Working with the limited scientific knowledge they had, the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations came up with a number of theories about the human body. While some were correct, most were not. As a matter of fact, some doctors, philosophers, and thinkers got it hilariously wrong.

10 Food Was Changed Into Blood By The Liver
Originator: Galen

Perhaps the greatest Roman (though, he was of Greek ethnicity) doctor ever, Galen published a vast number of writings on the human body and proposed many correct theories. One of the incorrect ones that he believed was that food was digested by the stomach and taken to the liver, where it was turned into blood. The biggest reason for many of Galen’s errors was that he’d never dissected a human body; in his time, it was outlawed by the Roman Empire. His theories were widely followed—practically blindly—until the 16th century, when Flemish doctor Andreas Vesalius began to question Galen’s findings.

9 Lambs Grew From Trees
Originator: Megasthenes

Megasthenes was a Greek explorer who returned from a trip he took to India and wrote a book about his travels. He referred to cotton plants that he saw as “trees on which grew wool,” which led to the misconception that lambs grew on trees. From that incorrect assumption, a number of other ancient thinkers, including Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder, mentioned “wool-bearing trees” in their writings, perpetuating the myth. As late as the 18th or 19th centuries, this was still a commonly believed theory, with books published on the subject and a number of expeditions undertaken in search of the mythical plant.

8 Light Came From The Eye
Originator: Plato

Plato, one of the greatest Greek philosophers, contributed greatly to medical knowledge—erroneously in a number of cases. Perhaps his worst error was the idea that “a stream of light or fire” emanated from the eye, rebounded off of an object, and combined with sunlight, allowing it to be seen by the eye. An object’s color was said to be “flame particles” that were let off its body. This was a commonly held notion until the 11th century, when Persian scientist Ibn al-Haytham developed his theory that the eye was merely an optical instrument in his writing The Book of Optics.

7 Veins Carried Blood, Arteries Carried Air
Originator: Praxagoras

An ancient Greek physician whose writings have been lost to humanity, Praxagoras is perhaps best known for being the first to realize that veins and arteries are different. However, he believed that air traveled through the arteries (probably due to the fact that blood tends to leave the arteries upon death and accumulates in the veins). Praxagoras explained away bleeding by saying the arteries attracted blood from the neighboring tissue when exposed to air. This theory was widely believed for hundreds of years.

6 Sleep Occurs When Blood Flows Away From The Surface
Originator: Alcmaeon

Another ancient Greek philosopher and doctor, Alcmaeon of Croton was the holder of a number of medical firsts, including the idea that the brain was the seat of understanding, rather than the heart. He also theorized that sensory organs are attached to the brain. However, he wasn’t always correct. He believed that sleep came to humans when their blood flowed from the surface of their bodies to the blood vessels farther in. Alcmaeon also believed that death occurred if all of the blood went deep into the body.

5 The Brain Was Just A Cooling Device
Originator: Aristotle

Aristotle believed the heart was the center of knowledge and the source of the sensations in the human body, rather than the brain, and he had an interesting theory about the brain. He felt that the brain was merely a cooling organ for the heart and an area for “spirit” to pool. Even though earlier Greeks, including Alcmaeon and Plato, had put forth a neuro-centric model of the human body, Aristotle ridiculed them for their “fallacious” views. In addition, he also thought women’s brains were smaller than men’s, another of his errors that persisted for a number of years.

4 Hemorrhoids Could Be Cured In Weird Ways
Originator: Pliny The Elder

Pliny the Elder was one of the greatest Roman authors and published Naturalis Historia, one of the earliest examples of an encyclopedia. Apparently, hemorrhoids were quite the problem for the ancient Romans, because there were a number of cures. Using an onion as a suppository was supposed to help, and eating garlic with wine but vomiting it back up was said to be beneficial to hemorrhoid sufferers as well. Using a fresh root of rosemary and rubbing it on the anus was also very effective (it also helped if you had a prolapsed rectum). Perhaps the strangest cure was a cream made from the lard of a pig and the rust of a chariot’s wheels.

3 Light Traveled Through The Ether
Originator: Aristotle

While Aristotle influenced civilization for thousands of years, it doesn’t give him a pass on some of his wilder theories. Chief among them was his idea that the entire universe was filled with an unknown substance called “the ether.” Aristotle proposed the theory because he believed light would be unable to move through an empty universe. Like many of his ideas, this one persisted, and the best and brightest of the scientific community failed to contradict it. It was widely believed until 1910, when Albert Einstein proved light didn’t need the ether with his theory of special relativity.

2 The Testicles Determined A Person’s Voice
Originator: Aristotle

Aristotle certainly had his fair share of incorrect theories. Not the least of these was that the testicles were a key factor in determining a person’s vocal pitch. Aristotle’s reasoning was that a boy’s voice tended to deepen during puberty, when his testicles dropped (a lot of this theory was dependent on his observations in animals as well). In addition, he noticed that men who were castrated before puberty maintained their “ladylike” voice, as well as a number of other traits. Obviously, we now know the larynx and the mucus membrane within it control the voice’s pitch.

1 The Womb Roamed Around A Woman’s Body
Originator: Hippocrates

Recognized as the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates had a number of incorrect theories, most notably his theory of humorism, which stated that the human body was made up of four elements that caused illnesses when out of balance. However, his craziest theory was the idea of a “wandering womb.” Hippocrates believed that a woman’s body craved warmth and moisture, so they needed to get laid often. If not, their womb would get bored and start to migrate around their body. In addition, an excess of “male activities,” could also cause the womb to wander. Depending on where it finally attached itself, various disorders could result, including hysteria. This was still a widely held theory until the Middle Ages.

It is interesting that we deem a disorder or disease “bizarre” precisely because of its rarity. One disease may be more visually repulsive than another, but in the end, we’re most impressed by whichever rare disorder we just don’t understand. If brains that block fear or stomachs that brew beer were as common as the cold, maybe they wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. But for now, they seem like examples of some of the very strange conditions that the human body can experience.

10 Walking Dead Syndrome

When the brain is injured in any way, the result can very easily become the stuff of science fiction or horror. Walking Dead syndrome (also called “Cotard Delusion,” after French doctor Jules Cotard) makes sufferers think they have died or are rotting away. The delusion is caused by the degeneration of neuronal synapses due to Alzheimer’s, brain trauma, or any of quite a few other disorders. The decay leads to a breakdown in the neuron chain between the facial recognition and emotion centers of the brain. Some victims of this delusion become convinced that because they are dead, there is no longer any point in eating, and they starve to death.

One of the best known recent examples is that of a Scotsman, identified as “WI,” who suffered severe brain trauma in a motorcycle accident. After receiving a clean bill of health and leaving an Edinburgh hospital, he went to South Africa for a vacation. By the time he arrived, he had convinced himself that he was dead and had gone to hell. South Africa’s heat seems to confirm the idea.

WI figured he had died from the brain injury, or from septicemia, or from AIDS—he considered AIDS a possibility only because he’d read an article on it not long before his accident. He even believed that his mother, accompanying him during the trip, was not actually with him. He thought that she was asleep in Scotland, and he’d stolen her soul to use as transportation around hell.

9 Pediatric Myelofibrosis

This disease is not particularly weird, but it’s extremely rare. Myelofibrosis is a bone marrow disorder, and though it affects thousands of adults, only 50 cases of its pediatric version have been documented throughout all of history. The disease causes bone marrow to produce excess fibrous connective tissue, which inhibits the marrow’s production of blood cells. The symptoms include general and severe fatigue, infection susceptibility that usually results in pneumonia, gout, shortness of breath, easy bruising, enlarged spleen, and—at all times—bone pain.

One of the disease’s rare sufferers is 16-year-old Lukas Larsson of Colorado, who was not born with myelofibrosis but acquired it at about the age of 15. He was not diagnosed for a full year, and there is now only one way for him to survive: a complete bone marrow transplantation. Without a transplant, this disease is nearly always fatal, so all the marrow in every bone in his body must be taken out and replaced with marrow from donors.

8 Encephalotrigeminal Angiomatosis

This is also called Sturge-Weber syndrome, and although doctors know precisely what causes it, they are powerless to stop it from happening. A gene mutation hits the sufferer while still in the womb, leading to excess blood vessels just under the skin on the side of the face. The classic symptom for a newborn is a “port wine” birthmark across the forehead and one eye (similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous birthmark, though he does not have this disorder).

The extra blood vessels under the sufferer’s skin surround the trigeminal nerve, which happens to be the primary nerve responsible for headaches. Other symptoms include excess blood vessels in the brain’s inner lining, severe mental retardation, and intense glaucoma in about half of cases. Glaucoma is excessive pressure in the eyes, which eventually leads to blindness by squeezing the eyeball. In cases of Sturge-Weber, the pressure can become so great that it forces the eyeball out of the socket.

The excess blood vessels over the brain kill large tracts of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. This causes severe convulsions that can make the victim to “jackknife” or bend sharply backward, risking damage to the spine and back muscles. The only treatment to combat these convulsions is surgery to remove the affected brain areas.

7 Gut Fermentation Syndrome

This may sound wonderful on the surface. Eat anything you want, and that food will make you drunk—very drunk, if you eat as much carbohydrates as most of us. But extreme drunkenness precedes extreme hangovers. Add in the frustration of everyone thinking you’ve been drinking and are lying about it, and you have the case of a 61-year-old Texas man from earlier this year. For five years, he’d routinely gotten drunk without actually imbibing any alcohol at all. His and his wife were both baffled and even bought their own home Breathalyzer test.

In September, he checked into the emergency room with a blood alcohol level of 0.37, nearly five times the legal level for intoxication. He insisted he was a teetotaler, and the doctors laughed, but they placed him under observation. Twenty-four hours later, having had no alcohol, he was still falling-down drunk.

Then the doctors found out why. His stomach does not digest the sugars in carbohydrates; it ferments them. Excess yeast grows in response to any starchy food and then converts the starch into ethanol before his stomach digests it. Assuming a healthy diet, this would enable a person to stay drunk almost all the time without developing a beer gut from booze’s empty calories. Alcohol’s effect on the liver, however, would very much still be a problem.

For now, “auto-brewery syndrome” syndrome is so rare that the few papers written on the subject have to specifically request that doctors take it seriously.

6 Microcephaly Capillary Malformation Syndrome

There are only 11 known cases of this disorder. One of its victims is Finn Straub of Connecticut, whose parents were told he would die before his first birthday. He had his second birthday in September and is still alive, which is almost unheard of given the disorder. But if he should survive well into his childhood or beyond, he will never have an IQ much higher than 30.

“Microcephaly” means Finn’s brain and cranium did not develop completely in utero. “Capillary malformation” means his blood vessels have branched excessively and lie too close to the epidermis, giving his whole body small “port wine” birthmarks. These capillary malformations aren’t fatal, but a brain so severely underdeveloped results in a wide variety of problems we don’t normally think of. His heart can’t carry fluid away from the chest cavity, his body is so weak that he can barely move his head, and he doesn’t even have the energy to cry.

This syndrome is totally genetic and yet so rare that it is impossible to predict before conception.

5 Osteogenesis Imperfecta

You might recognize this disorder from the Shyamalan film Unbreakable, but it’s real and affects one in 20,000 people. With this disorder, the body manufactures insufficient or defective collagen. Bones therefore break very easily, giving the disease the nickname “brittle bone disease.”

