YOUR AMAZING BODY
How much do you know about your amazing body? You are more remarkable than you ever imagined!
And some of these amazing answers will help you live longer and age more slowly.
A QUIZ IN 15 DAILY PARTS
YOUR AMAZING BODY NO. 9
How many sperm cells does the average man create in a minute?
a. 30,000
b. 90,000
c. 120,000
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B: A man makes about 1,500 sperm cells a second – 90,000 a minute and up to 300 million a day. Each sperm, produced by the testes, takes about seventy-two days to mature.
An average of 80 to 300 million sperm are released per orgasm at a speed of about 10mph – double jogging speed! Nature seems profligate, but to reach the fallopian tubes, sperm have a hazardous journey ahead of them. The average sperm travels at up to 8 inches or 20 cm per hour once inside a woman’s body – and has a life span there of up to 72 hours.
It’s not true that sperm are the only active participants in fertilisation – tiny hairs called cillia within the fallopian tubes and on the uterine walls pull the sperm toward the egg.
The female egg is the largest cell in the human body with a diameter of about a millimetre, and is typically large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Even though a woman is born with between 1-2 million eggs, she’ll only release about 400 in her lifetime.
The formation of the egg that created you – and the half of your DNA that came from your mother – could theoretically be argued as the very first moment of your existence. Since that happened before your mother was born, a newly born child of a 30-year-old mother (now the average age for a first baby) is arguably already 30 years old!
A single human sperm contains the 37.5 megabytes of male DNA (the computer data unit is the unit of measurement for DNA!) required to create a human child. So an average climax transfers 1.5 million gigabytes of information. A typical USB memory stick capacity might be 8 gigabytes.
The prostate gland doesn’t produce sperm cells (they’re produced in the testes), but a slightly alkaline fluid that forms part of the seminal fluid, the fluid that carries sperm.
To keep a healthy prostate, a man should exercise regularly, keep at a healthy weight and eat more fruits and vegetables. In particular, tomatoes, pink grapefruit and papaya all contain lycopene, a powerful carotenoid and an antioxidant associated with prostate health. Anti-oxidant-rich cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and kale are also good choices, as are soy beans, oily fish and other omega-3-rich foods and green tea.
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NEXT: How many senses do you have??
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