Do you really think you know all there is about our SKIN?...Think again.

20 facts about our skins...

I came across this magazine about skin - written by someone called Sean Markey (discovermagazine.com)...food for thought eh?. Thought I share it with you all. I know I haven't posted anything for awhile...soooooooooooooooo busy...

1. Skin is our largest organ..though some beg to differ..whatever..

2. An average adult's skins spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.

3. Skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather. The only areas that don't sweat are the nail bed, the margins of the lips, the tip of the penis and the eardrums.

4. Body smell. Body odor comes from a second kind of sweat - a fatty secretion produced by the apocrine sweat glands, found mostly around the armpits, genitals and anus....pheewww...what's this smell?

5. The body odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.

6. Breast are modified form of the apocrine sweat gland.

7. Fetuses don't develop fingerprint until three months' gestation.

8. Some people never develop fingerprints at all. two rare genetics defects, known asNaegeli syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, can leave carriers without identifying ridges on their skin.

9. Fingerprints increase friction and help grip objects. New World monkeys hve similar prints on the underside of their tails, the better to grasp as they swing from branch to branch.

10. Blowin' in the wind. Dead skin and other organic matter account for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. Skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute.

11. There are at least five types of receptors in the skin that respond to pain and to touch.

12. One experiment revealed that Meissner corpuscles - touch receptors that are concentrated in the fingertips and palms, lips and tongue, nipples, penis and clitoris - respond to pressure of just 20 milligrams, the weight of a fly.

13. In blind people, the brain's visual cortex is rewired to respond to stimuli received through touch and hearing, so they literally "see" the world by touch and sound.

14. "In the buff" became synonymous with "nude" in the 17th-century England. The term derives from soldiers' leather tunics or "buff" whose light brown color apparently resembled an Anglo-Saxon backside.

15. White skin appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climes and lost much of their melanin pigment.

16. Albinos are often cast as movie villains, as seen in The Da Vinci Code, Die Another Day, The Matrix Reloaded and - inexplicably - the 2001 flick Josie and the Pussycats. Robert Lima pf Penn State suggests that people associate pale-skinned albinos with vampires and other mythical creatures of the night.

17. More than 2,000 people have radio frequency identification chips or RFID tags, inserted under their skin. The tags can provide access to medical information, log on to computers or unlock car doors.

18. Flesh for fantasy. Th the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, customers can get an implanted RFID "debit card" and party until their funds are exhausted.

19. The Cleveland Public Library, Harvard Law School and Brown University all have books clad in skin stripped from executed criminals or from the poor.

20. One such volume (clad with skin) is Andreas Vesalius's piioneering 16th-century work of anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica ( On the Fabric of the Human Body)