Original photo by Jan-Otto/ iStock
The world’s most important pieces of infrastructure are overbuilt with safety in mind. New bridges can handle stresses far beyond what they’d ever experience, and airplanes are similarly designed with redundancies. But it turns out that this engineering principle is ripped straight from the biology playbook: The human body also has a few overengineered parts just to be safe. Nowhere is this more obvious than the femur, the body’s largest bone, located between the hip and knee. The femur is more than up for its job, as it’s capable of holding up to 30 times your body weight, or roughly 6,000 pounds (though the exact weight depends on the person and age).
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It's a fibAlthough the tip of your pinky is small, it doesn’t compare to the stapes, which measures only 2 mm in length. The stapes, meaning “stirrup” in Latin, is one of the ossicles, three bones that transfer and amplify air vibrations to the inner ear — a big job for tiny structures.
Named from the Latin for “thigh,” the femur has many important functions beyond just holding your weight. The femur stabilizes you as you walk, connects muscles and tendons from your hips and knees to the rest of your body, and also plays a vital role in blood circulation via the femoral vein (named after the femur). Because the femur can withstand so much weight, fracturing the bone is usually only possible during extreme trauma events, such as a car crash. Breaking a femur can be particularly life-threatening because it can lead to blood clots, but luckily, most injuries can be repaired with surgery and physical therapy. So the next time you’re struggling to backpack up a mountain or just carrying a heavy box up some stairs, don’t worry — you’re (over)built for this.
Numbers Don't Lie
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______ have more vertebrae than any other animal on Earth.
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Pythons have more vertebrae than any other animal on Earth.
Your funny bone is not a bone.
The term “funny bone” is quite an impressive misnomer. For one thing, the shooting pain that results from hitting it is not particularly funny, but also, this body part is not a bone. Whenever you smack your elbow against something, you’re actually hitting the ulnar nerve and not the knobby end of the humerus bone (which is where the “funny” bone derives its name — get it?). Although nerves are usually protected by muscle, fat, and bone, the ulnar nerve in the elbow is a rare exception. When you hit your funny bone, you’re actually pressing the ulnar nerve against the medial epicondyle bone at the end of the humerus, which sends a shooting pain along the nerve. Because the nerve runs up the arm and terminates in the pinky and ring finger, that’s the area particularly affected by that familiar tingly, not-so-funny sensation.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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