Scientists find evidence of lakes on Jupiter's moon, Europa

New research that suggests Jupiter's moon Europa has a body of water the size of the Great Lakes just two miles below its icy surface has brought scientists one step closer to determining whether or not the freezing satellite is suitable for the development of extraterrestrial life.

According to NASA, scientists have long thought that a huge ocean -- more voluminous than all of earth's oceans combined -- existed below Europa's surface. But since the moon is so far from the sun, the surface ice is thought to be tens of miles thick.

Now, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft have found ice blocks on Europa's surface that suggest an interaction between the moon's icy shell and a lake-like body of water under the surface, Discovery reports.

According to Britney Schmidt, the lead author of the study that appears in the journal Nature, this could mean nutrients and energy are moving between the ocean and icy shell.

"One opinion in the scientific community has been if the ice shell is thick, that's bad for biology. That might mean the surface isn't communicating with the underlying ocean," Schmidt said in a statement. "Now, we see evidence that it's a thick ice shell that can mix vigorously and new evidence for giant shallow lakes. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable."

To come to this conclusion, Schmidt and her team analyzed "chaos terrains," areas of dark, bumpy, irregular features on the surface of Europa. According to TIME and the paper's abstract, the team created models based on the formation of similar terrain on Earth -- subglacial volcanos and ice shelves -- to determine how the chaos terrain on Europa could have formed.

Europa Water: Scientists Find Evidence Of Lakes On Jupiter's Moon (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

While scientists are confident about their findings, NASA says the only way to confirm them is if a spacecraft were to explore the shell.

According to Wired, this won't happen anytime in the near future -- the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), proposed spacecrafts that would orbit Jupiter and Europa, would cost an estimated $4.6 billion.

From Space.com:

The researchers determined that it was heat rising from the moon's deep subterranean ocean and melting ice near the surface, creating briny lakes inside the moon's thick ice shell, that may have caused the collapse of these roughly circular structures above them.

CERN: Light Speed May Have Been Exceeded By Subatomic Particle

GENEVA — One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein's theory of relativity – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light – was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world's foremost laboratories.
European researchers said they clocked an oddball type of subatomic particle called a neutrino going faster than the 186,282 miles per second that has long been considered the cosmic speed limit.
The claim was met with skepticism, with one outside physicist calling it the equivalent of saying you have a flying carpet. In fact, the researchers themselves are not ready to proclaim a discovery and are asking other physicists to independently try to verify their findings.
"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which provided the particle accelerator that sent neutrinos on their breakneck 454-mile trip underground from Geneva to Italy.
Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity – the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. But no one is rushing out to rewrite the science books just yet.
It is "a revolutionary discovery if confirmed," said Indiana University theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky, who has worked on this concept for a quarter of a century.
Stephen Parke, who is head theoretician at the Fermilab near Chicago and was not part of the research, said: "It's a shock. It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that – if it's true."
Even if these results are confirmed, they won't change at all the way we live or the way the world works. After all, these particles have presumably been speed demons for billions of years. But the finding will fundamentally alter our understanding of how the universe operates, physicists said.
Einstein's special relativity theory, which says that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now." France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory on the experiment at CERN.
CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds. (A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.)
Given the enormous implications of the find, the researchers spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.
A team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but a large margin of error undercut its scientific significance.
If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein's theories, it's not surprising that it's the strange particles known as neutrinos. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years.
The neutrino has almost no mass, comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from our sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland.
Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, author of the book "Fabric of the Cosmos," said neutrinos theoretically can travel at different speeds depending on how much energy they have. And some mysterious particles whose existence is still only theorized could be similarly speedy, he said.
Fermilab team spokeswoman Jenny Thomas, a physics professor at the University College of London, said there must be a "more mundane explanation" for the European findings. She said Fermilab's experience showed how hard it is to measure accurately the distance, time and angles required for such a claim.
Nevertheless, Fermilab, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, has already begun working to try to verify or knock down the new findings.
And that's exactly what the team in Geneva wants.
Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that "they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements."
Only two labs elsewhere in the world can try to replicate the work: Fermilab and a Japanese installation that has been slowed by the tsunami and earthquake. And Fermilab's measuring systems aren't nearly as precise as the Europeans' and won't be upgraded for a while, said Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett.
Drew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that the CERN findings are the result of measurement errors or some kind of fluke. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult, he said.
"This is ridiculous what they're putting out," Baden said. "Until this is verified by another group, it's flying carpets. It's cool, but ..."
So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen?
Parke said there could be a cosmic shortcut through another dimension – physics theory is full of unseen dimensions – that allows the neutrinos to beat the speed of light.
Indiana's Kostelecky theorizes that there are situations when the background is different in the universe, not perfectly symmetrical as Einstein says. Those changes in background may alter both the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos.
But that doesn't mean Einstein's theory is ready for the trash heap, he said.
"I don't think you're going to ever kill Einstein's theory. You can't. It works," Kostelecky said. There are just times when an additional explanation is needed, he said.
If the European findings are correct, "this would change the idea of how the universe is put together," Columbia's Greene said. But he added: "I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won't hold up to scrutiny."

