Helen Otway - 1001 Beastly Body Facts

How amazing is your body? Even as you sit quietly reading this, its still a hive of non-stop activity your super-strong heart muscle is pumping blood, your digestive system is processing whatever you ate recently and your skin is busy renewing itself, especially if you have any bruises or scabs! Have you noticed that you cant stay very still for long, too? Thats because every so often, your brain will make your muscles shift various parts of your body into a different position to keep you comfortable.

Everybodys body is amazing without really doing much; but the body is also capable of incredible feats: 43 world records were broken when 10,500 athletes competed at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and pushed their bodies to the limit in their quest to swim, run, cycle or row faster than ever before. If you fancy having a record-breaking body yourself, you dont have to be an Olympic athlete you could just try juggling with 11 balls, knitting 118 stitches in one minute, or doing 177,737 pogo jumps to get yourself in the record books!

Some people dont realize how amazing their bodies are until they find themselves in the most difficult of circumstances and have to fight for survival. Here are just a couple of examples

German teenager Juliane Kpke was a passenger on an aeroplane that was shot to pieces by lightning over the Amazonian rainforest in 1971. Still strapped to her seat, she was the only one to survive the fall. She spent the following nine days wading down a stream in search of civilization and eventually came across some lumbermen, who treated her injuries and bug infestations as best they could before taking her on the seven-hour journey to safety.

Nineteenth-century American frontiersman Hugh Glass was badly mauled by a grizzly bear and abandoned by his fellow hunters, who were convinced he would die of his injuries. He set his own broken leg, used maggots to clean his festering wounds and wrapped himself in a bear hide to keep warm so he could manage the six-week crawl to the nearest settlement.

If you want to find out about the amazing, mind-boggling and beastly things your body is capable of without risking your life, then read on...

Your body is amazing and you need to keep it that way. If you want to become a performing flatulist to entertain your friends, then good luck; if you want to keep your belly button fluff in a jar, thats fine too (if you dont mind losing those friends). What you really mustnt do, though, is try any of the risky stuff that you read about in this book. So-called achievements like swimming under ice and scoffing television sets are done by crazy adults who have undergone endless hours of special training, mainly because they have nothing better to do. Dont try to copy them find safer ways to amuse yourself instead!

When you sneeze, the air coming out of your nose and mouth travels at the same speed as a category 2 hurricane: 160 kilometres/100 miles an hour!

Your fingerprints were formed six months before you were born.

Your sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than your sense of taste. About 80 per cent of what you taste comes from what you can smell, which is why you dont taste much at all if you have a cold!

Earwax tastes very bitter. If you must try it, make sure no ones looking

British man Graham Butterfield has such a sensitive bottom that he tests beds for a living. He has insured his behind for 1 million/US$1.4 million!

Your body makes a new skin every month that means youll get through about 1,000 skins in your lifetime!

Some perfumes contain ambergris. Sounds nice? Its whale vomit!

Most of the worlds population has brown eyes. In the US, only one person in six has blue eyes, compared to every other person a century ago. Where did all those blue eyes go?!

In space, astronauts use specially formulated non-toxic toothpaste, because they have to swallow all the froth. Gross!

You sweat all day long, even when you dont feel it. As you read this, more than two million sweat glands around your body are working to keep it at the right temperature.

What you hear when you fart is the vibration of your sphincter muscles as air passes through them. The sort of sound you get depends on how fast the air is travelling.

Touch signals travel to the brain more quickly than pain signals. Thats why you feel the bump from stubbing your toe before the agony sets in!

Poisons can give you great-looking skin! Botulinum toxin (Botox) is famous for its wrinkle-smoothing effects, but for those who dont like needles there is a cream that mimics viper venom and gives similar results.

When you were born, you couldnt see further than the end of your nose.

The first modern dental floss was invented in 1815. It was made of silk!

Your fingertips and lips are packed with touch sensors, making them the most sensitive parts of your body.

If you cut yourself, your body will produce one million extra cells an hour until it heals.

Fancy a Japanese bird poop facial? The special enzymes in the droppings of the Japanese Bush Warbler make it an ingredient in some anti-wrinkle and skin-whitening treatments.

Chin dimples are hereditary.

You produce a lot of saliva about 1 litre/2 pints a day. A cow produces 200 times more!

You have more bacteria on your body than there are people in the world.

Your eye muscles just cant keep still they move more than 100,000 times a day and are even busy while youre asleep!

Yawning is your bodys way of getting more oxygen into your lungs to try and make you feel more awake.

Cola is more acidic than vinegarand acid destroys the enamel on your teeth, so remember to brush properly!

The most bizarre cosmetic procedure has to be tongue-splitting: a scalpel or laser is used to cut down the middle of the tongue and give it a forked appearance. Freaky!

The Achilles tendon, at the back your foot, is named after a mythological Greek hero.

Nose-pickings are a mixture of dried mucus and what is filtered out of the air you breathe pollen, dust, fungus, dirt, maybe the odd bug and even tiny particles of dust from space!

Your fingerprints, palm prints, tongue print, toe prints and sole prints are all unique!

Your sense of hearing is at its best when you are ten years old.