20 amazing facts about the human body

Half the population has eyelash mites!? *shudder*

 

Yeah, becoming a Howard Hughes germophobe is a waste of time.

Cool article.

 

And most houses have dust mites also.

 

So your body wouldn't explode in space? Can you walk in space with just a oxygen mask?

 

My eyes have itched for the last two months. And to think I used to blame this on Lin.

 

Can someone explain to me the bit about the moon's size being an optical illusion? Why would my brain fool me into thinking it's smaller than it actually appears? And why do we all see it the same way?

 

ha ha.

 

thanks bald taco

 

That was one of the cooler points of the article. It brings my mass effect hopes somewhat closer to reality lol

Also I'm gonna use that "you're looking at a photon millions of years old when gazing at andromeda" to sound super deep next time I'm sitting with a chick outside.

That's actually really awesome tbh. Looking at something that took millions of years to travel to our eyes. Pretty neat.

 

I've read about this before but while your body wouldn't explode in space you would still suffer serious damage and die fairly quickly. Your body would expand a bit but also the moisture on your skin and eyes would rapidly freeze dry off.

NASA had looked at using a spacesuit design that was like a skintight wetsuit that wouldn't be pressurized but instead just rely on the compression of the material and insulation to protect the wearer. It would have a rigid helmet though. That idea was dropped though because it was so hard to get into it.

 

Taco knows his stuff.

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Wouldn't the heat be an issue as well? Maybe Radiation

Rocket River

 

I told this to my 8 year old and she told me she already knew. She saw it on Curious George.

 

What happens if the astronaut farts?

 

As noted heat isn't a huge issue as induction and convective heat transfer wouldn't happen in a vacuum as long as you keep the air and moisture inside the suit. A bigger problem is radiative heat from being exposed to the Sun but that can be handled to some extent with insulation and reflective material. For other radiation at least in near earth orbit isn't that big of a problem and a lot of radiation can just be deflected with things like gold foil. The Lunar module just used that as radiation shielding. Outside of Earth's protective magnetic field it would be a bigger problem but even a standard space suit wouldn't provide that much protection.

Hotballa doesn't fail to disappoint with a brilliant question. With a skin tight compression suit the fart would likely be trapped in the astronaut underwear. Likely though they would be wearing something to deal with waste, a diaper, that would trap the fart. Astronauts already do so they don't have to come back inside to use the facilities on long space walks.

If the fart could escape the suit smell wouldn't be an issue but in zero G unintentional acceleration could be.

 

Aren't retroviruses typically used as evidence for evolution since it can be seen that they are sometimes found in only human genetic code or occur both in humans and some primates, and the thought is that these are inert and do not actually correspond to some function, but were just generic markers indicating a common ancestor (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retroviruses)? If it turns out these bits of code actually serve a purpose, then what's to say that those strands couldn't have been created in humans and/or close ancestors precisely because they correspond to specific behavior unique to those organisms?

The fact that they are "entirely alien to our generic ancestry" yet serve important functions seems to lessen the weight of that argument. Feel free to enlighten me as I'm trying to learn about all this.