•Its been proven that people
who laugh more are healthier. Dr Lee Berk at the Loma Linda School of Public
Health in California found that laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and
strengthens the immune system. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day, six year
olds laugh an average of 300 times a day.
•Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour, about 1.5 pounds a
year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
•Armoured knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past
their king. This custom has become the modern day military salute.
•There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.
•While known as a painter, sculptor, architect and engineer, Leonardo da Vince
was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree
trunk reveals its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings
indicates the annual moisture. He could write with one hand and draw with the
other at the same time. Despite his great scientific and artistic achievement,
he was proudest of his ability to bend iron with his bare hands.
•The average human body contains enough iron to make a six-inch nail, sulfur to
kill all the fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to
fire a toy cannon, fat to make seven bars of soap, phosphorous to make 2,200
match heads and water to fill a ten gallon tank.
•Americans eat more banannas than any other fruit, a total of 11 billion a year.
Banannas are actually herbs and die after fruiting, like all herbs do.
•Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without
killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression to get fired.
•In the 19th century, craftsmen who made hats were known to be excitable and
irrational, as well as to tremble with palsy and mix up their words. Such
behaviour gave rise to the familiar expression ‘mad as a hatter’. The disorder,
called hatter’s shakes, was caused by chronic mercury poisoning from the
solution used to treat the felt. Attacking the central nervous system, the toxin
led to behavioural symptoms.
•The average person falls asleep in 7 minutes and is a quarter of an inch taller
at night.
•Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man
never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
•On average a woman utters around 7,000 words in a day while a man uses just
over 2,000.