#WeirdWednesday — Weird and wonderful Wedneday facts you need to know
Your body is a weird and wonderful place, did you know that?
On this Weird Wednesday, we talk about the weirdest place in the universe, which is often your very own body.
Here are some strange facts you probably didn’t know:
1. There is only one place in your body where there is absolutely no blood flow and which gets its oxygen directly from the air. That tiny thing is the outermost layer of your eye, called the cornea.
2. You are likely to shed a little more than three kilograms of skin every single year with no extra effort. In fact, this amounts to so much lost skin that about 80 per cent of the dust in your home is dead skin. That gives the term ‘dust-bunny’ a whole new, disturbing, meaning!
3. It’s estimated that less than 10 per cent of people in the world are left handed, while fewer than one per cent of people are ambidextrous, which means they do not have a preferred dominant hand, but use both equally. Bonus interesting fact: Almost all screwdrivers are ambidextrous (I hope you get that one…)
4. A living cell is the smallest living organism in your body, but smaller still than that are the atoms, which are the basic building blocks of everything. The average human body consists of about seven octillion (or seven trillion trillion) atoms.
5. Laminin may be the most important protein in your body, as it’s the glue that holds all of your cells together. Without it, you would literally fall apart. Laminin has a very basic shape that resembles a cross, with one long end and three shorter ends.
6. Babies have 94 more bones than grownups do. As babies grow into young adults, some smaller bones fuse together to form larger and stronger bones, taking you from 300 to 206 bones.
7. Whereas the human eye can distinguish between a staggering 10 million colours, the nose tops that by being able to tell more than a trillion smells apart.
8. The furthest city from Johannesburg is San Diego, in the USA. If all the blood vessels in your body are laid out end to end, they would span that distance six times over.
9. In ancient Greece, the dimples on your lower back were referred to as the Dimples of Venus on women and the Dimples of Apollo on men, and were considered one of the most attractive parts of the human anatomy. A beautiful person had to have had deep back dimples to be categorised among the most attractive in their society.
10. The human body consists of about 20 000 genes, whereas rice or wheat has more than twice that. That means that your daily bowl of cereal has more genes in it than you do! In this case, the number of genes aren’t important, but the complexity of their structures is. Human genetics are far more complex than those of rice and wheat.
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