Biomedical Engineering- Some Fun Facts

These fun facts do not just pertain to “Biomedical” engineering or simply biomedical, but also to biology and of course nature! Enjoy. (And this list ain’t complete! Won’t be ever, thanks to Mother Nature!)

1. In a strict generic sense, all organisms are unarguably of one family.

2. Tiny cells with thin walls can withstand pressures that would produce a blowout in any vertebrate artery. Yet the materials of cellular and arterial walls have similar properties.

3. An ant can lift many times its own weight with muscles not substantially different from our own.

4. It takes work to pull something upward but not to hold it suspended.

5. Stress ans Strain are entirely distinct, with the former commonly causing the latter.

6.Mass is not weight, even if they are functionally equivalent on dry land.

7.  No amount of practice will permit you to stand for long in any posture other than one in which your centre of gravity, an abstract consequence of your form, is above your feet.

9 .  The olfactory system responds to a vast number and variety of volatile compounds; most of them are foreign molecules which are evolutionarily “unknown” to the organism until they are encountered  for the first time. Nevertheless, they are readily detected and discriminated.

10.  If you squeezed out all of the bacteria from your intestines, you could almost fill up a coffee mug.

11. You blink every 2-10 seconds. As you focus on each word in this sentence, your eyes swing back and forth 100 times a second, and every second; the retina performs 10 billion computer-like calculations.

12.  Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete. (Then why engineers use concrete. Oh right! because thigh bones are scarce).

13.  ”After all, our species alone creates soufflés, computers, guns, make-up, plays, operas, sculptures, equations, laws and religions. Not only have bees and baboons never made a soufflé, they never even contemplated the possibility. They simple lack the kind of brain that has both the technological savior faire and gastronomical creativity.”

14. CARBON: Synonymous with life, it was born in the heart of stars.

15. More than 99.9% of all the animal species that have ever lived on earth were extinct before the coming of man.

16. The longest cells in the human body are the motor neurons. They can be up to 4.5 feet (1.37 meters) long and run from the lower spinal cord to the big toe.

17. The smallest bone in the human body is the stapes or stirrup bone located in the middle ear. It is approximately .11 inches (.28 cm) long.

18. In your lifetime, you’ll shed over 40 pounds of skin. (Every minute, 30-40,000 dead skin cells fall from your body and… Seventy percent of the dust in your home consists of shed human skin!)

19. Man was not the first to harness electricity and put it to work. When we look at the human body, for example, especially the nervous system, we should conclude that the designer of the human body must have had an intricate knowledge of electronics and must have known how to harness electrical energy to change it into other forms of energy. When we consider the scale of the operation (i.e. at the atomic and microscopic levels), we can only wonder at God’s profound wisdom in creation.

20. Three years after a person quits smoking, their chance of having a heart attack is the same as someone who has never smoked before.

(….will keep adding…there are thousands, I know!)

[References: Collected from various books, journals, science magazines over a duration of several months. And of course internet! ]

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

– Alexander Pope

For more info on Biomedical engineering:  BMES – Biomedical Engineering Society

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