Video

Our amazing bodies

Discover some things you did – and didn’t – know about the human body.

Transcript

Cathy Buntting: Who’s got something amazing that they can tell us about what bodies can do? Anyone? Who can wiggle their ears?

Student: I can click my shoulder blades.

Student: I can bend my thumb back and touch my arm

Student: I can put both my legs behind my head.

Sara Loughnane: We think we’ve all got pretty amazing bodies actually and we are going to tell you just a few things that all of your bodies can do, and do do all the time, that we think is pretty cool.

Cathy Buntting: Well, the first thing - did you know that the average person will cry up to 7 litres of tears of in a year. That’s seven bottles of tears.

Sara: Did you know that you have got about 2 million bacteria on your face right now.

Barbara Ryan: And did you know that bad breath is caused by food odours and mouth rot – that’s millions and trillions of little critters that live in your mouth, they swim, and they reproduce, and they poo, and they die in your mouth.

Cathy Buntting: And that’s just normal.

Sara Loughnane: And your body totally deals with that.

Cathy Buntting: Another amazing thing is, who knows how many hairs they lose off their head per day? Who will take a guess?

Student: 70.

Sara Loughnane: Pretty close.

Student: 100.

Sara Loughnane: It’s 80. Every day.

Cathy Buntting: And what I want to know is, who actually counts those hairs? Like, how do they work that out?

Barbara Ryan: And sweat is a natural air conditioning. So it oozes out of your skin to cool you down. And it’s not your sweat that smells bad, it’s the bacteria that eats the sweat. 

Rights: The University of Waikato
Published: 27 November 2007,Updated: 27 November 2007