Samuel L. Jackson’s Unbreakable character suffers from Type 1 of OI. He tells Bruce Willis’s character that there are four types, and those with Type 4 “don’t last very long.” Actually, there are eight types, and Type 2 is the most severe. With Type 1, bones form but break as easily as glass. The body grows slowly and rarely attains average height, the spine permanently curves from weak joint tissue, and the sense of hearing often breaks down. Type 2 has more intense versions of all these symptoms, and most victims die within their first year of life.

Adults with Type 2 are extremely rare, but all sufferers have to take extreme precaution in their daily lives. Such is the case with Ellen Dollar, who broke three dozen bones before turning 12 and then went on to have a daughter who also suffers from the condition. Her daughter one day tried holding a laptop with one hand. Its weight snapped both of her forearm bones.

4 Body Integrity Identity Disorder

People with this disorder want a body part amputated because they feel a constant sense that it doesn’t belong to them. Unlike apotemnophilia, a sexual fetish involving oneself as an amputee, BIID is likened to gender identity disorder, which seems to be more common. It may also be a psychosis linked to a fault in the brain’s body mapping center. This center in the right parietal lobe determines our definitions of “personal space,” and if anything undesirable ventures into your personal space, alarm bells sound. Those who suffer from BIID feel as though a body part, usually a limb, is an alien object that has invaded their space.

Most victims don’t go all the way with this delusion and have the body part cut off, and even fewer do the surgery themselves—this would set off entirely different alarm bells in the brain’s fear centers. But it does happen. In 2000, Scottish surgeon Dr. Robert Smith agreed to cut off the healthy legs of two different people who threatened to otherwise do the deed themselves. He claimed that to defy such a threat would be a crime against the Hippocratic Oath.

3 Cancer Of The Teeth

It is difficult to determine the very rarest form of cancer, but it may be malignant primary cardiac sarcoma, or heart cancer. It is theoretically possible to develop cancer in any part of the body made up of living tissue, from red or white blood cells to the neurons of the brain. Cancer of the teeth is also perfectly possible, since the teeth receive blood flow. But it’s so rare that any case receives global medical scrutiny, fascinating doctors the way the moon landing thrilled the public.

Tooth cancer’s technical term is “gigantiform cementoma.” It begins as a tumor in the tooth and, if unchecked, grows until it takes over the entire face. Because of its rarity, it almost always remains unnoticed until it manifests itself as a grotesque swelling around the mouth, either in the chin or jaw, or in the cheek.

The most well-known case is that of Novemthree Siahaan from Batam Island, Indonesia, who died at the age of six. When his family took him to Taiwanese doctors, the nearest ones who handle the problem, they immediately undertook surgery to remove the tumors. These four tumors had spread from tooth to tooth and then to all facial tissues and bones. They’d become so large that they completely obscured Siahaan’s sight in both eyes and shut off his sinus cavities. He could only drink water by looking straight up so the fluid would run down his throat on its own.

2 Crimean-Congolese Hemorrhagic Fever

CCHF’s pathology is similar to that of Ebola, but virologists who have observed its firsthand claim that Ebola pales in comparison. The CCHF mortality rate if treated is an extraordinarily high 30 percent. This is because CCHF, like Ebola, kills by liquefying the insides, but it gestates much faster than Ebola. It melts organs, especially the liver, and it typically does this faster than the immune system can get a handle on it.

The disease is spread by Hyalomma ticks. It’s the only viral disease on this list, and antibiotics are useless against a virus. After only one to three days, flu-like symptoms begin. External signs of hemorrhaging begin within three to five days if the first symptoms are not dealt with. Lesions on the inside of the throat eventually erupt, risking death by drowning you in your own blood. General mental confusion follows, with blood from the nose and in the vomit, urine, and feces.

Because the body attempts coagulation everywhere at once, it runs out of platelets and hemorrhages from the mouth, nose, eyes, ears, and even pores. With good treatment and a strong immune system, most victims should survive, but recovery takes about a week and a half to become noticeable. Until then, there is no telling if the victim will live or melt to death from the inside out. For the 30 percent who die, death from multiple organ failure comes in less than two weeks.

1 Cushing’s Syndrome

The common version of this syndrome isn’t too bizarre on its own. Steroid medications make the adrenal glands secrete too many corticosteroids, and doctors treat the disease by simply weaning the patient off the medication. The rarer form, however, is caused by an adrenal adenoma, a benign tumor on the adrenal gland that is usually removed with the gland. Thirty-eight-year-old Jordy Cernik suffered from adenomas on both glands and had to have both removed. Here is where it becomes bizarre: without his adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline, he is now incapable of feeling fear.

Fear can be good or bad. You ride roller coasters for the controlled thrill of almost dying , but when someone robs you at gunpoint, you must bury your fear to function. Cernik understands those situations in which he should feel fear, since he was perfectly normal before the surgery, but he simply cannot feel the sensation. Someone with Cernik’s disorder might comply with the mugger, or play dead at the feet of a bear, but they will not panic or think too quickly.

Post-surgery, Cernik went skydiving, which he says he’d earlier never have dared try. As he entered the plane, he felt nothing. As he stepped to the door at 3,000 meters (10,000 ft), he felt nothing. While he plummeted, he felt nothing. His heart rate did not fluctuate at all, because in such a situation, adrenaline is what forces the heart rate to climb. He no longer has any adrenaline.

Sounds great, but such oddities always come at a price. Adrenaline, along with endorphins, is one of only two natural analgesics produced by the body. Conditions such as minor arthritis that we can ignore cause Cernik chronic suffering. “I’m always in pain,” he claims. And adrenaline does a lot more than kill pain—those who have their adrenal glands removed frequently suffer severe and rapid weight gain.

The body is an accumulated wonder of parts fine-tuned by nature to perform precision tasks. Venture past the usual facts, and things tend to get interesting. In recent times, unknown body parts have turned up in fossils and living creatures, ranging from cute to creepy to deadly.

Doctors have grown things in strange places and traced the bizarre origins of the most normal of features. When life goes wrong, body parts can also unveil gruesome mysteries, suffering buried in history, and medical problems that beggar belief.

10 The Yo-Yo Injury

In 2005, Dazzling Dave visited schools in North Dakota. The professional yo-yo performer entertained kids for up to 12 hours at a time. A week later, the man, whose real name was David Schulte, noticed that his right index finger warmed more slowly than the rest. In cold weather, it was also the first to freeze.

When it started shifting colors—alternating between red, purple, and blue—he sought medical help. The doctor suspected a blood clot. A scan showed something else entirely.

There was no blood flow past the second knuckle of the finger. For some reason, the blood vessels had suddenly constricted and for too long. The unusual injury was probably caused by years of hitting that particular finger with a yo-yo.

Technically, it caused a condition known as Raynaud’s syndrome which can result in nerve damage and tissue loss. Luckily, the champion yo-yo artist suffered no lasting problems. A month of popping blood thinners solved the situation.^[1]

9 Crankles

In 2017, researchers riffled through the Natural History Museum in London. They found a game-changing fossil. The bones belonged to a carnivore called Teleocrater rhadinus.

When it was discovered in the 1930s, experts failed to find its place in the evolutionary tree. As a result, it was shelved and forgotten. The modern study determined that the creature was 245 million years old. It lived 10 million years before the dinosaurs. Even better, it was one of their ancestors.

Teleocrater‘s main surprise was a body structure more reminiscent of a crocodile than a dinosaur. In particular, they had crankles. Short for crocodile ankles, they gave the animal a reptilian gait on all fours like a monitor lizard.

This was significant. An impossibly long time ago, reptiles called archosaurs split into two lineages: the bird branch (which led to the dinosaurs) while the other remained reptilian, with today’s alligators and crocodiles.^[2]

Teleocrater is the earliest-known member from the bird line, but its crankles were like a strange missing link connecting it back to the archosaurs and the reptile branch. This profoundly challenged what scholars thought they knew about early dinosaur evolution.

8 Switchblade Cheeks

The stonefish is a rare fish. It also haunts Indo-Pacific coastlines as one of the most venomous creatures in the world. In 2003, a pet stonefish died. As the owner was a researcher, the fish hit the dissection table instead of the local pet cemetery. It started 15 years of curiosity about the species.

In 2018, when a “switchblade” was found in its face, the same scientist unraveled the mechanism behind the feature. The whole thing was bizarre. In other fish, the lachrymal bone is solidly fixed underneath the eye as part of the skull. When a stonefish gets huffy, this spike shoots out in a 90-degree angle—on each cheek.

This is no mustache. The lachrymal bones are dangerously serrated. To activate the spines, the fish pulls on chewing muscles in the upper jaw. This rotates and locks the spine through a mechanism shaped like a roly-poly. One stonefish species upped the freaky factor. Centropogon australis fluoresces in two tones. While the head emits red light, the spikes have a green glow.^[3]

7 Selam’s Foot

One of mankind’s most famous ancestors is Lucy. Found in 1974, she was an adult Australopithecus afarensis from Ethiopia. In 2000, a second one was found nearby. The female toddler was quickly dubbed “Lucy’s baby.” However, the child was the older fossil, having died around three million years ago, about 100,000 years before Lucy.

The youngster, renamed Selam, had the most complete set of A. afarensis foot bones ever found. Scientists already knew the species walked upright like modern humans. Indeed, Selam’s foot and ankle anatomy was identical to those of people alive today. The unusual part was that the two species developed their feet differently.

While young (Selam died at age three), A. afarensis‘s big toe was more fingerlike. It probably helped them to cling to their parents and trees for safety. Selam’s heel was also more fragile than those of human children.^[4]

Even though young A. afarensis were less suited for walking upright, their feet were already designed for life on the ground. Only later would they grow the same strong heel bones present in humans from birth.

6 Scaly Origin Of Teeth

In the quest to find out where human teeth came from, researchers turned to skates. These fish are covered in primitive scales called dermal denticles. Sharks also have them, which is why their skin feels like sandpaper.

A 2017 study found that the scales grew from neural crest cells, a critical element in mammal tooth development. A second find also suggested that teeth evolved from fish skin. Denticles, which roughly resemble teeth, also consist of dentine. A modern tooth is packed with this hard tissue.

However, the discovery does not mean that all species got their snappers this way. Research on zebra fish showed another evolutionary path where scales and teeth evolved from different types of cells. Skate skin presents a strong case that certain species grew scales as armor plating. Somehow, through millions of years, this external skeleton became modified and moved to the mouth as teeth.^[5]

5 Hitler’s Death Confirmed

When Adolf Hitler realized in 1945 that he could no longer escape the invading Allied forces, he committed suicide in his bunker. The Russians found his remains and threw the body into a river. For decades, they kept skull fragments to which nobody had access. During that time, rumors abounded that the fuhrer had faked his own death.

The conspiracy theories had sound roots. It is a fact that many high-ranking Nazis escaped when Germany’s power was broken. But things took a weird turn in 2009. Nick Bellantoni, an archaeologist and bone specialist, handled Hitler’s skull at the Russian State Archive.

During a documentary for the History Channel, he declared that the fragments belonged to a woman under 40. The Archive responded by saying that Bellantoni had never been there or handled the remains.^[6]

In 2018, the Archive finally permitted French pathologists to study the fragments. The teeth had complex dental work that perfectly matched Hitler’s medical records. Blue stains and a bullet hole showed that the fuhrer’s suicide plan began with swallowing a cyanide capsule, followed by a shot to the head.

4 White Blood

Recently, doctors in Germany faced something they had never seen before. A 39-year-old patient’s blood was so pale and thick that it looked like milk. The medical condition was not a mystery. The nearly comatose patient suffered from extreme hypertriglyceridemia. It is caused by too much fat in the blood.

