It's just so scintillating

Skin is your body's largest organ.

An average adult's skin spans 21 square feet, weighs 9 pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.

The skin releases as much as 3 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.

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. The odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.

Breasts are a modified form of the apocrine sweat gland.

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

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.

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.

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

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

One experiment revealed that Meissner's 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 Pussycats.” Robert Lima of Penn State suggests that people associate pale-skinned albinos with vampires and other mythical creatures of the night.

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.

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

The Cleveland Public Library, Harvard Law School, and Brown University all have books clad in skin stripped from executed criminals or from the poor. One such volume is Andreas Vesalius's pioneering 16th-century work of anatomy, "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" (On the Fabric of the Human Body).

They went through quite a few

Michelle Pfeiffer had to be vacuum sealed into her Catwoman costume.

A different way to see things

Anna May Wong was the first Asian actress ever to be filmed.

No better choice

Vivian Leigh was the first British actress to win an Oscar.

How could something so beautiful

Nicole Kidman is scared of butterflies

And then royalty

Grace Kelly was the first actress to appear on a postage stamp.

Staring through the window

Audrey Hepburn had a breed of tulip named after her in 1990.

The great lady herself

Greta Garbo was voted by The Guinness Book of World Records as the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

A pretty little star

At the height of Clara Bow's career, she received 45,000 fan letters a week, a record that has never been equaled.

I'd already said my goodbyes to the sun

During an equinox, two observers at the same distance north and south of the equator will experience nights of equal length.

Hello Mrs. Robinson

The Graduate was Richard Dreyfuss's first film.

A breath of air brought it all back

Smell is the sense with strongest links to memory. Sounds, and sights may bring back memories but only partly. The smells however trigger other senses also so you actually experience the memory with a greater effect.

No way to get to the middle of it

The universe is constantly expanding.

One does try

Green peppers have twice as much vitamin C as any citrus fruit.

There are nearly 15,000 varieties of rice, more than any vegetable or fruit.

Cauliflower also comes in a lime green color, which is sweeter than the white version.

The Mayans rubbed hot peppers on their gums to stop toothaches.

It was never their fault

Henry VIII had six wives.

Got milk

Milk drinking started about 7,500 years ago in Central Europe.

I'm no Thumbelina

The average American woman stands at 5'4", according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Mine was the first for my state

The first coeducational college for men and women was Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Oberlin, Ohio. It opened on December 3, 1833 with 44 students, including 29 men and 15 women. Fully equal status for women didn't come until 1837, and the first three women to graduate with bachelor's degrees did so in 1841.