Human facts and facts about people: bodies, habits, and the odd things people have decided to do.
82 facts on this shelf
Prairie dogs, those little pups popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm. They have different "words" for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures.
LFA stands for Low Frequency Active sonar, a technology used by submarines to "see." Unfortunately even one hundred miles from the source of a LFA source animals experience the equivalent of decompression sickness, killing every dolphin, porpoise, orca, and whale within 100-300 miles, depending on the decibal. It's no good for humans either.
Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
A wise monkey never monkies with another monkey's monkey.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.
The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1.
If you've had an organ transplant, it is best to avoid eating grapefruit or drinking grapefruit juice (it interferes with the anti-rejection drugs in your blood).
If you say somebody is 1 in a million you are saying there are 1,317 of them in China (as of 4/30/07)
"The pain of having less is much stronger than the joy of having more." Workers who discover they're earning more for the same work may be happy, but those who earn less can quickly feel slighted, killing motivation and often the quality of their output.
A new study (2/08) suggests that sadness leads to shopping.
According to the study that will be published in the June 2008 number of Psychological Science, sadness leads to ego-centrist thinking. In other words, a sad person tends to transform into a shopaholic, willing to spend extra money on the same item than neutral-emotion people would buy for a lot less.
“It is the combination of sadness and self-focus that drives the effect, and it turns out that sadness leads to an increase in self-focus,” said Cynthia Cryder, co-author to the study, AFP quotes. “What we think is going on is that sad and self-focused people are feeling pretty bad about themselves and have a decreased valuation, and one way to do this is by acquiring material goods.”
Oh yeah, it also says this therapy does not work. If you’re sad and feel like shopping, don’t!
According to Jeffrey Strain of TheStreet.com, here are 10 traits that will make you rich.
Patience
Satisfaction
Organization
Discipline
Reflectiveness
Creativity
Creativity
Curiosity
Risk-Taking
Goal-Oriented
Hard & Smart Working
If a woman reaches her 50th birthday without cancer or heart disease, she can expect to see 92.
There are 3 classifications of burns. a) First degree burn only involves the outer layer of skin. b) Second degree burn involves several layers of the skin tha become blistered. c) Third degree burn is all layers of the skin,underlying tissue and organs. Nerves are damaged and sometimes destoyed.
In early times various body parts were used as tools and guides, hence the word "feet," or "the rule of thumb."
Identical twins develop when one egg separates then is fertilized, fraternal twins are 2 separate eggs, and siamese twins is one egg that began to separate but was fertilized before the completion of the egg division.
One twin is always born healthier and bigger then the other because of the unbalanced distribution of nutrients during pregnancy. Some identical twins are actual mirror images of each other, e.g. one will be right-handed the other left or one is near sighted the other far sighted etc.
A human can bleed to death in a minute or less. A loss of 1 quart of blood or more will lead to shock or even death.
The most contagious disease is the common cold and the most non-contagious disease is gingivitis.
Classifications of cancer are:
a) carcinoma, involves skin
b) sarcoma, involves bone, muscle, cartilage, and fat
c) leukemia, involves white blood cells
d) lymphoma, involves lymphatic system
Sulfur dioxide is a colorless gas with a suffocating, choking odor. It is toxic to humans and concentrations as low as 8 ppm will produce coughing. Incredibly, in the Odyssey, Homer describes the burning of sulfur (formation of SO2) as a way that homes were 'fumigated'.
The roots of farming began in the areas of present day Turkey and the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. Over 80 percent of mankind's diet is provided by the seeds of less than a dozen plant species.
About 642 million people voted in India's 2024 general election, making it the largest democratic election in human history.
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on April 12, 1961, orbiting Earth once in about 108 minutes.
A German Shepherd's nose has about 225 million scent receptors, compared with roughly 5 million in a human. That huge difference is why they excel at tracking and detection work.
A Bulldog named Otto set a Guinness World Record in 2015 in Lima, Peru, by skateboarding through the legs of 30 people lined up in a human tunnel.
Elephants communicate with low rumbles called infrasound, which are too low for humans to hear and can travel for miles. They may even sense these vibrations through their feet.
The baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, was declared functionally extinct after a 2006 survey failed to find any. It was the first dolphin species thought to be wiped out mainly by human activity.