Siphoning off the offending triglyceride molecules and returning the cleaned plasma to the body usually solves the problem. However, when staff tried the normal route, his viscous blood clogged the hospital’s filtering equipment. Not once, but twice. The problem was a record amount of triglycerides. Around 500 mg/dL is considered “high.” The man’s count read an astonishing 18,000 mg/dL.

Desperate to save his life, doctors resorted to an ancient remedy abandoned by modern medicine—bloodletting. A good amount of the white gunk was drained and replaced with red blood cell concentrates and saline solution. It worked. Although the cause of the severity is unknown, the patient’s genes, obesity, and irregular consumption of his diabetes medication might have combined to cause the mother of all hypertriglyceridemia cases.^[7]

3 The Limb Pit

During the Civil War, the Second Battle of Bull Run took place north of Manassas, Virginia, in 1862. In 2018, archaeologists were investigating the battlefield when they discovered something exceptionally rare.

A shallow grave held two soldiers and the sawed-off limbs of up to 11 other men. The complete bodies, Burial 1 and 2, could not be identified other than being Union soldiers from the North.

Both died brutal deaths. Burial 1’s leg had been broken by a bullet which was still stuck in the bone when the skeleton was found. The injury was so bad that field surgeons probably left him to die. This frequently happened when there were too many injured soldiers.

Burial 2 was placed in the pit after the first man and rested slightly on top of him. His own death resulted from three bullets. One smashed his arm, another buried itself in the shin, and a third struck his groin. The bodies, with nine severed arms and legs arranged around them, were a unique find hailed as “one in a million.”^[8]

2 The Forearm Ear

When army private Shamika Burrage returned from leave in 2016, a car accident put her in rehabilitation for months. She also lost an ear. After Burrage recovered, her appearance bothered her so much that a counselor suggested plastic surgery.

In 2018, the William Beaumont Army Medical Center in Texas performed a rare procedure. They took rib cartilage from Burrage and shaped it like an ear. Afterward, it was inserted under the skin of her forearm. For the woman to experience feeling in the ear, doctors needed the new body part to develop fresh arteries, veins, and nerves—all available from the arm.

Once ready, surgeons replaced Burrage’s missing ear. Doctors also took the opportunity to reopen her hearing canal to restore the hearing she had lost. This was the first time that army plastic surgeons had performed this type of operation. However, the procedure dates to the early 20th century. Back in the day, rib cartilage ears were also grown under the skin but without the nerves and blood vessels.^[9]

1 Severed Russian Hands

Early in 2018, a fisherman decided to visit a small island near the Amur River in Siberia. Upon arrival, he noticed a hand in the snow. There was no sign of the rest of the body. Soon afterward, the man found a bag stuffed with the same grisly thing. All told, there were 54 human hands severed at the wrist. There was also medical waste nearby.

Social media cried foul after an anonymous sender circulated the photos online, showing the brutal cache in detail. The Russian government was unfazed. Investigators insisted that the amputations had a mundane explanation. Some forensic laboratories in Russia dispose of bodies without identities but keep the hands as a record.^[10]

In this case, authorities admitted that the unidentified laboratory broke the law by dumping the hands. Despite lifting fingerprints from only one pair, investigators also kept insisting that the hands were not the result of darker criminal activities.

We have plenty of things living on and in us. Most of the organisms that reside on or in us are not only perfectly natural but perfectly healthy as well. From the bacteria and fungi that dwell on our skin to the microflora that call our gut home, most of these creatures actually help us to protect ourselves, to survive, and to perform the basic necessary bodily functions of the human organism.

Occasionally, we’re reminded of the damage that can be done by something growing in our bodies, like when a terrifying flesh-eating microbe decides to eat away at us. Other times, small, unseen organisms can hijack our minds and alter our behaviors and even our perceptions. But beyond the usual pathogens, sometimes the organisms that grow on or in us are actually visible (or at least their effects are). Here are ten cases of infestations that actually took place inside people’s bodies.

10 The Hand

Barnacles are crustaceans that inhabit marine waters. Around 850 species of barnacles are largely immobile and don’t do much at all; think of the kind you see attached to the hulls of ships. These barnacles contain an extremely strong adhesive paste that they use, almost like cement, to attach themselves to things in such a way that it requires tremendous force to remove them. Other species of barnacles are internal parasites that infect other crustaceans and can seriously threaten ocean life from time to time.

A man named Chris Johnson would one day end up seeing a doctor about a strange growth in his hand that had become seriously concerning. Not knowing what the growth was, the doctors took samples, which they tested. They never expected that they would find barnacles growing inside the man’s hand—but that’s exactly what happened.^[1] Both the doctors and Johnson himself were terrified.

9 The Lung

In another absolutely bonkers case of living things growing inside someone, a Boston man named Ron Sveden was having some severe chest problems in 2010. Already suffering from emphysema, Ron resigned himself to his fate, believing that he had cancer. Once one of his lungs collapsed, though, enough was enough, and Ron went in to see the doctors to diagnose him with the appropriate lung cancer.^[2]

But that isn’t what happened. Doctors took the appropriate X-rays and indeed found a growth inside Mr. Sveden’s lung, but it wasn’t a clump of cancerous cells like they were expecting—it was the humble beginnings of a pea plant. Months prior, Ron had been eating, doctors hypothesized, when he must have taken a pea down the wrong tube and into his lung. The pain that ensued was from the pea being lodged inside his lung, but it didn’t stop there. The pea began to sprout and actually grow, infesting the inside of Mr. Sveden’s body.

8 Fir Tree

A very similar and slightly crazier incident hails from Russia in 2009. Yet again, an individual was pained in their chest, specifically their lungs, and something was removed. What exactly was that? The humble beginnings of a growing fir tree, which was apparently 5 centimeters (2 in) long. The doctors who performed the operation said that they were 100-percent certain that a tumor in the man’s lungs was cancer, but when they went to open him up, a sprouting fir tree was what was found inside.^[3]

While no one aside from the surgeons and the patient verified the claim, considering the story of Ron Sveden in the United States, it’s very possible the men were telling the truth. Seeds sprout without sunlight, and plants only really need light to photosynthesize once leaves begin to grow.

7 Maggots

Next on the list is an extremely unusual case of maggot infestation, one that ended up being most definitely a good thing. Pham Quang Lanh was a 28-year-old laborer working as a guest worker in Malaysia, outside of his native Vietnam, when he an iron bar fell off a building and onto his head in 2015. Fortunately, Lanh survived the injury, at least in the short term, thanks to surgery and a titanium plate that doctors were able to implant into his head.^[4]

But the story doesn’t end there. Lanh was in pain, and the site where the plate was inserted was swelling and generally not looking good. However, thinking it only a minor infection, he didn’t seek treatment. His family decided to take a closer look, and that’s when they discovered live maggots eating away at Lanh’s head.

In an unusual twist, while the man did, in fact, have a maggot infestation in his head, he also had a very bad infection—the kind that eats flesh, leading to necrosis of the skin cells, which can ultimately be lethal. But Pham Quang Lanh survived long enough to have the site treated because the maggots were eating away at the necrotic tissue that developed from the infection, which means the maggot infestation ultimately saved the man’s life. Talk about disgusting luck.

6 More Maggots

Believe it or not, the stroke of luck that Lanh had isn’t exactly unusual. Maggots can be very, very efficient nasty-bacteria-eating machines and can devour infections for our benefit.^[5] Not only is this reality, but it’s medicine, as doctors are willing to employ maggots when other options have run out. This almost sounds like some bizarre quack medical practice out of the Middle Ages, one that might have been used to (wrongly) fend off the Black Death, but no, this is current, modern-day medicine.

In 2012, a team of doctors at a hospital turned to maggots for a man named Waclaw Tyszkiewicz, who was suffering badly from an infection in his foot that was quickly spreading up his leg. The infection as such that amputation was the only choice—aside from literally dumping maggots on the infection site; and that’s exactly what they did. Once a week for three weeks, 800 maggots were applied for 36 hours, after which the area was doused in hydrogen peroxide, and guess what: It worked. While Waclaw still lost a toe in the ordeal, he managed to keep everything else and heal up nicely. Thanks to maggots, he was able to keep walking.

5 Morgellons

Morgellons disease is an odd one. A part of the problem in understanding this unusual skin disease is that different studies have drawn radically different conclusions over time, leading to a lot of confusion pertaining to what’s actually going on with the poor people who suffer from this extremely rare condition.^[6] Most of the symptoms are pretty common and shared with other diseases and syndromes, such as depression, fatigue, and skin rashes, but some of them stand out as downright mortifying: People with Morgellons disease begin to feel like insects are crawling inside their skin or like there is movement inside them beneath the skin.

From there, it just gets even more terrifying, as fibers actually begin to appear under the skin. The fibers are long and stringy, often black, and many of them have been tested and turned out to be cotton. Medical science doesn’t know for sure why this happens to some people (mental illness has been blamed), but it does.

4 Bird Mites

Bird mites are tiny, eight-legged, parasitic creatures that live on the blood of warm-blooded hosts—and they also sometimes make their way inside a person and decide to call them home. They sometimes dig into the noses of humans, too.

The most terrifying thing about bird mites is their symptoms, the main one being feeling like insects are crawling underneath your skin, which is to be expected. But bird mite infestation also causes severe psychological anguish as well as the usual depression.^[7] Fortunately, such mites can’t complete their life cycle inside human beings alone and thus must travel back into birds (where they come from) in order to do so.

3 Scabies

Scabies are awful for anyone to get—tiny mites infect the skin and cause the host organism extreme discomfort. Even worse, by the time a person infected with scabies notices any symptoms, it’s already too late, and they’ve become an infestation, as there is an incubation period of several weeks. Scabies can be treated most times with the simple application of a topical ointment, but sometimes, due to just the nature of these little critters, they can spread like crazy and wreak havoc.

One such instance was something straight out of a Stephen King book or movie. An infestation of scabies went absolutely crazy and even ended up being fatal.^[8] The outbreak took place, tragically, in a memory care facility, a place where people are kept when they have impairments such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Between 2013 and 2016, the SouthTowne Memory Care facility in Eugene, Oregon, had an outbreak that it would ultimately be sued for mismanaging, one which infected at least a few dozen people.

The painful, unceasing itching that scabies causes is absolutely mortifying. One 83-year-old woman named Pat Lancaster had left the facility but ultimately ended up dying a few months later. Between the time she left and the time she died, she had gone to the hospital, where doctors were shocked to see her condition so poor, with scabies so deeply embedded. They treated her and were able to remove the external scabies with ointments, but the mites had gone deep inside her, and she ended up dying from them. She was found having scratched massive chunks of skin off in a terrifying fashion. Scabies is no joke—it can kill you and should be taken very seriously. Two others also died in the outbreak.

2 Cockroach

Did you know that sometimes, cockroaches actually crawl inside people? They do, and the ear is a likely place of entry. When cockroaches are afraid, usually of weather changes or a perceived predator, they hide, sometimes inside your ear hole. They make themselves at home, and even more terrifyingly, sometimes, they’ll choose your ear as a perfect spot to lay their eggs. The fact that they generally can only go forward and not backward means that they probably won’t come out on their own.

In one terrifying situation, a woman from Florida named Katie Holley was sleeping one night in 2018 when she felt something seemingly cold slide into her left ear canal. Attempting to solve the problem and thinking the object was inanimate, she put a Q-tip into her ear and tried to figure out what it was—and that’s when she felt it move.^[9] That’s when things got even more awful: She removed the Q-tip to find what appeared to be legs on it.

