Wet or dry earwax: a single gene decides

Anecdota
Wet or dry earwax: a single gene decides
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🫀Human body

Wet or dry earwax: a single gene decides

There are two types of earwax: wet and sticky, or dry and flaky. In 2006, researchers showed this difference comes down to a single variant in one gene, ABCC11. The same gene also affects secretions from certain glands in the armpits. Your earwax is one of the rare human traits set by a single letter of DNA.

Nature Genetics (Yoshiura et al., 2006)
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🫀Human body

Your kidneys filter about 180 liters every day

Every day, your kidneys filter around 180 liters of blood plasma, about a bathtub's worth. Yet you only have about 3 liters of plasma, so it passes through your kidneys some sixty times a day. Over 99% of the filtered water is reabsorbed, leaving just one to two liters of urine.

NIDDK (NIH)
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🫀Human body

Your body has more atoms than the observable universe has stars

A 70 kg adult is made of about 7 × 10²⁷ atoms, or seven billion billion billion. The observable universe is thought to hold on the order of 10²² to 10²⁴ stars. Even with the high estimate, you contain thousands of times more atoms than there are stars in the entire visible cosmos.

European Space Agency (ESA)