The human body

Bathtubs of snot? The "gross but true" guide to human anatomy

Image: Tima Miroshnichenko

From the tiny, unseen creatures residing on your eyelashes to the incredible volume of mucus your nose produces annually, the inner workings of our anatomy are packed with crazy facts that sound like science fiction. Prepare to have your mind blown as we discover 10 of the most astounding, hard-to-believe truths about our very own body. Get ready to never again look at your saliva, bones, or even your earwax in the same way!

Image: César Couto

Did you know that about 50% of people have tiny creatures living on their eyelashes? These eyelash mites are about a third of a millimetre long. They can sometimes cause allergic reactions, but most people never find out they’ve got them. We bet you're calling your ophthalmologist for a consult right now!

Image: Franco Antonio Giovanella

Earwax is produced by your body to protect the lining of your ear canal by trapping dirt and repelling water. But what will probably baffle you is that by the time it reaches the outer ear, the wax has been inside your ear for about a month. No wonder it tastes so disgusting!

Image: Andrea Piacquadio

You usually only notice snot when you’re making too much of it, that is, when you are sick. But can you guess how much mucus an average person produces in a year? The answer will shock you: about 100 gallons, enough to fill two bathtubs! While the sticky goo is rather unpleasant, you wouldn’t want to go without it. Mucus creates a layer of protection between you and the outside world, so thank God it’s there.

Image: FUHMariaM

And what about your saliva? How many bathtubs do you think you can fill with your year's supply? Saliva helps break down and swallow food, fights bacteria, and neutralizes acid, among many benefits. So, if it is that good for you, it’s no surprise your mouth produces tons of it. In fact, it makes between 250 and 730 quarts a year, equivalent to filling a small swimming pool over a lifetime.

Image: BUDDHI Kumar SHRESTHA

That pink squidgy blob inside your head is stuffed with facts, memories, and dreams. Your brain is constantly crackling with tiny pulses of electricity, performing ten quadrillion calculations per second. They’re brilliantly complicated machines that scientists are only just beginning to understand. One thing is for sure: an average person has 1460 dreams in a year, about four dreams every night, or to put it another way, around the same as the number of miles from Denver to Nashville.

Image: camilo jimenez

Clever as your brain is, it wouldn’t be able to do much without the network of nerves that link it to the rest of your body. Nerves bring information from your senses to your brain and deliver orders from your brain to the other organs. As you can imagine, if we were to measure that amazing network, we would end up with a lot. In fact, every person has a whopping 44 miles of nerves running through their skin. Can you imagine?

Image: Ximena Mora

The outer layer of your skin is called the epidermis and consists of dead cells that provide protection from dirt and germs. What you probably didn’t know is that your body is constantly losing and replacing these cells. Also, your dead skin cells sometimes absorb water and swell. This is the reason the ends of your fingers go wrinkly in the bath. But don’t worry, the entire surface of your skin is replaced every month.

Want to play some more? How much do you think the average adult’s skin weighs? Just under 7 pounds, or as we like to say, the same as three pineapples!

Image: Ashton Bingham

Human hair feels soft, but it’s one of the strongest fibres on the planet. The number of hairs on your head ranges from around 9,000 to 140,000, depending on what sort of hair you have.

Everyone loses about 50 to 100 hairs every day, but this process can speed up in men as they get older. Hair generally grows about half an inch a month, or 6 inches a year. Yet, if you don’t cut it regularly, it will most likely stop growing when it’s about 5 feet long.

Image: cottonbro studio

This fact is not for skeptics: the average adult’s skeleton weighs the same as one car tyre. In fact, our skeleton only makes up about 15 per cent of our overall body weight. So, next time someone tells you that big bones is the reason for them being overweight, be suspicious.

Another fun fact? Your collarbone is the last of your bones to stop growing when you become an adult. Called the clavicle, it doesn’t stop growing until you’re about twenty-five.

Image: The Lazy Artist Gallery

Human muscles, on the other hand, make up about 40% of your body weight, and there are more than 600 of them. Yet, you use just 200 when you take a step, and almost all of them when you throw a ball.

The biggest muscle in your body is the _gluteus maximus_—a.k.a your bum. The smallest is in your ear, the stapedius, just about forty thousandths of an inch. The jaw muscle is the strongest by force, and the eye muscles are the busiest—10,000 movements an hour when reading! Our favorite muscle, though? The heart, of course!

Stranded at sea

From J.F.K. to Alexander Selkirk: 10 real-life castaway stories

Image: nikko macaspac

When we think of a shipwreck, the first thing that comes to mind is often a fictional character like Robinson Crusoe or the one played by Tom Hanks in Cast Away. However, throughout history, hundreds of real people have survived at sea or on deserted islands—often without water, food, or shelter. Here are 10 stories of brave adventurers who got lost in the ocean and survived against all odds.

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It is said that the story of Alexander Selkirk inspired Daniel Defoe to create his famous character, Robinson Crusoe. In 1704, this skillful Scottish sailor was on a buccaneering voyage in the South Pacific when he got fed up with a tyrannical captain who did not heed his warnings about the ship's poor safety.