It would take Katie a full nine days to get every piece of the roach out of her ear. She initially went to the emergency room, where most of the cockroach was removed, but then a week went by, and something just wasn’t quite right with her ear. After an uncomfortable several days, she decided to follow up with her doctor, who looked inside her ear, only to find more of the roach. Her doctor then removed the remainder, and her nightmare was finally over.

1 Super Gonorrhea

Just the name itself sounds absolutely horrifying: “super gonorrhea.” Super gonorrhea is an extremely antibiotic-resistant strain of the regular gonorrhea bacterium which is currently untreatable and spreading around the world slowly but surely. Unlike some other STIs, super gonorrhea is also transmittable through oral sex, making it a bacterium that’s relatively opportunistic.

In what has been called the worst case of super gonorrhea so far, a British man caught the bacterium after sleeping with a woman while on a trip to Southeast Asia in 2018. It was so bad that UK health officials attempted to track down his other sex partners themselves to warn them. Antibiotics failed to treat the disease, leading officials to worry what lies in the future when it comes to combating these critters that might infest and parasitize us. The complete inability to treat this man’s case with the go-to antibiotics was a first.^[10]

We hear about people being burned at the stake, frozen, and crushed with unbelievable amounts of outside force. But what really happens to the human body when it’s subjected to such extremes?

10Acceleration

G-forces never really affected humans until as late as the World War I, when pilots began mysteriously losing consciousness mid-flight. Thanks to US Air Force officer John Stapp, we then learned a lot more about how g-forces hit the human body, and the research took some serious dedication to the cause.

Stapp subjected himself to forces of up to 35 g, which is the equivalent of accelerating at 343 meters per second squared (1,125 ft/s²). His bones cracked and broke, and his dental fillings flew out. But the real effect, he determined, was on his blood.

When acceleration happens along a horizontal axis, the body tolerates the g-forces comparatively well because blood flow stays on that same horizontal plane. When g-forces act on the body in a vertical manner, things don’t go so well. Beyond a certain level (about 4 or 5 g for most people), our systems just don’t have enough strength to pump blood, and it all draws down to our lower extremities.

Negative g-forces cause the same problems, interfering with blood flow and making too much blood accumulate very quickly in one place. That’s where g-force suits come in. Air bladders in the suits expand with enough force to keep the blood where it belongs, preventing pilots from losing consciousness.

Stapp survived a final run in which he accelerated to 1,017 kilometers (632 mi) per hour, stopped in one second, and weighed more than 3,500 kilograms (7,700 lb) for a brief moment. He ultimately died peacefully at home at the age of 89.

9Pressure

Decompression sickness, commonly known as “the bends,” happens when the human body feels a sudden drop in surrounding pressure. Blood can no longer efficiently dissolve gases like nitrogen. Instead, the gases remain in the bloodstream as bubbles. In severe cases, the bubbles accumulate in blood vessels and block flow, resulting in dizziness, confusion, or even death.

The milder form of decompression sickness, DCS I, usually results in joint pain and tissue swelling. Divers who subject themselves to pressure changes on a regular basis can build up an undetected case of the bends that leads to permanent joint damage. DCS II is the type that can kill. Those stricken by this type experience conditions such as vertigo, paralysis, and shock.

8Cold

When the body’s temperature drops to about 30 degrees Celsius (86 °F), all bodily functions slow down. Fatigue, clumsiness, and a delay in reacting to outside stimuli are among the first symptoms.

One of the first systems to fail around the 30-degree mark is thermoregulation, or the body’s ability to maintain its core temperature on its own. The heart will also gradually slow, along with lung function, until the rest of the body starves of oxygen. In addition, the renal system quickly fails, flooding the body with a diluted version of urine. This substance leaks into the blood and organs, causing shock or other heart problems.

The reduced metabolism and decreased demand on the body’s systems enables some people to survive extreme cases of hypothermia and recover completely when properly warmed.

7Heat

Heatstroke happens when the body’s internal temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius (104 °F). Classic heatstroke develops slowly with exposure to heat, such as during a summer heat wave. Exertional heatstroke hits people who perform highly physical tasks in hot conditions, such as industrial workers and athletes. With either type, only about 20 percent of sufferers survive without treatment, and many who do survive suffer some degree of brain damage.

Humidity increases the chances of heatstroke by keeping sweat from evaporating, slowing the body’s ability to rid itself of heat. Once the core temperature reaches 42 degrees Celsius (107 °F) for as little as 45 minutes, cells break down. Tissues swell, and the digestive lining weakens, allowing new toxins into the body. In milder cases, called heat exhaustion, only the circulatory system slows. With full heatstroke, however, the nervous system malfunctions as well, causing confusion, convulsions, and dizziness.

6Fire

Hot air and humidity can push the body to its limits. But fire, unsurprisingly, takes the body several steps further, through damage, death, and disintegration.

Researchers at the University of West Florida are setting fire to donated corpses to document just what happens to the body. The average human body burns for seven hours. The outer skin goes first, crisping and crackling before it burns away pretty quickly. The dermal layers of skin don’t last much longer, vanishing after about five minutes.

By then, the fire has burned away your shell and starts on the fat layer. Fat is an effective fuel as long as flammable material such as clothing or the wood of a pyre acts like a candle wick. Fat melts away, absorbs into the wick, and then burns for hours. Flames also dry out muscles, contracting them and making the body move.

The fire typically burns itself out when only bones remain, unless they break to expose the marrow. Teeth don’t burn, either.

The research mimicked the fires from crime scenes. During cremation, however, fires roar much hotter, and the body burns more quickly. Most cremation fires burn at 600–800 degrees Celsius (1,110–1,470°F). Yet even at these temperatures, it can take several hours to completely reduce the body to ash.

According to the researchers, a burning body smells exactly like pork ribs on the barbecue.

5Starvation

We all know starvation kills, but the specifics are especially horrifying. The stomach physically shrinks, which can make it uncomfortable to start eating normal amounts again even if food arrives to save you. The heart and heart muscles also physically shrink, restricting the amount they can do and dropping blood pressure. Prolonged starvation causes anemia. In women, menstruation can stop completely.

When your body lacks enough sugars to burn, it start breaking down fat. This might sound desirable enough, but when stored fat breaks down quickly, it releases compounds called ketones along with energy. Ketones build up, leading to nausea and exhaustion, not to mention bad breath.

Your bones may permanently weaken after temporary starvation. Perhaps more surprising is the permanent effect on the brain. Without vital nutrients like potassium and phosphorus, the brain malfunctions. You may physically lose gray matter in the brain—even if you resume eating, some of the loss is permanent, making the impaired brain function permanent as well.

Growing children and teens can suffer chronic health issues later in life, such as the inability for a woman to carry a baby to term. Perhaps most weirdly, people suffering from long-term starvation often grow a full coat of tiny, soft hairs called lanugo to help the body regulate temperature.

4Height

Even if you’re not afraid of heights, you’ve likely experienced a spinning, sick feeling when you look off the top of a skyscraper. This is vertigo, and it’s more than just psychological.

Balance is a tricky thing. When we’re on the ground, we orient ourselves using stationary, steady objects. When we’re at the top of a 30-story building, however, that doesn’t work. The nearest stationary object (besides the floor beneath your feet) is so far away that your body can’t use it to reassure itself that it, too, is stationary.

The building’s sway adds an additional problem. When you’re up high enough, everything sways slightly, and our bodies detect it even if our conscious minds can’t. The higher we get, the more the sway, and the harder for us to regulate our balance. If the effect becomes too great, it can interfere with our own center of gravity.

People bad at estimating distances suffer from more powerful acrophobia. A California State University study looked at how people estimated buildings’ heights. Those who overestimated the height of a building had stronger reactions to standing at the top. Findings suggest a direct link between perception and fear.

3Chemicals

Hydrogen sulfide is pretty nasty stuff. You know it as the smell of rotting eggs, and in high amounts, it may have killed off the dinosaurs and a huge portion of other prehistoric life. But all living things produce the chemical in very small amounts, and it helps regulate the rate at which our internal processes function. Most recently, it’s been found to have a new use—putting mice into a state of suspended animation.

When administered at the proper dose, hydrogen sulfide slows the body’s metabolic rate and drops the core temperature to well below the hypothermia threshold. All bodily functions, including circulation and pulmonary activity, almost shut down.

In animal tests, hydrogen sulfide suppresses normal body function, perhaps forming an invaluable tool in slowing the damage done by burns and illnesses until a person can receive proper treatment.

2Radiation

Radioactive decay releases energy into the immediate environment. That energy interacts with the cells of the body, either killing them outright or causing them to mutate. Mutations develop into cancer, and some types of radioactive material hit specific body parts especially hard. For example, radioactive iodine accumulates in the thyroid gland, causing thyroid cancer, especially in children.

It takes a relatively huge amount of radiation exposure to significantly increase a person’s risk of developing cancer. The standard person is exposed to between 0.24 and 0.3 rem of radiation in a year. For your risk of developing cancer to increase by 0.5 percent, you need about 10 rem.

At the much higher level of 200 rem, radiation sickness kicks in. Radiation sickness causes short-term, instant effects like vomiting, a reduction of red blood cells, and damage to bone marrow. This bone damage causes another, more latent problem—bone marrow is responsible for producing platelets, which are essential in blood clotting.

1Loneliness

Feeling lonely is normal. Even in the most crowded of rooms, we can still feel an overwhelming sense of loneliness if we connect with no one. But chronic loneliness can have a very real effect on our bodies.

According to University of Chicago psychologists, people who report being lonely show severely suppressed immune systems for an interesting reason. Since lonely people view the world as a dangerous, unfriendly place, their immune systems fixate on fighting bacterial infections. This leaves them unable to produce as many antiviral antibodies, leaving them consequently more susceptible to viral illnesses.

They are also more susceptible to high blood pressure, as hardened arteries have also been linked to chronic loneliness, and difficulty sleeping. Higher stress leaves the lonely more vulnerable to heart disease and strokes.

+Water

We all know the dangers of dehydration, but we hear less about the dangers of drinking water to excess.

Water intoxication causes all kinds of problems, the most deadly being hyponatremia. When the kidneys can’t get rid of the extra water, they push it into the bloodstream, where it dilutes the blood and causes a severe drop in electrolytes. Without enough salt in the body, you suffer from headaches, exhaustion, vomiting, and disorientation.

Once the bloodstream can no longer handle it, the water rushes into cells, which swell. This becomes deadly when the cells lack room for expansion, such as in the brain and spine. You can then suffer from brain swelling, coma, seizures, and ultimately death.

You may also run into another problem from drinking too much. Water can contain pollutants. When you regularly drink more water than the safely recommended amount (which is actually rather less than the long-touted eight glasses per day), the pollutants can build to a level with which the body can no longer cope.

The human body is an amazing machine that is more complex than any man-made device ever created. While many of the functions it carries out require little explanation, some things it does are more complex. For the most part, people have no idea why their body does these things, but scientists and researchers have investigated them and came up with simple explanations for the baffling everyday functions of our body.

10Hiccups

Everyone has hiccuped at some point in their life. However, the involuntary action usually comes and goes relatively quickly for the vast majority of people, meaning it is more of a nuisance than anything else. Although for some, it can become something of an issue. Charles Osborne, for example, had the hiccups for 68 years.

