YOUR MIRACULOUS BODY

Do you take your body for granted? Actually, if you can, that's a healthy sign that it's working just fine, and not making any uncomfortable demands on your awareness. Your body has evolved according to an ingenious three million year-old blueprint to function automatically and constantly under a variety of circumstances, with a minimum of conscious attention. It efficiently assimilates food and eliminates waste, deftly cools and warms itself as conditions require, and silently monitors and repairs thousands of components, even as you obliviously go about your business. How miraculous that all this can happen on its own, without the slightest effort on your part!

But sometimes ignoring our bodies can lead to neglect and abuse, which in turn cause illness and disease. Perhaps a little more appreciation would lead to better self-care, or help us heal when things do go out of order. Why not take a few moments of your busy day, and read the following amazing facts about that marvel of functional design, your body. Perhaps your renewed appreciation will motivate you to make better choices on behalf of your faithful vehicle, and help insure many more years of productive, trouble-free service.

• Your body is made up of approximately 100 trillion individual cells.
• Your brain has ten billion nerve cells, and over a trillion different electrical circuits. The number of possible interconnections is ten with eight hundred zeros after it. This is eight times the number of atoms in the universe! Your brain, many times more complex than the most advanced computers, operates on the amount of electrical power that would light a 10-watt bulb.
• Think you know the back of your hand pretty well? Just a 3/4-inch square patch of skin, only one-twentieth of an inch thick contains: 9 feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 300 sweat glands, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors, and 75 pressure sensors.
• The combined pulling strength of all the muscles in your body equals 25 tons.
• Your body secretes more than seven quarts of digestive juices a day.
• Your ears can discriminate among more than 300,000 tones. Factory noise is one million times as loud as a soft whisper.
• Your eyes can distinguish nearly eight million differences in colors.
• The surface area of your lungs is 1,000 square feet - 20 times greater than the surface area of your skin.
• Your bones manufacture one billion new red blood cells every day, replacing old ones at the rate of two and one-half million per second.
• Your blood serum is almost identical in chemical content to sea water.
• All the blood vessels in your circulatory system total nearly 70 thousand miles in length.
• Your heart will pump about 2.5 billion beats in your lifetime.
• Every pound of excess fat You carry requires an extra 200 miles of capillaries.
• Your digestive tract is 30 feet long.
• One cubic inch of your bone can withstand a two-ton force.
• There are more bacteria living on and in your body than there are people on the earth. Most of them are benign and even beneficial: You on intestinal bacteria to help you digest your food.
  
• More than half the bones in your body are located in your hands and feet.
  
• There is enough iron in the human body to make one small nail.
  
• Women blink almost twice as much as men.
  
• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
  
• An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
  
• Beards are the fastest growing hair. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it could grow to 30 feet over the course of his lifetime.
  
• Every person has a unique tongue print.
  
• Fingernails grow faster than toenails and your middle fingernail is the quickest one to grow. It takes about 150 days to grow out a full length fingernail.
  
• Your brain continues to send out electrical wave signals approximately 37 hours after death.
  
• The nervous system transmits messages to the brain at speeds of 180 miles per hour.
  
• The human nose can remember 50,000 different smells.
  
• Your jawbone is the hardest bone in your body.
  
• When you were born, you had 350 bones in your body, and after childhood 144 of these bones fused together.
  
• Your brain stops growing when you are about 15 years old.
  
• Laughing and coughing put more pressure on the spine than walking or standing.
  
• About every seven years, your body replaces the equivalent of an entirely new skeleton.
  
• The spinal cord is less then two feet in length and is the same diameter as your index finger, yet it contains over 10 billion nerve cells.
  
• Blood type A can receive blood types A & O safely. Blood type B can receive types B & O. Blood type O can receive only O blood but are "universal donors" because O is acceptable to all other blood types. Blood type O is the most common blood type worldwide.
  
• The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle of the whole body. It contracts in less than 1/100th of a second.
  
• It takes approximately 200,000 frowns to create one permanent brow line. ("Every two thousand frowns :creates one wrinkle.")
  
• Your eyesight is the sharpest in the middle of the day.
  
• 50,000 of the cells in your body will die and be replaced with :new cells, all while you have been reading this sentence! :
  
• In one hour, your heart works hard enough to produce the equivalent energy to raise almost 1 ton of weight 1 yard off :the ground. :
  
• Scientists have counted over 500 different liver functions. :
  
• In 1 square inch of skin there lies 4 yards of nerve fibers, 1300 nerve cells, 100 sweat glands, 3 million cells, and 3 yards of blood vessels. :
  
• The structural plan of a whale's, a dog's, a bird's and a man's 'arm' are exactly the same. : :The world's first test-tube twins were born in June 1981. :
  
• There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.In a year, a person`s heart beats 40,000,000 times.
  
• :Most people blink about 25 times a minute. :
  
• Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of :blood vessels. : :Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 :miles per hour.
  
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself. ("Your stomach produces a new lining every 3 days in order to avoid digesting itself in its own production of acid.")
  
• Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for :your heart.
  
• You use an average of 43 muscles for a frown. You use an average of 17 muscles for a smile.
  
• The average human blinks his eyes 6,205,000 times each year. :
  
• The average human produces a quart of saliva a day or 10,000 gallons in a lifetime.
  
• Every person has a unique tongue print.
  
• The average human's heart will beat 3,000 million times in their lifetime. The average human will pump 48 million gallons of blood in :their lifetime. : :You burn 26 calories in a one-minute kiss.
  
• The average human body contains enough: Sulphur 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, Phosphorus to make :2,200 matchheads, and enough Water to fill a ten-gallon tank.
  
• :Among the first known "dentists" of the world were the Etruscans. :In 700 BC they carved false teeth from the teeth of various :mammals :and produced partial bridgework good enough to eat with.
  
• Ophthalmic surgery was one of the most advanced areas of medicine in the ancient world. Detailed descriptions of delicate cataract surgery with sophisticated needle syringes is contained in the medical writings of Celsus (A.D.14-37)
  
• A sneeze zooms out of your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.
  
• If you were freeze-dried, 10% of your body weight would be from :the microorganisms on your body. According to the World Health Organization, there are :approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.
  
• Your ears and nose continue to grow throughout your entire life. :
  
• When you eat meat and drink milk in the same meal, your body does not absorb any of the milk's calcium. It is best to have 2 hours between the milk and meat intake.
  
• Only humans and horses have hymens.
  
• The tooth is the only part of the human body that can't repair itself.
  
• Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell. :
  
• One human brain generates more electrical impulses in a single day than all of the world's telephones put together. THE TYANA TABLOID : 2 APRIL 2000
  
• We have a a whole pharmacy within us. We can create any drug inside us.
  
• Our bodies are recreating themselves constantly - we ,make a skeleton every 3 months, new skin every month. We are capable of reversing the Aging Process!!
  (From Deepak Chopra's, Magical Mind Magical Body')
  
• A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
  
• A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
  
• Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
  
• A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.