Fearing for his life, Selkirk demanded to be put ashore at the next land they encountered. He was left on the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra, more than 400 miles off the west coast of Chile. As time passed and no rescue appeared, Selkirk realized he would have to make island life livable, with only rats, goats, and feral cats for company. After four years and four months, he was finally rescued by two British privateers.

Image: Winslow Homer, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1542, 19-year-old French noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque joined her uncle, Lieutenant General Jean-François Roberval, on an expedition to Newfoundland. During the journey, Marguerite fell in love with a young man. Her behavior was deemed unacceptable, so she was marooned—along with her lover and a maid—on the "Isle of Demons," off the east coast of Quebec.

Everyone except Marguerite eventually died. She lived in a cave and survived by hunting wild animals. After two years, she was rescued by Basque fishermen. Upon returning to France, the young castaway became famous thanks to the Queen of Navarre, who documented her story in 1558.

Image: Jean-Baptiste Pillement, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1812, American Captain Charles Barnard discovered the crew of the British ship Isabella, which had sunk off one of the Falkland Islands—an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean. Realizing that the additional passengers would require more provisions, Barnard went out to search for food.

During his absence, the British crew took over his ship, the Nanina. Barnard and his party were abandoned by the very castaways they had saved. After surviving for 18 months on Eagle Island, they were finally rescued in November 1814.

Image: WaSZI

Juana Maria, better known as the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, was a Native Californian. In 1835, when the few surviving members of her tribe, the Nicoleño, were relocated from the island off the coast of Alta California to the mainland—intended to protect them from ongoing attacks by Russian sea otter hunters—Juana Maria was accidentally left behind.

Eighteen years later, in 1853, a party of men found her alive and well. She had been living in a shelter made from whale bones and wore a dress sewn from cormorant skins. She was brought to Santa Barbara, California, but unfortunately, the change in diet and environment affected her health. Juana Maria contracted dysentery and died just seven weeks later.

Image: Robert LeRoy Knudsen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Did you know that long before he became president, John F. Kennedy went adrift in the South Pacific? In 1943, the 26-year-old was commanding PT-109 when a Japanese destroyer suddenly emerged and cut the craft in half. Two of the 13-member crew were killed, and two others were badly injured.

The survivors clung to the drifting bow for hours. Escaping sharks and other dangers, they swam three and a half miles to the tiny, deserted Plum Pudding Island. Kennedy and his men were finally rescued after surviving for seven days on coconuts.

Image: Hans-Jurgen Mager

In the fall of 1921, Ada Blackjack, a 23-year-old Iñupiat woman, desperately needed money to care for her son, who was suffering from tuberculosis. She took a job as a cook and seamstress on Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s expedition to Wrangel Island, north of Siberia.

The plan was to stay for one year; however, the men were unable to find enough food and began to starve. In January 1923, three of them left to seek help, leaving Ada to care for the fourth man, who was sick with scurvy. The three were never heard from again, and the man she was caring for eventually died. Ada learned how to survive on her own until she was rescued in August 1923.

Image: Winslow Homer, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The story of Luis Alejandro Velasco was brilliantly portrayed in the non-fiction book The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In 1955, after setting sail from Mobile, Alabama, Velasco’s ship was wrecked in the Caribbean.

The rest of his ordeal is best summed up by the book's full title: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time. Quite an adventure, don’t you think?

Image: Maël BALLAND

In the fall of 1981, American naval architect and sailor Steven Callahan set out from Cornwall, in southwest England, bound for Antigua in the Caribbean. During a night storm, his 21-foot sloop, the Napoleon Solo, was badly damaged and began to take on water. Unable to remain aboard, he resorted to an inflatable life raft, on which he drifted for 76 days.

To survive, he collected rainwater, drank turtle blood, and ate fish eyes. Finally, on April 20, 1982, sailors off the coast of Marie-Galante, near Guadeloupe, spotted and rescued him. He had lost a third of his body weight and could barely stand. It took him six weeks to recover in a local hospital. Four years later, Callahan recounted his ordeal in the best-selling book Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea.

Image: Winslow Homer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1973, British couple Marilyn and Maurice Bailey set sail on a 31-foot yacht from Southampton, England, to New Zealand. On March 4, after safely crossing the Panama Canal, their vessel was rammed by a whale, forcing them to continue their journey in a small inflatable life raft.

The couple was stranded in the Pacific Ocean with little food, a few flares, and a compass. They collected rainwater and, when their supplies ran out, survived by eating birds, fish, and even turtles. After 117 days at sea—exhausted, malnourished, and near death—they were finally rescued by a Korean fishing vessel.

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José Salvador Alvarenga, an experienced Salvadoran sailor and fisherman, holds the record for the longest solo survival at sea: he spent 438 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean. On November 17, 2012, he set sail from a fishing village in Mexico with an inexperienced companion. Shortly after, a storm hit their 23-foot topless fiberglass skiff, destroying the engine and throwing them off course.

They drifted for months, surviving on rainwater and eating raw fish, turtles, and small birds. His companion refused to eat and eventually died of starvation. But Alvarenga never gave up hope. More than a year after their departure, he spotted land, swam ashore, and found himself on one of the Marshall Islands—on the opposite side of the Pacific from where he had started.