Scientists have never been able to completely understand why people hiccup, but they have proposed several theories. One of the most recent ones comes from Daniel Howes. He suggests that the hiccups may have evolved as a way for infants to expel air from the stomach so that they can more effectively suckle milk. The contraction of the diaphragm causes suction that forces air out of the mouth, allowing the infant to burp itself. Howes points to the fact that only mammals—the only type of animals that suckle milk—get hiccups and that they are much more prevalent in the young.

9Appendix

The appendix has long been considered an organ that does more harm than good. Its function was a mystery, and it has a tendency to cause serious health problems in a number of people. Appendicitis can lead to severe pain, fever, and even death if it is left untreated after the appendix bursts.

In 2007, after years of research, researchers finally discovered what’s believed to be the actual use of the appendix. Rather than simply being a leftover organ from our evolutionary past, it was an important part of the immune system. According to the research team, the appendix provides a safe haven for bacteria that is needed in the gut. When illness or diseases such as dysentery wipe out the bacteria in the gut, the organ allows the bacteria to reenter the digestive system. It essentially keeps a backup of bacteria needed for the immune system to function.

8Tickling

Every person has experienced being tickled at some point. While it can be pleasant at times, it is usually something that people dislike and try to avoid. This has never stopped people from trying to tickle others, though. That fact, combined with the response to tickling, is something that has perplexed thinkers for thousands of years.

Previously, it had been thought that the reaction might be a panic response, similar to that triggered by a spider crawling on you. But Christine Harris, following numerous experiments, has suggested a more complex answer. According to Harris, tickling may be a system designed to help develop combat skills.

She points to the fact that close family members or friends usually carry out that tickling in much the same way as play fighting. It causes the recipient to convulse and try to break free as quickly as possible, teaching the victim how to get away from an attacker without actually causing them any harm. Meanwhile, the fact that the recipients laugh and smile when being tickled encourages the tickler to carry on the action and to do it more frequently. This increases the value of the action as it is reinforced multiple times.

7Wrinkled Fingers And Toes

Spending a long time in the water will lead to fingers and toes becoming wrinkled. This bodily function has baffled researchers for decades, with very little evidence to say definitively what the cause of the reaction was. A leading theory had been that water caused the skin to swell, leading to the wrinkling effect.

Scientists now believe they have come up with the exact reason. According to a number of researchers, the wrinkling is an evolutionary advantage that helps to increase grip in wet conditions. Experiments showed that those with wrinkled fingers and toes get a better grip on wet objects.

Another study from Newcastle University theorized that the function might have helped our ancestors handle tools in rainy conditions or have steadier footing on a soaked floor, providing an advantage over others who did not get wrinkly fingers and toes from water.

6Lump In Your Throat

Ever been really sad and felt a lump in your throat even though you knew for a fact that there’s nothing physically there? That’s a pretty common occurrence that happens to people when they get bad news or are on the verge of crying.

The “lump in the throat” sensation is a consequence of the fight-or-flight response inbuilt in humans, which is induced when a person is put in danger or under intense stress. In these emotional situations, the body pumps blood and oxygen to the brain and muscles to allow it to react faster. This has the added effect of causing the heart to pump harder and for breathing to become more frequent. To facilitate this, vocal chords, known as the “glottis,” expand to allow more air to pass through the throat. However, when a person tries to swallow, the glottis need to close. The muscles effectively work against each other, causing the “lump” sensation.

5Phantom Vibration Syndrome

If you use a smartphone or another electronic device that comes with a vibrate function, you will probably have experienced the “phantom vibration syndrome.” Essentially, you feel a vibration in your pocket, take out the phone, and see that your phone is dark. Nothing has happened to cause the device to vibrate, and yet you could clearly feel it.

In 2010, a study found that 68 percent of people using such devices experience these phantom vibrations on a regular basis. Possible explanations include the brain misinterpreting other sensory information, such as a slight movement in clothing, as vibration as it anticipates incoming communication through the device.

4Shiver Down The Spine

Shivers down the spine, and the goosebumps that traditionally accompany them, happen in all kinds of situations. They usually occur during stressful moments, such as when a person is in danger. This affects the hypothalamus, the section of the brain that controls certain nervous system functions. It releases large amounts of adrenaline to help the body prepare to react to the situation. This causes muscles to contract and hair to stand on end, leading to goosebumps. The same reaction happens when a person feels intense emotions such as love, happiness, or shock. Music causes shivers down the spine because it induces strong emotions in humans, causing the brain to release adrenaline.

3Yawning

The act of yawning is so contagious that even reading about it can cause a person to yawn, but there has been much debate over what exactly causes it. One competing theory was that yawning allows the body to take in more oxygen for stressful events that are about to occur, like in sports, to make the body more alert. Other theories suggested that it may be a way to communicate boredom and tiredness and to pump vital fluid around the body.

In 2014, researchers came up with a new theory that unified many of the contradictory elements of yawning to give a complete explanation. According to the study, yawning is the body’s way of attempting to cool down the brain. The yawn takes cold air in and increases blood flow around the brain, carrying away excess heat. This theory also explains why so many situations cause yawning. The brain heats up in stressful situations and before exercise; it also increases in temperature as people grow tired. Yawns fight boredom by allowing the brain to be more alert.

2Alcohol-Induced Blackouts

It is a fairly common occurrence for those who have drunk a large amount of alcohol to be unable to remember parts of a night out (or the entire event). While these blackouts can happen with other drugs, they happen most frequently with alcohol.

Studies have shown that alcohol prevents the brain from being able to transfer short-term memory to long-term memory, essentially stopping people from remembering recent events. This is because alcohol stops receptors in the hippocampus from releasing glutamate. This prevents neurons from being able to communicate with each other normally, blocking the transfer of memory. As such, the person becomes unable to create new memories. The memory can still exist somewhere in the brain, though, which explains why people can be reminded of an event from the previous night and then suddenly remember all about it.

1Seasickness

Seasickness, and other types of motion sickness, is a set of symptoms experienced by a large amount of people when they are traveling in vehicles such as ships and cars. The symptoms can include vomiting and dizziness.

It happens because of a disconnect between what a person feels and sees. On a rocking boat, for example, the body senses the motion through the inner ear but cannot see the movement, as the entire boat appears to be still. This causes the brain to receive conflicting information. This triggers a psychological defense mechanism, because the most likely cause of a conflict between the senses are hallucinations brought about by poison. The nausea and vomiting are the body’s way of trying to get rid of the toxins it thinks are affecting it.

While medication and electronic devices can prevent seasickness, it can also be mitigated by looking at the horizon on a boat or out of the window in a car. This gives the eyes a visual cue to sense the motion, and so the brain doesn’t receive confusing information.

Nathan is a freelance writer who has provided work for a number of websites across a variety of topics including film, TV, sports, video games, and humor. He also occasionally writes serious pieces. You can keep up to date with his work at his website.

Some of us will carefully check the labels on most of the products we use, scrutinizing them to see if we can find some suspicious ingredients listed. The rest of us do not care and just use these products anyway. But how would you feel if you discovered that your food or body lotion contained human body parts?

Sure, you would cringe. Well! It used to be the norm a few centuries ago—at a time when products did not have ingredient labels. Many people unwittingly turned cannibal after ingesting food items made from human remains. Others just used regular products that contained human remains without being aware of it.

More products containing human secretions and body parts are still being developed today. But fear not! You will probably not be ingesting food made from human body parts without knowing about it.

10 Paint

Mummy brown was a thing a few centuries ago. Also called mommia and momie, it was actually the name of a brown paint used by artists. As you should have guessed, the paint was made from Egyptian mummies. Manufacturers created it by grinding mummies into powder and mixing them with some other stuff.

Mummy brown first appeared in the 16th century and quickly became a favorite of artists, who used it in their paintings as if it were just another paint. Interestingly, some manufacturers also made it from any corpse that had mummified enough. French artist Martin Drolling even used mummy brown made from dead French kings.

The use of mummy brown declined in the 20th century when most artists discovered its origin. However, it only went “extinct” in 1964 after manufacturers could not get fresh supplies of mummies to make the paint.^[1]

9 Medicine

A few centuries ago, many Europeans turned into unwitting cannibals after consuming medicines made with the bones, blood, and fats of living and dead people.

People of the day believed that these medicines cured a wide range of ailments. Skulls were ground into powder to make medicine for almost every problem with the head. Usnea, a moss that often appeared on buried human skulls, was used to stop nosebleeds and cure epilepsy.

Body fat was applied to the skin to cure medical problems like gout. Bandages were also soaked in fat before they were used to cover wounds. Egyptians mummies were not spared, either. They were ground into powder to produce a medicine that supposedly cured internal bleeding.

People without any medical issues also used the medicines due to the erroneous belief that the healthiness of the dead could be passed to them. One such believer was the English King Charles II, who drank a mixture of ground human skull and alcohol to maintain his health. The drink was called “the king’s drops.”

Fresh blood from a living person was also added to cooked food or just drunk to remain healthy. Many poor people who could not afford a living human’s blood often attended public executions with cups to siphon fresh blood from the executed person.

The act of using human body parts as medicine reached its height between the 16th and 17th centuries and started to die down in the 18th century. It had disappeared by the 20th century.^[2]

8 Diamonds

Within the last few years, several businesses have sprung up, offering to turn the cremated remains of our dead relatives and animals into diamonds—or as they prefer to call them, “memorial diamonds.” The process works because diamond is made of carbon, which is the second-most plentiful element in our bodies.

The process begins with the cremation. The human body produces several pounds of ashes after cremation. However, this is often filled with impurities, which are removed when the ash is cleaned with acid.

The carbon is 99 percent pure at this point but still contains around 1 percent of a few other elements like boron. That boron is often left alone because it has nearly identical properties to carbon, which makes them difficult to separate. However, the boron content makes the diamond blue. The more boron, the bluer it is.

Interestingly, diamonds made from people who underwent chemotherapy while alive are often lighter than diamonds made from people who did not. This occurs because chemotherapy often reduces the boron content of the body.^[3]

7 Food

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University are already working on converting our poop and urine to food. This diet is not intended for regular people but for astronauts, especially those who will travel on long-term space voyages to, say, Mars.

The scientists made the food by anaerobic digestion, a process in which microbes break down waste without using oxygen. In this instance, a first group of microbes is added to poop and urine to produce methane. That methane is then fed to a second group of microbes.

The result is a consumable substance that contains 52 percent protein and 36 percent fats. The diet is free of diseases because the microbes work so quickly that dangerous pathogens do not have time to form. The invention has not been released yet because the scientists are still working on it.^[4]

6 Lampshade

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. While most people went back to salvage whatever was left of their homes after the disaster, others like Raymond Henderson found something interesting: a lampshade made from human skin.

Henderson was checking out a flood-soaked drum set at a yard sale a few months after the hurricane. The seller said that he had a lamp along with its 25-centimeter-long (10 in) lampshade made from the “skin of Jews.”

Although skeptical at first, Henderson purchased the lampshade for $35 and took it home where he carefully inspected it. He discovered that it was real human skin. He could even see the wrinkles and pores on the dried skin. He later sent it to a lab where it was confirmed to be human skin.

There are suspicions that the lampshade was made by the Nazis during World War II even though there is no definite evidence of its origin. The ethnicity of the skin owner could not be tested, either, because the product was too dry to contain traceable DNA samples.^[5]

5 Books

On the shelves of Harvard University library sits a book titled Des Destinees de l’Ame (“Destinies of the Soul”). The brown, dusty, and aged cover will make most people think that it is a regular book—until they realize the cover is actually brown, dusty, and aged human skin. Anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of using human skin for bookbinding, was common in ancient times.

