💡 Body — Fun Facts

The smallest bone in your body is in your ear and is tinier than a grain of rice.

It helps you hear sounds around you. It is only about 3 millimetres long.

Your thigh bone is the longest and strongest bone in your whole body.

It is the big bone in your upper leg. It is strong enough to help you jump and run all day.

When you get cold, tiny muscles make the hairs on your skin stand up.

This gives you goosebumps. It is your body's way of trying to keep you warm.

Your body is made of billions of tiny building blocks called cells.

Cells are far too small to see with just your eyes. It takes a special microscope to spot even one.

Your hair and nails keep growing all the time.

Nails grow a tiny bit every day. In a whole month a nail grows about 3 millimetres.

Your funny bone isn't a bone at all — it's a nerve in your elbow.

When you bump your elbow it can feel tingly. That funny feeling comes from a nerve, not a bone.

Your bones are alive, and they grow with you as you get bigger.

Bones are hard on the outside but busy on the inside. They keep growing until you are a grown-up.

The oldest person ever lived to 122 years old.

A woman named Jeanne Calment from France lived 122 years — she was alive in three different centuries.

The tallest person ever was Robert Wadlow.

He was about 2.72 metres tall (8 feet 11 inches) — nearly as tall as a basketball hoop. He lived about a hundred years ago.

You can’t tickle yourself.

Your brain knows your own hands are coming and cancels the ticklish surprise — so only someone else can get you.

You are a little taller in the morning than at night.

While you sleep lying down, the soft cushions in your spine soak up fluid and puff up; standing all day gently squeezes them again.

Your fingerprints are all your own — no one else in the world has the same ones.

Fingerprints form before you're even born and stay the same your whole life. Even identical twins, who share the same DNA, have completely different fingerprints.

Your small intestine is about 6 metres long — longer than a car!

It's coiled up neatly inside your belly. Its job is to soak up the goodness from your food, and its walls are folded and fuzzy to give a huge surface area for absorbing nutrients.

If you lined up all your blood vessels, they could wrap around the Earth more than twice.

Your arteries, veins, and tiny capillaries together stretch roughly 100,000 km. Most of them are microscopic capillaries — thinner than a hair — delivering oxygen to every cell in your body.

The hardest part of your body is the enamel on your teeth.

Tooth enamel, the shiny outer layer, is even harder than bone. But unlike bone it can't repair itself once it's worn away — which is exactly why brushing to protect it matters so much.

Your brain uses about a fifth of all the energy your body makes.

Even though the brain is only about 2% of your body weight, it uses roughly 20% of your energy. Thinking, sensing, and controlling your whole body takes a lot of power.

You are a little bit taller in the morning than at night.

The soft cushions between the bones in your spine get gently squished as you stand and sit during the day. Lying down overnight lets them puff back up, so you're about 1 cm taller when you wake.

Babies are born with about 300 bones, but grown-ups have only 206.

As you grow, some soft, separate baby bones slowly fuse — join together — into single, stronger bones, for example in the skull and the spine. That's why adults end up with fewer bones than babies.

Your heart beats about 100,000 times every day.

That adds up to around 35 million beats a year, quietly pumping blood to every part of your body without ever taking a break. Over a whole lifetime it beats more than 2.5 billion times.