1. Human bodies produce 70 kg of ATP (a molecule that stores energy, permitting us to do nearly everything the body does) per day.
2. A human has a bone just after the spine ends, which helps proves that humans once had tails (possibly).
3. A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is been decapitated.
4. A human’s scent membrane in the nose is about the size of a postage stamp. A dog’s is about the size of a handkerchief. It’s olfactory lobe is also 4 times that of a human.
5. 1.7 litres of saliva is produced each day. In Discovery Channel, its a quart.
6. 10% of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
7. 10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria.
8. 11% of the world is left-handed.
9. 25% of a human’s bones are in its feet.
10. 1 out of every 113 people in the world will die in 2007.
11. The lunula is the half-moon shaped pale area at the bottom of finger nails.
12. You cannot sink into quicksand. By making small circles with each part of your body, water is re-introduced between the sand and clay particles, reducing the density and making it easier for someone to heave you out.
13. A person who is lost in the woods and starving can obtain nourishment by chewing on his shoes. Leather has enough nutritional value to sustain life for a short time.
14. A recent study indicates when men crave food, they tend to crave fat and salt. When women crave food, they tend to desire chocolate.
15. A scientist who weighed people immediately before and after death concluded that the human soul weighs 21 gms.
16. About 10,000,000 people have the same birthday as you.
17. All the chemicals in a human body combined are estimated to be worth about 6.25 euro.
18. Around 2,000 left-handed people die annually due to improper use of equipment designed only for right handed people.
19. At age seventy, 73% of men are still potent.
20. A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
21. A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
22. A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
23. A healthy individual releases 3.5 oz. of gas in a single flatulent emission, or about 17 oz. in a day.
24. A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
25. A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
26. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
27. According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
28. According to the Kinsey Institute, the biggest erect penis on record measures 13 inches. The smallest tops off at 1 3/4 inches.
29. After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.
30. An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
31. An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
32. An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
33. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
34. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.
35. Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
36. Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.
37. Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide.
38. By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.
39. By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)
40. Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
41. Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
42. Every person has a unique tongue print.
43. Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
44. Every time you lick a stamp, you’re consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
45. Fingernails grow faster than toenails.
46. Fingerprints serve a function – they provide traction for the fingers to grasp things.
47. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
48. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour – about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
49. Humans shed and re-grow outer skin cells about every 27 days – almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime.
50. If it were removed from the body, the small intestine would stretch to a length of 22 feet.
51. If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.
52. If you go blind in one eye, you’ll only lose about one-fifth of your vision (but all your depth perception).
53. In a lifetime the average US resident eats more than 50 tons of food and drinks more than 13,000 gallons of liquid.
54. In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful.
55. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
56. Jaw muscles can provide about 200 pounds of force to bring the back teeth together for chewing.
57. Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.
58. Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.
59. Most men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep.
60. On average women say 7,000 words per day. Men manage just over 2000.
61. One in every 2000 babies is born with a tooth.
62. Pregnancy in humans lasts on average about 270 days (from conception to birth).
63. The ashes of the average cremated person weigh nine pounds.
64. The average duration of sexual intercourse for humans is 2 minutes.
65. The average human body contains enough: iron to make a 3 inch nail, sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorous to make 2,200 match heads, and water to fill a ten-gallon tank.
66. The average human produces 25,000 quarts of spit in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.
67. The average person releases nearly a pint of intestinal gas by flatulence every day. Most is due to swallowed air. The rest is from fermentation of undigested food.
68. The body’s largest internal organ is the small intestine at an average length of 20 feet.
69. The feet account for one quarter of all the human bodies bones.
70. The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.
71. The human body has over 600 muscles, 40% of the body’s weight.
72. The human brain is about 85% water.
73. The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell. It is about 1/180 inch in diameter. The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm. It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.
74. The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.
75. The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.
76. The left lung is smaller than the right lung to make room for the heart.
77. The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
78. The longest muscle in the human body is the sartorius. This narrow muscle of the thigh passes obliquely across the front of the thigh and helps rotate the leg to the position assumed in sitting cross-legged. Its name is a derivation of the adjective “sartorial,” a reference to what was the traditional cross-legged position of tailors (or “sartors”) at work.
79. The most common blood type in the world is Type O. The rarest, Type A-H, has been found in less than a dozen people since the type was discovered.
80. The Neanderthal’s brain was bigger than yours is.
81. The only bone in the human body not connected to another is the hyoid, a V-shaped bone located at the base of the tongue between the mandible and the voice box. Its function is to support the tongue and its muscles.
82. The only time the human population declined was in the years following 1347, the start of the epidemic of the plague ‘Black Death’ in Europe.
83. The permanent teeth that erupt to replace their primary predecessors (baby teeth) are called succedaneous teeth.
84. The sound of a snore (up to 69 decibels) can be almost as loud as the noise of a pneumatic drill.
85. The tips of fingers and the soles of feet are covered by a thick, tough layer of skin called the stratum corneum.
86. There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.
87. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
88. There are four main blood types: A, B, AB and O and each blood type is either Rh positive or negative.
    Blood types in the US:

    O positive ~ 38.4%
    O negative ~ 7.7%
    A positive ~ 32.3%
    A negative ~ 6.5%
    B positive ~ 9.4%
    B negative ~ 1.7%
    AB positive ~ 3.2%
    AB negative ~ 0.7%

89. Three-hundred-million cells die in the human body every minute.
90. Women burn fat more slowly than men, by a rate of about 50 calories a day.
91. Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s.

On July 1st, Georgetown University made headlines when they discovered a very specific connection between stress and weight gain. Investigators at the Medical Center who worked with mice found chemical triggers that cause fat storage. Identifying those triggers led to bigger things, like learning the ability to ‘turn it off’ to eliminate fatty deposit.

The researchers managed to make the fat disappear in mice. It was tested on mice that were stressed and eating junk food, and fat deposits shrank from 40% to 50% in 2 weeks. Imagine if they could someday implement it in humans.

The types of stress included putting in an aggressive alpha mouse and standing in puddles of cold water. Mice fed with high fat, high sugar diet gained more weight than expected. Moreover, the fat gained was the worst kind. Abdominal fat. It releases illness causing hormones and chemicals.

The Georgetown researchers found high levels of a chemical messenger called the NeuroPeptide Y (NPY) in fat, stressed out mice. The scientists managed to keep the mice from getting fat when they injected a substance to block NPY. The mice were continually put under the same stress and diet conditions but remained the same. No fat gain was discovered.

Imagine if NPY was injected into certain areas of the body, like the breasts. No more going through painful expensive surgeries. =)

Scientists Discover Key to Manipulating Fat
Pathway also explains stress-induced weight gain

1. Analgesics also known as pain killers are a group of drugs used to reduce pain. Common examples are like paracetamol, aspirin and morphine. They are particularly effective for short term pain like headache, muscular pain or flu like symptoms.
2. Aspirin irritates stomach linings. Avoid it if you have an ulcer.
3. Taking aspirin during the later stages of pregnancy may lead to asthma.
4. Frequent use of aspirin may also worsen asthma sufferers.
5. Teens and adolescents associated with Reye’s disease, a children’s disease that can occur at any age and causes an acute increase of pressure within the brain and massive accumulations of fat in the liver and other organs, should avoid aspirins. Taking aspirin may result in fatally high temperatures.
6. Although aspirin is used the world over in small doses to reduce the risk of clotting, patients under blood thinning drugs like warfarin should also avoid it.
7. Although paracetamol has the same effect as aspirin, allergies and asthma attacks are unlikely. Which means that everyone including pregnant women are safe using it, though it is best not used for long periods during pregnancy.
8. Overdosing on paracetamol may cause extensive liver damage, hyperventilation, nausea, rhinitis and vomiting.

