Here are 9 Interesting Facts About Muscles.
Despite months of inactivity during hibernation, bears are not subject to bone or muscle wastage or degeneration. Understanding the molecular signals and reproducing it by way of drugs could have great benefits for human health.
When people are electrocuted and throw themselves across the room, it is as a result of sudden and violent contraction of the person’s muscles as a result of the electrical charge flowing through the body. This demonstrates a potential for muscle contraction that isn’t utilized under normal circumstances.
While shooting the movie Troy, Brad Pitt playing Achilles tore his left Achilles tendon, which delayed the movie’s final scenes for months.
The duck billed platypus hunts with neither sight nor smell, closing its eyes, ears, and nose each time it dives. Rather, when it digs in the bottom of streams with its bill, its electroreceptors detect tiny electrical currents generated by muscular contractions of its prey, so enabling it to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects, which continuously stimulate its mechanoreceptors.
The stapedius is the smallest skeletal muscle in the human body. The stapedius dampens the vibrations of the stapes by pulling on the neck of that bone. This helps to control the amplitude of sound waves from the general external environment to the inner ear. This protects the inner ear from high noise levels, primarily the volume of your own voice. Recordings of your voice sound odd because the stapedius muscle isn’t functioning then.
The hypnic jerk, or the twitching of the limbs that accompanies a falling sensation while sleeping, is caused by the brain’s misinterpretation of relaxed muscles as falling. The brain then sends signals to arm and leg muscles in an attempt to regain balance.
Stone Man Syndrome is an extremely rare disease of the connective tissue. A mutation of the body’s repair mechanism causes fibrous tissue (including muscle, tendon, and ligament) to be ossified (bone) spontaneously or when damaged. In many cases, injuries can cause joints to become permanently frozen in place.
Palmaris longus is a visible tendon in the midline of the anterior wrist. The muscle is absent in about 14 percent of the population. It can serve as a replacement for other tendons in case of injury.
A team of material scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have discovered a new way to create powerful artificial muscles from low-cost, everyday fibers such as fishing line and high-tension sewing thread that can lift 100 times more than normal muscles.
