Can your contact lens get lost in your eye and float into your brain?

No! Your eyelids, both top and bottom, are connected to the eyeball itself, thus preventing the contact lens from drifting behind your eye. If your contact lens is not centered over the front of your eye (the colored part , is the iris, and the dark circle, or the pupil), it can not help you see. Sometimes the contact can fold up on itself and drift to the side of your eye. By gently feeling the surface of your eye, you can usually find out where it is.

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Beth Ann Ditkoff, Why Don't Your Eyelashes Grow, questions, kids, human body,factoids,books, Penguin Books

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What is that dewdrop thing in the back of your mouth?

That thing is called the uvula. After food is chewed, but before it is swallowed, it passes through the back of your throat, called the pharynx, which is divided into the nose part of the pharynx and the throat part of the pharynx. The dewdrop uvula prevents food from coming back out through the nose by pushing it to the back of the throat and down the esophagus on its way to the stomach. If you are laughing when you drink milk, the uvula cannot do its job properly--and milk will come out of your nose!

Why don't humans have tails?

Human embryos do have tails -up to the eighth week if gestation and then they disappear during further development. You can feel what is left of your tail -which is the tailbone or coccyx-by sitting cross-legged on the floor. In this position, you can feel the pointed, triangle-shaped bone at the bottom of your spine just before the crack in your buttocks.

The coccyx got its name from the Greek word kokkyx, which means "cuckoo bird" because the bone is shaped like the beak of a cuckoo.

No one knows exactly why human being no longer have tails like monkeys do, but one idea is that monkeys need their tails for balance and grasping as they swing from tree to tree. Since humans walk upright on two feet, having a tail behind them would throw them off balance. Thus, humans have no need for tails.

Very rarely, a human baby is born with a small tail. This phenomenon was first described in the late 1800s and there have been fewer than one hundred cases reported in the medical literature since that time.

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As a physician, I am used to answering medical questions from my patients. However, friends and family also like to ask me health questions, ranging from serious topics like brain tumors to trivial ones like ingrown toenails. My two daughters, Andrea and Julia, also like to query me about medical matters. One day, my husband, Charlie, heard the girls ask me, "Why don't your eyelashes grow?" It is a basic questions, but one for which most people don't know the answer. As I explained to the girls about the cycle of hair growth, it gave my husband and idea. Why not write a book about everyday medical questions? Andrea and Julia would compile the questions, and I could provide the answers. Within days, Andrea and Julia had come up with dozens of questions--involving human body trivia (How many bones are in the body?), gross scientific facts (Why do we have boogers?), urban myths (Will you go blind if you sit too close to the TV?), and basic medical facts (Why do some people have innie belly buttons and others have outies?). In a little more than a month, we had more than 150 questions to answer! This book is intended for children and parents to address the everyday medical questions that come up frequently in day-to-day life.

Excerpt from p.55: "Why Don't Your Eyelashes Grow?"

Your eyelashes do grow, but not very fast.

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Beth Ann Ditkoff is our guest blogger during the week of October 6th. If you have any questions for Beth Ann Ditkoff, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some more information about Why Don't Your Eyelashes Grow?: Curious Questions Kids Ask About the Human Body:

Ever wondered what that small dewdrop thing is in the back of your throat? Or why you hiccup? Why Don’t Your Eyelashes Grow? addresses every weird question about your body that you could think of—or didn’t even think to ask. Prompted by the brain stumpers her own children and patients have asked her over the years, Dr. Beth Ann Ditkoff compiled a list of curious medical questions. In this book, she reveals the mysteries of the human body (gross, funny, or ugly!) to children and adults.

With eye-opening questions, like “Why do toenails grow slower than fingernails?” and “Why do you have earwax?” to weird oddities, like “Why do some people have dimples?” and “Why do you get a headache when you eat ice cream too quickly?” Ditkoff also explains hilarious and bizarre anatomy “situations” that every curious kid wonders, from “If you put a pea up your nose, will it go into your brain?” to “If you eat Pop Rocks candy and drink soda at the same time, will your stomach explode?” With expert explanations throughout, Why Don’t Your Eyelashes Grow? is an entertaining potpourri of fun factoids packed with real information.