Analgesics and their side effects
Pros and cons of painkillers

The cell is the smallest functioning structure of all living organisms. It is also known as ‘the building block of life’. The average human body has an estimated 100 trillion cells and a typical cell size is about 10 micrometer. Below are a list of 8 common cells found in organisms. That is how cells look like under a light microscope.

The Red Blood Cell

It’s job is to carry oxygen to other cells all over the body.

The White Blood Cell

provides protection from foreign cells and infections. A lot more can be seen near sites of infections.

The Amoeba

It is a type of protozoa, moves a lot and is highly active.

Sea urchin egg and sperm

The above is a picture of countless sperms trying to penetrate an already fertilized egg. You can see a barrier layer of membrane formed clearly at the lower right are of the circle.

The Sperm

Little soldiers of the male species.

Blood Clot

A blood clot is the cause of decreased blood flow through a vessel.

Eating up foreigners

Notice the fluorescent glow in the white cells. Those are engulfed particles in the tummy of white blood cells.

Plankton

The one above is called a Diatom. Planktons play an important role in producing, consuming and recycling organic material in freshwater and marine communities.

Exploratorium
The museum of science, art and human perception

Artificial Sweeteners
Pretty dangerous stuff to diabetics

Acupressure is a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) technique that involves placing physical pressure by hand, elbow on different acupuncture points on the surface of the body to relieve symptoms. Here are 5 pressure points that you and I can work on at any time and anywhere. Just use the thumbs, fingers, palms, the side of the hand, or knuckles to apply steady, stationary pressure. To relax an area or relieve pain, apply pressure gradually and hold without any movement for several minutes at a time.

(A) Heavenly Pillar

Relieves stress, over exhaustion, insomnia, heaviness in the head, eyestrain, stiff necks, swollen eyes, and sore throats.

(B) Heavenly Rejuvenation

Relieves nervous tension and stiff necks; increases resistance to colds and flu. It is also good for the lungs.



(C) Crooked Marsh

Relieves nervous stomach, anxiety, arm pain, elbow pain, and chest discomfort.

(D) Inner Gate

Relieves nausea, anxiety, palpitations, and wrist pain.

(E) Spirit Gate

Relieves emotional imbalances, fear, nervousness, anxiety, and forgetfulness.

The site by the ICP (Interactive Clinical Pharmacology) of New Zealand has been designed to increase understanding of important concepts and principles in Clinical Pharmacology. it gives us an insight on how drugs work and effect our body. Examples on the site have been developed using Macromedia Flash to enable user interaction.

Here are the 16 interesting topics covered.

Drug Clearance

You will learn what steady rate concentration means.

Saturable Metabolism

Learn how drug molecules interact with enzymes to form metabolites.

Drug Elimination

Learn how altered liver and kidney functions may affect drug clearance.

Protein Binding

Only important in interpreting measured drug concentrations.

Volume of Distribution

The volume into which a drug appears to be distributed. Determines loading dose.

pH and Pharmacokinetics

Acids are ionized in basic media. Bases are ionized in acidic media.

Half Life

The time for the concentration of the drug to halve.

Dosing and Age

Drug clearance and dose requirements vary between ages.

Dosing-I.V. vs oral vs slow release

The route of drug administration influences pharmacokinetics.

Drugs in Pregnancy

Effect of drugs on the pregnancy and vice versa.

Oral Availability

The fraction of drug that reaches the systemic circulation after oral ingestion.

Drug Interactions

When drug concentrations exceed the capacity of metabolism.

Pharmacodynamics

The action of the drug on the body.

Drug Transport

Active transporters can help prevent some drug toxicities and aid uptake of some drugs. Check out the human model

Pharmacogenetics

How genes determine drug concentrations.

Graph Plotter

Varying dose regimen for different clinical settings.

How drugs work in our body
16 interesting flash articles