Ghostly Images of Satellite Falling to Earth

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

An amateur astronomer in France captured video of an American satellite as it tumbled through space toward an expected impact with Earth sometime on Friday, according to NASA’s latest projections.
The Frenchman, Thierry Legault, posted the footage to a personal Web site and said it had been shot last week from the northern town of Dunkerque using a specially modified telescope. The object, he said, was approximately 150 miles above ground.
The satellite, known as the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite or U.A.R.S., appears as a ghostly white form, spreading and narrowing as it corkscrews down at an increasingly fast rate.

NASA puts the chance of this six-ton piece of defunct equipment hitting a human somewhere on the planet at 1 in 3,200, despite a trail of debris that will likely stretch to about 500 miles. As my colleague Kenneth Chang reported this week, there are no known cases of injury by falling satellite, not even from the much larger Skylab space station that plummeted out of orbit and into western Australia in 1979.
Despite the extremely long odds, NASA sought to reassure jittery Americans that there is nothing to worry about, noting early Thursday that their latest calculations do not include a collision with the United States.

#UARS update: Debris not expected to land in North America, based on latest predictions. http://t.co/jAvx87ogThu Sep 22 00:19:42 via webNASA
NASA

Mr. Legault and his sky-watching partner, Emmanuel Rietsch, were the subject of a profile in Wired magazine earlier this year that marveled at their ability to capture American intelligence satellites that usually remain unseen.

Huge Defunct Satellite Falling to Earth Faster Than Expected, NASA Says

An artist's concept of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) satellite in space. The 6 1/2-ton satellite was deployed from space shuttle Discovery in 1991 and decommissioned in December 2005.

This story was updated at 3:30 p.m. ET.
NASA space junk experts have refined the forecast for the anticipated death plunge of a giant satellite, with the U.S. space agency now predicting the 6 1/2-ton climate probe will plummet to Earth around Sept. 23, a day earlier than previously reported.
The defunct bus-size spacecraft is NASA's Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), which launched in 1991 and was shut down in 2005 after completing its mission. The satellite was expected to fall to Earth sometime this year, with experts initially pegging a weeks-long window between late September and early October, then narrowing it to the last week of this month.
That window, NASA now says, has been trimmed to just three days.
"Re-entry is expected Sept. 23, plus or minus a day. The re-entry of UARS is advancing because of a sharp increase in solar activity since the beginning of this week," NASA officials wrote in a status update today (Sept. 16). The projection is a day earlier than a previous forecast released by NASA yesterday.
NASA spokeswoman Beth Dickey confirmed with SPACE.com earlier today that the reason UARS is expected to fall early in its re-entry window is because of the sharp uptick in solar activity. Solar effects from the sun can create an extra drag on satellites in space because they can heat the Earth's atmosphere, causing it to expand, agency officials have said.

Where will UARS fall?
But exactly where the UARS spacecraft will fall is still unknown.
NASA expects at least 26 large pieces of the massive satellite to survive the scorching temperatures of re-entry and reach Earth's surface. Titanium pieces and onboard tanks could be among that debris, but the UARS satellite carries no toxic propellant (NASA used up all the fuel in 2005).
The debris is expected to fall over a swath of Earth about 500 miles (804 kilometers) long, NASA officials said. [Video: Where Could UARS Satellite Debris Fall?]
There is a 1-in-3,200 chance of satellite debris hitting a person on the ground, odds that NASA says are extremely remote. Outside experts agree.
"Look at how much of Earth is covered with water," Victoria Samson, the Washington Office Director of the Secure World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the peaceful use of outer space, told SPACE.com this week. "There's a really good chance it's going to go straight into the ocean."

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is in the grasp of the remote manipulator system end effector above the payload bay of the Earth-orbiting Discovery during STS-48 pre-deployment checkout procedures.

