Human Body:

An adult man’s body contains about 5 litres of blood. A woman’s contains about 4.3 litres. The blood travels along 100,000km of blood vessels, which is equal to going 2.5 times round the equator. It contains 25,000,000,000 to 30,000,000,000 red cells. The life span of red cells is only about 120 days, and 1,200,000 to 2,000,0000 of them are made every second. In a human lifetime you will make 0.5 tonne of red cells. Red cells are made and destroyed at a rate of 2-3 million per second.

You lose 100,000 brain cells every day! Luckily you have 100 billion altogether. If the surface area of your brain could be ironed out it would measure 2,090sq cm.

• Your brain is 80% water.
• A fifth of all the oxygen that you breath goes to your brain.
• Your brain demands 25% of your blood supply.

The average person inhales 6 litres of air per minute or 8,640 litres a day. You take 13-17 breaths a minute when sitting still and up to 80 during vigorous exercise. If you average 20 breaths a minute, you breathe 28,800 times a day.

Each of your eyes has 130 million light-sensitive cells built into an area the size of a postage stamp.

• You blink about 20,000 times a day
• You have over 5 million color detecting cones in the retina of each eye.
• You have 200 eyelashes on each eye to protect them from dust.
• Each of your eyeballs weights about 28 grams and is full of water.

Your stomach produces up to 2 litres of hydrochloric acid a day. Stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve metals, but it does not have time to damage the stomach walls because 500,000 cells in your stomach lining are replaced every minute. The small intestine is about 5m long and is the longest part of your digestive system. The large intestine is a thicker tube, but is only about 1.5m long.

On average, you will release 2 litres of gases from your intestines today as burps or farts.

• Hair grows about 0.5mm a day.
• Hot weather makes your hair grow faster.
• Hair grows faster than anything else in your body.

Your heart pumps 13,640 litres of blood around your body in a day enough to fill nearly 40,000 drink cans. An average heartbeat pumps 59cc of blood. An average heartbeat rate of 70 beats a minute adds up to more than 100,000 beats a day.

You will produce 37,800 litres of saliva in your lifetime.

• Your tongue has 8000 taste buds.
• Your tongue can taste only five different tastes - Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter & Savoury.
• A tongue can taste one drop of lemon juice in 129,000 drops of water.

There are about 13,000,000,000,000 nerve cells in your body, transmitting messages at speeds of 290km/h as fast as the world’s speediest road cars.

Your fingernails grow 0.05cm a week, it takes about six months to grow from base to tip.

• Your middle fingernail grows fastest, your thumbnail grows slowest.
• Your fingernails would grow 28 m long in your life if you didn't cut them.

Your sneezes can travel at 160km/h as fast as a train.

Your skin weights up to 4kg and covers an area of up to 1.3-1.7sq m. Getting dressed and undressed, rubbing body parts together, and even breathing cause microscopic flakes of skin to fall off at the rate of 50,000 flakes a minute. In a lifetime you will shed a total of 18kg of skin. Up to 80 percent of household dust is made of dead human skin cells.

In 7.5 hours of sleep, you will sleep lightly for 60 percent of the time and deeply for 18 percent. You will dream for 20 percent of the time.

You lose about 0.5 litres of water a day though 3,000,000 sweat glands. In hot climates you may lose as much as 13.5 litres a day.

There is enough carbon in your body to fill 900 pencils, enough fat to make 75 candles, enough phosphorus to make 220 match heads and enough iron to make a 7.5cm nail.

There are 50 trillion cells in your body and 3 billion of them die every minute (4,320,000,000,000 a day). Most of these are replaced. You make 10 billion new white blood cells each day. You have a total of 1,000,000,000,000 white cells, which help fight germs and infections.

You will pass between 400 and 2,000 millilitres of urine every day, depending on how old you are, your body size and the outside conditions, especially temperature.