The Mystery of Our Body

Our Body is such a wonderful creation that full of beauty. If you know more about how it works, you must be surprised. Our body is really very complicated, with a lot of organs working together. However, they are so organized that they work together in harmony.

Say for example, our brain receives and interprets messages from various sources. Our two eyes receive messages by reflection of light from the environment and our brain interprets these message into 3-dimensional colour objects. The theory of how our eyes work lay the foundation for today's camera, films, and 3-D films. Besides, our eyes are well designed and placed in the front so that we are able to view objects as 3-dimensional.

Our nose is another wonderful sense organ that receives messages of smell. It is situated just above our month so that we can smell good food, and avoid rotton one. Another amazing thing is that those bad food usually smell bad, such as bad eggs. Who design such a warning signal ?

Our mouth is another great design to give us more pleasure. Do you remember how many different tastes of fruits in the world ? Do you know why ? The most possible reason is that a loving God who designs various kind of stimulus for us, so that our life is a wonderful one.

Talking about warning signal in our body is another fantastic design. That runny nose, that fever, that cough, that tired feeling and all those other symptoms that we hate may actually be very good for us. They are signs that our body is not working properly. For example, a fever is one of the body's ways of 'burning up' bacteria and virii; sneezing and coughing keep the respiratory tract clear; inflammation such as swelling and pain can be nature's way of limiting unnecessary movement of the injured area; swelling also facilitates the movement of materials in and out of injured tissues. Vomiting and diarrhea are the body's way of telling us to get rest while it has repairs to do.

The following are some more interesting examples in our body:

Muscle
Hair
Heart and Blood
More information

This is not an exclusive lists of wonderful jobs of your body. You can find more yourself, such as our defense system, the beauty of our body. A simple can opener needs somebody to design so that it can work. What do you think our complicated body ?

Muscle

Our body muscle is divided into voluntary and non-voluntary muscles. Voluntary muscle will take action (contract and reflex) when we want to (our brain send messages). Voluntary muscles include muscles in our arms, fingers and legs. These voluntary muscles follow instructions from our brain, so that we can paint, draw, write, run ....

On the other hand, there are groups of muscles that will contract and relax involuntary. They will contract and reflex automatically without our brain instructions, such as our heart. There is a pacemaker so that our heart beats regularly.

If there is either only voluntary, or involuntary muscles, what do you think ? The result will be terrible. You will either see your arms and legs move at any time without control if all muscles are involuntary, or you have to worry your heart stop beating when you go to sleep.

More amazing is that some muscle will fatigue in order to protect from damage, such as our legs, and some muscle will never fatigue, such as our heart. More for you to discover ....

Hair

Can you name where you got hairs, and are there any reason for that ? There are hairs over all body, inside or outsider. Some are long and some are short. Some are pointing downward and some are pointing upward. Wonderful ?

Hair in our skin acts like a natural fur to keep our body warm, and provide a humid environment for our skin. Hair in our nose act as filter to avoid large foreign objects from falling into our lungs. Hair in our eyebrow serves as water guide so that rain from top will diverse away from our eyes. Our eyelashs also prevent dust from falling into our eyes. Hair in our head is a good cap to protect our head from sunshine, and keep our head warm.

Our hairs are normally pointing downward so that they can protect water or heat underneath. However, hair in our air messages (trachea) are all pointing upwards. Coughing will lead foreign objects upward in the direction of the hair, and not to accumulate inside our lungs.

Heart and blood - you are the best

The circumference of the earth is around 40,000 km, but the total length of all capillaries of a man is more than twice of that length. Mt Everest is the highest mountain on earth. The height of all red blood cells of a man is higher than Mt Everest by 5,000 times. Our heart is just a size of a fist, but it pumps 11 tons of blood a day which requires a machine of 144 horsepower.

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The heart beats seventy times a minute, 4,200 an hour, 100,800 a day, 36,792,000 a year, 2,565,440,000 in three-score and ten years, and at each beat two and a half ounces of blood are thrown out of it, one hundred and seventy-five ounces a minute, six hundred and fifty-six pounds an hour, seven and three-fourths tons a day. All the blood in the body passes through the heart in 3 minutes.

The lungs will contain about one gallon of air at their usual degree of inflation. We breathe on an average 1,200 times an hour, inhale six hundred gallons of air, or 24,000 a day. The aggregate surface of the air cells of the lungs exceeds 20,000 square inches, an area very nearly equal to the floor of a room twelve feet square.