Des Destinees de l’Ame was written by Arsene Houssaye, who gave it to one Dr. Ludovic Bouland sometime in the 1880s. It was Dr. Bouland who added the human skin cover. He had gotten the skin from a woman who died at a mental hospital.

Another anthropodermic bibliopegy book sits at the M Shed museum in Bristol, UK. On the cover are the words Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood (“The Actual Skin of John Horwood”). The book is owned by the Bristol Record Office. The infamous pirate skull-and-crossbones insignia is also etched onto the cover.

As the title already hints, the book was made from the skin of John Horwood, who was executed at age 18 for killing Eliza Balsum after falling in love with her. Horwood threw a stone at Balsum and almost broke her skull. Balsum survived the attack but later died of her injuries.^[6]

Horwood was tried and executed for the murder. His remains were sent to anatomy schools for dissection, and his skeleton was later put into storage. The skeleton was discovered and buried by Mary Halliwell 190 years after his hanging. Horwood was Halliwood’s great-great-great-grandfather’s brother. The book itself contains details of the murder.

4 Boiled Eggs

Some Chinese people believe that eggs boiled in the urine of young boys have medicinal properties. The eggs are called tong zi dan (“virgin boy eggs”). They are a thing in Dongyang in Zhejiang Province, China, where they are sold on the roadside. Consumers claim that the eggs cure or prevent a myriad of ailments.

The eggs are made by boiling regular chicken eggs in urine. It is a two-step process. The eggs are first boiled in urine. Then they are removed, cracked, and returned to the pot to continue boiling. This allows the urine to seep into the egg, altering its look and taste. While some consumers swear by its efficacy, others think it is just gross.

The egg vendors often visit schools with buckets for young schoolchildren to pee into. The vendor later recovers the pee-filled buckets to make the eggs. However, they often ask sick students not to pee in the buckets to ensure that they only end up with healthy urine and eggs.^[7]

3 Cosmetics

In 2005, The Guardian exposed an unnamed Chinese cosmetics company for using the skin of prisoners executed in China as an ingredient in its beauty products. The company planned to ship the cosmetics to Europe where they would be sold to unsuspecting buyers.

According to The Guardian, the company had informed prospective partners about a new beauty product created with the skin of executed prisoners. The company claimed that the product could clear wrinkles on the skin and lips. The Guardian added that the company had already shipped some of the products into the UK at the time of the report.

An unnamed agent of the company who had earlier bragged about the existence of the product later retracted his statement when The Guardian asked him for an interview. He had earlier revealed the existence of the product to an undercover researcher pretending to be a businessman.^[8]

The Guardian added that skin from executed prisoners is sometimes used in beauty products sold in China. The Chinese government supposedly knows about this but looks the other way as long as the companies keep it a secret. However, there are concerns that European users could be susceptible to infections from the executed criminals.

2 Bricks

In 2018, South African scientists revealed that they had developed a process to make bricks from human urine. The process actually allows them to create any solid substance from urine, but they seem to prefer making bricks instead.

The scientists created the bricks using bacteria, sand, urine, and calcium. First, they add bacteria to sand to create an enzyme called urease. Then they add the urease to urine. The urease decomposes the urea in the urine, leaving a hard, rocky substance called calcium carbonate.

This calcium carbonate is used to make the bricks or whatever else the scientists want to create. Fertilizer is a by-product, which makes sense as urea is synthesized to manufacture fertilizer across the globe.

Urine bricks are not on the market yet because researchers are still trying to perfect the process. Besides, they are also concerned about the source of their urine. A single brick needs approximately 20 liters (5 gal) of urine to produce. The average adult will require a few weeks to pass that much urine.^[9]

1 Perfume

A few years ago, Katia Apalategui’s mother lost her husband. She missed her husband so much that she often smelled the pillowcase he used before his death just so she could remember him. Katia Apalategui soon got some ideas and decided to make a perfume that smelled just like a dead person.^[10]

Apalategui teamed with chemist Geraldine Savary of the University of Le Havre in France to create a method of retrieving odor from the belongings of a dead person and using it to make a perfume. Apalategui has her product in the market already. Each bottle of perfume is custom-made and costs $600.

The human body is a wondrous thing and arguably a miracle of science. Consider how many other things are as complex as a human in the known universe and we do kind of stand out as pretty incredible. It’s either extremely fitting or extremely offputting then that some people have taken it upon themselves to use parts of bodies to craft new and interesting things. 

10. Flesh Map

Artists are often unique and creative individuals. They have to be if they want to succeed at their craft. So while some artists are happy to put ink to paper or paint to canvas, others like to experiment with how they create their works. After all, anything can technically be art if you try hard enough.

American artist Andrew Krasnow is an artist who pushes the envelope in how he makes art and also what he considers art. For twenty years, Krasnow has used human flesh to make sculptures. 

Using skin from bodies that have been donated to science, Krasnow has made lampshades, boots, and even a map of the United States. Naturally, Krasnow has a meaning behind his art and considers it a commentary on human cruelty. 

9. Ancient Blood Paint

Few things are more interesting from an archaeological standpoint than ancient cave paintings. Seeing some of the earliest forms of communication, art, and historical documentation is fascinating. Most of us think of cave art as little stick figures throwing spears at stick buffalo, but there’s more to it than all that. For instance, aside from the subject of the cave paintings, there’s something to be said for the paint itself. 

Research has shown that prehistoric artists in Australia and Tasmania developed the red pigment they used for their art in a very simple and all too obvious way. They used blood.

Several paintings dating back 10,000 years, and one at least 20,000 years, show evidence of proteins from human blood. The art itself looks to have been painted over even older carvings. It’s possible these date back as much as 31,000 years, making them some of the oldest cave paintings in the world.

8. Bone Sculptures

Not so long ago, humans used to be big fans of carving things from ivory. The fact that this had to be harvested from elephants wasn’t a concern for many people, and we’ve made countless pieces of art and even piano keys from it. The cruel and macabre practice is mostly, but not completely, behind us. But the fact is, death and the things it leaves behind have always fascinated us as a species. Some people are still making art from the bones of animals. And humans. 

Bruce Mahalski makes sculptures that, from a distance, might look like any other sculpture you’d see in a museum. Get closer, however, and the textures will catch your eye. He makes extensive use of animal bones, the kinds of things that might be left over from dinner or found on the forest floor. But then there are the human ones.

Mahalski’s art is like a three-dimensional collage of bits and pieces, large and small. The human bones are given no more prominence than any others and, in fact, are often hard to pick out of the crowd. This is intentional, as Mahalski doesn’t feel like humans are any more important than the other creatures of the earth. His goal is simple to show a reverence for both life and death, whether the bones are from chickens or humans.

7. Body Worlds

In 1995, the first Body Worlds exhibit opened to the public in Tokyo. Since that time, over 40 million people have gone to museums around the world to check out the exhibit or some of the spin-offs it inspired. 

The concept of the exhibit is as fascinating as it is grisly. They subject human bodies to a process called plastination. They remove fluids from the body, replacing them with polymers that harden and preserve the body perfectly. This allows the bodies to be manipulated in a variety of fascinating and unusual ways. They can be stripped of their flesh, or cut to show perfectly preserved cross sections. They can remove layers beyond just flesh including fat, muscle, and bone. In some cases, whole bodies constructed of nothing but veins and arteries in the shape of the human that once housed them have been made. 

Originally it was said that all of the bodies were donated by people who, in life, were 100% aware of what would happen to their bodies after death. That said, the exhibit actually returned some bodies to China in the early 2000s as there was evidence they had been executed prisoners. A competing exhibit called Bodies says that they are simply unable to verify one way or another if the bodies they used were executed prisoners or not. 

6. Human Skin Books

For a serious book fan, nothing beats a leather-bound tome. Whether it’s a personal journal or a valuable old antique, a book bound in leather can be a conversation piece and a collectible. But it’s worth looking into when a leather-bound book was made, and exactly how it was made. Leather comes in various forms after all, from sheep to cow and, more often than you might think, human.

In the 19th century, it became a rare but not unheard-of practice for the flesh of executed criminals or mental patients to be used to bind books. The skin of the first man hanged at the Bristol Gaol in England was used to bind the book that told the story of the man’s crime. The flesh of William Burke, a known murderer, was used to bind a journal cover. 

The practice was by no means widespread, and today there are only a handful of examples that have been found and definitively identified. It seems as though the books were mostly produced by doctors, people who had access to corpses and the skill to remove human flesh. Why they also felt the need to use it to make books is a matter that has not been fully determined, however. 

5. Lab Grown Human Skin Bags

The future comes at your fast and technology is changing the world every day. Just look at your local grocery store in the meat section and you’ll see that there’s already a section devoted to meat that isn’t actually meat. And soon there will be a section devoted to meat that is meat. It was just never alive.

Lab-grown tissue is a real thing and will revolutionize both your barbecue and healthcare. But maybe it’s destined to revolutionize fashion as well. After all, if you can grow skin without a living body, what’s stopping you from making your own leather? And, for that matter, what’s stopping you from making human skin leather? 

Designer Tina Gorjanc had plans as far back as 2016 to make leather handbags made from skin grown from the DNA of designer Alexander McQueen. McQueen died in 2010, but Gorjanc has access to some of his DNA thanks to hair samples he left behind. 

Celebrity bags aside, the same technology could be used to make a bag out of anyone’s DNA, if they had the money and the interest. 

4. Teeth Necklaces

There’s a popular legend that George Washington had wooden teeth. Look into it and you’ll see that’s not the case and he very likely may have had dentures made from the teeth of other humans. There has always been a market for human teeth, and they’ve served a number of purposes. Reusing them as dentures is almost too normal. Back in the day, they were used as necklaces as well.

Archaeologists in Turkey uncovered relics in a Neolithic that date back thousands of years. Among them are some teeth that are around 8,500 years old, which were drilled and strung together to form a necklace, just like beads. Analysis also indicated that the teeth likely came from different people.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that ancient peoples were knocking teeth out just for the fun of making jewelry, but it also doesn’t preclude that as a possibility. There was no sign of disease, so the likeliest possibility was that they were removed from someone on purpose, rather than falling out naturally.

3. Hair Sweaters

In the Bible, wearing a hair shirt is a form of penance. You slip into a camel hair garment as a way to punish yourself because it’s terribly uncomfortable. In modern times we have terribly uncomfortable wool sweaters that can get very itchy and arguably fit the bill here as well. Suffice it to say, there are not many benefits to wearing a shirt made of hair. And those ones aren’t even human hair. 

For those who do like the idea of hair, or fur, but not the cruelty aspect associated with traditional fur farming, some design clothing made from human hair. It’s arguably sustainable and offers something unique if nothing else. 

2. Blood Album

Sometimes an artist will talk about how they put their blood, sweat, and tears into the work that they make. It’s a metaphor in almost every single case, but not always. For instance, there is at least one album you can get that has been pressed with the blood of several pop stars inside. 

The Flaming Lips released an album called The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends back in 2012. As a special treat for extremely rabid fans, there were 10 special pressings of the album made. These versions contain blood samples taken from the aforementioned friends, including Ke$ha, Chris Martin, and Erykah Badu. The album had a price tag of $2,500 a pop and was sold with a normal copy of the album so you could still listen to it without risking a bloodbath in your record player. 

