20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Skin
Some list-y goodness today over at Discover Magazine:
1 It’s your body’s largest organ, despite what the readers of Maxim think.
2 An average adult’s skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.
3 The skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather. The areas that don’t sweat are the nail bed, the margins of the lips, the tip of the penis, and the eardrums.
4 Ooh, that smell: Body odor comes from a second kind of sweat—a fatty secretion produced by the apocrine sweat glands, found mostly around the armpits, genitals, and anus.
5 Yum! The odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.
6 Breasts are a modified form of the apocrine sweat gland.
7 Fetuses don’t develop fingerprints until three months’ gestation.
8 Without a trace: Some people never develop fingerprints at all. Two rare genetic defects, known as Naegeli syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, can leave carriers without any identifying ridges on their skin.
9 Fingerprints increase friction and help grip objects. New World monkeys have similar prints on the undersides of their tails, the better to grasp as they swing from branch to branch.
10 Blowin’ in the wind: Globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. Your skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute.
Click on through for the rest:
20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Skin – Discover Magazine
this list is a very very weird thing and its kinda creepy… but hey i learned something about my skin!