Constant satellite watch
NASA officials expect the UARS satellite to fall over a region somewhere between the latitudes of northern Canada and southern South America, which leaves a vast swath of the world open as a possible re-entry point. About 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered in water, which makes an ocean splashdown likely, NASA and experts have said.
NASA and the Joint Space Operations Center of U.S. Strategic Command at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., are keeping a close watch on the falling satellite, but will only be able to pinpoint its actual crash zone to within about 6,000 miles (10,000 km) about two hours before re-entry.
As of Thursday, the UARS satellite was flying in an orbit of between 143 and 158 miles (230 to 255 km) above Earth. That orbit is dropping lower each day, NASA officials said.
NASA has advised the public not to touch any debris that may reach the surface, should it be discovered. Instead, the space agency says that anyone who finds satellite debris should contact their local law enforcement agency.
The $750 million UARS mission was designed to measure ozone and other chemical compounds found in Earth's ozone layer in order to better understand how the upper atmosphere affects our planet. It also recorded wind speeds and temperatures in the stratosphere, as well as the energy Earth received from the sun.

Dead NASA Satellite Will Soon Fall To Earth

WASHINGTON — A dead NASA satellite will soon fall to Earth, but the space agency says there is very little chance that a piece of it will hit someone.

NASA says the 20-year-old satellite will probably fall sometime between late September and October. Pieces of it could land anywhere in the six inhabited continents in a worldwide swath from south of Juneau, Alaska, to just north of the tip of South America. NASA scientists estimate a 1-in-3,200 chance a satellite part could hit someone. Most of it will burn up after entering Earth's atmosphere.
The 6-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) ran out of fuel in 2005 and will fall uncontrolled out of orbit. Only about 1,200 pounds of metal should survive, NASA said.
This satellite is far smaller than the 135-ton Russian space station Mir, which fell to Earth in 2001 or the 100-ton Skylab that fell in 1979. Mir fell into the South Pacific, while Skylab hit the Indian Ocean and parts of sparsely populated western Australia. Because two-thirds of the Earth is ocean, space debris usually hits water
"Things have been re-entering ever since the dawn of the Space Age; to date nobody has been injured by anything that's re-entered," said NASA orbital debris chief Gene Stansbery. "That doesn't mean we're not concerned."
NASA now has a rule that the chance of any of its satellites hitting someone has to be more than 1 in 10,000. But UARS, which measured chemicals in the air, was launched in 1991 before that rule was adopted. The agency usually tries to put dead satellites into "a graveyard orbit" or steer them down to the ocean, Stansbery said. But there was not enough fuel in this one to fire engines that would move it to a higher orbit or steer it down safely.
The 1-in-3,200 odds of being hit pertain to any of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. But any one individual's odds of being struck are about 1 in 21 trillion.
Space debris bigger than 5 tons doesn't often fall to Earth. But this will be the third time this year for something that big to reach Earth, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard University astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit.
The UARS satellite travels over a large band of Earth, avoiding only areas close to the poles. NASA calculates that when the satellite does fall it will scatter pieces over a 500-mile-wide region.Stansbery said the agency doesn't know exactly when and where those will fall because it depends on the orientation of the satellite in the atmosphere, solar storm activity and other variables.
There probably is no hazardous material left in the falling pieces, but people should not touch any fallen satellite parts just in case, he said.
NASA will be tracking the satellite on a weekly and later daily basis until it falls.
NASA's UARS satellite re-entry tracking site: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/uars/index.html

Astronomers discover planet made of diamond

August 28, 2011

Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.

In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.

The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.

Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.

"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."

Chicago Public Schools Recess: CEO Jean-Claude Brizard Says It Will Be Mandatory In 2012

