Monthly Archives: March 2015

I already know you’re amazing, but here are some honest-to-goodness, scientific-y facts about the human body that make us humans even more awe-inspiring.

Did you know …

* There are over 100,000 miles of blood vessels in an adult human? If all your blood vessels were laid out end-to-end, they would go around the Earth four times.

Photo, NASA/ GSFC/ NOAA/ USGS via Wikimedia Commons

* Your intestinal tract, the system responsible for eating and digesting food, is over 30 feet long. (How in the world does it all fit??)

* Nerve impulses travel back and forth to the brain at speeds up to 250 miles per hour (nearly as fast as the fastest race car on record).

* Humans have the ability to read up to 1,000 words a minute.

* Our eyes are so sensitive that, if our surroundings were completely flat, we could see the flicker of a candle at night from 30 miles away.

Photo by israel Silberberg via Wikimedia Commons

* The adult body is made up of more than 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms. (One question: Who counted?)

* Humans have about the same number of hairs on their bodies as chimpanzees. (Ours are just so fine, you can barely see them, thank goodness.)

* Adult humans have about 2.5 trillion red blood cells in our bodies, but the average red blood cell lives only for about 120 days, so our bone marrow produces about two and a half million new ones every second. That’s like reproducing the entire population of Chicago every second.

* There are more living organisms on the skin of one human being than there are human beings on the Earth.

* Each of our bodies has 230 movable joints.

* Our hearts beat about 30 million times each year and our lungs breathe about 192 million gallons of air a year—all without even thinking about it.

Yep, we’re amazing.

Le Printemps by Pierre Auguste Cot (1873) via Wikimedia Commons

trinkets? We’ve all heard that some birds, especially crows, are attracted to trinkets. But to hear that a murder of crows (no, not that kind of murder … murder is the term for a group of crows) recognize that trinkets can be a gift of gratitude to us humans … well, that’s a strange bird (or birds, as the case may be)!

Kuznetsova by Repin, 1901

In Seattle, Washington, little 8-year-old Gabi Mann seems to have a flock of admirers, right in her own backyard. It all started when Gabi was just 4 years old, and the neighborhood crows, ever alert, noticed that Gabi tended to drop yummy things to eat. Gabi noticed too, and by the time she started school, she also started sharing bits of her packed lunch with the crows while waiting for the bus. Then, she and her mom started regularly feeding the crows in the backyard. That’s when they began noticing little presents left behind on the feeder … beads, rocks, buttons, and more.

Photo, Lisa Mann

So many presents that they now fill a 32-compartment bead storage box that Gabi treasures.

But the strangest present came recently when Gabi’s mom, Lisa, lost her lens cap while shooting photos of birds in their neighborhood. She found it on the rim of the backyard birdbath. When she checked their “bird cam” to see if it was, indeed, the crows who returned it, she saw that one actually spent time washing it off in the birdbath before laying it carefully on the rim for Gabi to find. Now that’s something to crow about!

Gabi and her mom, Lisa. Photo, Lisa Mann.

Read the whole story here.

I recently discovered a trailer for an amazing-looking documentary about origami, Between the Folds. I’ve watched a few minutes of it and plan to watch the whole thing the next time I have an hour to spare. In the meantime, I thought I’d share it with you. This isn’t your normal YouTube video about folding paper cranes, and in case you’re wondering if origami can capture your attention for a whole hour, here’s your chance …