It would not be a stretch to say that the human body is a scientific marvel.

Millions of processes go on at the cellular level in our bodies on a daily basis, and yet, most of us take it for granted.

These are 15 facts about the human body that may make you take better care of the "gift" given to you:

1) Your eyes blink an average of 20 times a minute, or over 10 million times a year!

2) Your ears never stop growing throughout your lifetime.

3) Earwax is actually a type of sweat.

4) You produce about 40,000 litres of spit throughout your life - enough to fill around 500 bathtubs.

5) You are 1cm taller in the morning than you are before you go to bed. This is because the soft cartilage between your bones get squashed and compressed during the day.

6) It would take an average person 690 days to walk around the world; assuming you walked 12 hours a day.

7) The only muscle that constantly works, but never tires, is the heart. So make sure you take good care of it.

8) Assuming you live to be 70, your never-tiring heart will have beat around 2.5 billion times!

9) The entire surface of your skin is replaced every 30 days, when new cells replace the approximately 40,000 skin cells that your body sheds daily. This amounts to about 1,000 different skins in your life, assuming you live to be 83 years old.

10) We "lose" bones as we grow. Simply put, babies are born with approximately 300 bones, but as they grow, some of the bones fuse together. By adulthood, humans only have 206 bones.

11) There are between 60,000 to 100,000 miles (over 160,000km) of blood vessels in the human body, and if they were taken out and laid end-to-end, they would be long enough to travel around the world more than three times.

12) Although teeth are considered part of the skeletal system, they are not counted as bones.

13) The brain only accounts to two per cent of our body mass, but consumes 20 per cent of our oxygen and blood supply.

14) Humans may not be the biggest, fastest, or strongest animals around, but we excel at long distance running - a gift inherited from our ancestors who hunted for food.

15) Blood makes up eight per cent of a person's body weight.


Source: penguin.co.uk, osgpc.com
Photo source: Pexels