August, 2011: The head of the Chicago Public Schools announced on a call-in radio program Monday night that he'd advocate for the return of mandatory recess at elementary schools around the city, marking a victory for parent advocacy groups that have been fighting for it for years.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said on WBEZ that he valued playtime for younger students, and that he would have enforced the mandate for this coming year if he'd been in office longer. Brizard was named to his current post in April of this year, coming over from Rochester Public Schools.
"We came in too late to actually push for a city-wide mandate for this fall," he said, "so we have quite a few more schools pushing recess during the school day for this coming fall. But by next fall, all schools - all elementary schools in the city - will have recess."
As of now, only 42 percent of schools have any recess at all: a mere 15 percent hold it outdoors, while 27 percent have recess in the classroom, according to a recent Chicago Sun-Times story.
Huffington Post Chicago wrote in May that CPS had asked schools to consider re-instating recess individually. Patricia O'Keefe of Raise Your Hand, a pro-recess coalition, was excited at the victory. "We're thrilled that we're going to finally stop depriving children of physical activity and the social time they deserve to be more productive members of society," she told the Chicago Tribune at the time.
And Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis came out in favor of recess as well, calling it a "win-win" in a conversation with the Sun-Times.
With Brizard's blessing, the remaining 58 percent of elementaries without recess should join the fold starting in the 2012-2013 school year. With the CEO and the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, still pushing for a longer instructional day, some advocates say that there will be diminishing returns on those academic hours unless the students are given rest and play-time during the day.

'Pink Or Blue' Test Detects Baby's Gender At 7 Weeks

CHICAGO -- Is it a boy or a girl? New research shows that a simple blood test in mothers-to-be can answer that question with surprising accuracy at about seven weeks.
Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.
Researchers analyzed 57 published studies of gender testing done in rigorous research or academic settings – though not necessarily the same methods or conditions used by direct-to-consumer firms.
The results suggest blood tests could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases. But the study also raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.

Massive Solar Flares' Effects Arriving On Earth

August 5, 2011: WASHINGTON -- The impact of a series of eruptions on the sun began arriving at Earth on Friday and could affect some communications for a day or so.Operators of electrical grids are working to avoid outages, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says some satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems could face problems.
Three solar flares erupted on the sun starting Tuesday, and the strongest electromagnetic shocks were being felt Friday by the ACE spacecraft, a satellite that measures radiation bursts a few minutes before they strike Earth, said Joseph Kunches, a scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
Tom Bogdan, director of the center, said the sun is going from a quiet period into a busier cycle for solar flares and an increase in the number of such blasts is expected over the next three to five years.
Solar flares send out bursts of electromagnetic energy that strike the Earth's magnetic field. The most common impacts for the average person are the glowing auroras around the north and south poles, and the researchers said those could be visible this weekend.
The magnetic blasts, which Bogdan likened to a tsunami in space, can also affect electronic communications and electrical systems. A 1989 solar flare knocked out the electrical systems in Quebec, Canada, but the current solar storm is not expected to be that powerful. On a scale of 1 to 5, he said, it is probably a 2 or 3.
But more significant solar storms are expected in the next few years, he said.
The most powerful known solar storm occurred in 1859, Bogdan said. There were not as many vulnerable electrical items then, but it did knock out telegraph services, even burning down some telegraph stations, he said.
Other serious solar blasts occurred in 1921 and 1940, he noted, and Kunches recalled one on Halloween in 2003.

What is a Google? (Submitted by Pankhuri Panpher)

When you hear the word Google the first image that comes to mind has to be the famous internet search engine but does the word actually mean anything ? Well the answer is a firm yes because it comes from the term “Googol” which represents a number (written as a 1 followed by 100 zeros) so large that it’s actually larger than the total number of atoms in the known universe.
As you might imagine the number is rarely used except maybe in theoretical and computational calculations, however the big question is whether a number bigger than a Googol exists ? Well funnily enough there is and it’s called a googolplex which would be a number 1 followed by, wait for it not one thousand zeros, not even one million zeros but a googol zeroes.
Getting confused ? Well you should be because this number is so large that it’s almost impossible to imagine and also impossible to write because doing so would require more space than the known universe provides. Absolutely mind boggling don’t you think!
Lastly for those of you that are interested in where this term actually came from, well it was popularized in the 1940′s by the american mathematician Edward Kasner who created it as a useful number when comparing unimaginably large numbers with infinity. Oh and the actual term “googol” was coined by his then 9 year old nephew Milton Sirotta, not bad for a 9 year old!

