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Amazing Facts About
The Human Body
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If you’re one of those very lucky reed
thin persons and if someone derogatorily refers to you as
“skeleton and bones”, wait; don’t despair or get angry. Just
imagine what it effectively means. It’s a whole science. The
science of anatomy.
The skeleton is the framework of the human anatomy. It supports
the body and protects its internal organs. The human bone is
considered to be as strong as granite, when it comes to
supporting. It is said that a block of bone, the size of a
matchbox can support nine tones of weight!
There are two hundred and six bones that make up the skeleton.
Half of these are distributed in the hands and the feet. At
birth, a baby has three hundred bones, but ninety-four of them
fuse together during childhood.
What lends the framework a high degree of flexibility are the
flexible joints. Joints are those areas at which bones are
connected to one another. There are over a hundred joints in the
human body. |
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The hyoid is a bone that is an
exception. It is the only bone in the human body that is not
directly connected to another with the help of a joint. Instead,
it anchors the tongue and is attached to the styloid processes
of the skull by a ligament. What is a ligament? It is a tough
band of fibrous tissue that binds joints together and connects
various bones and cartilage.
The tongue, usually flat and moderately extensible, consists of
a network of bundles of striated muscle fibers, fibrous tissue,
fat and lymphoid masses, mucous-producing glands and a covering
of mucous membrane. Besides being an extremely mobile muscle, it
performs the all important task of tasting food, moving it
around as it is chewed and pushing it into the pharynx (throat)
when swallowing, It also is vital in aiding speech.
The tongue is derived mostly from an
outgrowth (tuberculum) in the floor of the pharynx. The tuberculum
grows forward and is joined by other tissues from the region.
There are approximately six hundred and five muscles in an adult
human body. Of these, the smallest is located in the ear and is
about a millimeter long. |
The Skeletal System |
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Let’s take a look at more amazing facts about the body:
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Red corpuscles are produced by the red bone
marrow. The rate of production is approximately 1.2 million per
second. Each red corpuscle lives for about hundred days. In terms of
weight, the bone marrow produces about half a tone of red
corpuscles in a lifetime.
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The digestive acids in the stomach are
strong enough to dissolve zinc. Since the cells in the stomach
lining are replaced rapidly, with about five hundred thousand cells
being replaced every minute, and the entire lining every three days,
the acids do not have time to dissolve the lining.
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The body’s entire blood supply, which is
about four and half liters, washes through the lungs about once in a
minute.
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The weight of the human brain is about
three per cent of the body weight. Its requirements are greater: it
uses twenty per cent of the oxygen that we breathe, twenty per cent
of the calories from the food that we eat and fifteen per cent of
the total blood supply.
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