The Beautiful Body

The human body is beautiful and clever, as well as being totally bizarre, gross and liable to break down sometimes.

Body dollOver thousands of years we have developed into complex organisms that pride ourselves on our cognitions. However, did you know that the average person’s skin weighs as much as their brain? Or that your body gives off enough heat to boil half a gallon of water in 30 minutes? We have the capacity to produce one litre of sweat per hour and on a really hot day we produce up to 3 gallons of sweat – on a single day! – and there are 250,000 sweat glands on each one of our feet, supporting an ecosystem of 1 trillion bacteria. Yuck. I’d reach for my hand sanitiser but it only kills 99.9% of germs (check out this awesome xkcd comic to see what I mean).

In case you’re trying to enjoy an afternoon snack at the moment I’ll stop with the gross facts and leave you with the knowledge that we need to use about 300 muscles just to stand still, which seems rather inefficient, our tongues are the single muscle that is attached at only one end, and even though I’ve just told you how rubbish we are, our bodies are still beautiful and clever. And when they suffer we’re pretty smart at making ourselves better: we’ve been performing open-heart surgery since 1893.

The images of the doll bodies are borrowed and edited with thanks from Danny Choo under a Creative Commons License.