Isn’t the human body a marvellous and slightly scary thing? If you don’t agree then these facts about it might help you change your mind.

2 Swimming Pools of Saliva

Have you ever stopped to consider the amount of saliva your body produces? All of that saliva is needed for you to taste food, as a completely dry food wouldn’t allow you to dissolve food in order to taste it. Anyway, if you decided to somehow pour all of that saliva into a couple of swimming pools instead of dissolving food with it then, hey, you could fill them both during your lifetime. Wouldn’t that be cool? Swimming in your own saliva might kind of make up for never ever tasting any food.

Boil Water with Your Body

Ever had problems boiling water in your kettle? Why not try using your body instead? It is said that it would only 30 for the heat given off a human body to bring a gallon of water to the boil. That seems like a long time to wait for a cup of tea but I guess you would need it after all that.

Brain Bigger than an Encyclopaedia

There is no encyclopaedia in the world that holds more information than your brain can hold. For example, the National Archives of Britain contains 9 centuries of history and in computer terms uses 70 terabytes of storage space. Your brain is estimated to have storage space of up to maybe 1,000 terabytes, although some miserable souls claim that it is a lot lower.

Babies Have More Bones

Would be surprised to learn that a baby has more bones than an adult? Sure you would. When we are born our body contains over 300 bones but as we grow many of them fuse together. This means that by the time we are adults we have little more than 200 bones.

The Fastest Growing Nail

The nails on your hands grow faster than the nails on your feet but which one of them is the fastest of them all? I can now reveal that it is the nail of the middle finger of your dominant hand that grows quicker than any other. It seems that the longer a finger is the faster the nail on it will grow.

We All Have Some Gold in Us

Each of us has a very small amount of gold inside us, around 0.2 milligrams. Most of it is in our blood but you would need to get the blood of thousands of people in order to get enough of the yellow stuff to make even a small coin. Interestingly, the most abundant source of gold on Earth is the sea, where it is estimated that 10 million tons of gold is located.

Shorter at Night

Have you ever measured yourself last thing at night and then first thing in the morning? Maybe you should. We each shrink between 1 and 1 ½ cm each day, a height loss that is recovered at night. The reason for this is that our spinal discs are compressed by our daytime activities such as walking and sitting down. When we lie down to sleep they recover their original size again.

You Can Dissolve Razorblades

The acid that is in your stomach is so strong that it can dissolve even those sturdy potato dumplings my aunt used to torture us with. Slightly more impressively, it can also dissolve razorblades, although you shouldn’t try this at home. To be fair, I wouldn’t recommend the potato dumplings either.