Is It Sunday? Cool. Time For The Lighter Side of Health Insignifica
The walking, talking creature called “you” is a serious concatenation of intricate systems. And if you think doctors aren’t pretty nearly as baffled by your corpus as you are, you just don’t know much about the human body (or the mental limitations of doctors). Here are just a few little curiosities we’ve found oddly entertaining over the years:
> Your brain’s electrical output could power a string of 50, small LED Christmas lights. In fact, the brain generates as much energy as a 10-watt light bulb, even while you’re sleeping.
> Speaking of sleep, experts believe the higher your intelligence, the more you dream. Don’t know if smarter folks have scarier nightmares, but dumbness always scares us.
> You very likely sprout as many hairs per square-inch on your skin as a chimpanzee. So next time you hear anybody deny “evolution” ask them politely why that biological fact should possibly be?
> The acid in your stomach could easily dissolve a razorblade. Hydrochloric acid is what it is, and if you’ve ever had a bout of heartburn, you know how nasty stomach acid can be. We don’t suggest you swallow a razor to find out, but if you decide to do so, please contact us and report how well that worked out for you. We’ll publish it because that’s the way we are.
> Women blink twice as many times as men do per minute. Suppose that’s because they’re so often shocked by all the goofiness going on around them?
> Pretty much all Caucasian babies are born with blue eyes. You didn’t know that, did you? It’s because melanin – which is what causes darkening – isn’t fully set until about 24 months after birth.
> Most so-called “heart attacks” happen on Monday. Unless . . . unless, you routinely have Monday as a day off from work. Enough said?
> Your body’s arteries, veins and capillaries circulate your blood through about 50,000 miles of internal pipes. In an imaginably huge circle, that’s two trips around the earth.
> You are almost always about one-half inch shorter at the end of the day than you are when you wake up. That’s because the cushioning material between your spinal vertebrae – the disc-shaped cartilages – get compressed by all of your daily activities as the hours go by. So when a bat sleeps upside down, he is simply regaining his normal waking height. Okay, so we don’t actually know that.
> With the exception of koalas, humans and apes are the only animals with fingerprints. Again, for the doubters, ask yourself that thing about evolution.
> Women are far, far better “smellers” than men. Thus, perfumes and colognes are a $1,000,000,000 industry . . . guys can’t smell stinkies and . . . you know the rest.