Skin
The skin supports its own ecosystems of microorganisms, including yeasts and bacteria, which cannot be removed by any amount of cleaning. Estimates place the number of individual bacteria on the surface of one square inch (6.5 square cm) of human skin at 50 million, though this figure varies greatly over the average 20 square feet (1.9 m2) of human skin.
Oily surfaces, such as the face, may contain over 500 million bacteria per square inch (6.5 cm²). Despite these vast quantities, all of the bacteria found on the skin’s surface would fit into a volume the size of a pea.[1]
In general, the microorganisms keep one another in check and are part of a healthy skin. When the balance is disturbed, there may be an overgrowth and infection, such as when antibiotics kill microbes, resulting in an overgrowth of yeast.
– Human Skin, Wikipedia
21 Little Known Facts About The Human Body
- A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
- A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
- Every time you lick a stamp, you’re consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
- A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
- A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
- Every person has a unique tongue print.
- According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
- An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
- A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
- An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
- It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
- Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.
- 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.
- By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.
- By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)
- Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
- Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
- Every person has a unique tongue print.
- Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
- Fingernails grow faster than toenails.
- 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.
– Human trivia, Teach-nology
References:
- Theodor Rosebury. Life on Man: Secker & Warburg, 1969 ISBN 0-670-42793-4
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