So I haven't done one of these in months but have been meaning to. Now that Vizzed has a science forum I will be making these there, but I wanted to put this particular thread here in General to let the fans of it, if any, know that I will be continuing the series and in an attempt to get more people to visit and post in the science forum. I will try to create a new thread for this every week. This thread will be move to the science forum after a few days, or if it happens to sink to the bottom of the page. Which ever comes first.

Anyway, this week's thread focuses on that organ you scratch when you have an itch, or feel extreme pain on when getting an bad-ass tattoo (like I did). Taken from the February 2007 issue of Discover magazine.

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20 Things You Didn't Know....About
SKIN

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1 It's your body's largest organ, despite what the readers of Maxim think.

2 An average adult's skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.

3 The skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather. The areas that don't sweat are the nail bed, the margins of the lips, the tip of the penis, and the eardrums.

4 Ooh, that smell: Body odor comes from a second kind of sweat—a fatty secretion produced by the apocrine sweat glands, found mostly around the armpits, genitals, and anus.
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5 Yum! The odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.

6 Breasts are a modified form of the apocrine sweat gland.

7 Fetuses don't develop fingerprints until three months' gestation.

8 Without a trace: Some people never develop fingerprints at all. Two rare genetic defects, known as Naegeli syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, can leave carriers without any identifying ridges on their skin.

9 Fingerprints increase friction and help grip objects. New World monkeys have similar prints on the undersides of their tails, the better to grasp as they swing from branch to branch.

10 Blowin' in the wind: Globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. Your skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute.

11 There are at least five types of receptors in the skin that respond to pain and to touch.

12 One experiment revealed that Meissner corpuscles—touch receptors that are concentrated in the fingertips and palms, lips and tongue, nipples, penis and clitoris—respond to a pressure of just 20 milligrams, the weight of a fly.

13 In blind people, the brain's visual cortex is rewired to respond to stimuli received through touch and hearing, so they literally "see" the world by touch and sound.

14 "In the buff" became synonymous for "nude" in 17th-century England. The term derives from soldiers' leather tunics, or "buffs," whose light brown color apparently resembled an Anglo-Saxon backside.

15 White skin appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climes and lost much of their melanin pigment.

16 I see very, very white people: Albinos are often cast as movie villains, as seen in The Da Vinci Code, Die Another Day, The Matrix Reloaded, and—inexplicably—the 2001 flick Josie and the p****cats. Robert Lima of Penn State suggests that people associate pale-skinned albinos with vampires and other mythical creatures of the night.

17 More than 2,000 people have radio frequency identification chips, or RFID tags, inserted under their skin. The tags can provide access to medical information, log on to computers, or unlock car doors.

18 Flesh for fantasy: At the Baja Beach club in Barcelona, customers can get an implanted RFID "debit card" and party until their funds are exhausted.

19 The Cleveland Public Library, Harvard Law School, and Brown University all have books clad in skin stripped from executed criminals or from the poor.

20 Hopefully, they didn't have to reprint it: One such volume is Andreas Vesalius's pioneering 16th-century work of anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body).

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So, any comments or other facts to add? Discussion is welcome.

Wow, I never so much about skin! This is very interesting. I'm looking forward 2 more science facts. BTW, when did you start this series?

I didn't know most of that stuff!!!
Wow, things just get more fascinating every day.

So that's where white people come from lol. This whole time, I thought that there was just a factory in Europe! Have you heard of this guy that gets dead bodies, casts them in some sort of material to preserve them, and then slices them long ways into very thin sheets? I think he has a museum exhibit somewhere. I know that he sells them though, for a few thousand dollars I believe. I guess it's legal.

I love this kind of stuff.Number 19 is what the word above my picture means.
(to bind books with human flesh)
Im looking forward to more science facts.

And you can also drawn on it! I have had a few drawings on mine

Pretty useful, I would say

supernerd117 : I first did this last year, sometime in the early fall. This is the first thread I made for Vizzed-
https://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard/thread.php?id=7525

I learned a few things about skin myself when I read over those facts.

Umm... wow. thanks for the knowledge? xD That's an awful lo of...skin facts. And now I will probably not sleep as well tonight. But still. Thanks.

This is excellent! Thanks for sharing it! Number 10 is kinda scary, though.

The books with human skin is interesting. Creepy but interesting lol.