9 Mind-Blowing Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Yourself
You’ll soon know this stuff like the back of your hand.
You were born with blue eyes. Thats a fact. No matter how much you contest with the matter your eyes are actually brown, hazel or grey - you were born with blue eyes. Your true colour (unless theyre still blue) was revealed when a pigment called melanin became fully exposed to ultraviolet light. So theres one thing you didnt know about yourself before reading this.
Of course, theres some things we dont particularly want to know about ourselves; like the fact theres more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in the world. Oh, and most of that dust underneath your bed? Thats your dead skin, and you shed 600,000 particles of it every hour.
From how we came to be, to what happens when we die, our bodies create some insanely complex chemical reactions. So many of these we take for granted - like ejaculating, for example - when you ejaculate, youre actually transferring 1500 terabytes of information. Its true, one single sperm contains 37.5MB of male DNA required to create a human child. Essentially, your penis has a higher bandwidth than any Internet connection that ever existed. Now thats impressive.
If those facts haven't got your grey matter in a twist already, read on for more bizarre goings-on in that crazy body of yours.
9. You Have Tiny Mites Living In Your Eyelashes
Yes, really. If that wasnt bad enough, theyre having sex on your face.
What were referring to here is the Demodex mite, part of the arachnid family, and they live in the hair follicles of humans. Though considered harmless, they have been said to play a part in rosacea - a common skin disease - by laying eggs in the pores of your face. Horrifying, right? Scientifically referred to as Demodex folliculitis and Demodex brevis, the mites are sausage-shaped and a third of a millimetre in length. They also feed on dead skin and oily deposits; so as well as your eyelashes, they can also be found anywhere theres hair: ear canals, nipples, forearms, penis even your bum.
Demodex frequently get jiggy in the rims of your hair follicles while you sleep. Once inseminated, the female buries into your follicle and lays her eggs. When an eyelash falls out, its often due to more than one eyelash mite burying itself inside a single hair follicle. Someone pass the bleach.
So how do you know if you have them? Its quite easy actually - all you need is to pluck out an eyelash and look under a microscope. A study of 29 adults (18 and over) in North Carolina found that 90% carried mites, and that all adults over 18 carried them. If thats the case, were just gonna plead ignorance.