And Whitman didn’t know the half of it! The human body is made up of about 100 trillion cells and produces more than 1.5 million new blood cells every second.

Wonderful.

As the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher observed, “He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”

It takes about 72 muscles to speak one word. The strongest muscle in the body, in force per unit area, is the masseter — the jaw muscle.

NASCAR, eat your heart out: nerve signals race around the body at up to 120 meters per second — about 268 miles per hour!

Speaking of the heart, which is about the size of a fist: if you live a normal life, yours will beat around 3 billion times.

If the brain is your favorite organ, you’ll be happy to know a newborn’s brain weighs about three ounces. An adult’s averages three pounds — over two pounds of that is water.

And if that’s not enough: about 20 times per minute, you breathe in 13 pints of air into your lungs. Your two grayish-pinkish lungs contain 1,500 miles of airways and over 300 million alveoli — those tiny miracle workers that exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide.

And finally, if you think this is too much information, think again. In an average lifetime, your brain can store up to 100 million bits of knowledge.