The smallest bone in the human body is in the ear
It is the stirrup, one of three tiny hearing bones in the middle ear. It is two to three millimeters long and is named after its shape, which looks like a rider's stirrup.
Weird facts about the human body
The tiniest bone, the hardest substance, and why you are taller in the morning. Every fact here comes from the question bank of Bullshit, our bluffing party game, and each one was checked before it went into the game.
The hardest substance in the human body is tooth enamel
Enamel is about 96 percent mineral, the highest share in the body. Its main mineral is crystalline calcium phosphate.
The cornea has no blood vessels at all and gets its oxygen from tears
The cornea has to stay clear, so it has no blood vessels. Oxygen dissolves in tears and seeps into it from there.
Just like a fingerprint, everyone's tongue print is unique
Tongue prints are unique to each person, just like fingerprints, and researchers are studying them as a way to identify people.
The 'funny bone' in your elbow isn't a bone at all, it's a nerve
It is the ulnar nerve. At the elbow it sits between the bone and the skin with no muscle to protect it, so a knock there feels like an electric shock.
In the winter of 1963–64, an American high school student stayed awake for 11 days straight as an experiment
Randy Gardner, 17, from San Diego, stayed awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. Guinness World Records stopped accepting such attempts in 1997 for safety reasons.
In babies, the kneecap isn't bone yet, it's cartilage
Babies are born with kneecaps made of soft cartilage. They start turning into bone around age three, and the process finishes around the teenage years.
Your brain is smart enough that you can't tickle yourself
When we tickle ourselves, the cerebellum tells the rest of the brain exactly where the touch will land. The brain expects the feeling, so it is dulled.
In the morning we're all about a centimeter taller than in the afternoon
Your height changes during the day. A study that measured a hundred children found they got shorter by about a centimeter and a half on average between morning and afternoon.
An American named Charles Osborne didn't stop hiccuping for 68 years
Osborne's hiccups started in 1922 on a farm in Nebraska, after a heavy hog fell on him, and stopped only in 1990. He is estimated to have hiccuped over 430 million times and is in Guinness World Records.
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