Body & Health

In 1965, four-year-old Roger Lausier was drowning at a beach in Salem, Massachusetts when a woman named Alice Blaise pulled him out of the water. Nine years later, Roger was on an inflatable raft when he heard a woman scream that her husband was drowning. He paddled out and kept the man afloat until help arrived. The man was Bob Blaise. Alice's husband. Same beach. Same family. Nine years apart.

Your cornea has no blood supply at all — it gets its oxygen directly from the air, dissolved through your tears. It's one of the only tissues in the human body that is completely avascular. This is also why wearing contact lenses for too long can cause problems: they block oxygen from reaching the cornea.

The human liver can regenerate to its full size from as little as 25% of its original tissue. It's the only internal organ that can do this — which is why living-donor liver transplants work. Surgeons remove up to 60% of the donor's liver, transplant it, and both the donor and recipient end up with full-sized livers within months.

You have roughly equal numbers of bacterial and human cells—about 38 trillion of each. You're a 50/50 partnership with microbes.

Your brain's visual cortex rewires itself if you go blind, repurposing that area to process sound and touch with superhuman precision.

French entertainer Michel Lotito ate an entire Cessna 150 airplane over a 2-year period (1978-1980), and consumed an estimated nine tons of metal during his career from 1966 to 1997.

Sectoral heterochromia is an eye condition where one part of the iris appears different to the rest. It's generally a result of excessive pigment.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, after having a heart attack and bypass operation, ran 7 marathons on 7 consecutive days in 7 continents. He has also hacked off his own frostbitten fingers with a power tool, discovered the lost city of Ubar, and, in his sixties, reached the peak of Mt. Everest.

Edwin Robinson lost his sight and hearing in a truck accident in 1971. Nine years later, he stepped outside during a storm in Maine to rescue his pet chicken — and was struck by lightning. When he woke up the next morning, he could see and hear again. Doctors had no explanation.

In 1977, a 13-year-old boy had a tooth growing out of his left foot.

A 2012 UK study by NCP car parks found that women scored higher than men on a parking skills checklist, despite taking about 20 seconds longer to complete the maneuver.

Chewing gum can make a person fart more.

If you eat lots of carrots, you'll start to turn orange.

1 in 3 vegetarians admit to eating meat when drunk.

(Former) Billionaire Chuck Feeney gave away over 99% of his multi-billion dollar fortune to philanthropic endeavors, such as helping underprivileged kids go to college. He is now worth a few million dollars.

In Japan, ‘yaeba’ (or crooked teeth) in girls is considered cute and attractive. Girls actually undergo procedures to un-straighten their teeth.

In 2013, a man bought a house next to his ex-wife just to install a giant middle finger statue for her to see every day.

There are still 5 people living who were born in the 1800s - and they're all women.

In 1972, Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant, survived a fall of 33,330 feet when her plane exploded over Czechoslovakia. She held the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute until her death in 2016.

A Brazilian man named Xiahn Nishi, formerly known as Max, was so fascinated by Korean culture after studying abroad in South Korea that he underwent 10 plastic surgery procedures costing around $31,000 to make his appearance more Asian.