9 Really Fun and Weird Facts You Didn’t Know About Your Body

 For a fact, you do indeed give off a splendid radiance all by yourself. This was confirmed by Japanese researchers using highly sensitive equipment.

The human body emits very small amounts of light. But before you go sitting in dark rooms trying to read by your own natural incandescence, this phenomenon, known as bioluminescence is not as useful as one might hope. The glow, which is given off strongest from the cheeks, forehead and neck, is still far too dim for our eyes to notice. 

Your brain produces enough electricity to power a 10-20 watt bulb. We don’t often give it much consideration, but our thoughts are actually the result of electrical signals zipping around in the three pounds of brain matter stored in our skulls. Of course we are using that power for thinking rather than lighting, but perhaps the light bulb we use to represent an idea isn’t so far off the mark after all. 

Headaches affect millions of people every year and during one, you may feel as though your brain is throbbing. But oddly, it should be noted that headaches aren’t caused by pain in the brain itself. That’s because the brain is among the few areas of your body that lacks pain receptors.

It may interpret pain signals from everywhere else on your person, but brain tissue itself cannot experience that sensation. The likely cause of your headache is a dilation of the blood vessels within the brain or difficulties with sinus cavities outside of it.

Unlike your father who produced his sperm later in life, your mother was born with all the eggs she would ever have. That means you – or at least half of you – was already inside mom at the moment when she emerged into the world. In a sense, this makes you a bit older than you might suspect. The egg from which you developed was already the same age as your mother when it began to turn into you.

Most people think that the largest organ in the body is the liver. Yet, in reality, your largest organ isn’t in your midsection at all. Actually, you are wearing it right now. The skin is indeed a system within your body and essentially functions as an organ.

It can grow back parts of itself. In fact, liver transplants are sometimes done from living donors because the organ has this unique ability. A part is merely clipped off and implanted in the recipient. None of this means however that you may drink alcohol without consequence. Cirrhosis of the liver cannot be cured by this special property. 

The human body is mostly water. Assuming you are an average adult, as much as three-fifths of you is water. Of course, it isn’t very evenly distributed. While lungs are more than 80 percent water, your skeleton is only about 31 percent of the wet stuff. 

Your circulatory system is a miracle of nature so finely detailed that the smallest capillaries have individual red blood cells travel through in single file. This intricacy is not surprising since it must supply every cell in your body. Indeed, if you laid all your blood vessels end to end, they would reach from Lagos to Maiduguri more than 86 times over!

Though sex is decided at conception by your genes (the X or Y chromosome), your gender wasn’t well defined in the early stages of development in the womb. In fact, for the first few weeks there is very little way to tell one reproductive organ from another.

Everyone starts out looking pretty much the same. This is also seen in the fact that males and females retain certain similar characteristics for the rest of their lives. For instance, the prostatic utricle, a small pouch near the male’s prostate, is often referred to as the male uterus.