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The human body holds a lot of mysteries, and the world's greatest researchers never cease to dig into the building blocks of life: DNA.

From detecting a risk for a certain disease or solving a criminal case, the discovery of DNA has forever changed our lives. But if you thought you already knew everything about this integral piece of our bodies, think again. Prepare to be amazed by these strange facts about what scientists James Watson and Francis Crick defined as the "secret of life."

▲Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick are not the ones who discovered DNA, contrary to popular belief. In reality, DNA was first identified by Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher in 1869.

▲DNA is made of four building blocks: the nucleotides adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).

▲An organism's complete set of DNA, with all of its genes, is called a genome. A human genome contains no less than three billion base pairs of DNA.

▲Imagine typing 60 words per minute and doing so eight hours a day. It would take you around 50 years to be able to type the entire human genome.

▲Our entire genome would fill 201,000 pages worth of Yellow Pages!

▲DNA can help predict a person's inherited risk of disease such as breast cancer and heart disease.

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A person's environment has an influence on their DNA. While it doesn't completely change it, it does affect the way the genes work. This is the reason why, for instance, some people are hairier or darker than others.

▲Changes in genetic information are called mutations. Changes in an organism's DNA can lead to changes in all aspects of its life.

▲A lot of factors can cause a gene mutation: environmental forces such as UV radiation from the sun, tobacco, chemicals such as drugs, and so on.

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Most of the cells in your body contain DNA, except for red blood cells, due to the lack of nuclei and organelles.

▲There are different ways to extract DNA: cheek cells, blood, and urine.

▲DNA is also used in wildlife forensic science for solving wildlife crimes and identifying the poachers.

▲We have around 30 trillion cells in our bodies and 200 different types of cells.

▲If it was possible to stretch all the DNA in a human's body out, there would be enough DNA to go to the Sun and back more than 300 times. Mind you, the sun is 150 million km (93 million miles) away from the Earth!

▲If you could stretch the DNA in all the cells out, they'd be able to make over 9,000 trips to the Moon and back!

▲Half the DNA of a child is inherited from each parent. This means that each parent passes half of their DNA to their child through sexual fertilization.

▲Every human shares 99% of their DNA with other human beings, but a parent and child share 99.5%.

▲Identical twins or monozygotic twins are 100% genetically identical.

▲Even though identical twins share 100% of their genes, they don't have identical fingerprints. However, since their identical genes give them very similar patterns, their DNA is virtually indistinguishable. This basically means that if one identical twin leaves his DNA at a crime scene, it would be impossible for a crime lab to dissociate the two of them.

▲German police could not solve a jewelry heist even after finding DNA at the crime scene. The DNA evidence matched two identical twins, but since they both denied the crime and because it was impossible to link the DNA to one of them, they walked free.

▲DNA testing is not only used for humans, but also to authenticate food such as fine wine or caviar, to distinguish legal caviar from the illegal.

▲Humans share about 40-50% of their DNA with cabbage.

▲Humans and bananas share 50% of their DNA.

▲Humans share 98.5% of their alignable DNA sequence with chimpanzees.

▲DNA is more efficient than any hard-drive you could possibly think of. Harvard scientists have been able to store around 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA.

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In rare cases, it happens that one person has two different sets of DNA. For instance, when an embryo absorbs its own twin in the womb.

▲People with two different sets of DNA are called human chimeras.

▲DNA evidence can be unreliable in a courtroom for various reasons. One reason is the so-called "secondary transfer" or "accidental transfer," in which an innocent man's DNA could be found at a crime scene after shaking hands with the criminal.

▲The DNA undergoes up to one million damaging events per day in every cell of the body. This damage is repaired thanks to the repair proteins sent by the cells. In case of failure, the cells might be destroyed or converted to cancer cells.

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Eight percent of DNA is made of ancient viruses that used to infect humans.