By Makenzie Walsh
Is everybody ready to have their lives ruined? No? Too bad! Prepare for terrifying facts about the human body that will remind you of the horrors of mortality. Have fun thinking about these things at three o’clock in the morning. Please refrain from screaming too loudly, nobody will hear you anyways:
- To begin, saliva is basically filtered blood. Red blood cells, which are unneeded in our mouths, get filtered out amongst any other unneeded things, while hormones, calcium, even some immune system products remain. In fact, saliva analysis can be a method of testing for certain hormones or immune system diseases. This also would explain why each person’s saliva is a little different. While we are on the subject of saliva, it contains opiorphin, too. Opiorphin was discovered in 2006 and is a painkiller stronger than morphine. We only produce small amounts of it at a time, because if we did not, we would be high all the time.
- In a single year, you will shed over 8 pounds of skin. Not to mention the trillions of dust mites in your house right now, which will eat that skin. To continue down that path, the dust that would collect on coffee tables, windowsills, or picture frames is made up largely of skin. Enjoy cleaning up your dead scraps of epidermis. Not to mention airborne dust, which the author guarantees that you have breathed in before. Congratulations, you have breathed in human skin, and who knows, it might have been a stranger’s skin. Breathing is, with this in mind, cannibalism. Remember that next time you breathe.
- Livor Mortis, the fourth postmortem sign of death, is the pooling of blood in the body after you die (and gravity has an influence on it too, of course). This results in the skin gaining a purple-red discoloration. Livor Mortis tends to begin between thirty minutes and four hours after death, and twelve hours after, it is most noticeable. This can result in part of your corpse becoming a water balloon full of blood and all your regrets. Do not confuse this with Rigor Mortis, which relates to the joints and muscles stiffening after death!
With this final fact out of the way, this article can now be pronounced dead. Hopefully, this inspired either fear or an interest in learning more about the terrors within the human body. Or both, that works too!