Sugar Doesn't Melt -- It Decomposes, Scientists Demonstrate (Submitted by Josue Fernandez)

Flying in the face of years of scientific belief, University of Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sugar doesn't melt, it decomposes.
"This discovery is important to food scientists and candy lovers because it will give them yummier caramel flavors and more tantalizing textures. It even gives the pharmaceutical industry a way to improve excipients, the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps your medicine go down," said Shelly J. Schmidt, a University of Illinois professor of food chemistry.
In a presentation to the Institute of Food Technologists about the importance of the new discovery, Schmidt told the food scientists they could use the new findings to manipulate sugars and improve their products' flavor and consistency.
"Certain flavor compounds give you a nice caramel flavor, whereas others give you a burnt or bitter taste. Food scientists will now be able to make more of the desirable flavors because they won't have to heat to a 'melting' temperature but can instead hold sugar over a low temperature for a longer period of time," she said.
Candy makers will be able to use a predictable time-temperature relationship, as the dairy industry does in milk pasteurization, to achieve better results, she said.
Schmidt and graduate student Joo Won Lee didn't intend to turn an established rule of food science on its head. But they began to suspect that something was amiss when they couldn't get a constant melting point for sucrose in the work that they were doing.
"In the literature, the melting point for sucrose varies widely, but scientists have always blamed these differences on impurities and instrumentation differences. However, there are certain things you'd expect to see if those factors were causing the variations, and we weren't seeing them," Schmidt said.
The scientists determined that the melting point of sugar was heating-rate dependent.
"We saw different results depending on how quickly we heated the sucrose. That led us to believe that molecules were beginning to break down as part of a kinetic process," she said.
Schmidt said a true or thermodynamic melting material, which melts at a consistent, repeatable temperature, retains its chemical identity when transitioning from the solid to the liquid state. She and Lee used high-performance liquid chromatography to see if sucrose was sucrose both before and after "melting." It wasn't.
"As soon as we detected melting, decomposition components of sucrose started showing up," she said.
To distinguish "melting" caused by decomposition from thermodynamic melting, the researchers have coined a new name -- "apparent melting." Schmidt and her colleagues have shown that glucose and fructose are also apparent melting materials.
Another of Schmidt's doctoral students is investigating which other food and pharmaceutical materials are apparent melters. She says the list is growing every day.
Having disposed of one food science mystery, Schmidt plans to devote time to others. For instance, staling intrigues her. "We could ship a lot more food around the world if we could stabilize it, keep it from getting stale," she said.
Or there's hydrate formation, which can make drink mixes clumpy if they're open for a while. "We've observed the results -- clumping under conditions of low relative humidity -- but we really don't know why it happens," she noted.
Schmidt said that new instruments are making it possible to probe some of the processes scientists have taken for granted in a way they couldn't do before.

Quick Facts About Humans (Submitted by Marisol Pantigoso)

 

1. If stomachs did not have a lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself.
2. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
3. It takes about 60 seconds for a human blood cell to make a complete circuit of the body.
4. The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime.
5. 1/15th of a pint of blood is pumped with every heartbeat.
6. Humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimps. In comparison, we share 70% of our DNA with a slug.
7. The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams.
8. On average, women say 7,000 words per day while men manage just over 2,000 words.
9. The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy but is only 2% of the body’s weight.
10. On average, humans lose 40-100 strands of hair per day.
11. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph.
12. A cough can reach the speed of 60mph.
13. The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime.
14. It takes 17 muscles to smile while taking 43 muscles to frown.
15. The human brain is composed of 75% water.
16. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
17. More germs are transferred while shaking hands compared to kissing.
18. There are approximately 550 hairs in a person’s eyebrow.
19. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
20. A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime.
21. The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
22. The number of eye blinks varies greatly from about 29 blinks each minute if you are talking to someone to only 4 blinks each minute if you are reading.
23. The average human blinks 25 times per minute.
24. A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip.
25. Each second 10,000,000 cells die and are replaced in your body.
26. Your liver performs over 500 functions in your body.
27. The average person spends 1/3 of their lifetime sleeping.
28. More germs are transferred when shaking hands than kissing.
29. The average person (from western culture) consumes 10 liters of alcohol per year.
30. Roughly 75% of people who play the radio in their car sing along to it.
31. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
32. Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
33. The human brain is composed of 75% water.
34. 70% of the composition of dust in your home is made up of shed human skin and hair.
35. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
36. One human hair can support 3kg.
37. Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush.
38. It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
39. If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons.
40. The fingernail grows about 1.5 inches per year.
41. The total amount of skin covering an adult human weighs 6 lbs.
42. The average person flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a lifetime.
43. Each person inhales about seven quarts of air every minute.
44. On average, we breathe between 12 and 18 times a minute.
45. The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime.
46. Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma.
47. The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day.
48. One out of every hundred American citizens is color blind.
49. An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
50. A human heart beats 100,000 times a day.

Found on this website: http://www.science-facts.com/amazing-human-facts/