The average weight of the brain of an adult male is three pounds and eight ounces, of a female two pounds and four ounces. The nerves are all connected with it, directly or by the spinal marrow. These nerves, together with their branches and minute ramifications, probably exceed 10,000,000 in number, forming a bodyguard outnumbering by far the greatest army ever marshalled!

The skin is composed of three layers and varies from one-fourth to one-eighth of an inch in thickness. The atmospheric pressure being about fourteen pounds to the square inch, a person of medium size is subjected to a pressure of 40,000 lbs. Each square inch of skin contains 35,000 sweating tubes or perspiratory pores, each of which may be likened to a little drain pipe one-fourth of an inch long, making an aggregate length of the entire surface of the body of 201,165 feet, or a tile ditch for draining the body almost forty miles long.

The human body is a marvel of mechanical efficiency and adaptability. Like many other machines, it derives its energy from carbon. Coal or oil burning engines get their carbon from coal or oil. But these fuels come originally from plants. Man also gets his carbon from plants, either directly or through the meat of an animal which has eaten plants or has eaten some other animal which has eaten plants. The body, like an engine, takes in oxygen, combines it with the carbon, and exhales carbon dioxide. The energy resulting from the combustion is the energy at our disposal for everything we do.

Because of this oxidation process going on within him, man is a kind of walking furnace. The average human body dissipates about 2,500 calories daily -- enough energy to boil 25 pots of coffee. The oxidation also provides us with heat -- which is a form of energy. A remarkable temperature regulation system keeps the body heat at an average of about 98.6 F. throughout our lives, summer and winter, except when a higher temperature is needed to combat disease.

The regulation of the temperature of the blood stream is accomplished through a delicate control centre in the brain. From this centre, nervous signals are sent throughout the body asking for an increase or decrease of temperature. If the temperature drops, oxidation is increased and the blood vessels of the skin contract, so that less heat is lost by radiation. The skin glands secrete a fatty substance, the hair of the skin stands erect, resulting in a layer of dead air which acts as an insulation layer.

If the blood temperature becomes too high, signals are sent from the control centre for the oxidation to be decreased. The blood vessels of the skin dilate, so that more blood passes through and perspiration takes place. The moisture thus evaporated cools the skin surface and the body.

This remarkable system can -- for a limited time -- prevent our body temperature from rising, even in heat that will fry a steak. A man has actually withstood a temperature of 262 degrees for fifteen minutes. A steak was fried in the same enclosure during the time he was in it, yet close to his skin, almost normal body temperature was measured.

The body is an intricate electronic device, far more complicated than any which man has ever built. The human brain is made up of something like 10 million nerve cells, or neurons. Each neuron is a battery-powered device operating at a potential of 0.07 volts.

If man were to make an electronic equivalent of the human brain, it would need a very large building to house it, and all the electricity generated at Niagara Falls to operate it.

The nervous system is a telephone system by which the brain is kept informed of what goes on around us. It is estimated that each of our eyes has 130,000,000 rods and 7,000,000 cones which are the sensory terminals of sight. These are connected to the brain by over 300,000 separate "telephone" lines. When we look at something, the thing we see is broken down by these millions of sensory points, and the graduations of light and shade and color of each incremental area are sent to the brain as separate signals. There they are rearranged, in some way yet unknown to us, to give the impression of visualizing the whole scene.

In television, each tiny elemental area of the screen is connected to the receiver for only about 1-250,000th of the time. In the human eye, information is sent to the brain from all areas of the scene simultaneously. Some of the early television systems proposed to use the method which the eye uses, but the system was so bulky, even to transmit a very poor image, that it was abandoned.

To carry signals from the ear to the brain, something like 150,000 separate conductors lead from each ear, each insulated from the others. These signals are picked up by delicate probes on the brain, amplified by sensitive amplifiers and reproduced on a loudspeaker. These electrical signals sent to the brain, in some unknown way give us the sensation of hearing. (World Science Review)

The Human Body

In 24 hours the average adult accomplishes much:
Your heart beats 103,689 times
Your blood travels 168,000,000 miles
You breathe 23,040 times
You inhale 438 cubic feet of air
You eat 3 1/2 pounds of food
You drink 2.9 quarts of liquid
You lose 7/8 pound of waste
You speak 4,800 words
You move 750 muscles
Your nails grow .000046 inch
You exercise 7,000,000 brain cells
It's no wonder you feel tired!