10 Things you didn't know 5 minutes ago! (Part 3)

Here's the next chapter!

10. Women speak more than men

Women speak roughly 7000 words a day, men speak roughly just over 2000.


9. One human hair can support 3kg


Pretty cool this, it explains why you can't pull a patch of hair out at one time (not that you'd want to anyway).


8. Every second 10,000,000 of your cells die


Your body is a factory there's no doubt in that, every one of your cell is undergoing mitosis right now, replicating each cell so that when one dies, there's one to replace it.

If 10 million cells die a second, then the amount of cells which die in a year is 3.15 x10^14, to appreciate this value, that is 315,000,000,000,000 cells!


7. The hardest bone in your body is the jawbone


Your jawbone, the tool you use to crack nuts, and gnaw your way though a delicious steak.

The average human biting force is just short of 1000N.

The T-rex though had a biting force of 57000 newtons which would no doubt crush through most materials.


6. Why parrots can talk


Parrots have 4 vocal chords.

Now I'm sure you're thinking 'yeah but we have 2' or 'why can't monkey?'

Parrots have an organ called the syrinx which is good at modulating sounds. Apes however have a more compact mouth and their soft palate is not free (the back of the roof of your mouth).


5. Why Pi doesn't end


Pi if you don't know if the ratio of the circumference to diameter of a perfect circle. It doesn't end because it is irrational or it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction, so far pi has been calculated to a few trillion digits, never repeating itself.


4. Every second, over 1000 lightning bolts strike the earth


That's some serious electricity! If we could harness all this some way, we wouldn't have to touch fossil fuels ever again!


3. Human tapeworms can grow up to 23m


Tapeworms are parasites, they survive by living off you basically, while they make constant company, do you want a 23 metre one crawling around your body?


2. Water is bulletproof


Next time you're being shot at, take a dive into a nearby lake or pond. Experiments have been done to find if being shot at underwater still penetrates skin.

To do this, they scientists created a gel target seeing as they weren't keen to take one for science.

They found that the bullets quickly decelerated within a couple feet of water and didn't penetrate the gel target.


1. You can use salami as rocket fuel


This was tested in a myth-busters episode, the salami is rich in nitrates, so when an oxidising agent was added, the mini rocket shoots up.

To prove the salami had an effect, a control was used by another rocket just using nitrous oxide. However when the salami was added the rocket has 3x as much thrust.