Domestic dogs descend from an ancient population of wolves that were domesticated by humans tens of thousands of years ago.
Sharks don't have bones. Their skeletons are made of cartilage, the same flexible material in human ears and noses, which makes them lighter and more flexible.
The whale shark is the largest fish in the world and can grow longer than 40 feet, but it feeds mostly on tiny plankton and is harmless to humans.
A 2013 study estimated that humans kill about 100 million sharks each year, many for their fins, which has pushed many species toward extinction.
Unprovoked shark bites on humans are rare, usually fewer than 100 per year worldwide, and only a handful are fatal. People are far more dangerous to sharks than sharks are to people.
Baleen whales filter food through baleen plates made of keratin, the same material as human fingernails and hair.
Humans share about 98.7% of their DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos, which makes them our closest living relatives.
In 1960, Jane Goodall saw a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using a grass stem to "fish" for termites, proving that humans weren't the only animals that make and use tools.
A chimpanzee named Ham became the first great ape in space in 1961, helping NASA prove that humans could perform tasks during spaceflight.
Chimpanzees are stronger than humans, but not superhero-level. A 2017 study found their muscles are about 1.35 times as powerful as ours, much less than the "five times stronger" myth.
A chimpanzee named Washoe learned around 350 signs of American Sign Language, making her one of the first non-human animals taught to communicate with human signs.
A young chimpanzee named Ayumu outperformed human adults on a test that required memorizing the positions of numbers flashed on a screen for a split second.
Despite their size, grizzly bears can run about 35 miles per hour in short bursts, faster than any human sprinter.
Humans first landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down while Michael Collins orbited above in the command module.
The Great Pyramid was the tallest human-made structure in the world for about 3,800 years, until England's Lincoln Cathedral spire surpassed it in the early 1300s.
The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980, making it the first human disease wiped out by vaccination.
"Computer" originally meant a person who did calculations, and NASA relied on human computers like Katherine Johnson.
About 18% of the human body's mass is carbon.
Oxygen is the most abundant element in the human body, making up about 65% of its mass, mostly in the form of water.
A musical saw has an eerie sound, similar to a human voice.
The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons.
Laid end to end, the blood vessels in one human body would stretch about 60,000 miles.
An adult human heart is about the size of a fist.
Surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in South Africa in 1967.
The human eye can tell apart about a million different colors.
Koalas have fingerprints that look very similar to human ones.
Polar bear liver contains so much vitamin A that eating it can poison humans.
Adults have 206 bones, while babies are born with around 300 that later fuse together.
Humans can hear sounds from about 20 to 20,000 hertz, but we lose the highest frequencies as we age.
Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body.
George Washington's dentures weren't made of wood. They included ivory and human teeth, some likely from enslaved people.
A 2014 study estimated that humans can tell apart about a trillion scents, though other scientists dispute the number.
A 2007 UC Berkeley study found that people can follow a scent trail like dogs.
Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" is a drawing that explores the ideal proportions of the human body.
Orcas are one of the few species besides humans known to go through menopause.
Fossil evidence shows that roses existed about 35 million years ago, long before humans.
According to legend, Patanjali was an incarnation of the cosmic serpent Adishesha, so he's often shown with a human upper body and a serpent's tail.
Aristotle described humans as political animals.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe became the fastest human-made object and flew closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before it, passing about 3.8 million miles from the surface in December 2024.
The transistor is the most manufactured human-made object in history, with an estimated 13 sextillion made by 2018.
Cyrus the Great founded the Persian Empire around 550 BC, and his Cyrus Cylinder is sometimes called an early statement of human rights.
Genetically engineered human insulin was approved in 1982.
Karl Landsteiner discovered the main human blood types in 1901 and won the Nobel Prize in 1930.
The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003 and cost about $2.7 billion.
Humans have about 20,000 protein-coding genes.
Sequencing a human genome now costs about $1,000 or less.
Scientists published the first complete, gap-free human genome sequence in 2022.
The DNA in one human cell would stretch about two meters if uncoiled.
Humans share about 99.9% of their DNA with each other.
Thomas Starzl performed the first human liver transplant in 1963.
Raymond Damadian performed the first full-body MRI scan of a human in 1977.
France's Iseult MRI scanner produced its first images of the human brain in 2024.