billion
miles, which is from here to Pluto and back! And if you took all of your veins, capillaries
and arteries, and laid them
end to end...you’d die. So...don’t do that!
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