Your sense of smell is far better than its reputation

Anecdota
Your sense of smell is far better than its reputation
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🫀Human body

Your sense of smell is far better than its reputation

In 2007, researchers asked blindfolded volunteers with blocked ears to follow, on all fours, a trail of chocolate scent laid in a field. Most succeeded, and improved with practice. The idea of a poor human nose seems to stem more from 19th-century assumptions than from actual measurements.

Nature Neuroscience (Porter et al., 2007)
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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)