In 2014, Meredith Graves of the band Perfect Pussy one-upped the Flaming Lips by having her own blood pressed into the wax itself rather than just being encased in a compartment in the vinyl and put out 180 copies of the album. 

1. Blood Ink

Ancient cave artists aren’t the only ones who saw the upside to using blood as ink. Modern art has found some uses for it as well, and it’s not the avant-garde fringe art you may think. In fact, in more than one instance the use of blood in art has been incredibly mainstream. 

Back in the year 1977, the band KISS was incredibly huge. They were so big, in fact, that Marvel comics actually had a KISS comic to chronicle some fictional adventures for the band. 

For the Super Special #1 issue, blood was drawn from all four band members and mixed into the ink used to color the book. And why not? They were taking on some big-time Marvel villains like Dr. Doom. Blood was inevitably going to be spilled. 

Though it sounds like the stuff of urban legends, it really did happen and was even certified by a notary public. Obviously, someone felt it was unbelievable even at the time it was happening. A copy of the book in decent condition will run you a few hundred dollars on eBay.

Closer to the present, rapper Lil Nas X caused a stir by releasing some limited-edition Satan-themed shoes in 2021 that also contained his blood in the ink used for the design. Many people were up in arms over the idea, but it also made international news and guaranteed that the shoes would be known the world over, so maybe the plan worked out just fine.

Our bodies are made up of various parts that seamlessly come together to help us perform day-to-day functions. Some of them—like the heart and lungs—may pull more weight than the others, though we can all agree that every body part is important in its own way.

Some parts possess awesome, specialized abilities beyond their day-to-day functions that most of us don’t know about. We don’t require these organs to be able to do these things in our daily lives. But for the specific situations for which they’re designed, they can outperform even our best machines.

10 Liver Can Reprogram Itself To Regenerate

Our body’s ability to heal itself is truly extraordinary and something we take for granted. If it wasn’t for that, every minor wound would turn into a life-threatening situation. For all its merits, though, our self-healing abilities aren’t able to regenerate lost tissue. In cases of tissue damage, the most our bodies can do is patch things up with scars.

Of course, that is true only if we exclude the liver from the conversation, which is the sole organ that can fully regenerate itself. Scientists have been impressed by this seemingly isolated ability for a long time, even if they don’t quite understand how it evolved.

A recent study may suggest the answer. In case of damage, the liver is able to reprogram itself to mimic the earliest stages of childbirth and regrow itself as if nothing had happened.^[1]

9 The Skin Can Smell

Being able to smell our surroundings is one of the most useful abilities we have. It alerts us to any potentially harmful microbes in the surrounding environment and lets us know exactly what we need to avoid to remain healthy. We’ve always assumed that it’s just the nose that has this ability. In some recent experiments, though, we’ve realized that a few other organs—like our skin—may also be able to detect smells.

In a study, researchers discovered that the skin’s cell division mode is triggered when the skin is exposed to a synthetic form of sandalwood oil. Simply put, some types of aromas may signal our skin to start its healing process. This works independently from our traditional olfactory receptors in the nose.

Exactly how our body perceives odor—and the precise organs involved in the process—is an ongoing area of research. From all the information we’ve gathered to date, it seems that smell may have other functions in the body that we’re currently unaware of.^[2]

8 Our Bones Are Stronger Than Steel

The bones are possibly some of the most boring organs of the body. They don’t seem to do anything other than keep the overall structure intact, even if some of us know the important role that bone marrow plays in the general functioning of the body. They’re often overshadowed by the cooler, more hip organs.

If we just bothered to read up on them, though, bones are impressive on their own, especially when it comes to strength. Ounce for ounce, bones are stronger than the toughest man-made materials like concrete and steel. If your first response to that is “well, then how do I manage to break them so often,” it’s because they’re also incredibly flexible.

Scientists have been perplexed by their flexibility and strength for quite some time. According to recent research, it’s all due to how they’re structured. Human bones are shaped like ropes tied together in a helical structure.

Every layer down to the nanoscale repeats that formation. Imagine it as a rope made with individual threads, except that the threads are ropes as well that are made with even tinier threads right down to a resolution of 5 nanometers.^[3]

7 Eyes Can Perceive Flavor

We know that our eyes can do some awesome things—from being able to see in the night to tracking things at high speeds. However, all of that is still only related to sight. Did you know that our eyes can also taste?

Research proves that human eyes are relatively good at identifying flavors. Moreover, our visual sense of a flavor can even override our taste buds. In one experiment, the researchers gave professional wine tasters two glasses of wine from the same bottle of white wine. However, the contents of one glass was colored red with flavorless dye.

In a massive blow to the wine tasting industry, the critics identified the latter as red wine.

While you may think that occurred because wine tasting is a bogus science anyway—which may be true—something more complicated was happening. When the brain senses two conflicting pieces of information about taste, it goes with the visual information even if it’s the brain of someone with years of expertise related to that taste.^[4]

6 Smelling STDs

One of the biggest problems with modern dating culture is the scarily high prevalence of STDs. If you’re not careful, a careless one-night stand may leave you with much more than feelings of regret and unfulfillment (like warts). If you’re lucky, all you’ll need is a few doctor visits to fix it. If not . . . well, you know how this goes.

Apparently, the human body has built-in mechanisms to detect STDs without having to go through all that. One of them is our sense of smell. One study found that women are capable of smelling gonorrhea just from saliva or armpit samples of men, something that otherwise takes quite a few tests and medical visits to detect.^[5]

It makes perfect sense, too, as women may have developed this ability to weed out potentially risky sexual partners.

According to studies done on mice, there’s evidence that our sense of smell may be able to detect much more than STDs, including other viruses and parasites.

5 Brain Can Manipulate Time

As Albert Einstein spent his life trying to convince everyone, time is relative. It’s only now that we have the tools required to prove that, and the more we experiment, the more we find that he was absolutely right. We now know that our perception of time is intrinsically related to our position in space and is influenced by many other seemingly unrelated factors.

According to science, our brain also plays a huge role in how we perceive time and even has the ability to tweak it when required. It’s because of the simple concept that our internal clock is different from real time and is controlled by different parts of the brain.

Ever notice that time seems to pass a lot faster when you grow old?

It’s not just in your head. Studies show that our internal clock really slows down with age, which in turn makes everything outside appear to happen faster. The same concept applies when time seems to fly by when we’re having fun.^[6]

4 Facial Expressions Can Influence The Brain Into Actually Feeling Those Emotions

Our faces can convey a ridiculously wide array of emotions. Of course, not everyone is capable of employing the full expression spectrum. But even the most reserved among us can do a lot with the face. However, we always assume that our expressions indicate what’s happening in the brain and never the other way around.

As it turns out, our expressions can influence our moods to the extent that our countenance can trick the brain into feeling whatever you want it to. The results of many studies seem to confirm this.

Take the one where they used Botox to remove frown lines from patients suffering from depression. The procedure ended up alleviating much of their depression, suggesting that looking sad may contribute to feeling that way. Another study found that people who are forced to smile with a pen between their teeth find the same comics funnier than people with the pen between their lips, which suppresses their smiles.^[7]

3 Sperm Can Smell The Egg

Reproduction is a fairly simple procedure once you find a partner willing to do it with you. In a nutshell, it’s all about introducing sperm to the general vicinity of the egg. As long as the woman is in the fertile period of her reproductive cycle, both of them should come together to do their thing and make an embryo.

Although we know the basics, what exactly happens when sperm make their way to the egg is still not clear.

According to science at least, it’s due to sperm’s innate ability to smell out the egg. Many studies have found that a man’s sperm has odor receptors similar to those in the nose and they’re specifically designed to detect a fertile egg just by its scent.

Now we don’t yet know if the eggs have similar receptors that work in the opposite direction, though scientists think that it’s a very real possibility. More research is underway to understand how smell affects the reproductive system. This has applications in many fields of medicine (like contraception).^[8]

2 Our Immune System Kills Cancer Cells Every Day

Most of us don’t quite understand how cancer works, even if around 4 out of 10 people will be diagnosed with it at some point in their lives. Although the whole process is a bit more complicated than can be explained here, simply put, it’s what happens when the cells grow abnormally in any way (hence the term “malignant growth”).

Some types of cancer accelerate the growth of the cells, while others slow it down—and it can happen to anyone. Cancer risk is the price we pay for having such a complicated and evolved growth mechanism.

What we don’t realize, though, is that the body is constantly fighting cancerous growths and comes out as the victor many more times than it loses. Our immune systems are constantly checking for cancer cells and destroying them, a process that’s underway every day of our lives.

In many of those cases, it takes a call on killing cells that won’t die on their own and may turn into tumors. Despite our immune systems winning so many of the mini battles going on in our cells, cancer is still prevalent in all human populations because the bad kind of growth only has to win once for cancer to happen.^[9]

1 Vagina Has The Ability To Clean Itself

Thanks to Big Pharma, many women think that vaginal discharge is some sort of impurity they need to clean up to keep things hygienic. The market is flush with products that claim to improve vaginal cleanliness, and unsurprisingly, many of them cost a fortune. If Big Vagina was an equally influential lobby, we’d know that it doesn’t need any cleaning at all.

As men around the world already know, the female vagina is an evolutionary marvel. At the time of puberty, it’s colonized by a good kind of bacteria that gradually forms a mini ecosystem of its own. Vaginal discharge is made up of that bacteria (among other things like mucus from the cervix), and it protects against sexually transmitted diseases along with naturally keeping the inner walls clean.

That’s why if a woman goes to a gynecologist, they almost always tell her to never wash the inside of the vagina. Well, if they’re good at their job anyway. That’s not to say that women should give up on cleanliness around their private parts altogether as regularly cleaning the outer area is still essential.^[10]

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant or get in touch with him for writing gigs.

The human body is a magnificent machine. Our anatomy is the result of millennia of adaptation to Earth’s changing environment, which has turned us into one of the most complex life forms. And while advances in medicine over the past centuries have allowed us to explore the nature of the human organism in detail, we never stop discovering new components and processes within our bodies. Some of those constituents, moreover, would never have been thought to exist in previous times. From explosive elements to cosmic stuff, here you will be presented with some of the strangest, most amazing, and largely unknown things that make up your body.

See Also: 10 Amazing Things You Didn’t Know Our Body Parts Can Do

10Alcohol

Alcoholic beverages are among the most consumed drinks in the world. Such is the case that currently, about 36 billion liters (9.5 billion gallons) of alcohol are consumed every year around the world, enough to fill more than 14,000 Olympic pools. So it is clear that alcohol and human beings are closely linked to each other. In fact, they seem to be so linked that the human body produces its own alcohol at all times.

Ethanol is a naturally occurring type of alcohol created after fermentation of organic materials and is the alcohol present in alcoholic beverages. In the human body, bacterial populations in the mouth and intestines are capable of producing ethanol endogenously. To do that, bacteria and yeast cause the fermentation of carbohydrates such as sugar in the gastrointestinal tract. This process generates small amounts of ethanol, which is subsequently introduced into the bloodstream.

According to multiple studies, a healthy—and sober—person generally has up to 0.8 milligrams of endogenous ethanol per liter (0.26 gallons) of blood. Methanol, another type of alcohol, has also been detected in human blood in concentrations of 0.6 milligrams per liter. Fortunately, these values are too small to be easily detected in the blood and cause legal problems.

