You may think you know your body very well. Maybe simply because you’re the one who feeds it, nurtures it, looked at yourself in the mirror, and uses your body to walk through this world. But you may not have known that your body has the power to digest metal. Or that every time you blink your eye, you are actually taking a tiny nap. So read on, and you are going to see all of the amazing things that you never knew your body could do.
1. A BLINK IS A MICRONAP
You may not have had an idea that a blink was just something you did simply to keep your eyes moist or to pull dust away from them. That is a very valuable service, of course, but we actually blink way more than needed for that alone—about 15–20 times per minute. The truth is that closing your eyes briefly has been found to help you sharpen your attention and serves as a miniature recharge.
2. BIG EYES CAUSE NEARSIGHTEDNESS
That your big eyes which may be considered beautiful by some, do you know that they can
cause nearsightedness, also known as myopia? the condition that causes distant objects to look blurry is caused by light not properly reaching the retina. If your eyeball grows too long, light is focused too soon, before it hits the retina—so when it does hit the retina the image is blurry.
3. HAIR CAN TASTE
Our nasal passages and lungs are lined with fine hairs, or cilia, this detect and sweep out all impurities. But how do they do this? It senses bitter tastes of the things passing through
them—such as nicotine. When the hairs taste something bitter, this makes them increase their rate of movement, in an attempt to sweep out the bad stuff.
4. YOUR FEET CONTAIN A QUARTER OF YOUR BONES
Human feet contain 52 bones—26 for each foot. That’s nearly one-fourth of all the bones in your whole body. Each also contains 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
5 STOMACH ACID DISSOLVES RAZOR BLADES
You are not supposed to swallow these things, but are surprised to learn that your stomach could do some serious damage on razor blades if you mistakenly swallow them?. Researchers tested the effects of gastric juice on metal objects and found out that after over 24 hours, the stomach acid reduced razor blades to 63 percent of their original weight (but when this test was co ducted on pennies and batteries, however, they were barely affected).
6. SNEEZES CAN TRAVEL UP TO 20 FEET
Don’t feel so safe when the guy across the subway car sneezes, but you may be in the line of fire and not even know it. A video study conducted by researchers at MIT found that sneezes travel much farther than previously believed—as far as 20 feet.
7. EARWAX IS GOOD FOR YOU
Not for food though, but that annoying stuff you’re using cotton buds to remove serves the
important purpose of cleaning, lubricating, and protecting your ears from infection. It’s as much as 50 percent fat, coating the ear and catching dust and debris—thereby keeping your ears healthy, even if it looks gross.
8. YOU LOSE ALMOST ONE-THIRD OF YOUR BONES AS YOU AGE
You are born with about 300 bones, but as you grow, some of this fuse together as cartilage ossifies, eventually giving you 206 bones by the time your growth has stopped and you have reached young adulthood. This is one of the 40 Ways Your Body Changes After 40.
9. YOU CAN’T TICKLE YOURSELF
The reason for this is due to your cerebellum—the area in the back of your brain that monitors movement—which predicts the sensation you will feel when you attempt to tickle yourself, countering the response that the tickle would otherwise elicit in other parts of your brain. “Two brain regions are involved in processing how tickling feels. The somatosensory cortex processes touch and the anterior cingulate cortex processes pleasant information, both regions are less active during self-tickling than they are during tickling performed by someone else, which helps to explains why it doesn’t feel tickly and pleasant when you tickle yourself.”
10. OUR NAILS GROW FASTER THAN THEY USED TO
If you feel you should be trimming your nails more often than before then go ahead. A study by the University of North Carolina comparing the growth of finger- and toenails to two previous studies and 50 years earlier, found that growth had increased by almost a quarter over the
