The Human Body: 45 Surprising Insights – Part 5

Most of the human body's tissues are under constant renewal. The surface layer of the skin is recycled every two weeks. Our entire skeleton is replaced every 10 years. The average age of all the cells in an adult's body may be as young as 7 to 10 years.

2. Nobody really knows the exact number of muscles in the human body. Numbers range from 656 to 850 to over 50 billion depending on how you count them.

3. Myostatin is a protein produced in the human body that inhibits muscle growth. People with myostatin deficiency have twice the muscle mass of the average human and usually more muscle strength. Strongman Eddie Hall has myostatin deficiency.

4. An average 70 kg (150 lb) human adult has approximately 7×10^27 atoms and contains at least detectable traces of 60 chemical elements, some of which are metals that only form during massive celestial explosions like Supernova.

5. The human body produces trace amounts of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) which has been called "The most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science."

The largest organ in the human body besides skin is the liver, which weighs 3.5 pounds (1.6kg).

7. If you stretched out all the DNA in a human body, it would measure about twice the diameter of the solar system.

8. Our nose and our ears get bigger with age, but not because they are growing. It's because of gravity and the breakdown of collagen.

9. The human body when resting still produces enough energy to power 10 light bulbs(10-watt bulbs) and at maximum can produce up to 2000 watts of energy.

10. The human body is an ecosystem by itself. It is known as Human Microbiome. No two human microbiomes are the same. Average human body is a home to over thousands of different species of microbes and contains about 100 trillion microbial cells.

The egg cell is the biggest cell in the human body and the sperm cell is the smallest.

12. The single human body organ that requires the most energy is not the brain, but the liver.

13. The fattiest organ in the human body is the brain, which is approximately 60% fat.

14. While the human body contains only 250g of ATP at any one time, more is created and used continuously such that we go through more than our weight's worth of it each day.

15. About 65% of the human body mass is from oxygen, followed by carbon contributing 18.5% and hydrogen at 9.5%.

On average, every adult human body contains 2 to 6 lbs of bacteria.

17. In adult human bodies, fat is stored in yellowish deposits due to coloration from beta carotene and other nutrients. Infants, who have not yet accumulated these substances, have fat that is closer to white.

18. The strongest muscle in the human body is the masseter, our jaw muscle. It can bite with the force of 200 lbs from the molars. To put that into perspective, a hyena's bite force is 1100 lbs, a Silverback's bite is 1300 lbs and a saltwater crocodile's bite is 3700 lbs.

19. The human body may be incapable of living beyond 120 years due to genetic coding which may limit the number of times our cells can divide.

20. There are cells in the human body called Faggot cells that cause leukemia.

The human body has a vitamin B12 storage for 3-5 years, the highest long-range storage of every nutrition we need.

22. The average human body temperature has been dropping by 1/20 of a degree Fahrenheit per decade, since being established as 98.6 in 1851. The reason behind this is improved health and thus reduced population-level inflammation. Heat is a symptom of inflammation.

23. Bile breaks down in the human body into stercobilin (makes poop brown) and urobilin (makes pee yellow).

24. The human body contains energy equal to that of roughly 1.86 million kilotons of TNT.

25. There is a protein in the human body named after Pikachu. Pikachurin transmits electrical impulses from the eyes to the brain.