But some people do not have it that easy, especially those suffering from conditions such as the so-called “auto-brewery syndrome” (ABS). Under such conditions, an individual’s digestive system is overpopulated with fermentation-producing bacteria and fungi, making huge amounts of alcohol from sugar-rich foods. People with ABS can have more than four grams (0.14 ounces) of alcohol per liter of blood, to the point of always being drunk without drinking any alcoholic beverage.^[1]

9 Ozone

Ozone is an unstable substance. Being composed of three oxygen atoms, ozone tends to disintegrate into simpler molecules in minutes. For that reason, the ozone gas in the atmosphere must be continuously replenished and would decrease until almost disappearing if it were not for certain ozone-producing sources. Ultraviolet radiation, thunderstorms, and human activities produce most of the ozone present on Earth. But your body also contributes to it.

Nearly two decades ago, scientists discovered that the human body’s immune system produces ozone as a way to fight biological threats. Our bodies contain cells called neutrophils, white blood cells coated with antibodies, which travel through the body to eliminate infectious bacteria and fungi. To do their job, neutrophils feed their antibodies with high-energy oxygen molecules. The antibodies then transform such molecules into ozone, which is useful for eliminating invasive bacteria. Neutrophils engulf the foreign microorganisms and bombard them with the newly created ozone molecules to destroy them.

Since almost three-quarters of our body’s white blood cells are neutrophils, the amount of molecular ozone produced in each person is significant enough. However, this is not a good thing – ozone in large concentrations is harmful. At 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) above Earth, ozone composes a gas layer protecting Earth’s life from solar radiation. But near the ground, ozone contributes to air pollution, being one of the main components of the so-called “smog.” And in the human body, ozone breaks down cholesterol, creating toxic molecules that accelerate the development of diseases such as atherosclerosis and arthritis.^[2]

8 Cyanide

For humans, cyanide is an extremely toxic chemical compound. It kills in a short time by preventing cellular respiration in the organism. Cyanide’s lethality is more than proven; it has been used as a chemical weapon to kill countless people over the centuries. For that reason, it is surprising to know that cyanide exists naturally within the human body itself.

Various concentrations of cyanide enter our bodies every day since the chemical is present in the air, water, and food we eat. In fact, foods such as apples and spinach are carriers of cyanide. But there is no need to panic – such concentrations are extremely small, in the order of a few micrograms per plant (for the record, a microgram equals one-millionth of a gram). In contrast, an intake of 0.1 grams of cyanide is necessary to kill a 70-kilogram (154-pound) average person.

Our bodies also produce cyanide. For example, chemical processes in saliva lead to the creation of cyanide gas inside our throats, which is then expelled by breathing. It is estimated that, at any given time, a healthy person can contain up to 50 micrograms of cyanide per 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of tissue. But such compound does not accumulate inside our bodies. Most of it is processed in the liver and excreted in the urine. Another part is converted into carbon dioxide by our lungs, and like the aforementioned cyanide gas, it is released with each breath.

The processes behind the absorption, production, and detoxification of cyanide in the human organism are quite complex. So we must thank our bodies for silently freeing ourselves from such a lethal poison.^[3]

7 Radioactive Elements

Any type of radiation in excessive amounts is harmful to humans. For example, even if ultraviolet radiation is not trying to burn our skin, the background radiation found everywhere will be pushing us to get cancer anyway. But did you know that some radioactive materials also inhabit our interior?

A radioactive element found inside our bodies is thorium, a heavy metal used in electronic devices. While we ingest small amounts of thorium daily through food and water, it usually leaves the organism in a matter of days.

Another of the most infamous substances we carry is uranium. It is a heavy, highly radioactive element that exists naturally across the entire planet. As you may know, its biggest uses have been in nuclear reactors and weapons of mass destruction. Studies indicate that an average adult person contains 22 micrograms of uranium in their body and can ingest about five micrograms daily. The biggest sources of uranium intake are food—especially unwashed vegetables—and water.

Once inside the body, uranium can enter the bloodstream and deposit in various organs, staying there for a few months until being expelled from the body. Two-thirds of the uranium consumed is deposited in our bones.

We should also mention potassium-40, a radioactive isotope of the potassium element that we ingest through many foods, but which is beneficial for the human body. As you can see, we are pretty radioactive. But do not be alarmed; it is unlikely that you will trigger a nuclear explosion just by sneezing.^[4]

6 Precious Metals

Not everything in your body has to be dangerous or radioactive, though. There are also precious elements inside you that make you economically valuable by nature. Even so, it is not advisable that you try to get them out of your body to sell them.

First, we have gold. Most of the gold in an average person is in their blood, with gold accounting for 0.02 percent of it. In total, the human body contains 0.2 milligrams of gold, enough to make a cube of pure gold with a size of 0.22 millimeters (0.008 inches). We also contain silver, another precious metal of low toxicity for human beings. An average person consumes up to 88 micrograms of silver a day, a weight equivalent to a few sand grains.

But that is too little to be valuable, right? Well, researchers have found that human feces also contain gold particles and other expensive metals. One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of human waste could contain a maximum of four grams (0.14 ounces) of copper, silver, vanadium, and gold. Given this, it has been estimated that the waste of one million people could be worth 13 million dollars.

So even while you did not know it, your body has constantly been a money-making machine. The problem, of course, is to mine your own precious metals to make a profit from them, since you might have to resort to some nasty methods to extract them.^[5]

5 Hard Drugs

It is well known that the human body produces its own versions of some commonly used drugs. For example, our bodies produce endocannabinoids, molecules similar to the chemicals found in marijuana. Our brains also produce chemical compounds called endorphins, which cause the same pain-killing effects as morphine. But the human organism can naturally generate other drugs that, in large enough amounts, would be life-threatening and totally illegal.

One such drug is called dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. This drug is commonly extracted from certain South American plants and can be drunk, smoked, or injected. DMT produces serious hallucinogenic effects, with users claiming to have traveled to other worlds or met divine beings after ingesting the drug. However, there is evidence that the human brain regularly produces small amounts of DMT. It is believed that the drug could be released in the body during deep sleep or in near-death experiences.

Another human-produced drug is a substance known as GHB, sometimes called “liquid ecstasy.” This substance has very diverse uses; bodybuilders ingest it to gain muscle, while doctors prescribe it to treat sleep disorders. But GHB can become very dangerous if it is not used correctly.

Among other cases, ingesting GHB along with alcohol can kill a person or leave them in a coma. That is why it is surprising to know that our bodies contain the drug naturally, although in minuscule and non-harmful amounts. GHB is found in many tissues of the body, in the blood and also in the brain, in concentrations of up to one milligram per liter.

It is convenient to warn that both DMT and GHB are illegal drugs, and their use is prohibited in many countries. So be cautious when telling someone that you make those substances, even if it is true.^[6]

4 Magnetic Fields

Magnetism is essential for the continuity of life. The magnetic influence of the Sun, for example, protects our planet from cosmic radiation. And without the Earth’s magnetic field, solar radiation would destroy our atmosphere and kill us like ants under a magnifying glass. But magnetic forces are not limited only to celestial bodies. Life forms also generate their own magnetism, and we are no exception.

Electric currents produce magnetism, so every object with electric currents flowing inside also has a magnetic field. And since humans run on electricity moving through our nervous system, the latter is the one that generates magnetic fields inside and around our bodies. In addition, each of our organs works with a specific amount of electricity, so each part of the body has its own magnetic field.

It is estimated that the strength of the magnetic field on the human body’s surface is one ten-millionth of the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. Meanwhile, the magnetic field of the brain is about 200 million times weaker than that of our planet. On the contrary, the winner among the most magnetic organs is the heart. It has a magnetic field just one million times smaller than the magnetic force of the Earth. The heart’s magnetic field is so strong that it extends outside the body and is believed to affect certain biological processes.

As you can see, the magnetic forces of the human body are very small. But that has not stopped some people from claiming that they are magnetic enough to attract metal. What benefits has the ability to stick spoons to the body, on the other hand, is not something well known.^[7]

3 Stardust

This point is much more comprehensive than the rest because not only do we have stardust in our bodies but we are actually made of it. The idea that humans are composed of stellar materials has been around for decades now, but recently we could prove that it is a reality.

At the beginning of the universe, there were only basic elements such as hydrogen and helium. When these chemicals clumped together to form the first stars, heavier and more complex elements began to be produced inside those bodies. Such elements were carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, iron, and sulfur. These elements, in turn, make up human beings almost entirely.

How did these elements get to Earth? When stars reach the end of their lives, they usually explode, ejecting their outer layers with plenty of different elements. After traveling great distances for a long time, the remains of these exploding stars fall to the Earth’s surface, where they mix with the rest of the ground. Then, plant life absorbs such elements dispersed in the soil, and we do the same by eating those plants.

Over the years, the materials formed inside the stars become part of our bodies, which are renewed with such elements all the time. Two years ago, researchers discovered that 97 percent of the atoms in the human body are of the same types as those found in stars. Moreover, 93 percent of the body’s mass is believed to be stardust.^[8]

2 Light

It has been known for a long time that the human body emits light radiation. To give an example, the heat of our bodies produces infrared light, a type of electromagnetic radiation that humans cannot see, although other animals can. Now, when it comes to emitting visible light, one might think that such a thing is impossible for us. Like almost all matter in the universe, we reflect light, but we do not emit it, right? Well, that is not entirely true.

In 2009, a scientist from the Tohoku Institute of Technology (Japan) named Masaki Kobayashi decided to investigate human bioluminescence – our ability to emit light. To do that, he recruited five individuals and photographed their naked bodies for 20 minutes every three hours, for three days. The photographs were taken with cameras extremely sensitive to light. The results showed that certain portions of the individuals, such as their necks and heads, emitted light constantly, reaching a maximum brightness around four in the afternoon.

This is probably a consequence of our biological clock, due to which we spend more energy during the late afternoon. Scientists believe that our bioluminescence is produced by small molecules called fluorophores, which emit photons after interacting with electrons released by cellular respiration.

But if we emit light, why do we not glow as if we were flashlights with eyes? The answer is pretty ironic: the visible light we produce is too weak for us to see. In fact, such light is a thousand times less intense than what our eyes are adapted to detect. But there it is, coming out from us every second. So not only are you made of stardust, but you also shine like a star. Well, maybe not so much.^[9]

1 Antimatter

Matter and antimatter hate each other. When these two substances collide they mutually annihilate, leaving only energy behind. But despite how volatile antimatter is in our universe, we have a bit of it inside us, all the time.

To understand how this is possible, we need to bring back potassium-40, which we previously said exists in the human body. As already stated, potassium-40 is one of the radioactive isotopes or variants of potassium, a soft metal. Such isotope decays—that is, it transforms into another element after its atoms lose energy. To do that, potassium-40 can be transformed into calcium-40 through a process called beta-minus decay.

A potassium-40 atom loses some particles during this process and generates others, including an antimatter particle called an antineutrino. And this is where the math begins. It is estimated that 5,000 potassium-40 atoms decay per second in the human body. Around 89.25 percent of these atoms undergo beta-minus decay. Therefore, at least 16 million antineutrinos are generated in our bodies every hour.

Meanwhile, potassium-40 can also be transformed into the isotope argon-40. This occurs when each of the potassium-40 atoms releases a positron, the antimatter version of the electron. However, this process is very rare, happening in 0.001 percent of cases. But even so, considering the potassium-40 atoms that decay per second, that means the human body generates about 180 positrons per hour.

And this is the result of just one radioactive isotope transforming inside the body. But we also have other elements that decay in the same ways, generating their own antiparticles at every moment. So, congratulations, you are also an antimatter reactor.^[10]