Top 10 Amazing Facts About …. YOU!

1 – Body Position Affects Your Memory

Can’t remember your anniversary, hubby? Try getting down on one knee. Memories are highly embodied in our senses. A scent or sound may evoke a distant episode from one’s childhood. The connections can be obvious (a bicycle bell makes you remember your old paper route) or inscrutable. A recent study helps decipher some of this embodiment. An article in the January 2007 issue of Cognition reports that episodes from your past are remembered faster and better while in a body position similar to the pose struck during the event.

2 – Your Skin Has Four Colors

All skin, without coloring, would appear creamy white. Near-surface blood vessels add a blush of red. A yellow pigment also tints the canvas. Lastly, sepia-toned melanin, created in response to ultraviolet rays, appears black in large amounts. These four hues mix in different proportions to create the skin colors of all the peoples of Earth.

3 – Big Brains Cause Cramped Mouths

Evolution isn’t perfect. If it were, we might have wings instead of wisdom teeth. Sometimes useless features stick around in a species simply because they’re not doing much harm. But wisdom teeth weren’t always a cash crop for oral surgeons. Long ago, they served as a useful third set of meat-mashing molars. But as our brains grew our jawbone structure changed, leaving us with expensively overcrowded mouths.

4 – Your Stomach Secretes Corrosive Acid

There’s one dangerous liquid no airport security can confiscate from you: It’s in your gut. Your stomach cells secrete hydrochloric acid, a corrosive compound used to treat metals in the industrial world. It can pickle steel, but mucous lining the stomach wall keeps this poisonous liquid safely in the digestive system, breaking down lunch.

5 – Bones Break (Down) to Balance Minerals

In addition to supporting the bag of organs and muscles that is our body, bones help regulate our calcium levels. Bones contain both phosphorus and calcium, the latter of which is needed by muscles and nerves. If the element is in short supply, certain hormones will cause bones to break downeupping calcium levels in the bodyeuntil the appropriate extracellular concentration is reached.

6 – Much of a Meal is Food For Thought

Though it makes up only 2 percent of our total body weight, the brain demands 20 percent of the body’s oxygen and calories. To keep our noggin well-stocked with resources, three major cerebral arteries are constantly pumping in oxygen. A blockage or break in one of them starves brain cells of the energy they require to function, impairing the functions controlled by that region. This is a stroke.

7 – Thousands of Eggs Unused by Ovaries

When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova.

8 – Puberty Reshapes Brain Structure, Makes for Missed Curfews

We know that hormone-fueled changes in the body are necessary to encourage growth and ready the body for reproduction. But why is adolescence so emotionally unpleasant? Hormones like testosterone actually influence the development of neurons in the brain, and the changes made to brain structure have many behavioral consequences. Expect emotional awkwardness, apathy and poor decision-making skills as regions in the frontal cortex mature.

9 – Cell Hairs Move Mucus

Most cells in our bodies sport hair-like organelles called cilia that help out with a variety of functions, from digestion to hearing. In the nose, cilia help to drain mucus from the nasal cavity down to the throat. Cold weather slows down the draining process, causing a mucus backup that can leave you with snotty sleeves. Swollen nasal membranes or condensation can also cause a stuffed schnozzle.

10 – The World Laughs with You

Just as watching someone yawn can induce the behavior in yourself, recent evidence suggests that laughter is a social cue for mimicry. Hearing a laugh actually stimulates the brain region associated with facial movements. Mimicry plays an important role in social interaction. Cues like sneezing, laughing, crying and yawning may be ways of creating strong social bonds within a group.

20 Things You Didn't Know About Obesity

1. Child-safety seat manufacturers are starting to make bigger models after a recent study showed that over 250,000 U.S. children age 6 and under are too fat to use them.

2. According to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, nearly half the 4,000 people responding to an online survey about obesity said they would give up a year of their life rather than be fat.

3. Between 15 percent and 30 percent also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.

4. Five percent and 4 percent, respectively, said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than be overweight.

5. From 1991 to 2000, the average weight of Americans increased by 8.5 pounds.

6. In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration increased its estimate of the weight of the average male from 170 to 184 pounds.

7. Airlines spent $275 million on 350 million additional gallons of fuel in 2000 to compensate for the additional weight of their passengers. Now we know why the peanuts are no longer free!

8. Stand by your man: More than a decade ago, Manuel Uribe, now weighing 1,200 pounds (the equivalent of five baby elephants) and bedridden for the past five years, was abandoned by his wife because she was frightened by his increasing size.

9. Virgin Atlantic paid Barbara Hewson from Wales the equivalent of US$24,100 in 2002 as compensation after she was squashed by an obese person sitting next to her on a transatlantic flight. Barbara suffered a blood clot in her chest, torn leg muscles, and acute sciatica and was bedridden for a month.

10. Duke University Medical Center found that women and men who lost 10 percent of their total body weight reported a significant improvement in their sexual quality of life.

11. Obesity ranks second among preventable causes of death. Tobacco use is number one.

12. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, of the 7.5 million veterans who receive their health benefits from the agency, more than 70 percent are overweight and 20 percent have diabetes, which may lead to blindness, amputations, and kidney and heart problems.

13. Two years ago, the Hardee’s fast-food chain introduced the 1,420-calorie 107-fat-gram “Monster Thickburger.” It contains two 1/3-pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese, and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame-seed bun.

14. Mississippi is the home of the mud pie, Cajun fried pecans, sweet potato crunch, fried shrimp, and catfish. Mississippi is also home to the country’s fattest people—more than 25 percent of adult Mississippians are obese. Coincidence?

15. Recent studies have shown that obesity can cause you to lose sleep.

16. On the other hand, a lack of sleep may result in obesity.

17. It’s a vicious cycle.

18. Never forget your past: Aborigines and the Pima indians of Arizona developed obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension after transitioning to a Western lifestyle.

19. If the entire morbidly obese population of the U.S. lived in one state, it would be the 12th highest-populated state, with more people than Virginia.

20. A 2003 study reported that 21 percent of all New York City elementary students from all income levels are obese.