Interesting Facts

According to a paper published in the journal Biological Reviews, men's faces evolved to cope with fist fights. (The beefier facial features of men developed as a defense, so the bones most commonly broken in a fist fight gained the most strength, a sort of defensive armour. This explains the average look of those involved in a Saturday night punch-up in Nottingham.)

 According to research carried out at Ohio State University, the average human only makes 21 facial expressions. (There are six core emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, but human Faces Can express21 distinct emotions, combining emotions, such as happily surprised or sadly angry.  However, according to research carried out at the University of Glasgow human faces might only be able to make four universally recognized facial expressions. They argue that shared key facial signals should be combined: the wrinkled nose: fear and disgust widened eyes: fear and surprise I'm sure my face has shown more than 21 expressions just in the time it took me to write this. Perhaps they didn't count the tongue sticking out of the side of the mouth to help concentration as an expression.) Plutchik's wheel of emotions Sources:- http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/science-four-basic-emotions-01742.html http://economictimes.indiatimes.c...

“Rex” – the world’s most complete bionic man cost a million dollars to make. ( He consists of a prosthetic face, hips, knees, feet and hands, all of which are commercially available. Other off-the-shelf items include an artificial retina, cochlea and heart. The robotics team Shadow, who built Rex, believe they can now replicate about two-thirds of the human body. They said, “There are some vital organs missing, like the stomach, but 60 to 70 per cent of a human has effectively been rebuilt.” )

Researchers from the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam ave identified genetic factors that contribute to facial appearance. (The scientists have managed to identify 9 points, including the position of the cheekbones, the distance between the eyes, and the height, width and length of the nose. This could mean that the good old photo-fit might be a thing of the past, as it may be possible in the future to produce portraits of suspects from a scrap of their DNA.)  

Prosopagnosia aka Face Blindness is the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people. (It comes from the Greek: "prosopon" = "face", "agnosia" = "inabilty to recognise/identify familiar people or objects". In severe cases people are unable to recognise their own family. Two per cent of the UK population suffers from some form of face blindness, and as someone who is "not good with faces" I think I might be one of them. But now, when I can't put a name to the face, I can at least put a name to the condition.)