By Shreesha Ghosh
May 20, 2022
On average, most people blink around 15 to 20 times each minute. It means that about 10 per cent of the time when you’re awake, you blink 900 – 1,200 times an hour, 14,400 – 19,200 times a day, 100,800 – 134,400 times a week, between 5.2 and 7.1 million times a year. Each blink lasts between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds.
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You are about 1cm taller in the morning when you first get up than when you go to bed at night. It happens because, throughout the day’s hustle, the cartilage in our knees and spine compresses and gets squashed causing us to shrink a little. When we sleep at night, the cartilage relaxes and returns to its normal size.
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The only muscle in your body that never tires is the heart. Your heart is made of cardiac muscle, consisting of special cells called cardiomyocytes which are highly resistant to fatigue. This type of muscle works automatically and constantly without ever pausing to rest.
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While the rest of our body shrinks as we get older, our noses, earlobes and ear muscles keep getting bigger as they are made mostly of cartilage cells, which divide more as we get older. At the same time, the connective tissue found between other tissues in the body, including the nervous system, begins to weaken.
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Your tongue is covered in about 8,000 taste-buds, each containing up to 100 cells helping you taste your food. Taste receptor cells are responsible for reporting the sense of taste to the brain. The tongue has five basic tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. They help us to decide whether the food should be eaten or not.
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The entire surface of your skin is replaced every month or approximately 27 days, which means you have about 1,000 different skins in your life! Your skin will constantly change as the epidermis continually makes new skin cells. These new cells replace approximately 40,000 old skin cells that your body sheds every day.
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Laid end to end, an adult’s blood vessels could circle Earth’s equator (40,075 kilometres) four times! Each 2.54 square centimetre (a square inch) of human skin has six metres (20ft) of blood vessels. These vessels carry a million barrels of blood in a lifetime that flows in your body continuously.
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For an average person, losing two litres of blood becomes life-threatening. Interestingly, a mosquito bite absorbs 0.01 to 0.001 millilitres of blood on average. So, it would take somewhere between 2,00,000 to two million mosquito bites to kill a human due to blood loss.
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