How Big Can We Get?
http://testtube.com/by Jack J. Shamama
Some animals, like the blue whale, keep getting bigger and bigger over time! How big are humans able to grow?
One common misconception is that people are growing taller with each generation: Going back 1,000 years, people were just as tall as we are now. Nutritional deficits during childhood caused humans to shrink an average of two-and-a-half inches during the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition to poor diets, disease and climate can have an effect on how tall someone grows up to be. People always have had the potential to be as tall as we are now.
Robert Wadlow is the tallest person on record. He grew to be just one inch shy of being nine feet tall: He was 8'11" (2.7m) when he died at the age of 22 in 1940. Wadlow and other extremely giant people suffer from a condition where a tumor presses up against the pituitary gland in their brain, causing it to secrete an abnormally large amount of growth hormone. There's a limit to how tall healthy people can become due to gravity: the taller a person grows, the more they weigh, the larger their bones, muscles, and other bodily resources need to be in order to keep them alive. They need more blood, and more blood requires more pressure from the heart. There's a limit to how big a heart can be because there's only so much room in their chest.
Animals like whales, on the other hand, can grow to enormous sizes because buoyancy of water helps to support their weight. Astronauts can grow as much as three percent taller when they're in zero gravity because the space between their vertebrae expands. You would get taller if you were on a planet with less mass than the Earth because it would have less gravity. Mars has only 38% the gravity of Earth, so if a child were to grow up on the Red Planet, they would be taller than they'd be on Earth. They would have to stay on Mars, however, because their larger frames would have trouble adjusting to Earth's gravity.
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